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The Rise and Fall of Bishop Bilson

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2014

William M. Lamont
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Extract

Thomas Bilson, in the eyes of his contemporaries, soared like a Jewel or a Hooker above his fellow writers; unlike Jewel or Hooker his fame has not endured. He seems at first sight to be another writer with a tiny talent, overpraised in his lifetime. If this were all that there was to Bilson, then better to leave him to “such as delight in things obsolete and antique” (as an unsentimental critic said of a later, more prolix, writer).

Yet there are curiosities about the rise and fall of Thomas Bilson. He was born in 1547, became Bishop of Winchester in 1597, and died in 1616. He is a shadowy figure, whose fame rests principally on two works: The True Difference Betweene Christian Subjection and Unchristian Rebellion (1585); The Perpetual Government of Christes Church (1593). If one were to plot a graph of his public reputation, it would show a steady rise after his death, reaching a peak as late as the 1640s, and then followed by a precipitous decline. Now this is not what common sense would have led us to expect. If he had been merely an overvalued mediocrity, one would have expected a redress of the critical balance to follow close on his death. Neither the length of time taken up by the rise nor the abruptness of the fall could have been anticipated. It is true that Bilson lacked the stamina for enduring greatness, but he was not exactly shortwinded either.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , May 1966 , pp. 22 - 32
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1966

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References

1. A Serious Epistle to Mr. William Prynne (London, 1649), p. 26Google Scholar.

2. Wood, Anthony, Athenae Oxonienses, ed. Bliss, W. (Oxford, 1817), III, 170Google Scholar. For typical instances of the use made of Bilson by resistance apologists on the parliamentary side in the Civil War, see: Bridge, William, The Wounded Conscience Cured (London, 1643), p. 10Google Scholar; Hunton, Philip, A Treatise of Monarchie (London, 1643), p. 59Google Scholar; A Discourse Upon Questions in Debate Between the King and Parliament (London, 1643)Google Scholar, passim.

3. Downame, George, A Defence of the Sermon (London, 1611), p. 26Google Scholar, said of Bilson: “his proofes bee such, as never were, and never wil be answered.” Laud's biographer and friend, Heylyn, Peter, in the Preface to his The Historie of Episcopacie (London, 1642)Google Scholar, emphasized the Anglican debt to both Downame and Bilson; in his A Briefe and Moderate Answer (London, 1637), p. 64Google Scholar, he justified the bishops' defence of the iure divino claim for their order at the trial of John Bastwiclc by direct reference to Bilson; in his Cyprianus Anglicus (London, 1671), p. 57Google Scholar, he linked Bancroft's sermon of 1588, which is commonly held to be the first public statement of the claim that bishops ruled by divine right, with the writings of Bilson as the twin foundations of the new Anglicanism. Cf. Davies, E. T., Episcopacy and the Royal Supremacy (Oxford, 1950), p. 33Google Scholar, for a generous appreciation of Bilson's clericalist contribution.

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14. Baillie, , Canterburians Self-Conviclion, p. 22Google Scholar. But on another occasion Prynne too had described Bilson as “a fierce Antipuritane” who subscribed to St. Ambrose's clericalist pretensions: see Prynne, William, The Soveraigne Power of Parliaments (London, 1643), Pt. 3, pp. 145, 127Google Scholar. Prynne's attitude to Bilson is hard to discover. He noted with approval that Bilson in The True Difference had refused to identify the Church with its divinely appointed bishops: see his A Quench-Coale (London, 1637), p. 19Google Scholar, and A Breviate of the Prelates Intollerable Usurpations (London, 1637), p. 85Google Scholar. Moreover, when Prynne set out in his The Antipathie (London, 1641)Google Scholar to catalogue the vices of every bishop who ever lived, he stopped his analysis of the see of Winchester at Stephen Gardiner. In that same work, however, he called Bilson “a great Patriot of Episcopacie,” but congratulated him at the same time for not making the iure divino claim for bishops! See ibid., Pt. 2, pp. 465, 460.

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