ANDREWES, Lancelot

by Lancelot Andrewes

£1,500 · Offered by Sokol Books

First edition, first issue with the errata, of Lancelot Andrews important refutation of Cardinal Bellarmine s response to the Oath of Allegiance. Andrewes (1555-1626) was one of the leading figures of the Anglican Church, a skilled controversialist, deeply scholarly, and proficient in fifteen languages. Sometime Master of Pembroke, Cambridge, Fellow of St John's, Oxford, and Bishop of Winchester, he narrowly missed being Archbishop of Canterbury. A Privy Councillor, his name appears first in the list of divines appointed to produce the King James Bible, and Fuller says of him that "the world wanted learning to know how learned this man was". He was elegised by Milton and frequently consulted by Bacon. He was anti-Papist, and carefully defended the interests of the Church of England. In 1606, after the Gunpowder Plot, Parliament instituted a new Oath of Allegiance, targeted at Catholics. Cardinal Bellarmine issued an attack on the institution of this Oath, prompting an anonymous Royal defence ('Triplici nodo, triplex cuneus') published the following year. Bellarmine replied at the Pope's behest in 1608, under the name of his chaplain, Matteo Torti; prompting James I to commission Andrewes to compose a full reply to supplement the King's 'Apologie for the Oath of Allegiance . James s desire not to see his sovereignty diminished led him to pursue and even intensify Henry VIII s policy regarding the requirement of loyalty to the crown, and in terms of Ecclesiological consequences

• Binding: Hardcover

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