Tracts Ascribed to Richard Bancroft

In the library of St John's College, Cambridge is a manuscript thus catalogued by M. R. James: 'Certain Slanderous Speeches against the present Estate of the Church of England, published to the people by the Precisians, with the particular causes that have so stirred them, and blasphemous and seditious positions held by them, with refutations of the same, and an Index of Browne's heresies with their refutation.' The manuscript is a valuable conspectus of the state of the controversy between Presbyterian and Episcopalian. This is Dr Peel's 1953 transcription of the manuscript. In an introductory essay he argues that the author is Richard Bancroft, Bishop of London (1597–1604) and Archbishop of Canterbury (1604–10), who played a prominent part in the history of the Church of England at a critical period, and whom the Presbyterian Andrew Melville described as 'the capital enemy of all the Reformed Churches in Europe'.