Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Hooker, Richard
HOOKER, RICHARD (1554?–1600), theologian, was born at Heavitree, Exeter, probably in March 1553–4. The original name of the family was Vowell, but in the fifteenth century members of it called themselves Vowell alias Hooker or Hoker, and in the sixteenth century the original name was generally dropped. Hooker's great-grandfather, John Hooker (d. 1493), and his grandfather, Robert Hooker (d. 1537), were both mayors of Exeter, the former in 1490 and the latter in 1529. His father, Roger Vowell alias Hooker, seems to have been in poor circumstances. A sister, Elizabeth, who married one Harvey, is said to have died in September 1663, aged 121 years; she seems to have supplied Fuller with some very incorrect information about her distinguished brother. Richard was educated at Exeter grammar school. His progress there was rapid, and at the solicitation of the schoolmaster, his uncle, John Hooker alias Vowell [q. v.], resolved to provide him with means for a university education. The uncle was intimate with Bishop Jewel, and urged his friend to ‘look favourably’ on his poor nephew. Jewel summoned the lad and his teacher to Salisbury; was impressed by Richard's promise; bestowed an annual pension on his parents, and in 1568 (according to the second edition of Walton's ‘Life’) obtained for him a clerk's place at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. The president of the college, William Cole (d. 1600) [q. v.], interested himself in the youth. Hooker often journeyed on foot from Oxford to Exeter, and paid on the way several visits to Jewel at Salisbury. Jewel died in September 1571, and his place as Hooker's patron was taken by his friend, Edwin Sandys [q. v.], then bishop of London, who sent his son Edwin (afterwards Sir Edwin) to be Hooker's pupil at Oxford. Sandys and another Oxford pupil, George Cranmer [q. v.], grandnephew of the archbishop, became Hooker's chief friends in after-life. When nearly twenty years old (1573) Hooker was elected a scholar of his college. The statutable limit of age for the admission of scholars was nineteen, but it was permissible according to the founder's statutes to make an exception in case of a candidate of unusual attainments. Hooker graduated B.A. 14 Jan. 1573–4 and M.A. 8 July 1577, and in the latter year obtained a fellowship. An extant inventory of the furniture in his college rooms—on the second or third floor above the library—shows that his books included Hosius's ‘De Hæreticis,’ ‘Jewel's reply to Harding,’ 1564, and Lyra's ‘Commentaries’ (Notes and Queries, 2nd ser. xi. 221). As a young man Hooker's range of learning was very wide. He was well acquainted with Greek and Hebrew, and although theology was then, as afterwards, his special study, he was no stranger to music and poetry, ‘all which he had digested and made useful.’ Henry (afterwards Sir Henry) Saville was one of his Oxford friends, and in July 1579 he was appointed deputy to Thomas Kingsmill [q. v.], the professor of Hebrew, on the recommendation of the Earl of Leicester, chancellor of the university. He read Hebrew lectures in the university until his final departure. In October 1579 he was expelled from the college for a month, with his friend and former tutor, Dr. John Rainolds or Reynolds, and other colleagues. The cause is not known, but it seems probable that Hooker and his friends' views had offended John Barfoot, the vice-president, who was an ardent puritan. On returning to Oxford he quietly continued his studies, and about 1581 took holy orders. Outside Oxford he made his first public appearance in the same year, when he preached at St. Paul's Cross in London.
On the occasion of this sermon Hooker lodged in the house of a draper in Watling Street named John Churchman, and Mrs. Churchman (according to Walton) straightway persuaded him to marry their daughter Joan, an ill-tempered woman, neither rich nor beautiful. Wood calls her ‘a clownish, silly woman, and withal a mere Xanthippe.’ That the marriage was ‘a mistaken and ill-asserted one’ seems undoubted, and Walton attributes Hooker's error in the choice of his wife to his bashfulness and dim sight. Walton's story was doubtless derived from friends of Hooker, who specially disliked his wife, and should not, perhaps, be taken quite seriously. That Hooker's relations with his wife were thoroughly unhappy is rendered improbable by his will, in which he makes ‘my wel-beloved wife’ sole executrix and residuary legatee, while ‘Mr. John Churchman, my wel-beloved father,’ is appointed an overseer along with Hooker's friend Sandys.
Hooker vacated his fellowship on his marriage, and on 9 Dec. 1584 was presented by John Cheney, the patron, to the living of Drayton-Beauchamp, Buckinghamshire. When his pupils Cranmer and Sandys visited him there they found him (according to Walton's well-known anecdote) in a field reading the odes of Horace while tending his sheep; were soon deprived of his ‘quiet company’ by his wife, who ordered him to rock the cradle, and left disgusted at the domestic tyranny to which Hooker submitted. Sandys is said to have told his father (now archbishop of York) of Hooker's condition, and at the archbishop's suggestion and by the influence of Whitgift, archbishop of Canterbury, Hooker was, on 17 March 1584–5, appointed master of the Temple. Walter Travers [q. v.], a well-known puritan, who was already afternoon-reader or lecturer at the Temple, was a candidate for the post, and was passed over in Hooker's favour.
As soon as Hooker was installed in office the Temple church became the scene of a violent theological controversy between the master and the afternoon-lecturer. The church was thenceforth crowded with judges and barristers, including Sir Edward Coke and Sir James Altham, who took ‘notes from the mouths of their ministers’ (Fuller, Church Hist. ed. Brewer, v. 184 sq.) It is noticeable that Hooker's Cambridge friends Jewel and Rainolds both belonged to the moderate puritan school among English churchmen, and he himself seems at first to have inclined to their views. He always adhered generally to Calvin's doctrine of election (cf. his sermon on Justification), carefully studied Calvin's ‘Institutes,’ and invariably spoke of Calvin with respect. But Travers's extravagant puritanism compelled him to emphasise his objections to Calvinistic theology in detail, and he proved himself in his sermons the ablest living advocate of the church of England as by law established. ‘The pulpit,’ wrote Fuller, ‘spake pure Canterbury in the morning and Geneva in the afternoon.’ Travers's lectures proved more popular than his antagonist's, and soon became strenuous denunciations of Hooker's views, which he represented as latitudinarian and erroneous. Whitgift intervened, and silenced Travers on the ground that he had received ordination according to the presbyterian form in a foreign congregation. Travers, in an appeal to the council, charged Hooker with heresy, and Hooker answered the charge at length (printed in 1612). Although the controversy was keen it was conducted with much dignity, and Hooker and Travers never lost respect for each other. When the dispute was subsiding, Hooker resolved to investigate the general principles involved in the position of the church of England, and his great work on the ‘Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity’ was the result. So that he might the more peacefully pursue his studies he appealed to Whitgift in 1591 to give him a country benefice. The archbishop presented him to the rectory of Boscombe, Wiltshire, where he soon completed half his treatise. On 17 July 1591 he was instituted to a minor prebend of Salisbury.
In July 1595 the crown, doubtless on Whitgift's recommendation, presented him to the better living of Bishopsbourne near Canterbury, and there he continued his literary labours. Dr. Hadrian Saravia, a Dutch protestant, who had lately become prebendary of Canterbury, strongly sympathised with Hooker's views, and in his later years was his dearest friend. His reputation spread rapidly, and many interested in the controversy in which he had engaged sought him out at Bishopsbourne. He died at Bishopsbourne on 2 Nov. 1600, and was buried in the chancel of the church. Bishop Andrewes wrote five days later that ‘his workes and worth’ were ‘such as behind him he hath not (that I know) left anie neere him.’ Sir William Cowper, grandfather of William, first Earl Cowper [q. v.], built in 1635 a monument above Hooker's grave, with a bust of the scholar upon it. Sir William's epitaph, in English verse, first associated the epithet ‘Judicious’ with Hooker's name.
Hooker's will, dated 26 Oct. 1600, was proved 3 Dec. The value of his estate, which chiefly consisted of books, was 1,092l. 9s. 2d. His wife Joan, who was sole executrix and residuary legatee, died in March 1600–1, five months after her husband, but not, it is said, until she had married a second husband. To each of his four daughters, Alice, Cicely, Jone, and Margaret, Hooker left 100l. as their marriage portions. Alice died unmarried 20 Dec. 1649, and was buried 1 Jan. following at Chipstead, Surrey. Cicely married ‘one Chalinor, sometime a schoolmaster in Chichester.’ Jone married Edward Nethersole at Bishopsbourne 23 March 1600. Margaret, the youngest daughter, was wife of Ezekiel Charke, B.D., rector of St. Nicholas, Harbledown, near Canterbury, and had a son, Ezekiel, rector of Waldron, Sussex (d. 1670). Ben Jonson told Drummond of Hawthornden in 1618 that Hooker's children were then beggars (Conversations with Drummond, Shakesp. Soc. p. 10).
Hooker's chief personal characteristic, according to his friends, was his humility, or, to use Fuller's phrase, ‘his dove-like simplicity.’ Walton describes him when living at Bishopsbourne as ‘an obscure harmless man, a man in poor clothes, his loins usually girt in a coarse gown or canonical coat; of a mean stature and stooping, and yet more lowly in the thoughts of his soul; his body worn out not with age but study and holy mortifications; his face full of heat pimples, begot by his unactivity and sedentary life.’ ‘God and Nature,’ Walton continues, ‘blessed him with so blessed a bashfulness that, as in his younger days his pupils might easily look him out of countenance; so neither then nor in his age did he ever willingly look any man in the face, and was of so mild and humble a nature that his poor parish-clerk and he did never talk but with both their hats on or both off at the same time; and to this may be added, that though he was not purblind, yet was short or weaksighted, and where he fixed his eyes at the beginning of his sermon, there they continued till it was ended.’ At one time he was the victim of the blackmailing persecution of a scheming woman, who threatened to charge him with immorality; but his pupils Cranmer and Sandys finally relieved him of her visits.
Hooker was an active and exemplary parish priest, and personally practised much fasting and private prayer. He was not a popular preacher. According to Walton, his ‘sermons were neither long nor earnest, but uttered with a grave zeal and an humble voice.’ ‘He seemed to study as he spake: the design of his sermons, as of all his discourses, was to show reasons for what he spake, and with these reasons such a kind of rhetoric as did rather convince and persuade than frighten men into piety.’ Fuller draws attention to ‘the copiousness of his style’ as a preacher, and the severe demands he made on the intelligence of his audience, some of whom censured him as ‘perplext, tedious, and obscure.’ ‘His voice was low, stature little, gesture none at all, standing stone-still in the pulpit.’ But attentive hearers, who closely followed his argument, ‘had their expectation ever paid at the close thereof.’
On 29 Jan. 1592–3, John Windet, the publisher, obtained a license from the Stationers' Company for the publication of ‘The Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie. Eight books by Richard Hooker’ (Arber, Transcript, ii. 295). On 13 March Hooker presented a manuscript copy to Lord Burghley. The first edition—a small folio—was issued by Windet without a date, and bore the title ‘Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie. Eyght Bookes by Richard Hooker. Printed at London by John Windet.’ The first forty-five pages are occupied by Hooker's preface, addressed ‘to them that seeke (as they tearme it) the reformation of lawes and orders Ecclesiasticall in the church of England.’ The forty-sixth page supplies a list of the ‘things handled in the bookes following,’ and the contents of eight books are enumerated. Four books only follow, and prefixed to the concluding list of errata is ‘An advertisement to the reader,’ stating that the author had ‘for some causes thought it at this time more fit to let goe these four bookes by themselves than to stay both them and the rest till the whole might together be published.’ ‘Such generalities as here are handled it will be perhaps not amisse to consider apart, as by way of introduction unto the bookes that are to follow concerning particulars.’ 1592 is the date given by Ames to this edition; Walton, more probably, suggests 1594. In 1597 Windet published the fifth book, which is longer by sixty pages than the volume containing the first four. The title runs, ‘Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie. The fift booke by Richard Hooker,’ and it is dedicated to Whitgift, archbishop of Canterbury. Towards the end is an address to the reader running, ‘Have patience with me for a small time, and by the helpe of Almightie God I will pay the whole.’ No other portion of the work appeared in Hooker's lifetime. A second edition of the first four books appeared in 1604, edited by John Spencer, of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, the husband of a sister of Hooker's pupil Cranmer. In 1611 was issued together in folio a third edition of the first and a second edition of the second volume, with a title-page engraved by Hole. In 1617 a new edition in six parts included ‘Certayn Divine Tractates, and other Godly Sermons,’ by Hooker, which have often been absurdly identified by bibliographers with later books of the ‘Politie.’ The tractates and sermons had been already published separately in 1612 and 1613 (see below). Other editions, all in folio, with the same contents, are dated 1622 (called the fifth), 1632, and 1638, and an undated copy in 8vo is known (Notes and Queries, 3rd ser. x. 511).
In 1648, and again in 1651, two additional books of the ‘Politie’—the sixth and eighth—were published together in 8vo. The title-page describes them as ‘a work long expected, and now published according to the most authentique copies.’ The text had been prepared from a collation of six transcripts. The editor, in an apology to the reader, laments the absence of the seventh book, and states that the endeavours used to recover it had hitherto proved fruitless. In 1662 Gauden edited Hooker's works, with a dedication to Charles II; a very incomplete life was prefixed, together with a good portrait engraved by Faithorne after the bust at Bishopsbourne. Here a seventh book appeared for the first time. Of the recovered book, Gauden writes that, ‘by comparing the writing of it with other indisputable papers or known MSS. of Mr. Hooker's,’ he had ascertained that it was ‘undoubtedly his own hand throughout.’ This edition reappeared, with the improved life by Izaak Walton, in 1666, 1676, and 1682. Reissues, with some corrections by Strype, are dated 1705, 1719, 1723, 1739, &c. In 1793 an 8vo edition was issued by the Clarendon Press, Oxford, edited by Bishop Randolph. Two improved editions followed; one, edited by the Rev. W. S. Dobson, appeared in London 1825, and the other, edited by B. Hanbury, in 1831. In 1836 Keble issued at Oxford an admirable edition of Hooker's works, and the seventh edition was revised by Dean Church and Canon Paget (afterwards Bishop of Oxford) in 1888. Useful abridgments appeared in 1705 and 1840. John Earle, bishop of Salisbury [q. v.], prepared a Latin translation of the ‘Politie,’ but his manuscript was destroyed before it went to press (Letters from the Bodleian, i. 141).
The genuineness of the three posthumously published books (vi.–viii.) has been much disputed. Bishop Andrewes on 7 Nov. 1600 wrote that immediate care was necessary to preserve Hooker's manuscripts from the clutches of his ignorant relatives, whose puritan proclivities were undoubted (Hooker, Works (1888), i. 91). According to Walton, a month after Hooker's death Archbishop Whitgift sent a chaplain to inquire of Mrs. Hooker concerning the unpublished books, and she declined to give any information. Three months later Whitgift summoned her to be examined by the council on the subject. On her arrival Whitgift saw her privately at Lambeth, and she confessed to him that her son-in-law Charke, and ‘another minister that dwelt near Canterbury,’ had, with her consent, obtained access to her husband's library after his death, and had ‘burnt and tore’ many of his writings, ‘assuring her that they were not fit to be seen.’ In the 1604 edition, containing the first five books only, John Spencer, the editor and Hooker's friend, informed the reader that the last three books had been completed by Hooker, and had been destroyed by ‘some evil-disposed minds,’ who had ‘left unto us nothing but the old, imperfect, mangled draughts, dismembered into pieces;’ but Spencer added, ‘it is intended the world shall see them as they are.’ William Covel, in his ‘Just and Temperate Defence’ of the ‘Politie’ (1603), p. 149, refers to these three books, ‘which from his [i.e. Hooker's] own mouth I am informed that they were finished.’ Spencer was president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, from 1607 till his death in 1614, and during those years he entrusted such of Hooker's papers as he possessed to a scholar of his college, Henry Jackson (d. 1662) [q. v.], for transcription. Jackson straightway prepared for publication several of Hooker's sermons, which were published at Oxford in 1612 and 1613. On Spencer's death the papers passed to Dr. John King, bishop of London; on King's death in 1621 they were claimed by Archbishop Abbott, and were taken to Lambeth before 1633. On 28 Dec. 1640 Laud's library at Lambeth was given into Prynne's custody, and on 27 June 1644 a vote of the Long parliament made Hooker's manuscripts over to Hugh Peters. Their history has not been further traced. But there is no doubt that many copies were made from them, and from Spencer's notes and Jackson's transcripts, before they reached Hugh Peters. Some of these, including a valuable copy of the eighth book, fell into Ussher's hands, and are now in the library of Trinity College, Dublin. Others are among William Fulman's papers in the library of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Walton knew of at least half a dozen copies of what claimed to be the last two books of the ‘Politie,’ most of them pretending ‘to be the author's own hand, but much disagreeing, being, indeed, altered and diminished as men have thought fittest to make Mr. Hooker's judgment suit with their fancies or give authority to their corrupt designs.’
A critical examination shows that the seventh and eighth books, in their existing shape, are constructed from Hooker's rough notes, and, although imperfect, are pertinent to his scheme; but that the so-called sixth book has no right to its place in Hooker's treatise. According to Hooker's list of subjects ‘to be handled,’ which appeared in his first volume, his sixth book was to treat ‘of the power of jurisdiction which the reformed platform claimeth unto lay-elders;’ but after stating that subject, and briefly discussing the nature of spiritual jurisdiction, the sixth book, as it stands now, straightway embarks on a dissertation ‘of penitence,’ and deals thenceforth with ‘primitive and Romish penance in their several parts, confession, satisfaction, absolution.’ The basis of these chapters are, doubtless, notes by Hooker, but not notes prepared for the ‘Ecclesiasticall Politie.’ This is placed beyond controversy by the fact that there are extant in the library of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, manuscript comments prepared by Cranmer and Sandys on Hooker's first draft of his sixth book, and these comments fully discuss ‘lay elders and presbyteriall jurisdiction,’ and omit all mention of ‘penance.’ Ussher's chaplain, Dr. Nicholas Barnard or Bernard [q. v.], in his ‘Clavi Trabales, or Nails fastened by some great Masters of Assemblies confirming the King's Supremacy and the Church Government under Bishops’ (1661), showed that Gauden's edition of Hooker's eighth book was derived from a very imperfect transcript, and supplied omitted passages from a manuscript copy in his possession which had belonged to Ussher. Many of Bernard's additions, which deny that kings are accountable to their subjects for their conduct, have been incorporated in later editions of the ‘Politie.’
The original aim of Hooker's ‘Ecclesiasticall Politie’ was to supply the Elizabethan settlement of English ecclesiastical government with a philosophical and logical basis. And so largely rational is his examination of the general principles involved in church government, that an important part of his treatise belongs to the domain of moral and political philosophy rather than to that of theology. His puritan opponents asserted that all religious doctrines and institutions derived their sanction solely from Scripture, and that any addition to or deviation from the doctrines and institutions ordained in Scripture was erroneous, and deserving of condemnation. From this view Hooker dissented. He argued that human conduct was to be guided by ‘all the sources of light and truth with which man finds himself encompassed,’ and that those sources of light were only in part disclosed in the Scriptures. The universe, in Hooker's view, was governed by natural law, which was not expounded at all in the Scriptures. Natural law embodies God's supreme reason, and appoints to the whole field of Nature, moral as well as physical, the means by which it works out perfection in its several parts. Natural law is ascertained and is recognised as binding by man's reason; and to its authority church and civil government, like all human institutions, must conform. ‘Obedience of creatures to the law of nature is the stay of the whole world.’ The Scriptures, however, supplement natural law with a supernatural law, which furnishes man with knowledge of a future life and other mysteries of faith. ‘The insufficiency of the light of nature is by the light of Scripture … fully and perfectly supplied’ (bk. ii. viii. 3). Incidentally Hooker explains the origin of civil government as due to ‘a common consent’ given by men in a prehistoric era ‘all to be ordered by some who they should agree upon’ (bk. i. ch. x.). He thus distinctly anticipates the theory of a social compact which Locke and Rousseau developed later. The range of Hooker's argument grows narrower as he leaves, at the end of Book ii., his general discussion of the nature of law, and of the relations that subsist between the natural and the scriptural or supernatural law. In Book iii. he argues that there is not to be found in the Scriptures a definite form of church polity, the laws of which may not be altered. In Book iv. he vindicates, in the light of his philosophic conclusions, the government of the English church in opposition to that of Rome and the reformed churches. In Book v. he expounds and justifies in detail the ceremonies and ritual of the established church. Books vii. and viii. deal respectively with the advantages of episcopacy over presbyterianism, and with the relations that ought to subsist between the church and throne. Keble insists that Hooker credited episcopacy with a divine origin, but it is doubtful if Hooker, whose cautious moderation in treating the subject is very notable, intends to claim much more for episcopacy than that it is the most convenient form of church government, and is justified in practice by history. The interpolations and alterations which the manuscripts of the seventh book have undergone at the hands of partisans, make it dangerous to infer very much from occasional expressions which tally ill with the general tone of argument.
Exceptional dignity of style and wealth of illustration from classical and mediæval writers characterise the five completed books. The seventh and eighth books, although merely compiled from Hooker's notes, betray much of Hooker's literary workmanship. The great treatise first proved the capacity of English prose for treating severe topics with a force and beauty which the great classical models rarely excelled. Hooker's style is based on Latin models, and is often cumbrous and stiff, but it never lacks solidity nor dignity. He was a thorough logician in the arrangement of his sentences, always gives the emphatic word the emphatic place, even at the cost of intricacies of construction, and was keenly sensitive to the harmonious sequence of words. ‘His stile,’ says Fuller, ‘was long and pithy, driving on a whole flock of clauses before he comes to the close of a sentence;’ but although he demands his reader's full attention, he is not unduly prolix, and extorts by his own intellectual cogency his reader's acquiescence in his conclusions. In his own day the grandeur of his literary style excited the sneers of his enemies, who charged him with sacrificing religious fervour to culture and philosophy. Swift (in the Tatler, No. 230) asserts that Hooker, like Parsons the jesuit, had written so naturally that his English had survived all changes of fashion. In Hallam's phrase, ‘Hooker not only opened the mine, but explored the depths of our native eloquence.’ From a literary point of view Hooker must be ranked with Bacon.
Hooker's work was appreciated by his contemporaries. Churchmen at once adopted its arguments. Walton says that a learned English Romanist—either Cardinal Allen or Dr. Stapleton—read the first book to Pope Clement XII, who declared ‘there is no learning that this man hath not searched into; nothing too hard for his understanding,’ and desired that it should be translated into Latin. James I expressed extravagant admiration for the treatise, and Charles I recommended it to his children ‘as an excellent means to satisfie private scruples and settle the publique peace of the church and kingdom.’ James II illogically pretended that perusal of it converted him to Roman catholicism. Anglican divines, from Hammond to Keble and Dean Church, have written much in Hooker's praise.
Puritan opponents attempted to counteract the effects of Hooker's book in his own lifetime in ‘A Christian Letter to certaine English Protestants, unfained favourers of the present state of Religion, authorised and professed in England; unto that reverend and learned man, R. Hoo, requiring resolution in certain matters of doctrine which seeme to overthrow the foundation of Christian Religion and of the Church among us, expreslie contained in his five books of “Ecclesiastical Policie,”’ 1599. This is clearly the work of some experienced puritan controversialist. Dr. Wordsworth suggests that it was by Andrew Willett. The writer's friends pretended that the attack so wounded Hooker ‘that it was not the least cause to procure his death.’ But William Covel [q. v.], who issued a reply—‘A Just and Temperate Defence’—in 1603, asserted that ‘he contemned it in his wisdom,’ although had he lived he would have answered it. Notes by Hooker on grace, the sacraments, predestination, &c., which were intended to form a reply to the ‘Christian Letter,’ have been printed by Keble from manuscripts preserved in Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and Trinity College, Dublin.
Besides the ‘Ecclesiastical Polity,’ the following works of Hooker have been published (they were prepared by Henry Jackson under Dr. Spencer's direction): 1. ‘Answer to the Supplication that Mr. Travers made to the Council,’ Oxford, 1612, 4to. 2. ‘A Learned Discourse of Justification, Works show the Foundation of Faith is overthrown, on Habak. i. 4,’ Oxford, 1612, 4to. 3. ‘A Learned Sermon of the Nature of Pride, on Habak. ii. 4,’ Oxford, 1612, 4to. 4. ‘A Remedy against Sorrow and Fear, delivered in a Funeral Sermon, on John xiv. 27,’ Oxford, 1612, 4to. 5. ‘A Learned and Comfortable Sermon of the Certainty and Perpetuity of Faith in the Elect; especially of the Prophet Habbakuk's Faith,’ Oxford, 1612, 4to. Jackson also edited from Hooker's papers ‘Two Sermons upon part of St. Jude's Epistle—Epist. Jude vv. 17, 21,’ Oxford, 1613, 4to, but the style has few of Hooker's characteristics, and if they are his work they belong to a very early period.
‘A Summarie View of the Government both of the Old and New Testament; whereby the Episcopal Government of Christ's Church is Vindicated’ was issued in 1641, ‘out of the rude draughts of Launcelot Andrewes, late bishop of Winchester.’ To this volume was prefixed ‘A Discovery of the Causes of these Contentions touching Church Government, out of the fragments of Richard Hooker.’ The book seems to have been issued by Ussher to prepare the way for a compromise on the current disputes respecting church government. The editor suggests that ‘A Discovery’ was printed from Hooker's autograph, but the general style and argument does not justify its ascription to him.
[Walton's Life of Hooker, written at Archbishop Sheldon's suggestion, to correct the errors of Gauden's biography (1662), was first published in 1665; was reprinted with Walton's other Lives in 1670, and reached a fourth edition in 1675. Walton was in early life acquainted with the family of George Cranmer, Hooker's friend, and derived much information from him; but he also consulted Archbishop Ussher, Dr. Morton, bishop of Durham, and John Hales of Eton, ‘who loved the very name of Mr. Hooker.’ Little has been discovered since Walton wrote, and the charges of exaggeration and credulity brought against him are not conclusively proved. Fuller, in his Church History and Worthies, supplies a few particulars, some of which are manifestly inaccurate. Keble's introduction to his edition of Hooker, with the corrections of Dean Church and Canon Paget in the reissue of 1888, is valuable. Dean Church's preface to his edition of the Ecclesiastical Polity, bk. i. (Clarendon Press, 1876), and Ronald Bayne's introd. to his edition of bk. v. (1902) are of importance. See also Fowler's Hist. C.C.C. Oxford, 1898; Prince's Worthies of Devon; Wood's Athenæ (Bliss), i. 694; Remusat's La Philosophie Anglaise depuis Bacon jusqu'à Locke, i. 125; Masters in English Theology, ed. Dr. A. Barry (1877), 1–60; F. D. Maurice's Modern Philosophy; John Hunt's Religious Thought in England (1870), i. 56–70; Ueberweg's History of Philosophy (English transl.), ii. 350–2. Hooker and Bacon take part together in one of Landor's Imaginary Conversations, but both from historical and philosophical points of view it is unsatisfactory.]