Dr Vivienne Larminie explores the political career of one of the most influential mid-seventeenth century bishops
As the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Act of April 2026 reminds us, the composition of the Upper House has long been the subject of debate. One element of this has concerned the presence of faith leaders in general and of Church of England bishops in particular. This may seem a modern, or at least a post-Enlightenment issue, but in the 1640s it surfaced briefly to greater and more far-reaching effect. Stepping forward at this juncture to defend not only the ‘lords spiritual’ but also the whole structure of a Church itself established through statute, Joseph Hall was an able and experienced apologist, and an unexpected victim of parliamentary and popular animosity.
Born in 1574, Hall rose from a modest background, through the encouragement of puritan ministers and aristocratic patronage, to become in 1627 bishop of Exeter. In the meantime, he had been a versatile and prolific author, publishing innovative satires, literary epistles, biblical commentary and, most notably, devotional material which – especially in the much-reissued The Arte of Divine Meditation – gained him a high reputation across Protestant Europe. While his declared preference was for this pastoral genre, he also engaged in ecclesiastical apologetics. Consistently a theological Calvinist, he occupied a middle ground which upheld the liturgy and hierarchy of the Church as enacted in 1562 and maintained the close relationship with other European Reformed churches enjoyed by early Elizabethan bishops. As a representative of this tradition, he was chosen by James VI and I in 1617 to advocate for episcopal government in Scotland and in 1618 to attend the international Synod of Dort in the Netherlands.
In the 1620s, Hall’s position became more difficult to sustain as anti-Calvinists such as William Laud came to dominate the Church and their clericalist and ceremonialist stance demanded conformity to what Hall saw as unwarranted ‘innovations’. Once installed in his bishopric, he encountered hostility: ‘some that sat at the stern of the church had me in great jealousy for too much favour of puritanism’ (J. Hall, The Shaking of the Olive Tree (1660), 41). Yet he managed not to provoke Laud, or abandon his convictions, by obediently transmitting to his diocese unwelcome orders from Lambeth, while taking little action to investigate whether those orders were implemented.
Following the outbreak of rebellion in Scotland in 1637, Hall published a work attacking its core Presbyterian document, the National Covenant, thereby positioning himself as a prospective apologist for episcopacy and by extension controversial ‘Laudian’ ecclesiastical policies. Laud rejected Hall’s proposal for a ‘general synod of the whole three kingdoms [of Scotland, England and Ireland]’ to settle the ‘schism’ of the Kirk, and instead – recognising Hall’s potential leverage with fellow Calvinists – requested in September 1639 that Hall himself ‘write some satisfactory discourse on this subject’ (TNA, SP16/431, f. 5). Over succeeding months, Hall and Laud fenced over what form it would take, with Laud insisting on the assertion that church government by bishops was the only way ordained by God and that thus neither the Covenanters nor the continental Reformed were true churches, and Hall resisting the last point.
Against this backdrop, both men attended the Short Parliament (13 April-6 May 1640), where criticism surfaced of the archbishop’s policies in both church and state, and Convocation, the meeting of clergy that by custom accompanied parliamentary sessions. As mobs attacked Lambeth Palace, Hall attended Convocation as it unprecedentedly continued sitting beyond the dissolution of Parliament on 6 May – a consequential decision. Not long after the Long Parliament opened that November, Laud was arrested and confined to the Tower of London on charges of treason, a development which will have shocked Hall, but which also gave him freedom to defend the Church of England on his own terms. Accepting the role of leading apologist, he proceeded to do battle.
In passionate speeches he deplored ‘the scurrilous libels and pamphlets’ that were circulating and the ‘many scandalous aspersions and intolerable affronts that are daily cast upon the bishops’, calling on peers, ‘the eldest sons of your dear mother, the church’, to ‘vindicate her wrongs’ and suggesting that, as with ‘the Jack Straws and Cades and Wat Tylers of former times’, their lordships would be the next target of popular agitation (The Works of the Right Reverend Joseph Hall ed. P. Wynter, viii. 277-8). His long-gestated work Episcopacie by Divine Right Asserted finally appeared early in 1641, only to embroil him in a pamphlet war with leading London ministers writing under the collective pseudonym of Smectymnnus and, eventually, John Milton; much of it was addressed to, and intended to influence, Parliament. In the Lords, Hall sat on several committees discussing religious reform, some of which he welcomed, but by May 1641 a bill was introduced to exclude the clergy from secular affairs. Hall was stunned: it was ‘the strangest bill that ever I heard since I was admitted to sit under this roof …it strikes at the very fabric and composition of this House, at the style of all laws’. He appreciated ‘that ecclesiastical and sacred persons should not ordinarily be taken up with secular affairs’ but averred that their occasional participation in Parliament was valuable because their ‘long experience and conversation, both in men and in books, cannot but have put something into [them] for the good of others’ (Works, ed. Wynter, viii. 281-4).
In the long run, such arguments were of no avail. In August, Hall was among 13 bishops impeached for agreeing controversial ecclesiastical orders during the extra-parliamentary Convocation the previous year. A speech in which he attempted to defend Convocation lost him many friends in the House. These impeachment proceedings disappeared amid other concerns, but on 30 December 1641, 12 bishops, including Hall, presented a petition claiming that mob intimidation prevented them from sitting in the Lords. Since this contradicted a Lords’ resolution on the 28th that Parliament was free, it was regarded as a breach of privilege. The Commons responded by impeaching the bishops ‘for endeavouring to subvert the fundamental laws of this realm and the being of Parliament’ (LJ iv. 497b, 498b, 499a). The charge constituted treason, and Hall and the others were sent to the Tower.
Hall was still there in February 1642 when an act preventing anyone in holy orders from exercising temporal jurisdiction or authority, and hence from sitting in Parliament, came into force. Characteristically, he took up his pen to express bewilderment at his predicament and mourn the loss of his reputation. ‘My intentions and this place are such strangers, that I cannot enough marvel how they met’; what had he ‘done to forfeit that good estimation, wherewith … I was once blessed’ (The Works of Joseph Hall, DD (1837-9 edn.), i. p. xxxvii).
Worse was to come. Parliamentary ordinances in 1646 proscribed the Book of Common Prayer, the source of the Church’s liturgy, abolished the offices of archbishop and bishop, and set up the sale of episcopal lands. By then Hall had long been released and was living privately in what had very briefly been his new diocese of Norwich. There was no restitution before his death in 1656, yet all was not lost. Episcopacy and the Prayer Book returned promptly, if at first unofficially, at the Restoration, bishops re-entered the Lords in 1661, and, after the nadir of 1641-2, Hall’s international reputation rapidly regained its lustre.
VL
Further Reading:
Anthony Milton, England’s Second Reformation: the battle for the Church of England, 1625-1662 (Cambridge, 2021)
A biography of William Laud can be found in HP Lords, 1604-29; both Laud and Hall will appear in the forthcoming HP Lords, 1640-60.