The Commission for Ecclesiastical Causes 1686–1688: A Reconsideration

Abstract

The current orthodoxy on James II's Commission for Ecclesiastical Causes was established quite late, by David Ogg in I955.1 But although Ogg had read the Letters Patent setting up the Commission, which is more than most historians have, he gave a partial account of its powers, which according to him only extended to ecclesiastical persons; and even on them it could only impose the ecclesiastical penalties of suspension or deprivation. Moreover, he assumed that those dealt with by the Commission were 'the personages, often very exalted personages, for whom the visitatorial jurisdiction was designed'; later he defined them further as 'a certain class of person, usually a highly placed person'.2 He thus endorsed the concept (already extant) of the Commission as a kind of mighty judicial weapon, only wheeled out of its shed on state occasions, to deal with the likes of Bishop Compton, the vice chancellor of Cambridge University, or the fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford. On the other hand, Ogg argued that within its limits such a commission was perfectly legal; it depended not on clause I 8 of the Act of Supremacy of I 559, deleted by statute in I64I and again in i66i, but on clause I7, which according to him also established the crown's 'visitatorial power over the ecclesiastical state and persons', as well as the Act of I66I, which confirmed the king's general powers as Supreme Governor. Finally, Ogg argued very strongly that the Commission was never a court, on the rather strange grounds that it could not fine or imprison. The question seems to me of slight importance, but obviously not to Ogg and many others. However, a body which referred to its meetings, in its own minutes, as 'A court, held in the Council Chamber at Whitehall on ... [etc.]', a body chaired by the Lord Chancellor, who must always be of the quorum of three, a body which included the Chief Justice of King's Bench and in I 687 also the ChiefJustice of Common Pleas and one of the Barons of the Exchequer, a body which summoned men before it on complaint, which sub-poenaed witnesses and examined them on oath, which came to verdicts and dealt out punishments, whose proceedings were formally recorded by a Secretary, William Bridgeman surely this body can have been nothing other than a court? After all, the Oxford English Dictionary defines a court of judicature merely as, 'An assembly of judges or other persons legally appointed and acting as a tribunal to hear and determine any cause, ecclesiastical, military or naval'.