Richard Baxter and James Ussher

Abstract

As revealed in the new edition of the Reliquiæ Baxterianæ, the text of James Ussher’s Reduction of Episcopacy, which was published in 1696 as part of ‘Mr Richard Baxter’s narrative of the most memorable passages of his life and times’, is tantalizing in its potential significance. A former chaplain in the parliamentarian army in the 1640s, Richard Baxter was to become a leading light in Interregnum attempts to forge church associations in Worcestershire and elsewhere ‘for our mutuall helpe & concord in our worke’.1 After a prominent role on behalf of a broadly Presbyterian group during attempts to establish a compromise Church settlement at the Savoy conference in the early years of the Restoration, Baxter established himself as the preeminent ‘moderate’ nonconformist in later-Stuart England. James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh from 1625 to 1656, was a staunch Calvinist who had resisted the reforms to the Church of Ireland proposed by William Laud in the 1630s, yet had none-the-less remained a firm advocate of episcopal church government and loyalty to the crown in the 1640s. Though suspected of puritan leanings, his reputation for scholarship and piety was such that competing contingents of diverging ecclesiological opinion sought at his death to portray him as a figurehead for their movement.2