Edmund Grindal

Archibishop of Canterbury (1576-1583)

• Born: c. 1519
• Birthplace: St. Bees, Cumberland, England
• Died: July 6, 1583
• Place of death: Croydon, Surrey, England

An important figure in the establishment of the Elizabethan Church of England, Grindal served successively as bishop of London, archbishop of York, and archbishop of Canterbury.

Early Life

Edmund Grindal (GRIHN-dehl) was born the son of a poor tenant farmer, William Grindal, in St. Bees, Cumberland, a rural English parish. His birth date of 1519 remains uncertain. He matriculated to Magdalene College, Cambridge, and appears as a scholar of Christ’s College in 1536-1537. Grindal took his bachelor of arts degree in 1538 and his master of arts degree in 1540 from Pembroke Hall. After earning a bachelor’s degree in divinity in 1549, he served as a proctor and became vice-master of the college under Bishop Nicholas Ridley .

Through the offices of Ridley, Grindal’s role extended beyond Cambridge. After becoming bishop of London, Ridley appointed Grindal as one of his chaplains. By 1551, Ridley arranged a precentorship for Grindal at St. Paul’s. In quick succession, Grindal became a royal chaplain, a licensed preacher of Canterbury province, and a prebendary of Westminster.

The death of the Protestant king Edward VI in 1553 and the accession of the Catholic queen Mary I halted Grindal’s ecclesiastical advancement. While several of his colleagues, including Bishop Ridley, underwent martyrdom under Mary’s administration, Grindal chose exile, primarily in Strasbourg. He returned to London on January 15, 1559, the very day of Queen Elizabeth I’s coronation.

During his years on the Continent, Grindal was influenced by the German theologian Martin Bucer’s advocacy of church discipline. Grindal played a key role in maintaining the unity of the English exile community. He also helped collect and organize the literary remains of English Protestant martyrs, which John Foxe eventually published as the Actes and Monuments of These Latter and Perillous Dayes (1563; better known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs ). Returning to England in 1559, Grindal was well positioned to take on an important role in Queen Elizabeth’s efforts to reinstitute the English church.

Life’s Work

On his return to England in 1559, Grindal was named one of the commissioners to review the liturgy, and he served as a disputant at the Westminster conference, which was held to suppress the Catholic clergy. He also was selected to explain the revised prayer book, was appointed as one of the commissioners for the visitation of the clergy, and was made master of Pembroke Hall. Finally, on July 26, 1559, he was elected to the most populous and cumbersome bishopric in the country that of London. In addition to overseeing the large and troublesome see of London, Grindal would also serve as the superintendent of the churches of “strangers,” Reformist Protestant congregations of French, Dutch, Spanish, and other exiles resident in the city.

Initially, however, doubts about the appointment plagued Grindal, since he, as a moderate Reformist, did not approve of the wearing of episcopal vestments or the exchange of the Church’s temporal lands for the impropriations of tithes from parishes previously belonging to monasteries. His friend, the theologian Peter Martyr, advised him to accept the position and to work for reform from within the existing church hierarchy, and this is the path that Grindal chose for himself.

During his tenure as bishop of London, Grindal faced two major challenges owing to natural catastrophes: rebuilding St. Paul’s Cathedral after a devastating fire in 1561 and maintaining social order during the London plague in 1563. It was a third challenge, however, that tested his religious conscience: that of how to deal with the growing number of nonconformists who threatened the unity of the Elizabethan church. Grindal, a moderate Reformer, did not always agree with the more conservative archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker . It was thus that Grindal found himself stuck in the middle of the controversy over vestments, which erupted in 1566.

Parker believed that Grindal’s patronage of nonconformist clergy, as well as his sympathy for their views, contributed to disorder in church discipline. The controversy was sparked by the efforts of the queen and Parker to enforce the Act of Uniformity of 1559, which required parish clergy to wear the surplice. A significant number of ministers refused to conform to the mandated attire and were either punished or deprived of their positions. Grindal, who believed in the importance of maintaining church discipline, was nonetheless opposed to the idea of enforcing uniformity in matters that he considered indifferent to religious faith. He preferred to make decisions concerning the enforcement of rules of clerical attire on a case by case basis, depending on the collective leanings of individual parishes and clergy.

At the same time, however, he was suspicious of radical Puritans, Anabaptists, and other separatists or schismatics who refused to obey religious authority and threatened the unity of the newly established Elizabethan church. When forced to decide, Grindal, despite his scruples over conformity, sided with the church hierarchy in the enforcement of the dress code.

In 1570, Grindal was temporarily relieved of the controversies in London through his promotion to the position of archbishop of York, where he took on responsibilities more suited to his theological bent: rooting out the material and ceremonial vestiges of Catholicism from the parishes of this large northern province. He focused his energies on improving the quality of the local clergy; ensuring that rood lofts, crosses, and altars were torn down; and that the Edwardian Book of Common Prayer was followed in church services. He may be credited with realizing the Elizabethan Settlement in the north country in meaningful ways and without undue controversy.

Following the death of Matthew Parker, Grindal was once more called on to face Reformist controversies when he was appointed archbishop of Canterbury in 1576. In the opening months of his tenure as archbishop, Grindal busied himself with the reform of various ecclesiastical and spiritual courts, including the Courts of Faculties, Arches, and Audience, and the Prerogative Court of Canterbury. His normal routine of ecclesiastical duties was soon disrupted.

In June, 1576, reports reached the archbishop of disturbances in Northampton and Warwick caused by a deprived Puritan preacher, Eusebius Paget, and a rector of Warwickshire, John Oxenbridge, during the performance of academic exercises known as “prophesyings.” Belying their name, prophesyings did not involve prognostications. Instead, they constituted meetings of local clergy open to parishioners in which two or three ministers offered their interpretations of biblical passages in dignified sermons. The collegial meeting often ended with the clergy retiring for private discussion and dinner. The meetings were thought by many to support the continuing theological education of the clergy and to promote collegiality. Although occasional polemical Puritan abuses of this forum had occurred before 1576, the preponderance of clergymen looked on these exercises with favor.

Grindal favored continuing the practice of prophesyings on the grounds that they were necessary to the continuing education of the clergy, but Queen Elizabeth ever fearful of Puritan nonconformity demanded that Grindal suppress them throughout the realm. It was at this point that Grindal took the step for which he is most well known in Anglican history. He wrote a six-thousand-word, somewhat tactless letter to the queen explaining his refusal to obey her direct order to suppress the prophesyings, which he believed were necessary to the edification of the clergy. For Grindal, these exercises were in line with God’s will for his ministers and his refusal to suppress them was a matter of religious conscience.

Queen Elizabeth was infuriated by Grindal’s disobedience and had him sequestered in 1577, with hopes never fulfilled of having him deprived of his position. Despite efforts by various court and church officials to bring the two together, the queen and her archbishop were never reconciled. Although never deprived of his position, Grindal was not allowed to present himself at Court for the remainder of his tenure. His freedom of movement was mostly restricted, and he was limited to performing certain routine administrative duties. Thus, from May, 1577, until his death in July, 1583, the Church of England persevered without a fully functioning archbishop. On Grindal’s death, Elizabeth was able to appoint a man to the archbishopric John Whitgift who sympathized with her strict views on ecclesiastical conformity and the importance of suppressing Puritan resistance.

Significance

Although unable to promote his Reformist goals as archbishop of Canterbury, Grindal remained a positive figure for later Reformers and Puritans. They admired his principled conscience and his Reformist stance against the queen’s directive, particularly in the light of such successors as Whitgift, Richard Bancroft, and William Laud, whose repression of Puritan views contributed to the turbulent English Civil Wars of the mid-seventeenth century.

As a moderate ecclesiastic who was well connected to international circles of the Protestant Reformation, Edmund Grindal represented the popular mainstream of English Protestantism. Grindal’s opposition to the queen on the basis of religious conscience earned him respect among moderate Puritans and Reformers in subsequent decades.

Bibliography

Brooks, P. N. “The Principle and Practice of Primitive Protestantism in Tudor England: Cranmer, Parker, and Grindal as Chief Pastors, 1535-1577.” In Reformation Principle and Practice: Essays in Honour of Arthur Geoffrey Dickens, edited by Peter Newman Brooks. London: Scolar Press, 1980. Compares and contrasts the Reformist policy and styles of three Tudor Protestant archbishops of Canterbury.

Collinson, Patrick. Archbishop Grindal, 1519-1583: The Struggle for a Reformed Church. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. Full-length comprehensive biography of Grindal and his contributions to the formation of the Elizabethan Protestant church. The first full-length work written on the subject since 1710.

Kaufman, Peter Iver. “Prophesying Again.” Church History 68 (June, 1999): 337-358. An examination of the Elizabethan controversy over prophesying.

Strype, John. The History of the Life and Acts of the Most Reverend Father in God, Edmund Grindal, the First Bishop of London, and the Second Archbishop of York and Canterbury Successively, in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1821. Originally published in 1710, this biography was for centuries the definitive work on Grindal.