'A bitter enemy to the papists': The life and works of Bishop George Carleton (1559-1628)

Bishop George Carleton's (1559--1628) life and works represent a wide range of interests from Latin poetry, to issues of predestinarian thought, to religious biography. Taken as whole he shows an antagonism to challenges to the status quo of received religious and political authority of Jacobean England. Following Carleton's life from his early days at Merton College, Oxford to his last days as Bishop of Chichester a number of elements useful to understanding the Jacobean period emerges. These elements include the shared intellectual background of the Oxford educated, this is related to the increased number of students within the university system and this in turn points to the high level of education achieved by Jacobean bishops which is connected to aspects of the clerical patronage system. The bishop also shows that throughout the period papists and hatred of Catholics influenced Jacobean England's sense of nationhood. The Jacobean perception of, and reaction to, Catholicism has often been overlooked in the search for precursors to the armed conflict of the 1640s. The most notable precursors have been the Puritans, and more recently, Anti-Calvinists. Carleton's life confirms the former since he saw Puritans as doctrinally sound but lacking in their acceptance of ecclesiastical discipline. In terms of the latter, he defended the Calvinist sense of doctrinal predestination as head of the English delegation to the Dutch Synod of Dort (1618--1619) and at home in his rebuttal of Richard Montagu's controversial work. The bishop also saw in aspects of astrology a possible threat to his predestinarian beliefs. Neglected for the most part after the seventeenth century, a re-examination of Carleton's life and work will restore some luster to his tarnished reputation.