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Bishops, Seals, Mitres*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2016

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The four volumes of Robert Surtees’s great History and Antiquities of the County Palatine of Durham, which were published between 1816 and 1840, included a series of engraved plates of episcopal seals. They started in the eleventh century, with the seal of William of St Carilef, and ended in the sixteenth century, with Cuthbert Tunstall. According to a note in the late volume, written by Surtees’s friend, helper, and literary executor, James Raine, in 1839, five years after the author’s death, ‘The Seals of the Bishops of Durham, after Tunstall’s period, are so devoid of taste and character, that Mr Surtees did not consider them worthy of being engraved.’ While the aesthetic judgement that explained this decision may be understandable, historical and iconographie interests now make it regrettable. For it was precisely at this time, after the death of Cuthbert Tunstall in 1559, that reforming dictates began to have an impact on episcopal seal-making. And, as was realized by G. C. Gorham less than twenty years after Raine’s note, changes in ecclesiastical seals reflect wider issues in church affairs, and may be revealing of their owners’ opinions.

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Research Article
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Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1999 

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Footnotes

*

I am very grateful to Kenneth Fincham for reading, commenting on, and generously contributing to this paper.

References

1 Surtees, R., The History and Antiquities of the County Palatine of Durham, 4 vols (London, 1816-40), 4, end pages clxxviGoogle Scholar, note by James Raine, dated Crook Hall, near Durham, 17 December 1839. Raine, who was responsible for this volume, listed and sorted out the muddle in the arrangement of the plates of seals in the earlier volumes, and the 1972 Scolar Press reprint of the work, following this order, places the plates in volume 1. Raine (who died twenty-four years after Surtees, in 1858) was the originator of the Surtees Society in 1834; Eric Birley, Introduction to 1972 reprint, 1, pp. xiii-xiv; DNB, 47.

2 Gorham, G. C., Gleanings of a Few Scattered Ears, during the Period of the Reformation in England (London, 1857)Google Scholar, includes engravings of and observations on seals of Cranmer, Parker, and Jewel (on which more below). This necessitated laborious research which Gorham found amply repaid ‘by the incidental illustration which these seals throw on the progress of the Reformation’ (p. 1). See MacCulloch, Diarmaid, Thomas Cranmer (New Haven, CT, and London, 1996), pp. 1112, 117–19, 228–30Google Scholar, for Gorham’s engravings and (with some corrections) his findings about Cranmer’s seals, which removed imagery of Becket in accordance with Henry VlII’s campaign against the Saint.

3 Harvey, P. D. A. and McGuinness, Andrew, A Guide to British Medieval Seals (London, 1996), p. 34Google Scholar for the destruction of the royal great seal in 1327, and ch. 4 on episcopal seals; Blair, C. H. Hunter, ‘A Note upon medieval seals with special reference to those in Durham Treasury’, Archaeologia Aeliana, ser. 3, 17 (1920), pp. 254–5Google Scholar; idem, ‘Medieval seals of the bishops of Durham’, Archaeologia, 72 (1922), pp. 1-24, at pp. 3-4. See also John Hope, W. H. St, ‘The seals of English bishops’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries, ser. 2, 11 (1885-7), pp. 271306Google Scholar, and below notes 5 and 84 on Welsh episcopal seals. These publications consider the various seals used by bishops. Seals of office, including court seals, and institutional seals like those of monasteries and collegiate foundations could, of course, have long lives, stretching across centuries.

4 Others after Surtees who have been dismissive of Reformation seals on account of their poor quality include Birch, Walter de Gray, who wrote of the ‘insidious commencement of decline’ in the sixteenth century: History of Scottish Seals, 2 (1909), p. 61Google Scholar, and William Greenwell, who wrote of Matthew Hutton’s seal (see below, n. 24) that it lacked grace, dignity and beauty, and he reproduced it only ‘to shew how low the art of seal engraving had fallen by the end of the sixteenth century.’

5 For the conventionalized form of episcopal seals see, in addition to the works cited above, Alexander, J. and Binski, P., eds, Age of Chivalry, Exhibition catalogue, Royal Academy of Arts (London, 1987), pp. 317–19, 495–7Google Scholar, nos 277-88, 673-7, and Birch, W. de G., Catalogue of Seals in the Department of Manuscripts in the British Museum, 1 (London, 1887), plates VIVIIIGoogle Scholar; Dalton, John P., The Archiepiscopal and Deputed Seals of York 1114-1500, Borthwick Texts and Calendars, 17 (York, 1992)Google Scholar; and for a long chronological range of examples, Williams, David H., Catalogue of Seals in the National Museum of Wales, 1 (Cardiff, 1993), pp. 3841Google Scholar, W 46-W 94 (illustrated pp. 82-4).

6 Birch, Catalogue of Seals, 1, p. 409, no. 2486; Harvey and McGuinness, Guide, p. 28; for examples see Hunter Blair, ‘Medieval seals’, nos 16-18, and illustrations in plates V and VI.

7 The mitre is not invariably present on the helm; for example, it was not shown on the seal of Bishop Skirlaw (1388-1406).

8 Blair, C. H. Hunter, ‘Armorials upon English seals from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries’, Archaeologia, 89 (1943), pp. 126CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 6, and plate V.

9 Hunter Blair, ‘Medieval seals’, p. 20, plate VI, 6; Surtees, History of Durham (1972 reprint), 1, plate VI (1), nos 3-4.

10 Works of Jama Pilkington, ed. J. Scholefield, PS (1842), pp. 491, 494 (from The burnynge of Paules church [1563]), and on images p. 129 (from Aggeus and Abdias prophetes [1562]); Garrett, C. H., The Marian Exiles (Cambridge, 1938, repr. 1966), pp. 250–1.Google Scholar

11 ‘The pope has commanded his bishops to christen bells and ships, to hallow mitres and staves, rings, church-yards, altars, superaltars, albs, vestments…and yet not one such word appointed them by God in scripture’: Works of Pilkington, p. 493 (The burnynge of Paules church).

12 Ibid, p. 584 (The burnynge of Paules church), citing Horace, Satire, i.iv.34.

13 Ibid., p. 586.

14 Blair, C. H. Hunter, ‘Post-Reformation ecclesiastical seals of Durham’, Archaeologia, 77 (1928), pp. 165–78, at pp. 165–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 169 (the author here refers to the equestrian figure as the reverse, but he later corrected this to the obverse); Birch, Catalogue of Seals, 1, p. 412, no. 2496. The banishing of the mitre from the obverse equestrian figure of the bishops did not mean, however, that it went for ever from the Durham seals, as will appear below.

15 Carleton, George, The Life of Mr. Bernard Gilpin (London, 1629), pp. 53–8Google Scholar; cf.Gilpin, William, The Life of Bernard Gilpin (London, [1753]), pp. 195–8Google Scholar; Marcombe, D., ‘Bernard Gilpin: anatomy of an Elizabethan legend’, NH, 16 (1980), pp. 2039, at pp. 36–8Google Scholar; Haigh, C., Reformation and Resistance in Tudor Lancashire (Cambridge, 1975), pp. 253, 290Google Scholar; for Barnes’s 1577 injunctions for the diocese of Durham (which struck some independent lines) see Kennedy, W. P. M., Elizabethan Episcopal Administration, Alcuin Club Collections, 3 vols, 25–7 (1924), 2, pp. 7081.Google Scholar

16

Sed quid miramur facta haec emblematice digna?
Ille quidem totus fuit emblematicus, omnis
pars domus inventis eius splendebat, eadem,
picturas fingit, qua scribit Pallade versus.
Unam qua valde delectabatur, et in qua
ipse sibi nimium placuit, quam Pallade dextra
se finxisse putat, proponi iussit in aula.
Parturiunt montes, nascetur ridiculus sus,
fingit nempe sui cacauli [?] insidere Papam,
foedatosque illis, qui caudam forte trahebant,
vili (quo melius nil pictum) stercore vultus.
Spectatum admissi risum teneatis Amici?
A porco mage quam de porco ficta videtur
fabula, nam quid habet Musis et Apollino dignum.
Multa essent dicenda mihi, sed plura tacenda
illius in nugis inopem me copia fecit.

Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Rawl. B.223, fol. 6r; cf. BL, MS Add. 30352, fol. 6r; Gee, Henry, ‘A Sixteenth Century Journey to Durham’, Archaeologia Aeliana, ser. 3, 13 (1916), pp. 103–16, at pp. 106–7Google Scholar; on Edes and manuscripts of the Iter Boreale, see DNB, 16; McConica, James, ed., History of the University of Oxford, 3 (Oxford, 1986), pp. 506, 511, 515, 518Google Scholar lists books he gave to Christ Church. Matthew was installed as dean of Durham in August 1583, but did not resign the deanery of Christ Church, Oxford, until early 1584, in which year Anthony Wood places the journey. Barnes’s anti-papal fixation was already evident in 1561 when as chancellor of York he preached against ‘absurd doings’ of the popes. Cross, Claire, ‘From the Reformation to the Restoration’, in Aylmer, G. E. and Cant, R., eds, A History of York Minster (Oxford, 1977), p. 205Google Scholar. Stockton Castle, which Barnes renovated, was destroyed in the 1650s. On a related image of scatological satire dated to 1583-4 see Jones, Malcolm, ‘Appendix: “The Flanders Cow”’, in Emblematic Perceptions: Essays in Honor of William S. Heckscher, ed. Daly, P. M. and Russell, D. S. (Baden-Baden, 1997), pp. 2332Google Scholar (grateful thanks here to Malcolm Jones).

17 James, Mervyn, Family, Lineage, and Civil Society (Oxford, 1974), p. 147Google Scholar; cf. p. 155, which suggests that Barnes was a weak character. See The Injunctions… of Richard Barnes, ed. J. Raine, SS, 22 (1850), pp. xiv-xvi, for Barnes’s will of 23 August 1587, which left ‘all my stuff’ at Stockton to the bishop’s French wife Jane who, with his son Dr Emanuel Barnes, features in Edes’s verse.

18 These seals were pointed ovals, somewhat smaller than episcopal seals of dignity, and, as the term implies, used for judicial business. Harvey and McGuinness, Guide, pp. 72-3; Hunter Blair, ‘Medieval seals’, p. 13.

19 For these seals see Hunter Blair, ‘Post-Reformation seals of Durham’, pp. 166, 169-70 and plate XIV, nos 2 and 3; Birch, Catalogue of Seals, 1, pp. 408, 414, nos 2484, 2502.

20 For the seal of Robert Swift, see Hunter Blair, ‘Post-Reformation seals of Durham’, plate XX, no. 6, and p. 177; and for Swift’s activities (including preaching) while in Barnes’s service, The Injunctions… of Richard Barnes, ed. Raine, pp. 11, 80-1, 102 and passim. The seal shows Christ as judge holding flaming sword and crown, labelled PENA and PREMIU[M], with open Bible in base.

21 MrsWare, Henry, ‘On the seals of the Bishops of Carlisle, and other seals belonging to that diocese’, Archaeological Journal, 48 (1891), pp. 341–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at pp. 349-50, 351-2, plate V, figs E and F. The Society of Antiquaries of London, Seal Collection, C 8, includes fragments of Barnes’s Carlisle seals.

22 Hunter Blair, ‘Post-Reformation ecclesiastical seals’, nos 166, 170-1, plate XIV, pp. 4-5. Apart from the change in the shield of arms, the seals of these two bishops are the same. An engraving of Matthew’s seal (1595), showing the bishop holding a closed book, is in Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries, ser. 2, 11 (1885-7), pp. 80-2, where the pointed cap is described as ‘mitre-like’.

23 C. H. Hunter Blair, ‘Armorials upon English seals’, plate XIV(f).

24 Another scroll between the archbishop and the book seems to be inscribed QUO…QUE/DOMIN…William Greenwell and C. H. Hunter Blair, ‘Durham seals: Catalogue of seals at Durham’, Archaeologia Aeliana, ser. 3, 14 (1917), p. 290, no. 3246, and plate xiv; eidem, Catalogue of the Seals in the Treasury of the Dean and Chapter of Durham, 2 vols (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1911-21), 2, p. 500, no. 3246, and plate. For Hutton’s comparable appearance (holding a book, but in square cap, not skull-cap) in his funeral monument at York, see Aylmer and Cant, eds, History of York Minster, pp. 435-6. For Hutton’s activity and zeal as dean of York (1567-89) see Claire Cross in ibid., pp. 206, 207-8, 210, 218. On square caps (to which Puritans objected) and skull-caps, see John Ingamells, The English Episcopal Portrait 1559-1835 (privately printed, 1981), p. 48, and below n. 69.

25 Luke 10.37. BL, Department of Manuscripts, Seals DR 279; Birch, Catalogue, 1, pp. 377-8, no. 2343; Society of Antiquaries, Seal Collection, C 6.

26 I Cor.9.16 (“Vae enim mihi est si non evangelizavero’). Mrs H. Ware, ‘Seals of the Bishops of Carlisle’, p. 350, and plate III, no. 14. This image seems, interestingly, to be related to the image of the preacher (also in high pulpit, with tiered auditors and three-light window) in the small delicate brass of Alexander Strange, dated 1620, in the church of Buntingford, Herts., which he built (‘Domus orationis 1615’ is inscribed on the outside; both the Latin and Greek inscriptions on the brass refer to his having built it). A common source is likely, but it is also worth noting that Ussher was in England from 1624 to 1626, and in March 1625, when he was appointed Archbishop of Armagh, was living with his friend George Montaigne, Bishop of London, at Much Hadham, Herts., which is only a few miles from Buntingford. Rensten, Mary, Hertfordshire Brasses (Stevenage, 1982), pp. 24–5Google Scholar, fig. 16; DNB, 58, s.n. Ussher; B., R. Knox, James Ussher Archbishop of Armagh (Cardiff, 1967), pp. 33–4, 42Google Scholar; The Whole Works of…James Usher, ed. C. R. Elrington, 17 vols (Dublin, 1847-64), 1, pp. 284-7, links the choice of the seal motto with the Archbishop’s preaching record; 16, pp. 412-13 prints a letter of the archdeacon of London, Theophilus Ailmer, dated 30 August 1624, inviting Ussher to spend a week at Hadham, and to browse through the Fathers in Ailmcr’s library. See Fincham, Kenneth, Prelate as Pastor: the Episcopate of James I (Oxford, 1990), p. 9.Google Scholar

27 Braun, Joseph, Die liturgische Gewandung im Occident und Orient (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1907), pp. 424–98Google Scholar; idem, ‘Mitre’, in Catholic Encyclopedia, 10 (New York, 1911), pp. 404-6. See also Mayo, Janet, A History of Ecclesiastical Dress (London, 1984), ch. 5Google Scholar on the Reformation, and Pocknee, C. E., Liturgical Vesture: Its Origins and Development (London, 1960), pp. 4351Google Scholar, on episcopal insignia.

28 On these portraits see Hearn, Karen, ed., Dynasties: Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England 1530-1630, Tate Gallery Exhibition Catalogue (London, 1995), pp. 23–5, 48–9Google Scholar, figs 10-14, no. 12; Mayo, Ecclesiastical Dress, p. 69; MacCulloch, Cranmer, pp. 338-42. If Cranmer had a model in mind for his portrait, it might well have been Holbein’s Erasmus (Longford Castle) which Erasmus had painted for Warham, rather than the portrait of Warham himself.

29 Brightman, F. E., The English Rite, 2 vols (London, 1915), 1, pp. cxlcxli, 2, pp. 1014–15.Google Scholar

30 Hierurgia Anglicana, ed. Vernon Staley, 3 vols (London, 1902-4), 1, pp. 208-9; Strype, J., Memorials of Archbishop Cranmer, 3 vols (Oxford, 1848-54), 2, pp. 34Google Scholar; Strype, J., Annals of the Reformation, 4 vols (Oxford, 1824), 1, i, p. 44Google Scholar; Diary of Henry Machyn, ed. J. G. Nichols, Camden Society, 42 (1848), pp. 186-7. On ‘he mitred bishops at the coronation and funeral of Mary, and the gold and silver mitre given to Canterbury Cathedral by Cardinal Pole, see Lehmberg, S. E., The Reformation of Cathedrals (Princeton, 1988), pp. 124, 128, 138.Google Scholar

31 Zurich Letters, ed. H. Robinson, 2 vols, PS (1842-5), 1, p. 50; Collinson, Patrick, The Religion of Protestants (Oxford, 1982), p. 23.Google Scholar

32 Strype, J., The Life and Acts of Matthew Parker, 3 vols (Oxford, 1821), 1, p. 122.Google Scholar

33 Brook, V. J. K., A Life of Archbishop Parker (Oxford, 1962), p. 85Google Scholar. Parker was consecrated on 17 December 1559.

34 Visitation Articles and Injunctions, ed. W. H. Frere and W. M. Kennedy, 3 vols, Alcuin Club Collections, 14-16 (1910), 3, p. 144. No mitre was inventoried among Parker’s goods when he died; Sandys, W., ‘Copy of the Inventory of Archbishop Parker’s Goods at the time of his Death’, Archaeologia, 30 (1844), pp. 130CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This is also the case with Archbishop Matthew (d. 1628) and Bishop James Mountagu (d. 1618); Fincham, Prelate as Pastor, p. 248, n. 4, and the author tells me that he has not found a mitre in any post-1603 episcopal will, even where convocation robes or other regalia are bequeathed.

35 Claire Cross, ‘Reformation to the Restoration’, p. 200; Hierurgia Anglicana, 1, p. 224. William of Wykeham’s mitre and crosier survive, thanks to his having left them to New College, Oxford. Hayter, William, William of Wykeham, Patron of the Arts (London, 1970), pp. 102, 106 and colour plates at p. 41.Google Scholar

36 Gorham, Gleanings, pp. 426-9, includes engravings of Parker’s archiepiscopal seal of 1560 (with scene of the Last Judgement), and Jewel’s episcopal seal, also 1560 (with depiction of the Good Shepherd).

37 For these illustrations see King, John N., Tudor Royal Iconography (Princeton, NJ, 1989), ch. 3, figs 37, 39-49, at pp. 135, 141–52Google Scholar; Aston, M. and Ingram, E., ‘The iconography of the Acts and Monuments ’, in Loades, David, ed., John Foxe and the English Reformation (Aldershot and Brookfield, VT, 1997), pp. 66142, figs 4.3, 4.31-4, at pp. 75, 122–5.Google Scholar

46 Goodrich died in 1554. His brass shows him fully vested, with mitre and crosier, holding Bible and great seal in his right hand. Hierurgia Anglicana, 1, p. 225; Pevsner, N., The Buildings of England, Cambridgeshire (Harmondsworth, 1954), p. 293.Google Scholar

47 Vallance, Aylmer, English Church Screens (London, 1936), p. 91Google Scholar, figs 191, 197-8 (the rood screen at Great Plumstead was destroyed by fire in 1891); Cautley, H. Munro, Suffolk Churches, 4th edn rev. (Ipswich, 1975), pp. 123, 364.Google Scholar

48 Nelson, Philip, Ancient Painted Glass in England (London, 1913), pp. 90, 227Google Scholar; Osborne, June, Stained Glass in England (London, 1981), pp. 162, 222Google Scholar; Aylmer and Cant, eds, York Minister, pp. 359, 365-6.

49 Culmer, Richard, Cathedrall Newesfrom Canterbury (London, 1644), pp. 21–2.Google Scholar

50 Aston, M., England’s Iconoclasts, 1 (Oxford, 1988), p. 69Google Scholar. Hall reports that he dealt with this objection by having the heads of these figures ‘taken off’. Such ‘reform’ by partial obliteration could also be achieved by over-painting (ibid., p. 260, n. 19; Anthony Wood reported that the saints in the library windows of Balliol College, Oxford, were obscured with black paint during the Civil War; VCH, Oxford, 3, pp. 92-3), and it needs to be remembered that taking heads off images could have been done to save as well as to reform.

51 Thomas-Stanford, Charles, Sussex in the Great Civil War and the Interregnum 1642-1660 (London, 1910), pp. 151–5Google Scholar; HMC, Thirteenth Report, Appendix, pt. 1, p. 178; The Sea-Gull ([London], 1644); The Sussex Picture, or, An Answer to the Sea-Gull (London, 1644). The former of these pamphlets described the correct un-English subject of the painting, pointing out (p. 5) that There is not any representation of the Pope at all; for there is no Triple Crowne… but an ordinary Bishop with a Miter and a Crosier’; the latter text, in reply, defended an English Protestant reading of the painting, even if that was not the ‘author’s’ intention, arguing that ‘a pompous clinquant Bishop’, wearing a mitre, could represent a bishop of Rome in the days before the adoption of the triple crown, and that the painting could be ‘directly, and immediately’ of one topic, and at the same time ‘reflexively, and secondarily’ refer to another (sigs. A 2r, A 3r, A 3v-4r).

52 The Petition of the Weamen of Middlesex (London, 1641), sig. A 2v.

53 Burton, Henry, For God, and the King ([Amsterdam], 1636), p. 161.Google Scholar

54 Overton, R., Articles of High Treason Exhibited against Cheape-side Crosse (London, 1642), pp. 3, 5.Google Scholar

55 Dering, Edward, A Collection of Speeches (London, 1642), p. 62Google Scholar, going on to express the hope that ‘we may…un-Lord them from a domineering power’; cf. Puritan Manifestoes, ed. Frere and Douglas, p. 63 (An exhortation to the byshops, STC, 10392).

56 Hunter Blair, ‘Post-Reformation ecclesiastical seals’, p. 166; plate XV, nos 5-6, and p. 171.

57 Smart, Peter, A short Treatise of altars [London, 1641]Google Scholar (written in 1629), sig. 1r; idem, The Vanitie and Downefall of Superstitious Popish Ceremonies ([London?], 1628) - a sermon preached in Durham cathedral on 27 July 1628 - sig. 4r. (Neile’s translation to Winchester was confirmed on 7 Feb. 1628.) On Neile, see James, Family, Lineage, and Civil Society, pp. 117-21, 167-8; Davies, Julian, The Caroline Captivity of the Church (Oxford, 1992), pp. 207–11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

58 Prynne, William, The Antipathie of the English Lordly Prelacie, 2 pts (London, 1641), pt 1, p. 305Google Scholar; cf. Journals of the House of Commons, 1547-1628 (London, 1803), pp. 922-3, for Pym reporting on Arminianism, including Durham ceremonies, and Russell, Conrad, The Fall of the British Monarchies 1637-1642 (Oxford, 1991), p. 36.Google Scholar

59 For Parker’s private seal with the mitre as armorial bearing, see Gordon, Gleanings, p. 428 and plate facing; for Morton and Cosin, Hunter Blair, ‘Post-Reformation ecclesiastical seals’, pp. 166-7, 172-3, plates XV, XVI; and for Sterne, Society of Antiquaries, Seal Collection, C 6.

60 Ingamells, English Episcopal Portrait, pp. 123, 147, 155, 183, 195, 198, 315, 347, 414-17, figs 22, 46, 57, 88, 102, 106, 212, 241, 313-14. Compared with these nine examples of depicted coats of arms accompanied by mitre, there are sixteen that represent episcopal arms without mitre; figs 23, 33, 93, 112, 127, 140, 150, 162, 215, 225, 232, 234, 255, 308, 309, 321. The latter include Archbishops Grindal and Whitgift.

61 Canterburie Dreame ([London], 1641), sig. A 3r; Colvin, Howard, The Canterbury Quadrangle, St John’s College Oxford (Oxford, 1988), pp. 9, 33, 36–7, 39, 42–4Google Scholar, with plates. The quadrangle was built 1631-6. Did Laud possess a crosier? Ken Fincham cites an intriguing entry in his accounts for February 1637, recording payment of 5s. for bringing the crosier’s staff from the Lord Marshall (PRO, E101/547/5, fol. 27r).

62 G., H., The Mirrour of Majestie: Or, the Badges of Honour conceitedly emblazoned: with Emblems annexed (London, 1618), STC, 11496, p. 2Google Scholar, Embleme 1. See pp. 8, 40, 42, 44 for episcopal coats of arms bearing mitres. My thanks to Ken Fincham for referring me to this work. For the device of crown and mitre on royalist Civil War flags, and mitres under threat on parliamentary ones, see Young, Alan R., ed., The English Emblem Tradition, 3, Emblematic Flag Devices of the English Civil Wars 1642-1660 (Toronto, Buffalo, and London, 1995), pp. 110, 115, 129, 138, 171, 223, 236, 257.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

63 Burne, R. V. H., Chester Cathedral (London, 1958), pp. 95–6, 116–17, 136–7.Google Scholar

64 BL, Dept. of MSS, Seal DR 272; Birch, Catalogue of Seals, 1, p. 335, no. 2163. I owe this example to Ken Fincham; see his Prelate as Pastor, pp. 232-8, 247, 306, on Buckeridge.

65 He also specified the words of the Latin inscription. Goodwin, Gordon, A Catalogue of the Harsnett Library at Colchester (London, 1885), pp. xiii, xviiixxii, at p. xxiGoogle Scholar; Fincham, Prelate as Pastor, pp. 248-9; Tyackc, N., Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism, c. 1590-1640 (Oxford, 1987), pp. 164–5, 181–3, 252–3Google Scholar; DNB 9. The brass has been moved, more than once, but escaped the damages Harsnett provided against. Harsnett provided a gallery for the scholars in Chigwell Church, which lasted until the church was enlarged at the end of the nineteenth century.

66 For these brasses see Rensten, Hertfordshire Brasses, pp. 61-2; The Register of Robert Hallum, ed. Joyce Horn, CYS, 72 (1982), frontispiece. The former example, made 1360-70, is Flemish; the latter appears to have been made in England.

67 Presumably the Bible. But this in itself was not without medieval precedent; see Harvey and McGuinness, Guide to Seals, p. 63, and fig. 57, p. 64.

68 Esdaile, Katharine A., English Church Monuments 1510 to 1840 (London, 1946), p. 104Google Scholar, and plate 49: Burke, J., ‘Archbishop Abbot’s tomb at Guildford. A problem in early Caroline iconography’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 12 (1949), pp. 179–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For another comparison see Fincham, Prelate as Pastor, p. 248 and plate 1, on the brass of Bishop Robinson of Carlisle (d. 1616). He wears skull-cap and holds crosier.

69 Lambeth Faire. Wherein you have all the Bishops Trinkets set to Sale ([London], 1641), sigs. A 2r, A 3v, B 1v. On objections to the square cap in the 1560s see Gilby, Anthony, A Pleasaunt Dialogue ([Middelburg?], 1581)Google Scholar, sigs. A 2v, M 3r (against ‘the horned cappe - indicating relationship with mitre - as well as tippet, surplice, and cope in great churches); Pilkington, Works, pp. 658-62 (for Pilkington’s 1564 letter to the Earl of Leicester about vestments); Collinson, Patrick, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967), pp. 7183Google Scholar; Cross, Claire, The Royal Supremacy in the Elizabethan Church (London, 1969), pp. 73–4, 107–8Google Scholar; Primus, J. H., The Vestments Controversy (Kampen, 1960)Google Scholar, ch. 7. On the forms of square cap and skull-cap see Ingamells, English Episcopal Portrait, p. 48.

70 The funeral mitre and crosier borne at Wren’s funeral (both at Pembroke College, Cambridge) are believed to have been acquired for the occasion. The funeral sermon, preached by John Pearson in the new chapel which Wren had given to the College, invited those present to look at the holy badges [sacras infulas) and contemplate the insignia of episcopacy adorning the bier as a reminder of how Wren had himself adorned the dignity of that holy order. Wren, Christopher, Parentalia: or, Memoirs of the Family of the Wrens (Stephen Wren, London, 1750), p. 39.Google Scholar

71 Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. de Beer, 6 vols (Oxford, 1955), 3, p. 307; Hierurgia Anglicana, 1, pp. 228-30; Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. R. Latham and W. Matthews, 1 (1970), p. 259: quoted by Cross, Claire, Church and People 1450-1660 (London, 1976), p. 230Google Scholar. Sec Mayo, Ecclesiastical Dress, p. 89, for the occasional practice, at the end of the seventeenth century, of hanging mitre and pastoral staff over a bishop’s tomb. Examples of monuments that make much of mitres are those of Bishop Barlow of Lincoln (d. 1691) at Buckden (Hunts.), and Archbishop Dolben (d. 1686) in York Minster, wearing his mitre (Aylmer and Cant, eds, History of York Minster, pp. 444-5). Apart from Harsnett, it was only after 1660 that Reformation bishops were represented mitred, Ken Fincham’s first example being that of John Hacket.

72 The proceedings against Wren started on 19 Dec. 1640 (the day after Laud’s impeachment); Journals of the House of Commons, 1640-1642, pp. 54-5, 211, 218.

73 Wren, Parentalia, p. 7.

74 Ibid., pp. 13-14; Evans, John T., Seventeenth-Century Norwich (Oxford, 1979), pp. 8895.Google Scholar

75 This was not among the nine articles of impeachment voted on by the Commons on 5 July, but formed article 19 of the enlarged list of twenty-four delivered to the Lords and read out at a conference of both Houses on 20 July 1641. The Articles or Charge against Matthew Wren ([London], 1641); Wren, Parentalia, pp. 11-12, 14; Prynne, Antipathie of Lordly Prelacie, pt 2, p. 274.

76 Wren, Parentalia, p. 22, speech of Sir Thomas Widdrington in Parliament, 20 July 1641.

77 Gorham, Gleanings, pp. 2-3 and plate; MacCulloch, Cranmer, pp. 228-9.

78 ‘But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world’: Wren, Parentalia, p. 105 (wording slightly different).

79 Song of Solomon 8.6.

80 See Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Tanner 314, fols 124r, 125r-v, for a certificate of ‘all Recusants in Suffolk’, 1636, listing (not alphabetically but by deaneries) about two hundred people.

81 ‘… as soon as he understood, that any had taken scruple at it, he presently, to avoid all pretence of scandal, caused the said seal to be altered, and the figure of Christ to be wholly omitted’: Wren, Parentalia, pp. 105-6; see also p. 48 on the list of recusants delivered by Wren to the Lord Chief Justice at the Suffolk assizes, as recorded in ‘Evidences of Bishop Wren, preparatory to his Defence’ at his impeachment.

82 BL., MS Add. 23015, fol. 290v, with the pelican in her piety and motto [CAR]ITAS PATITUR…(cf. 1 Cor. 13.4); marginal drawing of 1827 added to Blomefield, Francis, An Essay towards a Topographical History of the County of Norfolk, 3 (London, 1806), p. 562Google Scholar. The charges in the arms of the see of Norwich were three mitres and a cross. Jegon was consecrated on 20 Feb. 1602/3.

83 Evans, Seventeenth-Century Norwich, pp. 93-4; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Tanner 68, fols 158r, 160v.

84 For examples of seals of sixteenth-century Welsh bishops that used classical ‘Palladian-style’ canopies and architecture, see Williams, David H., ‘A Catalogue of Welsh ecclesiastical seals as known down to AD. 1600: Part 1: Episcopal seals’, Archaeologia Cambrensis, 133 (1984), pp. 114–15, 123, 127, 133–4Google Scholar, nos 19a, 25, 55, 72, 74, 77, 97, 100, plates XIX, XX, XXVI, XXEX, XXXIII, XXXIV. These and other examples help us to see that earlier investigators exaggerated the deterioration of this period, and seals, like funeral monuments, make it possible to study the arrival of new styles in a continuing ecclesiastical art.

85 On the omission in the sixteenth century of the earlier customary DEI GRACIA from the legends of episcopal seals see St John Hope, ‘The seals of English bishops’ (n. 3 above), p. 288, where the last examples are given as those of Cranmer and Heath (1533 and 1543). In fact, Archbishop Parker still used this formula (Gorham, Gleanings, p. 427); the examples in Williams, ‘Catalogue of… Episcopal Seals’ (n. 77), show the arrival of this change in Elizabeth’s reign.