The Royal Hunt and the Puritans, 1604–1605
Authors: Quintrell B. W. 
Published: March 2011

‘As one that honoureth and loveth his most excellent Majesty with all my heart’, wrote Archbishop Hutton to Cecil from Bishop-thorpe in December 1604, ‘I wish less wasting of the Trasure of the Realm, and more Moderation in the lawful exercise of Hunting; both that poor Men's Corn may be less spoiled, and other his Majesty's subjects more spared.’ At the time James I was again in the field, as he had been for much of 1604, complementing his natural propensity for settling the principles of a policy and leaving its working out to his ministers with an addiction to strenuous exercise for his health's sake. He had already allowed delay among his more reluctant bishops in carrying through the series of concessions granted to the puritan clergy at the Hampton Court conference; and as the expiry of the period of grace before the full enforcement of the new canons drew nearer, he made it clear that he did not expect to be troubled with whatever detailed problems might arise. They were his bishops’ responsibility. In Bancroft he seemed to have found the primate he need to succeed Whitgift. Not only would Bancroft enhance the prospects of stability within the state by bringing a sense of discipline and order to the Church, but he had the energy and determination to take charge of ecclesiastical administration for months at a time. For these reasons above all the Calvinist James had overcome his reservations about Bancroft's views on iure divino episcopacy. As the guiding hand in convocation behind the revised and more fully explained canons, Bancroft was undoubtedly best fitted, by experience as well as temperament, to take charge of the efforts to enforce them. By the time he died late in 1610, after a hard struggle to ‘reconstruct’ the English Church, only a minority of its dioceses had not lost clergy through deprivation from their livings, mostly for inconformity and most of them in the southern province; countless others had been suspended. So closely has Bancroft been associated with the efforts to obtain obedience to the new canons, especially to the articles in canon 36 referring to the Book of Common Prayer and the Thirty Nine Articles, that debate about his impact on the Church, both in the parliamentary skirmishing at the time and among commentators since, has commonly used as a measure the number of clergy he is supposed to have dispossessed, whether the 300 his puritan critics claimed, the 60 or so he himself once asserted and which R. G. Usher subsequently endorsed, or the 80 to 90 finally established by S. B. Babbage. The case for or against him has always tended to be built on numbers rather than on any assessment of the degree of responsibility he had for what happened. James, although clearly not open to direct attack in parliament, has in any case seemed a peripheral figure, expressing anger and alarm when signs of opposition to conformity came his way, but in no sense providing continuous direction of his bishops’ efforts. Before he departed once more for the countryside in mid-November, he had settled with Bancroft the manner in which the new canons were to be introduced, quietly permitting additional time beyond the deadline at the end of November for all but the most notoriously inconformable clergy in the hope of edging the rest fairly quickly towards full conformity and, where appropriate, subscription to the new terms ‘willingly and ex animo’.