ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY 



seminary priests and a traitor who fled into Tyrone's camp during the 

 rebellion in Ireland. He was further accused of keeping a priest in his 

 house and trying to revive recusancy throughout the district. 1 But no 

 attention was paid to these reports by those in authority, and Lord 

 William Howard continued to the end of his days a trusted servant of 

 the government in the civilization of the Border counties. As a matter 

 of fact the battle of national religion had been fought and won during 

 the late Queen's reign. Recusancy had become so insignificant that it 

 was no longer regarded as a danger to the State. 



When King James visited Carlisle in August 1617, Bishop Snowden 

 presented an address on his own behalf in which he laid before his 

 Sovereign some notice of the civil and ecclesiastical condition of the 

 diocese as he had found it after a study ' for the space of well nere two 

 moneths by my presence in visitations, sessions, and commissions, and 

 by petitions, conference and suggestions.' The state ecclesiastic was 

 hugely weakened, not only by the impropriations served by poor vicars 

 and a multitude of base hirelings, but by compositions contracted in the 

 troublous times and now proscribed, yet there was some show of grave 

 and learned pastors. And albeit many of the clergy in their habits and 

 external ' inconformities ' seemed to be puritans, yet none of them were 

 found of repugnant opinion to the bishop's monitions or the ecclesias- 

 tical law. Though the diocese was not infested with recusants so 

 dangerously as the bishoprics of Durham and Chester, yet in his late 

 visitations about eighty persons had been detected and presented, and 

 most of these were confined to a few families, whose conversion or 

 reformation he should strive to effect by gentle persuasion and all other 

 good means to the utmost of his power." The condition of the 

 diocese was such as we might have expected from its previous history. 

 The succession of bishops of ultra-protestant proclivities, who were 

 more interested in the suppression of papism than in the building up of 

 the clergy and people in the principles of the national religion, had done 

 its work. The standard of clerical education and efficiency had been 

 lowered and the church had fostered within itself those puritan ' habits 

 and external inconformities' which were so soon to break out to the 

 subversion of Church and State. 



The true tendency of the old ecclesiastical policy began to be 

 realized when King James addressed a letter to Archbishop Abbot in 

 1622 on the abuses and extravagances of preachers in the pulpit, and 

 sent him directions to be observed in the composition of sermons. The 

 King's interposition produced much discontent among the clergy, who 



i S.P. Dom. James I. vols. xl. n, Ixxxvi. 34 ; Lord William Howard's Household Books, Surtees Soc. 

 pp. 423-4, etc. 



" Bishop Snowden's address to his ' most blessed Soveraigne my great and most gratious Lord and 

 Master ' was dated at ' Rose Castle, August 2, 1617,' by ' your Maties meanest but most obliged and most 

 dutifull subject and servant, Robt. Carlisle.' The document was found about twenty years ago by Mr. 

 Walter Money, F.S.A., among papers collected by John Packer, secretary to George Villiers, first Duke 

 of Buckingham, and printed in the Carlisle newspapers. Chancellor Ferguson has made it more acces- 

 sible by reproducing it in full in his Dioc, Hist, of Carl. (S.P.C.K.), pp. 131-3. 



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