177 
CRITICAL OBSERVATIONS ON BISHOP BURNETT'S 
«“ HISTORY OF THE REFORMATION OF THE 
CHURCH OF ENGLAND.” 
In a season of great political convulsion, when it was almost an 
impeachable offence for any honest or right-judging man to hint his 
doubts concerning the reality of the popish plot; when a king was 
upon the English throne who had so basely apostatized from the faith 
he had sworn to his people, as willingly to co-operate in all the plans 
suggested for sweeping away the bulwarks of protestantism, and 
whose courtiers, for the most part, were of that unprincipled 
feebleness, servility, and corruption, as to submit passively to his 
deeds of infamy; in this perilous and degraded state of pub- 
lic affairs, so utterly unsafe for any writer, not the apologist or pane- 
gyrist of despotism, Bishop Burnett produced his celebrated work, 
the “ History of the Reformation of the Church of England.” Ac- 
cording to his enemies, this performance owes its origin to an over- 
weening confidence in his own powers, assisted by mercenary views of 
personal advantage. If, however, we are to credit his own assertions, 
-and assuredly no substantial reason can be alleged why we should not, 
he was solely influenced to this great undertaking by the praiseworthy 
motive of showing, as he says, “ what popery and what the Reforma- 
tion was,”* and, by this confrontation of the doctrines and the disci- 
pline of the national churches, to prove to what aggressions of civil 
and ecclesiastical tyranny a country would be exposed by the actual 
establishment of a religion such as that of Rome. 
But some critics, in pointing out the principles and tendencies of 
these different and opposed systems of action, with more warmth than 
fairness, in our opinion, have asserted that the understanding of our 
historian is so warped by his profession, and his head so filled with 
the most chimerical fears and fancies, that, though his reasonings may 
be formed on facts, yet his views, whenever he touches upon the de- 
bateable ground of popery, are neither large, liberal, nor enlightened. 
Higgons, Sewell, Cole, and other writers still less favourable to his 
memory, have accused him, not only of preserving no temperance of 
* Introduction to the Hist. of the Reform. vol. iii, p. xxviii, Oxford edi- 
tion. “He gave,” says Gorton,” his first volume to the public in 1679, 
when the affair of the popish plot was in agitation ; the second appeared in 
1681 ; but the third volume, which was supplementary, not until 1714.—See 
Gen. Biog. Dict. vol. i, p. 364. 
VOL. 1X., NO. XXVI. 23 
