3
June 1594 A.D. Mr.
(Bp.) John Aylmer, Church of England, Dies—English Reformer.
Wiki tells the wee-story.
John Aylmer (Ælmer or Elmer; 1521 - 3 June 1594) was an English bishop, constitutionalist
and a Greek scholar.[1]
Contents
Early life and career
He was born at Aylmer Hall, Tilney St. Lawrence, Norfolk. While still a boy, his precocity was noticed by Henry Grey, 3rd
Marquess of Dorset, later 1st Duke of Suffolk, who sent
him to Cambridge, where he seems to have become a fellow of Queens' College.[2] About 1541 he was
made chaplain to the duke, and tutor of Greek [3] to his daughter, Lady
Jane Grey.
His first preferment was to the archdeaconry of Stow, in the diocese of Lincoln,
but his opposition in Convocation to the doctrine of
transubstantiation
led to his deprivation and to his flight into Switzerland. While there he wrote a reply to John
Knox's famous Blast against the Monstrous Regiment of
Women, under the title of An Harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe Subjects,
etc., and assisted John Foxe in translating the Acts of the Martyrs
into Latin. On the accession of Elizabeth he returned to England. In 1559 he resumed the Stow archdeaconry, and in
1562 he obtained that of Lincoln. He was a member of the famous convocation of
1562, which reformed and settled the doctrine and discipline of the Church
of England.
In 1576 he was consecrated Bishop
of London, and while in that position made himself notorious by
his harsh treatment of all who differed from him on ecclesiastical questions,
whether Puritan or Roman Catholic. Various efforts were made to remove him to another see.
He is frequently assailed in the famous Mar prelate Tracts, and is characterized as "Morrell," the bad shepherd, in Edmund
Spenser's Shepheard's
Calendar (July). His reputation as a scholar hardly
balances his inadequacy as a bishop in the transition time in which he lived.
His Life was written by John
Strype (1701).
Works
"Aylmer, like John
Ponet and Stephen
Gardiner before him, is an important figure in the story of the
reception of classical mixed government in Tudor England." [4] John Aylmer wrote
his work An harborowe for faithful and trewe subiectes (1559), to defend
the female monarchy of Elizabeth I associating "the rule of boyes and
women, or effeminate persons" and on another basis; "that cytie is at
pits brinks, wherein magistrate ruleth lawes, and not the lawes the magistrate:
What could any kyng in Israell do in that common wealth, besides the pollycie
appointed by Moyses?". His effort to familiarize his fellow countrymen
with the "strange and alluring vocabulary of politics", introducing
them to the classical forms and terminology, must be viewed as secondary to
this primary goal.
Aylmer nevertheless described England
as not "a mere monarchy, as some for lack of consideration think, nor a
mere oligarchy, nor democracy, but a rule mixed of all these." 1
He goes on to say that in the mixed
state, "each one of these have or should have like
authority." He argued that in the king-in-Parliament, or, in Elizabeth's
case, the queen-in-Parliament, was not the "image" of a mixed state
"but the thing in deed." It was in Parliament that one found the
three estates: "the king or queen, which representeth the monarchy; the
noble men which be the aristocracy; and the burgesses and knights the
democracy." As he says, "In like manner, if the Parliament use
their privileges: the king can ordain nothing without them." Parliamentary
restraint of a queen's feminine vices would, according to Aylmer, ameliorate
the disadvantages of female monarchy.
His work, particularly his
characterisation of England as a mixed monarchy, would be important to later
English constitutionalists.
Notes
1.
Jump up ^ Dangerous Positions; Mixed
Government, the Estates of the Realm, and the Making of the "Answer to the
xix propositions", Michael Mendle, University of Alabama Press, 1985.
pg 49.
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