4 January 1581–21 March 1656 

Education

Ussher was born in Dublin, Ireland into a well-to-do Old English family of Norman descent. His grandfather, James Stanihurst, had been speaker of the Irish parliament, and his father was a clerk in chancery. Ussher's younger, and only surviving, brother, Ambrose, became a distinguished scholar of Arabic and Hebrew. According to his chaplain and biographer, Nicholas Bernard, the elder brother was taught to read by two blind, spinster aunts.

Ussher was a gifted linguist, entering Dublin Free School and then the newly founded (1591) Trinity College, Dublin on 9 January, 1594, at the age of thirteen. He had received his Bachelor of Arts degree by 1598, and was a fellow and MA by 1600 (though Bernard claims he did not gain his MA till 1601). In May 1602 he was ordained in the Trinity College Chapel as deacon in the Protestant, established Church of Ireland (and possibly priest on the same day) by his uncle Henry Ussher, the Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland.

Ussher went on to become Chancellor of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin in 1605 and Prebend of Finglas. He became Professor of Theological Controversies at Trinity College and a Bachelor of Divinity in 1607, Doctor of Divinity in 1612 and then Vice-Chancellor in 1615 and vice-provost in 1616. In 1613 he had married Phoebe, daughter of a previous vice-provost, Luke Challoner, and published his first work. In 1615 he was closely involved with the drawing up of the first confession of faith of the Church of Ireland.

Early career

In 1619 Ussher travelled to England, where he stayed for two years. His only child, Elizabeth, was born in London in 1619. He became prominent after meeting James I. In 1621 James nominated him Bishop of Meath. He also became a national figure in Ireland, becoming privy councillor in 1623, and an increasingly substantial scholar. From 1623 until 1626 he was again in England and was excused from his episcopal duties in order to study church history and was nominated to become Primate of All Ireland and Archbishop of Armagh in 1625, where he succeeded his uncle.

Primate of All Ireland

Archbishop James Ussher (1581-1656)After his consecration in 1626, Ussher found himself in turbulent political times. Tension was rising between England and Spain, and so to secure Ireland Charles I offered Irish Catholics a series of concessions, including religious toleration, known as the Graces, in exchange for money for the upkeep of the army. Ussher was a convinced Calvinist and viewed with dismay the possibility of people he regarded as anti-Christian papists being able to achieve any sort of power. He called a secret meeting of the Irish bishops in his house in November 1626, which drew up "Judgement of the Arch-Bishops and Bishops of Ireland". This begins:

The religion of the papists is superstitious and idolatrous; their faith and doctrine erroneous and heretical; their church in respect of both, apostatical; to give them therefore a toleration, or to consent that they may freely exercise their religion, and profess their faith and doctrine, is a grievous sin.

This was not published until it was read out at the end of a series of sermons against the Graces given at Dublin in April 1627. In the end, the Graces were not confirmed by the Irish parliament.

During a four year interregnum between lord deputies from 1629, there was an increase in the efforts to impose religious conformity within Ireland. In 1633 Ussher wrote to the new Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud to gain support for the imposition of recusancy fines on Irish Catholics. Thomas Wentworth, who arrived as the new Lord Deputy in Ireland in 1633 deflected the pressure for conformity by stating that firstly, the Church of Ireland would have to be properly resourced, and set about its re-endowment. He also settled the long-running dispute about primacy between the sees of Armagh and Dublin in Armagh's favour.

However, Ussher soon found himself at odds with the rise of Arminianism and Wentworth and Laud's desire for conformity between the Church of England and the more Calvinistic Church of Ireland. Ussher resisted this pressure at a convocation in 1634, ensuring that the English Articles of Religion were adopted as well as the Irish articles, not instead of them, and that the Irish canons had to be redrafted based on the English ones rather than replaced by them.

In 1634 Ussher lost a battle to block the appointment of an Arminian as provost of Trinity College, by 1635 it was apparent that Ussher had lost de facto control of the church to John Bramhall, Bishop of Derry, in everyday matters and to Laud in matters of policy.

A traditional portrait of Ussher is of a slightly unworldly scholar who was at best a mediocre politician and administrator: in fact he was an effective bishop and archbishop, and politically important;[1] however, he was reactive and sought conciliation rather than confrontation.[2] The story that he successfully opposed attempts to reintroduce the Irish language for use in church services by William Bedell, the Bishop of Kilmore, has been refuted [3][4].

Out of preference Ussher was a scholar when he could be. He also engaged in extensive disputations with Roman Catholic theologians. Even as a student he had challenged a Jesuit relative, Henry Fitzsimon (Ussher's mother was Roman Catholic) to publicly dispute the identification of the Pope with the Antichrist. However, Ussher also wrote extensively on theology and ecclesiastical history, and these subjects gradually displaced the anti-Catholic work. As well as his learning, he was also distinguished by his charity and good temper.

Ussher left Dublin for his episcopal residence at Drogheda, where he concentrated on his archdiocese and his research. In 1631 he published his Discourse on the Religion Anciently Professed by the Irish, a ground-breaking study of the early Irish church, which sought to demonstrate how it differed from Rome and was, instead, much closer to the later protestant church. In 1639 he published the most substantial history of Christianity in Britain up to that date, Britannicarum ecclesiarum antiquitates. This account of the early Celtic church in Britain and Ireland was respected into the twentieth century.

English Civil War

In 1640 Ussher left Ireland for England for what turned out to be the last time. In the years before the English Civil War, his reputation as a scholar and his moderate Calvinism meant that his opinion was sought by both King and Parliament. After Ussher lost his home and income through the Irish uprising of 1641, Parliament voted him a pension of £400 while the King awarded him the income and property of the vacant see of Carlisle. Despite his Calvinism, Ussher was a royalist, who supported the King and Wentworth (now Earl of Strafford) in the events leading up to the latter's execution, and a defender of the episcopacy. In the face of attacks on the institution of bishops by puritans, he wrote or edited five books to demonstrate their existence since the earliest days of the church. The last two, treatises on the Ignatian epistles were particular scholarly achievements that have largely survived modern scrutiny.

During the Civil War Ussher committed himself to the King and remained loyal, turning down an invitation to join the Westminster Assembly in 1643. He moved to Oxford, then Bristol, Cardiff, and then to St Donat's. In June 1646 he returned to London under the protection of his friend, the Countess of Peterborough, in whose houses he stayed from then on. He became a preacher at Lincoln's Inn early in 1647, and despite his royalist loyalties was protected by his friends in Parliament. He watched the execution of Charles I from the roof of the Countess of Peterborough's London house, but fainted before the axe fell.

Ussher's Chronology

Ussher now concentrated on his research and writing, and returned to the study of chronology and the church fathers. After a 1647 work on the origin of the creeds in 1648 Ussher published a treatise on the calendar. This was a warm-up for his most famous work, the Annales veteris testamenti, a prima mundi origine deducti ("Annals of the Old Testament, deduced from the first origins of the world"), which appeared in 1650 and its continuation, Annalium pars postierior in 1654. In this work, he calculated the date of creation to be nightfall preceding 23 October 4004 BC. Other scholars calculated their own dates for Creation, such as that by the Cambridge academic, John Lightfoot. The time is frequently misquoted as being 9 a.m., noon or 9 p.m. on 23 October. See the related article on the Ussher chronology for a discussion of its claims and methodology.

Ussher's work is sometimes, and often mockingly, associated with Young Earth Creationism, that holds that the universe was created only a few millennia ago.

In fact, calculating the year of creation may seem a trivial and slightly eccentric activity to some nowadays with the benefit of geology and palaeontology — the Earth now being dated by the scientific community at about 4.6 billion years old, with the universe nine billion years older than that — but at the time it was an important and difficult task which many Renaissance scholars, such as Joseph Justus Scaliger had attempted.

Ussher's chronology represents a considerable feat of scholarship. It required the Bible to be firmly anchored in history, which needed a huge depth of learning in ancient history, including the rise of the Persians, Greeks and Romans. Then constructing a biblical chronology required expertise in biblical languages, and in-depth knowledge of the Bible. His account of historical events for which he had multiple sources other than the Bible is usually in close agreement with modern accounts; for example, he places the death of Alexander in 323 BC and that of Julius Caesar in 44 BC. The period of time between the Flood and the Creation depended on the version of the Old Testament that was used: Hebrew (1656 years), Samaritan Pentateuch (1307 years), or the Ethiopic text (2262 years). Ussher favoured the Hebrew version. Annals has recently been republished in modern English.

Death

In 1655 Ussher published his last book, De Graeca Septuaginta Interpretum Versione, the first serious examination of the Septuagint, discussing its accuracy compared with the Hebrew text of the Old Testament. In 1656 he went to stay in the Countess of Peterborough's house in Reigate, Surrey. On 19 March he felt a sharp pain in his side after supper and took to his bed. He died at one o'clock on 21 March at the age of 75. His last words were reported as O Lord forgive me, especially my sins of omission. His body was embalmed and was to have been buried in Reigate, but at Cromwell's insistence he was given a state funeral on 17 April and buried in the chapel of St Erasmus in Westminster Abbey.

Footnotes

1. Abbott, W. M. (1990). "James Ussher and "Ussherian" episcopacy, 1640–1656: the primate and his Reduction manuscript." Albion xxii: 237-59
2. James Ussher, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004)]]
3. O'Sullivan, W. S. (1968). "Review of R.B.Knox, James Ussher Archbishop of Armagh." Irish Historical Studies xvi: 215–19.
4. Leerssen, J. (1982–3). "Archbishop Ussher and Gaelic culture." Studia Hibernica xxii–xxiii: 50–58.