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April 2008
Parish History Episode 84 - The Sermon at Greenwich
On the Sunday after Epiphany, in the Year 1552, Bernard Gilpin was invited, or summoned, to Greenwich, to preach a sermon before the King and Court.
He was still an unbeneficed priest, earning his living by assisting in London parishes. He had, we may recall, at one time been seen as a champion of the older, the Catholic, form of worship and doctrine, but, after his public disputation with Peter Martyr, and his private discussion with his uncle, Bishop Tunstall, he had apparently modified his views, and had now come round to a more Protestant interpretation of the Sacraments. No doubt he had simplified complicated mental processes when he attributed his conversion simply to those debates and discussions, but there is no reason to disbelieve his assertion that the Doctrine of Transubstantiation was the rock upon which he had stumbled.
The Palace at Greenwich to which he was summoned was then a royal residence, in what is now Greenwich Park, facing the River Thames. Greenwich Dockyard was then the chief base of the Royal Navy, protecting London from any threat of a maritime assault. Here were built the King's ships, and the kings were proud of their fleet. A regular Navy was an innovation of the Tudor Dynasty. Previous kings had simply requisitioned merchant ships for their campaigns against France, but Henry VII, aware of the ease with which he had landed in Britain, to kill King Richard and claim the Crown, wished to make sure that he would be the last man to come to power by such means. Henry VIII had increased the fleet, to make use of it in his rather pointless campaigns against France, and now Edward VI had inherited it. Now it had been arranged for the young King to come to Greenwich to inspect his ships. It was arranged that, on the Sunday, Gilpin would be the Preacher to the King and his Court.
So Gilpin came down the Thames, from London to Greenwich. He found, on arrival at Greenwich Palace, that the hearers were to be fewer than he had expected. The young King, a sickly lad, was apparently too ill to travel down the river, and had stayed in London. John Dudley, the new "Lord Protector", and Earl of Northumberland, and effective ruler of England, had stayed behind with his ward, presumably anxious that no-one other than himself would have much chance of speaking with the young King in private.
When Gilpin arrived, he found that he would be preaching to a depleted congregation. Nevertheless, he began boldly. He read the lesson, from the Second Chapter of Luke's Gospel, telling of the visit of Jesus to the Temple in Jerusalem, for the occasion of His Bar-Mitzvah, and how He became separated from His parents, how they sought Him, and how they reproached Him when they found Him; and the preacher's text was Jesus' reply to His earthly parents : "Wist ye not that I must be about My Father's business?"
Gilpin tells his hearers that we all must be about our Father's business. "As I am here", he tells them, "I must cry unto all estates, of the ecclesiastical ministry, of the civil government, and of the vulgar people".
He begins with the ecclesiastical ministry, the priests. He blames them for Plurality (one man holding, and drawing a stipend for, more than one benefice) and for Non-Residence (a priest choosing to live away from his parish or parishes). "So long as it shall be lawful", he says, "for men to have so many livings as they can get, and discharge never a one; so long as men may have livings in which they live not, but lie where they will in idleness, far from their cure, fatting themselves like the Devil's porklings, and letting a thousand souls perish for lack of spiritual food, God's business shall never be well applied."
"A thousand pulpits in England are covered in dust", he continued dramatically, "and have not heard more than three or four sermons these past fifteen or sixteen years, and few of those sermons worthy of the name!"
He looked up, and ran his eye over the congregation, noting the empty seats. He did not blame King Edward for being absent, knowing that the young King was ill. The King's physicians no doubt needed to be with him, but why were so many other courtiers absent? "I am come this day", he announced, "to preach to the King, and to those which be in authority under him. I am very sorry that they should be absent, which ought to give example, and encourage others to the hearing of God's Word. And I am more sorry for that other preachers before me complain much of their absence. But in their absence I will speak to their seats, as if they were present".
Gilpin then, beginning with the words, "But now, to come to the civil governance, the nobility, the magistrates and the officers..." castigated all in authority for their pride and their greed, and for their mad scramble for offices, pensions, dignities and honours.”Look, in all counties", he said, "how Lady Avarice has set up mighty men, gentlemen and rich men, to rob and spoil the poor, to turn them from their livings, and from their rights, so that for ever the weakest go to the wall."
No doubt some of his hearers had, since Dudley had replaced Seymour as Lord Protector, been, with the help of well-paid lawyers, engaged in enclosing poor men's fields, and had been able to act with greater impunity than heretofore, and they must have listened with some discomfort as Gilpin reminded them of how much better disposed were the laws of ancient Israel to the rights of the poor than were those of contemporary England. Had not, he asked, King Ahab, craving possession of Naboth's vineyard, been forced to offer the peasant its value in silver in order to secure it? (But, when Naboth still refused to sell, Ahab took more violent measures to secure possession.) And had not Ahab's son, King Jehoram, granted Elisha's friend, the Shunammite Widow, on her return from the Philistine country, possession of the land that she claimed?
There was, at this time, as those readers whose memories extend back to the October, 2007 issue of "Signpost", and my article, Number 78 in this series, "The Dying King" may remember, a steadily worsening economic situation, in England, and in most of Europe.
The rich and powerful, however, were able by various means to insulate themselves from the severe distress which had become the lot of the labouring poor. In fact, in much contemporary opinion, they had - many of them - aggravated the situation, by enclosing fields, turning ploughlands into sheep-runs, and evicting the unwanted peasantry, turning them adrift, to seek work in the towns, or to beg or steal to feed themselves.
Bishop Hugh Latimer had made a name for himself by his denunciations of the practice of enclosures, and had at one time influenced the former Lord Protector, Edward Seymour, to take steps to minimise the spread of enclosures, and even to undo some more recent enclosures, and restore the land to the plough. But now Seymour was in the Tower of London, and would be executed about a week after Gilpin preached his sermon at Greenwich. Though Bernard Gilpin was never formally a "Commonwealth man", as followers of Bishop Latimer were known, he, in the final part of his sermon, showed sympathy with their ideas.
Gilpin had already unfavourably compared the great men (or many of them) of King Edward's England with those Biblical kings, such as Ahab and Jehoram, generally regarded as wicked tyrants. He now moved towards condemning their practices more explicitly. Again he drew a Biblical parallel.
"When Christ suffered His Passion", he told his listeners, "There was one Barabbas. Saint Matthew calls him a notable thief - a gentleman thief, such as rob now-a-days in velvet coats. The other two were obscure thieves, and nothing famous. The rustical thieves were hanged, and Barabbas was delivered. Even so, now-a-days, the little thieves are hanged, that steal of necessity, but the great Barabbasses have free liberty to rob and to spoil without all measure, in the midst of our city, where the God of Truth ought to be honoured.
But let them alone! They are occupied in their father's business - even that of the Prince of Darkness!"
A short while later, Gilpin informs us, "Thousands in England, which have kept honest houses, now beg, door to door.."
Why does not the Law do anything about it? "Well", Gilpin tells us, "Be the poor man's cause never so manifest a truth, the rich shall for money find six or seven counsellors that shall stand with subtleties and sophisms, to cloak an evil matter, and to hide a known truth. Alas, that even manifest falsehood should be maintained! A piteous case in a Christian commonwealth!"
And there Gilpin uses Latimer's favourite word - "commonwealth". But Gilpin was not to follow Latimer, with his ideas of what we would describe as a "socialist" commonwealth all the way: certainly not all the way to the stake, at which Hugh Latimer would die, during Queen Mary's reign. But he survived that Queen's persecutions, and he lived, he might perhaps have claimed, to try and apply some of Latimer's ideals, locally, in Houghton-le-Spring, during Queen Elizabeth's reign.
The sermon was over. Neither the King nor the Lord Protector had been there to hear it. But other courtiers were present. They included two young men, the sons of the two heroes who had suppressed the recent peasant revolts in the West and in the East. One was Francis Russell, who would, on his father's death, become the Second Earl of Bedford. The other was Robert Dudley, a younger son of John Dudley, the Lord Protector. He will later become the Earl of Leicester, and, in the writings of many romantic novelists, he will be Queen Elizabeth's secret lover.
Be that as it may, both men will be men of influence, and both will come into Gilpin's life again. When they come into power, they will remember the gifted preacher whom they heard at Greenwich. They met with Gilpin after the service, and they asked him for a written copy of his sermon, and they then arranged to have it printed.
That is how it comes to be that the text of this sermon alone, of all those which Bernard Gilpin must have preached, survives.
I have never read the text. But I did hear it preached - not on the first occasion, at Greenwich in 1552, but four hundred and forty years later, on Bernard Gilpin's Day, in March, 1992, when Peter Fisher, our former Rector, read it out from the pulpit of Houghton Church.
Dick Toy
