Commontide
Anglican Commemoration
Bishop of Winchester & Teacher of the Faith
September 26 · d. 1626
also known as Lancelot of Winchester
Bishop of Winchester, a leading translator of the King James Bible, and one of the founders of the distinctive Anglican spirit: learned, sacramental, and steeped in the Fathers. Andrewes was reputed to know fifteen languages, preached sermons so finely woven that T. S. Eliot quarried one for a poem, and left behind a book of private prayers stained with his tears. He held learning and devotion together and refused to choose between them.
Lancelot Andrewes was born in London in 1555, the son of a master mariner, and from boyhood he was the sort of scholar who frightens his teachers. He went up to Pembroke College, Cambridge, became its master, and gathered languages the way other men gather coins, until report credited him with fifteen, enough, it was said, to have served as interpreter at Babel. He was ordained in 1580, and three sovereigns in turn, Elizabeth and James and at last Charles, kept him near the throne as a chaplain and a bishop, of Chichester, then Ely, then Winchester.
But Andrewes wore his learning lightly and his religion deep. When King James gathered the finest scholars in the realm to make a new English Bible, Andrewes was put at the head of the company at Westminster that turned the books from Genesis to the end of Kings, and the grave music of the King James Version owes more to him than to almost any other single hand. In the pulpit before the court he preached sermons so densely woven, so alive to the very grain of the Greek and Hebrew words, that they reward slow reading still. Three centuries later the poet T. S. Eliot opened Journey of the Magi by lifting Andrewes almost whole from a Christmas sermon of 1622:
A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and specially a long journey in. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off, in solstitio brumali, the very dead of winter.
For all his eminence, the truest Andrewes is the one no congregation saw. He left behind a little book of private prayers, the Preces Privatae, written in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew and worn, his friends said, with his tears, a daily round of confession, intercession, and praise that he kept alone. When he died at Winchester House in Southwark in 1626, men remembered not a courtier but a man of prayer, and they buried him in the great church across the river that is now Southwark Cathedral, where his tomb still stands.
Andrewes is documented in the ordinary way of a great Jacobean churchman, and in one extraordinary way besides. His sermons were gathered after his death by royal command into the folio XCVI Sermons (1629), and his Preces Privatae were printed in 1648; both survive in his own words. The records of the King James Version name him as director of the First Westminster Company, and the translators' surviving notes confirm his leading part. His public career, the bishoprics and court appointments, is a matter of plain state record.
What we cannot fully recover is the inner man, except through the prayers he never meant for print. Their discovery and publication after his death opened a window the bishop himself had kept shut, and they have shaped Anglican devotion ever since.
Andrewes is commemorated on September 26; he died on the night of September 25, 1626. He is honored as one of the founders of the distinctive Anglican spirit, learned, sacramental, rooted in the Fathers, neither Roman nor Puritan, that later generations would call the via media. The Oxford Movement revered him as a patristic-minded bishop who had held that balance two centuries before them.
His share in the King James Version places him among the makers of the English language itself, and the Preces Privatae remain in print as a classic of Christian prayer, translated and re-translated for readers who never tire of them. He is, in a sense, a patron of those who love both exact scholarship and deep devotion and refuse to choose between them.
XCVI Sermons (Ninety-Six Sermons)(English, 1629)
The collected court sermons, including the 1622 Nativity sermon Eliot drew upon.
Public domain: Internet Archive
Preces Privatae (The Private Devotions)(Greek and Latin, c. 1620 (pub. 1648))
His private prayers, a classic of Anglican devotion; Brightman's is the standard translation.
Public domain: Internet Archive, Brightman translation
Lancelot Andrewes, 1555-1626(English, 1958)
The standard modern biography.
Further reading. The Ninety-Six Sermons repay slow reading, above all the Nativity and Resurrection sets. The Preces Privatae (Private Devotions) are best met in F. E. Brightman's classic translation, The Preces Privatae of Lancelot Andrewes (1903). For the life, see Paul A. Welsby, Lancelot Andrewes, 1555 to 1626 (SPCK, 1958); for his preaching and theology, Nicholas Lossky, Lancelot Andrewes the Preacher (Oxford University Press, 1991).
Online resources. Andrewes's sermons and the Preces Privatae are scanned at the Internet Archive; the 1622 Nativity sermon stands in the Ninety-Six Sermons.
British (Received Pronunciation): Privatae /prɪˈvɑːtiː/
Readings for a Teacher of the Faith
Proverbs 3:13–26Psalm 119:89–1061 John 1:1–10Matthew 13:47–52
Almighty God, you gave your servant Lancelot Andrewes special gifts of grace to understand and teach the truth revealed in Christ Jesus: Grant that by this teaching we may know you, the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.