At the IHR Parliaments, Politics and People seminar on Tuesday 2 June, Professor Eloise Davies of the University of Florida, will be discussing the politics of convocation in early Stuart England.

The seminar takes place on 2 June 2026, between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m. You can attend online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

The history of Convocation, the traditional assemblies of the bishops and clergy that sat alongside Parliament in England, remains a relatively little-known aspect of parliamentary history. In the early modern period, however, its meetings became major flashpoints in debate over the relationship between Church and State.

The controversy over the role of Convocation in the wake of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 is the best-known part of this story. Following the introduction of toleration for dissenters in the Toleration Act (1689), High Church Tories feared that William III’s rule posed existential dangers to the Church of England. They turned to Convocation as an alternative, clerical source of authority that could resist secular incursions into the spiritual realm. This argument found its most forceful expression in an anonymous pamphlet (attributed to Francis Atterbury), Letter to a convocation man, published in November 1696.

At stake was the question of who held final authority over Anglican doctrine. Tory pamphleteers argued that authority should be grounded in ecclesiastical institutions. Whigs, by contrast, claimed that the Royal Supremacy meant jurisdiction over matters of Church government flowed directly from the king and his patronage.

This post-1688 debate over the constitutional role of Convocation did not appear from nowhere. The question of how Convocation fitted into the Royal Supremacy was longstanding. The question of the role of Parliament within the system of Royal Supremacy was vexed enough, and the idea of a legislative body composed of ordained ministers added another level of complexity.

Tracing the history of Convocation back into the earlier seventeenth century, however, is notoriously challenging. Many records of the Convocation of Canterbury were destroyed by the Great Fire of London in 1666. Canterbury was the most consequential of the two provinces of Convocation in this period; the other, which generally played a merely confirmatory role, was at York.

Historians are greatly indebted to the monumental efforts of Gerald Bray, whose Records of Convocation is the authoritative guide to the sources that survive. Yet it remains difficult to say much about the body’s political influence in the early Stuart era.

Mentions of Convocation in early seventeenth-century sources are often oblique, and not easy to search for systematically. The paper I will deliver at the IHR’s Parliaments, Politics and People Seminar attempts to draw together some examples from this (piecemeal) source base. It will examine Convocation’s role as a forum in which the clergy could – to an extent – contest and shape royal policy and explore how Convocation’s authority was theorised. 

During controversies over Subscription (1604) and the Spanish Match (early 1620s), members of Convocation engaged in what seem to have been coordinated efforts to oppose royal policies which they viewed as a threat to the progress of Reformation. Sources related to the career of William Bedell (1571–1642) and Daniel Featley (1582–1645) provide a window on to these discussions.

Yet Convocation’s role as a forum for disagreement could also – by keeping controversy contained within appropriate bounds – help bolster the Royal Supremacy. Members of the Jacobean Court were keen to emphasise that Convocation was convened by the king and its decisions only made law when confirmed by him. That there was disagreement and debate within Convocation was no challenge to the Royal Supremacy: it was merely the best way for the king to take advice from his clergy.

On this understanding, Convocation could help mediate and settle Church-State tensions, within the overarching framework of Royal Supremacy and in accordance with the practices of the early Church. Some went as far as to consider this worthy of emulation abroad: the English Ambassador to the Hague, Dudley Carleton (1573–1632), put Convocation forward as a model for the meeting that became the Synod of Dort (1618–19).

Perhaps Convocation even provided a model for mediating international religious controversy. James VI & I is known for his eagerness to appeal to a General Council of the Church to settle Europe’s religious debates. But he always insisted that the Council would only be legitimate if convened and authorised by secular princes. In this way, at least, James’s vision of a pan-European Church Council resembled his vision for Convocation in his own realm.

ED

The seminar takes place on 2 June 2026, between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m. You can attend online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

Further Reading

G. Bray (ed.), Records of Convocation (Woodbridge, 2005–2006), 20 vols.

M. Grieg, ‘Heresy Hunt: Gilbert Burnet and the Convocation Controversy of 1701’, Historical Journal, xxxvii (1994), pp. 569–92

W. B. Patterson, King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge, 1997)

J. Rose, Godly Kingship in Restoration England: The Politics of The Royal Supremacy, 1660-1688 (2011)

B. Sirota, ‘The Trinitarian Crisis in Church and State: Religious Controversy and the Making of the Postrevolutionary Church of England, 1687–1702’, Journal of British Studies, lii (2013), pp. 26–54