Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 February 2009
One of the most problematic tasks which the historian must address is the assessment of people's opinions and the motives for their actions. There is violent disagreement about the opinions of individuals for whom there exist extensive archives of correspondence, whose ideas are recorded in numerous printed works and whose political associations and circles of friends help to disclose their views. How much more difficult then to assess the motives of a man for whom such sources are very slight, whose ideas are set out in the shortest of polemical tracts, and whose opinions, when assembled, seem to represent a mass of contradictions? Such a man was Benjamin Carier whose change of religious opinions and notorious conversion to Rome are the subject of this article. He was a chaplain to James i but his beliefs were not fully attuned to those of the Jacobean clerical establishment and he decided towards the end of his life to embrace Roman Catholicism. He was apparently just a minor churchman whose early promise was never fulfilled and who changed horses out of pique at his enemies' dominance in the Church of England. His conversion in 1613 caused a brief stir but in less than a year he was dead. His influence in the established Church is uncertain; his real doctrinal beliefs appear to be lost or polemicised beyond the point where they can be used to analyse his transfer of religious allegiance.
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4 Benjamin, Carier, A treatise written by Mr. Doctour Carier, Brussels 1614Google Scholar; two other editions were printed clandestinely in England. It is difficult to determine when this tract was first published. The date of the ‘open letter’ which is its substance is 12 Dec. 1613, and Carier told du Perron that it was sent for the king's eyes alone: Les ambassades el negotiations de l'illustrissime & reverendissime Cardinal du Perron, ed. Ligny, C., Paris 1623, 703Google Scholar. It should be distinguished from the first Latin letter of Aug. 1613 which Carier sent to James via Isaac Casaubon: Dodd, , Church history, ii. 508Google Scholar; Strype, , Life, ii. 512Google Scholar. Carier wanted to delay its publication: Dodd, , Church history, ii. 511Google Scholar. There were evidently manuscript copies of it around by late January at least: ibid. ii. 514, but it was not more generally known even in mid Apr. 1614:HMC Downshire MSS, iv. 311, 376. It is possible that it did not appear in print until after his death: AAW, A xiii. 355. Cf. BL, MS Burney 363, fo. 1908r, for Carier's initial desire to keep his journey abroad a secret.
5 Hakewill, George, An answere to a treatise written by Dr. Carier, London 1616Google Scholar, sig. b3r.
6 At Canterbury, though, he had been a friend of the crypto-papist John Langworth: AAW, OB i. pt i, no. 39. I owe this reference to Patrick Collinson.
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12 PRO, SP 46/63/11. I am grateful to Kenneth Fincham for this reference. Mark Pattison has suggested that Carier tried to use his friendship with Casaubon, Isaac to obtain the deanery of Rochester: Isaac Casaubon 1559–1614, London 1875, 311Google Scholar.
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15 Sir Thomas Lake made no efforts on his behalf: Dodd, , Church history, ii. 512Google Scholar. One of Carier's benefices, Paddlesworth in Kent, was in the gift of the Wotton family (though Carier resigned it in 1599), as was his chapelry at Allington: Loomie, A. J., ‘A Jacobean crypto-Catholic: Lord Wotton’, Catholic Historical Review liii (1967), 328–45 at p. 339Google Scholar. There is, however, little evidence of an active connection between him and Lord Wotton (though his friend Casaubon came over in Lord Wotton's suite in 161 o: Pattison, , Casaubon, 307)Google Scholar.
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23 AAW, A xii. 395, 400, 425, 459, 502, xiii. 58.
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27 I owe this point to Andrew Foster.
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30 Oxford, Balliol College, MS 270, pp. 153–63. This treatise, written after the Gunpowder Plot but before Carier had decided to forsake the Church of England, is addressed to an unnamed secular peer. This could be taken to mean that Carier had already decided that renovation of the English Church would not come about through its clergy but only as a result of political change. (I am grateful to Anthony Milton for this point.) For a definitive discussion of the issue of reunion see Milton, Anthony, Catholic and Reformed, Cambridge 1995CrossRefGoogle Scholar, ch. vii.
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34 Hakewill, Answere, sig. dv. Abbot told Trumbull that Carier had been unsound (implying that he was likely to defect) for years: HMC Downshire MSS, iv. 194. The words which Hakewill reproduced from Carier's commonplace book (dated to early 1612) suggest that as late as this Carier thought it was possible to be in communion with the true Church through a right faith even if, technically, one was a member of a Church which was temporarily in a state of schism.
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