[?] “Autograph list at Pusey House gives both Newman and Brewer, each with a ’?’ In Opuscula at B.O., N includes only p. 39.”—Blehl.
[British Critic, vol. 27, January 1840.]
These volumes contain a great deal of what may be called the gossip of the times to which they relate, or, in other words, of curious and interesting matter, for such gossip is, so far as it is true. The Memoirs of Bishop Goodman, of which the first volume consists, are published from the MS. copy preserved in the Bodleian Library; and the letters, which form the second, have been collected from various depositories, with a view of supplying a general illustration to the Memoirs. Mr. Brewer, to whom we are indebted for the publication, has added a number of apposite historical notes, which show much reading, and increase the attraction of the work.
Goodman, Bishop of Gloucester in the reign of Charles the First, lies under the odium of having conformed to the Church of Rome; and certain it is, he had a difference with Archbishop Laud, at the celebrated Convocation of 1640. In that convocation a canon was enacted against Papists, and Goodman would not sign it. In consequence he was committed to prison, “where he got by his restraint,” says Fuller, “what he could never have gained by his liberty; namely, of one reputed Papist to become for a short time popular, as the only confessor suffering for not subscribing the canons.”—Hist. iii. In the beginning of his episcopate a petition had been presented against him to the king, by Bastwick, Barton, and Prynne, for having, “at his proper cost,” as they said, repaired the high cross in the town of Windsor, and made it a crucifix; also for putting up an altar in his cathedral, and introducing cushions and cloths with the crucifix worked upon them. Moreover, it seems, he had interfered with a clergyman who had been preaching against the “idolatries of the Papists,” and declaring that either obstinate Papists, dying Papists, would not be saved, or else Protestants could not. The bishop is said to have wished him to own that in the eye of the law we were still one with the Church of Rome, though politically severed from it; that it was an offence, nay, a deadly and mortal wound against our own Church to say that members of the Roman Church cannot be saved, inasmuch as we have the same orders, church service, ceremonies, fasts, and feasts as they. Shortly before this he had been reprimanded for maintaining certain unsound opinions at Court, and was generally suspected of embracing the tenets of Romanism. In his Memoirs he advocates auricular confession.
An editor is bound to feel chivalrously towards his author, and Mr. Brewer is not behind his duty. He meets ultra-Protestants with their own weapons,—severity in weighing and difficulty in admitting evidence; and fairly argues that it does not follow, it is not necessary, it is not certain, that, because Bishop Goodman said this or that, therefore he was other than “a sound Protestant.”
“In his will he professed that as he had lived so he died, most constant in all the articles of our Christian faith, and in all the doctrine of God’s holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, ‘whereof,’ he says, ‘I do acknowledge the Church of Rome to be the mother Church. And I do verily believe that no other Church hath any salvation in it, but only so far as it concurs with the faith of the Church of Rome.’ But a sound Protestant might even profess as much; the only question being what he meant by the terms ‘mother Church,’ and ‘concurs with the faith of the Church of Rome.’ A Romanist would rather have professed that the Church of Rome was the only true Church, and would scarcely have admitted the possibility of salvation in a Church separate and distinct from the Church at Rome. At least, if Goodman was consistent, he, having been so long a member of the Church of England, could scarcely say that he had lived most constant to the faith of the Church of Rome, if he considered the Church of Rome to be the only true Catholic and Apostolic Church.”—Introd. xii. xiii.
However, it is certain that during the latter part of his life the bishop had been in habits of intimacy with the well-known Santa Clara, and died in his company. Wood calls him “a harmless man,” “hurtful to none but himself,” “faithful to the poor and hospitable to his neighbours.” That he was kindhearted and placable is shown by his praising, in the course of his Memoirs, both Laud and Williams, though he had had differences with both.
Bishop Goodman was nephew of Dr. Gabriel Goodman, forty years Dean of Westminster, and one of the translators of the English Bible. He was born in 1583, and educated at Westminster School, under the historian Camden, of whom he has recorded some sayings in his Memoirs. From Westminster he was removed to Trinity College, Cambridge; and came into life about the time of King James’s accession and the Raleigh and Gunpowder plots; the latter of which he calls “The most wicked and cursed attempt that ever was practised by man, and generally acknowledged for a truth on all sides.”—vol. i. p. 160. There had been abundance of plots in Elizabeth’s time, but from the ease and unconcern with which she went into public, the bishop argues, either that she did not fear much from them, or that she was, as was certain, “of a wonderful courage and undaunted spirit.”—p. 161.