Life
1581-1656 [freq. Usher]; b. 4 Jan., Nicholas St., Dublin, son of Dublin lawyer and member of familay with many Catholic members incl. his uncle Richard Stanyhurst, a recusant; ed. school of two Scottish agents of James VI, seeking to establish a party in Ireland; entered TCD at it foundation, the charter having been secured by his uncle Henry Usher, archbishop of Armagh; schol., 1594; grad. 1600; fellow, 1599-1605; lay preacher at Christ Church, Dublin; MA and ord. 1601; sent to England to buy books for TCD, 1602; Chancellor of St. Patrick’s, and rector of Finglas, 1605; professor of theol. controversies, 1607-21; rector of Assey, 1611-26; published Gravissimae Questionis de Christianarum Ecclesiarum […] Historica Explicatio (1613), a history of the Western Church extending the narraive in Jewel’s Apology for the Church of England from the third to the middle of the thirteenth century; DD, 1614; prepared Calvinist convocation articles of Church of Ireland with others, 1615; Vice-Chancellor of TCD, 1617; rector of Trim, 1620; Bishop of Meath, 1621, when the Book of Kells was in his possession and care in his house in Drogheda, having previously been held by Richard Plunkett, last abbot of the monastery, and thereafter by his kinsman Gerald Plunkett in Dublin; his Discourse of the Religion Anciently Professed by the Irish and the British, arguing the continuity of the British and Irish Churches in opposition to Rome, later published in fuller edition of 1631 and primarily aimed at an Old English audience, first appeared as an appendix to Christopher Sibthorp’s A Friendly Advertisement to the Pretended Catholics of Ireland (Dublin 1622); studied in England, 1623-26, bringing the Book of Kells with him; Archbishop of Armagh, 1625, obstructing of Bedell’s Bible and discountenanced idea of using Irish in the religious service, 1629; defeatd efforts to make Irish doctrine conform exactly with English; incorporated DD, Oxon., 1626; defended penal laws, 1626-27; corresponded with Archbishop Laud advertising the prestige of the Irish primacy in comparison with that of Canterbury as descending from St. Patrick, 1628-40; attacked Philip O’Sullivan Beare and was himself the object of an attack in the appendix of Decas Patritiana (1629) where he is called “Archicornigeromastix”; brought out his Discourse on the Religion Antiently Professed [...] (1631); issued Britannicarum ecclesiarum antiquitates (Dublin 1639) [var. Primordia] on a reading of the Patrician narratives in the Book of Armagh [but see note on Antoninus, infra]; accepted on instructions of Strafford the English 39 Articles but rejected the English canons of 1604 in favour of Irish canons, 1634; crushed pretensions of Archbishop Bulkeley of Dublin to Irish primacy in special hearing before Lord Lieutenant, 1634; pressed for equality of Irish primacy at Armagh with that at Canterbury as direct successor of St. Patrick, 1634; left Ireland 1640; counselled Charles I against execution of Strafford; drafted scheme of modified episcopacy acceptable to puritans, and published without his permission, 1641; bishopric of Carlisle [in commendam], Feb, 1642-Autumn 1649; moved to Oxford, 1642; voted pension of Westminster, Sept. 1643, paid Dec. 1647; objected to Westminster Assembly of divines, 1643; refuged in Wales, 1645; guest of Countess of Peterborough, at Reigate, Surrey, 1646; conferred with Charles I in Isle of Wight on abortive negotiations with parliament on question of episcopacy; preacher at Lincoln’s Inns, 1649; offered pension by Richelieu, c.1649; Chronology or Annales Veteris et Novi Testamenti, 2 vols. (1650-54), in which he calculated the long-accepted chronology printed by an unknown authority in the Authorised Version of the Bible and dating creation of the world at 22 Oct. 4004 BC; his marginal notes are visible on the late 14th century Latin MS Vitae Sanctorum Hibernicorum, otherwise the Codex Armachanus, now in Marsh’s Library (MS 122 fols.); De Graeca LXX Interpretum Versione Syntagma (1655), his last work; d. 20 [err. 21 March DIB] at Lady Petersborough’s house, Reigate, Surrey; buried in state in Westminster, 17 April, with permission of Oliver Cromwell; his library of 10,000 vols. was bought for £2,000 in 1658, and placed in TCD by Charles II at the Restoration, 1661; astronomists celebrated 25 Oct. 1996 as the day on which the world would end according to his forecast; nephew of Richard Stanihurst, and son-in-law of Luke Challoner; considered implacably opposed Catholicism in religion but kindly to Catholic friends; Charles Gavan Duffy proposed that his remains be brought back to Ireland, in Irish Statesman (4 Sept. 1926); there is a portrait of Ussher doubtfully attrib. to Sir Peter Lely. RR CAB DNB PI DIB DIW OCEL FDA OCIL

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Works
A Discourse of the Religion Anciently Professed by the Irish and the British (Dublin 1631); An Answer to a Challenge made by a Jesuit in Ireland (London: R. Young 1631; for Partners of the Irish Stocke) [infra]; Do. [4th edn.] 1687); Veterum epistolarum Hibernicarum sylloge (Dublin: Stationers’ Company 1632), 4o [STC 24557] [includes two of Eruigena’s letters]; Britannicarum Ecclesiarum Antiquitates (Dublin: Stationer’s Company 1639); Apostolical Institution of Episcopacy (1641); C. R. Elrington and J. H. Todd, The Whole Works of ... James Ussher &c, 17 vols. (Dublin 1847-64); ‘Refutation of J[ohn] H[arrison] his Opinion, that ye World Should End AD 1630’ (c.1615), Bod. MS Add. C., 301ff. 95-97; ‘The effect of a speech delivered by the Lo[r]d Primate before the Lo[r]d Deputy’, TCD MS 842, printed in part as ‘The Duty of the King’s Necessities’, in N. Barnard, ed., Clavi Trabales (London 1661); The Reduction of the Episcopacy unto the form of Synodical Government received in the Ancient Church (1641), in C. R. Elrington & J. H. Todd, eds., The Whole Works, 17 vols. (1847-64) [Leerssen var. 1839-64].

An Answer to a Challenge made by a Iesvite in Ireland wherein the Iudgement of Antiquity in the points questioned is truly delivered, and the Noveltie of the now Romism doctrine plainly discovered, by Iames Ussher Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of Ireland wherevnto Certain other treatises of the same author are adjoyned, the titles whereof in the [n]ext leafe are more particularly specified (London, printed for RI the Partners of the Irish Stocke. 1631), 583pp.. Appendix includes 1] An Answer to a challenge made by a Iesuite in Ireland, first published in the yeare, 1624, and since revised and augmented. 2] A sermon preached before the house of commons, 18th Feb. 1620. 3] A brief declaration of the Universality of the Church of Christ, and the Unitie of the Catholic Faith professed therein, delivered in a sermon before the Kings majestie, the 20th of June 1624. 4] A discourse of the religion anciently professed by the Irish and the British, first set forth in the yeare 1622 and now digested in some better forme, and further enlarged. 5] A speech delivered in the Castle-Chamber at Dublin, the 22th November 1622 concerning the Oath of Supremacy [called rare by CAB]. Includes chronological list of authors cited from Nicodemus to Erasmus. Top of page titles in the last section include Of Prayer to Saints, Of Images, Of Free-will, &c.

“Directions for Reading Theology” [being MS 217 ff 41v-42v., Queen’s College, Oxford], rep. in J. R. Parr, The Life of James Ussher (London 1686)]; Patrick Kelly, ‘A Pamphlet Attributed to John Toland and an Unpublished Reply by Archbishop William King, in Topoi, 4 (1985), pp.81-90.

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Criticism
J. R. Parr, The Life of the Most Reverend Father in God, James Ussher, late Arch-Bishop of Armagh, Primate and Metropolitan of all Ireland (London 1686).

A. Carr, Life and Times of James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh (1848); R. William Ball Wright, ed., The Ussher Memoirs [Genealogy of the Ussher families in Ireland] (Dublin: Sealy, Bryers & Walker 1889).

Hugh Trevor Roper, ‘James Ussher’, in Catholics, in Anglicans and Puritans (London: Secker & Warburg 1985) [q.p.].

Norman Sykes, ‘James Ussher as Churchman’, in Theology 60 (1957), pp.54-60, 102-11.

R. Buick Knox, James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh (Cardiff: Wales UP 1967) [see infra]; and rems. in Hugh Kearney, Scholars and Gentlemen (Faber 1970), pp.67-77.

Alan Ford, The Protestant Reformation in Ireland, 1590-1641 (Frankfurt 1987).

Declan Gaffney, ‘The Practice of Religious Controversy in Dublin 1600-1641, in W. J. Shiels and Diana Ward, eds., The Churches, Ireland and the Irish (London 1989), pp.145-58.

Bernadette Cunningham, ‘The Culture and Ideology of the Irish Franciscans at Louvain 1607-1650, in Ciaran Brady, ed., Ideology and the Historians (Dublin 1991), pp.11-30.

Alan Harrison, ‘John toland and Celtic Studies’, in C. J. Byrne et al., eds., Celtic Languages and Celtic Peoples [Proceedings of th Second North American Congress of Celtic Studies] (Canada, Halifax 1992), [cp.564].

Alan Ford, ‘The Church of Ireland 1588-1641: A Puritan Church?’, in A. Ford, J. I. McGuire, & K. Milne, eds., As by law Established (Dublin 1995) [q.pp.].

Ute Lotz Heumann, ‘The Protestant Interpretation of History in Ireland: The Case of James Ussher’, in B. Gordon, ed., Protestant History and Identity in Sixteenth Century Europe, Vol. II: The Later Reformation (Aldershot 1996), pp.107-20.

John McCafferty, ‘St Patrick for the Church of Ireland: James Ussher’s Discourse’, in Irish Studies Review (April 1998), pp.87-101.

Elizabethanne Boran, ‘Reading Theology with the community of Believers: James Ussher’s “Directions”’, in Bernadette Cunningham & Máire Kennedy, eds., The Experience of Reading: Irish Historical Perspectives (Dublin: Rare Books Group [… &c.] 1999), pp.39-59.

Joep Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fíor Ghael, 2nd ed. (Cork UP 1996 [rep. edn.]), pp.263-77; Bernadette Cunningham & Raymond Gillespie, ‘“The Most Adaptable of Saints”: The Cult of St. Patrick in the Seventeenth Century’, in Archivium Hibernicum, Vol. 49 (1995), pp.92-93.

John McCaffrey, ‘“God bless Your Free Church of Ireland”: Wentworth, Laud, Bramhall and the Irish Convocation of 1634’, in J. F. Merritt, ed., The Political World of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford (Cambridge 1996), pp.187-208.

Joep Leerssen, ‘Archbishop Ussher and the Gaelic Past’, in Studia Hibernica, Vols. 22-23 (1982-23), pp.50-58.

William Monck Mason, The Catholic Religion of St. Patrick and St. Columbkill (Dublin 1822).

Nelson McCausland, Patrick Apostle of Ulster: A Protestant View of St. Patrick (Belfast 1997).

William O’Sullivan [q. title], Irish Historical Studies, XVI, No. 62 (Sept. 1968), pp.215-19.

Robert E. Ward, et al., eds, Letters of Charles O’Conor of Belanagare (Cath. Univ. of America Press 1988).

Norman Vance, Irish Literature, A Social History (Basil Blackwell 1990), Chap. 2.

Anthony Alcock, Understanding Ulster (Lurgan: Ulster Society [Northern Whig] 1994), pp.11-12.

George Saintsbury (English Literature, 1898), (1922 ed., p. 384).

W. B. Stanford, Ireland and the Classical Tradition (IAP 1976; 1984).

Muriel McCarthy & Caroline Sherwood-Smith, eds., Hibernia Resurgens: Catalogue of Marsh’s Library (1994).

Prof. James O’Meara, Eriugena (Mercier 1969), (p. vii.).

William O’Sullivan, Irish Historical Studies, XVI, No. 62 (Sept. 1968), pp.215-19.

Alan Ford, reviewing Parry, The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the 17th century (1995), in Irish Historical Studies, Vol. XXXI, No. 121 (May 1998)].

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Notes
Charles Read, ed., A Cabinet of Irish Literature (3 vols., 1876-78), selects ‘Of Meditation’, from A Method for Meditation (London 1656); ‘How Adam and Eve Broke all the Commandments at Once’, from The Body of Divinity, 5th ed. (1658); and ‘On the Oath of Supremacy’, from rare work Clavi Trabales, or Nailes fastened by so[me] great Masters of Assemblyes, with a pref. by the Lord-bishop of Lincoln, a speech delivered in the Castle Chamber at Dublin, 22 Nov. 1622, at the censuring of some officers who refused to take the oath of supremacy. By the Primate Usher, then Bishop of Meath’; Read calls this the only time he raised his ben against the cavaliers; but in it he instances the argument that the form of the oath requires ‘a full resolution of conscience’, and goes on to ‘clear this point and remove all needless scruples out of men’s minds’, invoking the Pauline injunction to obey sovereignty, and the civil duty to provide for the moral welfare of citizens]. CAB calls Ussher Irish of long-continued descent; from a Nevil, the train of King John, office of Usher; first ed. two blind aunts, intellectual and religious; then ed. by Scotsman, in disguise, actually Jacobites; collected materials of Annals of the Old and New Testament; controversy with Jesuit Henry Fitz-Symonds, prisoner in Dublin Castle; responded to the latter’s taunts of youth; MA 1600; proctor and lecturer, ord. by his uncle, Archbishop of Armagh; sermon prophecy, ‘for this year I reckon forty years; and then those whom you now embrace shall be your ruin, and you shall bear their iniquity’ (viz., Rebellion); proceeded to London with Dr Luke Challoner to buy books for TCD, 1603; BD, 1607; Chancellor of St. Patrick’s; Camden (1551-1623), visiting, concludes his description of Ireland in Britannia, ‘Most of which I acknowledge to owe to the diligence and labour of James Usher, chancellor of the church of St. Patrick, who in various learning and judgement far exceeds his years’; professor of Divinity at 26; visited London in 1609, and became acquainted with Selden, Sir Robt. Cotton, Lydiat, Dr Davenant; afterwards stayed by rule three moths each three years; elected provost of TCD, 1610, but refused; 1612, DD; De Ecclesiarum Christianarum Successione et Statu (1613); printed with Antiquities of the British Churches (1687 ed.); m. dg. of Luke Challoner; made Bishop of Meath by James I, London 1619; appointed by James to collect material for eccles. history of England, Ireland, and Scotland; appt. Archb. of Armagh, 21st, six days before death of James I (27 Mar.); received £400 out of treasury of Charles I; employed British merchant at Aleppo to buy oriental writings incl. Samaritan Pentateuch, and coy of OT in Syriac, now in Bodleian; [details of his English career follow]; his library seize [sic] for refusal to present himself at the Assembly of Divines, 1643, to remodel the Church; Dr. Featly obtained it for his own use; published On the Lawfulness of Levying War against the King; Historical Disquisitions touching Lesser Asia, and The Epistles of Saint Ignatius; retired to Cardiff Castle, commanded by Sir T. Tyrrel, who had married his dg.; moved to castle of St. Donats, invited by Dowager Lady Stradling; his manuscripts broken into by thieves and flung about; rescued by county gentlemen; moved to London to house of Lady Peterborough, 1646; preacher of Lincoln’s Inn, 1646; called for advice by King at Carisbrooke Castle; watched execution from roof of Peterborough House; Annals of the Old Testament (1650-54); pleaded cause of English clergy before Cromwell, 1654 and 1655; taken ill and died, 20 Mar.; Cromwell ordered his interment at Westminster Abbey, 17 April; his library sought by Kings of Denmark and Mazarin; Cromwell had it purchased by army and stored in Dublin Castle; other works, solar Calculations of the Syrians; On the Apostles’ Creed and other Ancient confessions of Faith; De Graeca Septuaginta; Ecclesiastical Antiquities of the British Church, of which Gibbon ‘all that learning can extract from the rubbish of the dark ages is copiously stated in Archbishop Usher’; Jebb calls him ‘the most profoundly learned offspring of the Reformation’; and Johnson, ‘Usher is the great luminary of the Irish church; and a greater no church can boast of’. [… &c.]

Seamus Deane, gen. ed., Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 1 selects A Discourse of the Religion Anciently Professed by the Irish and the British [251-52]; BIOG, 271 [this notice taken directly from DIB], bishop of Meath, 1621; although a Royalist, he advised Charles I against the execution of Strafford bishop of Carlisle, and later resided in Oxford and then in Wales; WORKS & CRIT [see supra]; 237 [counted with Ware, Wadding and Colgan as ‘scientific’ historians of the age]; 1291 [patristic scholar who devoted much of his energies to the cause of a distinctive Irish reformed church]. FDA2 the idea of the Celt … was received wisdom of the Church of Ireland [tracing itself from St. Patrick] since the days of Archbishop Ussher [Terence Brown, ed.], 519; Aodh de Blacam (Studies 1934), ‘In the seventeenth century, the University [TCD], like Ussher himself, was not unfriendly to Irish historical studies’; ftn. Ussher attempted to prevent use of Irish in Church of Ireland by, among other things, obstructing Bedell’s Irish translation of the Bible, an avid student of early Irish history [Luke Gibbon, ed.], 1016 [but see infra, Leerssen].

John McCafferty, ‘St Patrick for the Church of Ireland: James Ussher's Discourse', in Irish Studies Review, April 1998, pp.87-101, incls. bibliography: Ute Lotz Heumann, ‘The Protestant Interpretation of History in Ireland: The Case of James Ussher’, in B. Gordon, ed., Protestant History and Identity in Sixteenth Century Europe, Vol. II: The Later Reformation (Aldershot 1996), pp.107-20; Alan Ford, The Protestant Reformation in Ireland, 1590-1641 (Frankfurt 1987); Declan Gaffney, ‘The Practice of Religious Controversy in Dublin 1600-1641, in W. J. Shiels and Diana Ward, eds., The Churches, Ireland and the Irish (London 1989), pp.145-58; Bernadette Cunningham, ‘The Culture and Ideology of the Irish Franciscans at Louvain 1607-1650, in Ciaran Brady, ed., Ideology and the Historians (Dublin 1991), pp.11-30; C. R. Elrington & J. H. Todd, eds., The Whole Works of … James Ussher, 17 vols. (Dublin 1847-64); Alan Ford, ‘The Church of Ireland 1588-1641: A Puritan Church?’, in A. Ford, J. I. McGuire, & K. Milne, eds., As by law Established (Dublin 1995) [q.pp.]; for discussion of Dempster controversy, see Joep Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fíor Ghael, 2nd ed. (Cork UP 1996 [rep. edn.]), pp.263-77; Bernadette Cunningham & Raymond Gillespie, ‘“The most adaptable of saints”: The Cult of St. Patrick in the Seventeenth Century’, in Archivium Hibernicum, Vol. 49 (1995), pp.92-93; McCaffrey, ‘“God bless your free Church of Ireland”: Wentworth, Laud, Bramhall and the Irish Convocation of 1634’, in J. F. Merritt, ed., The Political World of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford (Cambridge 1996), pp.187-208; Joep Leerssen, ‘Archbishop Ussher and the Gaelic Past’, in Studia Hibernica, Vols. 22-23 (1982-23), pp.50-58; William Monck Mason, The Catholic Religion of St. Patrick and St. Columbkill (Dublin 1822); Nelson McCausland, Patrick Apostle of Ulster: A Protestant View of St. Patrick (Belfast 1997).

Hyland Books (Cat. 224) lists A Body of Divinity, or the Summe and Substance of Christian Religion [1st edn.] (1648), port.

Univ. of Ulster (Morris Collection) holds Nicholas Bernard, The Life and Death of the Most Reverend and Learned Father of Our Church Dr. James Usher, Late Arch-Bishop of Armagh, and Primate of All Ireland, published in a sermon at his funeral at the Abbey of Westminster, April 17, 1656, Printed by E. Tyler (1656) [12], 119, [6] p.; also Charles Richard Elrington, Life of the Most Rev. James Ussher, DD, Lord Archb. of Armagh, and Primate of All Ireland, with an account of his writings (Hodges and Figgis 1848) [var. Hodges & Smith 1847].

Library of Herbert Bell (Belfast) holds An Answer To Challenge (London 1631); A Brief Declaration London 1631); A Sermon Preached Before The House of Commons (London 1631); A Speech Delivered in the Castle Chamber at Dublin (London 1631); A Discourse of The Religion of The Irish v. British (London 1638).

Great Chad: Ussher was called ‘the greatest luminary of the Irish Church’ by Dr. Johnson, and described on the continent as ‘catholicorum doctissimus’, while Bishop Jebb called him ‘the most profoundly learned offspring of the Reformation’ (Quoted Rev. Alexander Leeper, DD, Canon of St Patrick’s, Historical Handbook of St Patrick’s Cathedral (1891, p.47.)

Sylvester O’Halloran wrote of Ussher: ‘[O]ur great primate Usher [Ussher] who, though not of Irish descent, yet thought the glory of his country worth contending for, and adverting harshly to “the Caledonian plagiary”.’ (Letter to the Dublin Magazine, signed ‘Miso-Dolos’, Jan 1763 p.21-22; headed ‘The poems of Ossine, the son of Fionne Mac Comhal, reclaimed’; quoted in Joep Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fíor Ghael, 1986, p.401.)

Catholic convert? Various sources (incl. Cleeve & Brady, Dictionary of Irish Writers) suggest that he was intensely hostile to Bishop Laud and died a Roman Catholic. Norman Vance remarks in Irish Literature: A Social History (Basil Blackwell 1990) that his mother may have been Catholic, like her brother (Richard Stanihurst), a claim made in Commentarius Rinucinnianus (1658): ‘si non patre, certe matre Catholica’. Ussher was also related to Henry Fitzsimons, the Jesuit controversialist and Prof. of Philosophy at Douai, who was invited to take part in a debate with Ussher while imprisoned in Dublin Castle. A variant account exists giving Cardiff as the place he died.

Library Gift: Ussher amassed 10,000 books, assigned to TCD Lib. through intervention of Charles II. His collection inclues manuscripts and texts by Bainbridge, Roger Fry, Galileo. Also Irish, Greek, and Arabic, and mss of the Waldenses, a religious party resistant to Rome. Ussher collated the Book of Kells with the Book of Durrow in 1621, registering that the Book of Kells had then four more leaves than now. See TOPICS, TCD Lib(2).

Disraeli’s Coningsby contains an allusion to his famous chronology, as does the the film, Inherit the Wind.

George A. Little (Dublin Before the Vikings, 1957) remarks that Archbishop Us[s]her in his Primordia, explains ‘baile’ [town] as oppidum (p.861); further, Ussher’s Epist. Hist. Syll., N. 8, contains Livinius’ poetical epistle to Abbot Florbert (q.p.)

John Colgan: lacking direct access to texts on St. Patrick in compiling his Triadas Thaumaturga (1647), Colgan cited those fragments of Tirechan and Murchu which he had found quoted in Ussher’s Britannicarum Ecclesiarum Antiquitates of 1639 [De Burca 44; 1997, p.10.] Note, however, that Ussher is said to have used St. Antoninus’s Historiorum Chronicarum (1480) as a basis of his life of Patrick in 1639 (Thomas Kobdebo, ed., Treasures of Maynooth Library; see further under Fitzgeralds.)

Portrait: There is a portrait of Ussher doubtfully attrib. to Sir Peter Lely, oil; see Anne Crookshank, ed., Irish Portraits Exhibition (Ulster Museum 1965).

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