Richard Bancroft and Anti‐Puritanism (2012)

Abstract

This essay begins by exploring the difficult personal circumstances in which Pat Collinson completed his final book – suffering from cancer, far from Cambridge and with his private library largely dispersed. It examines how this return to the sources he had pondered for half a century allowed him to make one last effort to get inside the minds of the godly ministers and laymen whose struggle for the soul of the Church of England he had so long admired and struggled to understand. Now he explored them through a study of their close encounters with and battles against their greatest opponent within the Church's establishment, Richard Bancroft, in sequence chaplain to the Lord Chancellor, then bishop of London, and (from 1604) archbishop of Canterbury. It explores Bancroft's obsession (his ‘Moby Dick’) with a supposed conspiracy of international Calvinism to take over Great Britain. The essay explores Collinson's empathy with Bancroft's puritan opponents and lack of empathy with his Catholic enemies, and concludes by finding much to admire in the heroic engagement with treacherous evidence that often misleads as to its completeness.