The Reformed Episcopal Absentees

The bishops and high-church divines who were named to the Assembly's original ordinance but refused to sit out of loyalty to episcopal polity and the king. The group includes James Ussher (Archbishop of Armagh, the most learned Reformed Episcopalian), Joseph Hall (Bishop of Norwich, whose Episcopacie by Divine Right provoked the Smectymnuan tracts), Ralph Brownrig (Bishop of Exeter), Robert Sanderson (the great casuist), Henry Hammond (royal chaplain, father of English biblical criticism), George Morley (later Bishop of Winchester), Thomas Fuller (the church historian), Thomas Westfield (Bishop of Bristol), Walter Balcanqual (Dean of Durham), and John Williams (Archbishop of York). Doctrinally they were mostly Calvinist; polity-wise they were episcopalian — retaining bishops as a third order of ministry while affirming Reformed doctrine. Their absence meant the Assembly's ecclesiology was decided without the strongest episcopal voices present.