Cloud of Witnesses: The bishops who refused to swear

The Church of England’s status as the established church has sometimes been a burden to those of its clergy who, having sworn an oath of allegiance to the monarch as their Supreme Governor, have subsequently paid a price for their loyalty. Two who found themselves in just such a dilemma in the 1680s stand proudly in the cloister windows of Chester Cathedral: William Sancroft, archbishop of Canterbury from 1678 to 1690, and Thomas Ken, bishop of Bath and Wells from 1684 to 1691. (Sancroft’s window is back to front!) The cause of their discomfiture came at a pivotal moment in English history.

From the beginning of his reign in 1685, King James II incurred first the suspicion and then the outright opposition of the Church of England towards his religious policies. James was a Catholic, and his imposition in 1687 of a Declaration of Indulgence that gave people the freedom to worship in whatever ways they wished was bitterly opposed by Protestants who feared it might lead to a Catholic revival. Many clergy refused to allow the Declaration to be read in their churches, and seven Anglican bishops, led by William Sancroft and including Thomas Ken, petitioned the king to withdraw it. They were motivated in part by their profound aversion to Catholicism but also by their concern that James was challenging the Church of England’s authority as the established church. Furious at what he saw as their rebelliousness, James committed Sancroft and the other bishops to the Tower of London and ordered them to be tried for seditious libel; but in a verdict that was disastrous for the king, they were found not guilty and acquitted. 

The reprieve was, however, short-lived, for following the ‘Glorious Revolution’ in 1688 that saw King James II cast into exile in France and brought King William III and Queen Mary II to the throne, William Sancroft and Thomas Ken refused to take an oath of allegiance to the new monarchs. They, along with many other Anglican clergy, were morally unable to renounce their ordination oath of allegiance to James II while he was still alive – albeit in exile. Known as ‘non-jurors’ because of their refusal to swear a loyal oath to the new king and queen, they were mostly High-Church Anglicans who, nominally at least, had remained sympathetic to the Jacobite cause.

Retribution for such a defiant display of disloyalty to William and Mary was swift. William Sancroft was suspended from his duties as archbishop of Canterbury in 1690 and Thomas Ken was deprived of the bishopric of Bath and Wells in 1691. Yet neither man was inherently rebellious. Quite the reverse: both were acting from the highest of motives, refusing to abjure their ordination vows of loyalty to the monarch. After losing his office as archbishop, Sancroft, who had an otherwise undistinguished career, retired to his native village of Fressingfield in Suffolk, where he died in 1693. Thomas Ken took what might now be called early retirement at Longleat, in Wiltshire, where he was a guest of his long-standing friend Thomas Thynne, 1^st Viscount Weymouth. When his replacement at Bath and Wells, Richard Kidder, died in 1703, Ken was pressed by Queen Anne to resume his episcopate, but he refused and was finally rewarded for his principles with the royal grant of a pension of £200.

Thomas Ken is especially remembered not only in Bath and Wells but also in Winchester where he was a scholar at Winchester College and later wrote hymns for the choristers there. Some are still sung, among them ‘Awake my soul and with the sun’ and ‘Glory to Thee my God this night’. Thomas Ken died at Longleat in March 1711. On the following day, while his friends were singing ‘Awake my soul and with the sun’, he was buried in the church of St John the Baptist in Frome.

William Sancroft and Thomas Ken were men of high principle at a time when it must have seemed reckless to incur the wrath first of James II and then of William and Mary. Yet for these two bishops, as for all the other Anglican non-jurors, an oath that had been given before God could not simply be set aside for reasons of self-interest; and while both men were deprived of their livelihoods as a result of their stand, they may cause us to reflect, as we pass by their images in the cloister, on the proper relationship between principle and expediency, duty and self-interest.