Blair Worden - A Book of Friendship

BLAIR WORDEN - A BOOK OF FRIENDSHIP

Church. It was his honour, ‘tho unworthy’, to be a priest of ‘the old orthodox Church of England’, most pure in doctrine and best regulated in discipline and worship of any church, ‘and consequently the most happily and unexceptionably reformed of all those churches which were by the impositions, abuses and corruptions of the Church of Rome forced to depart from her’. 17 His churchmanship was ‘Apostolick’, ‘primitive,’ and deeply marked by the experience of the seventeenth century: ‘the Good old Church of England-Divinity’ was ‘infused into mee’ by ‘Right Orthodox & Loyall Doctors of the old Stamp’, the clerical generation of Cosin, Peter Gunning, and others who suffered through the 1640s and 1650s. 18 Two characteristics of this outlook stand out. One was its focus on the Prayer Book, and the integration of private devotion with public worship, above all through the practice of spiritual preparation before reception of the Lord’s Supper. 19 The product of a worthy reception was ‘that your chief endeavours’ lay ‘in conforming your Life (as far as you are able) to the Life of Christ, (the grand examplar of all true Grace and Vertue) and the Holy Scripture, the rule and square of all our Actions.’ 20 These ‘endeavours’ – a term much used by Granville – are the substance of ‘holy living’, and here, at least, there seems little confusion about virtue and vice. The other salient characteristic was the indissoluble association of devotion to the church and loyalty to the Stuarts. 21 Dean Granville preached and practised absolute obedience to James II. The prism of the 1640s prevailed here too: ‘Why Rebellion , Sedition , or any rude Treatment of Majesty , should now portend better in 88, than it did 48 yeares ago, I cannot discover.’ 22 Yet not only the nation, but even Granville’s siblings, repudiated James, and it was left to Granville, ‘the Resigned & Resolved Christian and Faithful & Undaunted Royalist’, to flee to France where he was ‘reduced to … hard circumstances (whereto, in conformity to my own Doctrine I Heartily submit)’. 23 Abandoned by James for his unwavering Protestantism, deprived of his preferments, surviving on handouts from Mary of Modena, occasional receipts 17 Remains (1865), p. 211. 18 Denis Granville, The Resigned & Resolved Christian and Faithful & Undaunted Royalist (Rouen, 1689), pp. 20-21. 19 This regime ‘suppose not only the Information of the Understanding in the necessary Points of Practical Religion, but a faithful Examination of our Consciences, and diligent enquiry into our Hearts, till we discover whether we have in Truth and Sincerity the Graces of Faith and Repentance, which are Indispensable Qualifications of a worthy Communicant’: Counsel , pp. 50-1. 20 Counsel , p. 55. 21 He was ‘an Unalterable firme son of the Church of England as first establish’d as well as a right loyall Subject to his soveraigne’: Resigned & Resolved Christian , ‘The Deane of Durhams Reasons for his Withdrawing into France’, ‘Advert to the Reader’. 22 Resigned & Resolved Christian , ‘Two Sermons’, p. 26. 23 Resigned & Resolved Christian , ‘To the Reader, 15 November 1689’.

54