ODNB Entry

This is the entry for our Thomas Adams in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. The author is J Sears McGee.

Adams, Thomas (1583–1652), Church of England clergyman, matriculated from Trinity College, Cambridge, in the Lent term of 1598 and graduated BA in 1602 and proceeded MA in 1606 from Clare College; he was ordained deacon and priest in Lincoln diocese on 23 September 1604. He served as curate of Northill, Bedfordshire, from 1605 to 1611, when he was sacked by its new patron. However, his Northill parishioners signed a petition stating that Adams had ‘behaved himselfe soberly in his conversation, painfully in his calling, lovingly amongst his neighbours, conformable to the orders of the Church, and in all respects befittingly to his vocation’ (Maltby, 78), and this testimony may have aided his appointment in 1612 as vicar of Willington, Bedfordshire, by its patron, Thomas Egerton, Baron Ellesmere.

Ellesmere advanced him on 21 December 1614 to the vicarage of Wingrave, Buckinghamshire, but by 1619 Adams was in London, where he remained for the rest of his life. The dean and chapter of St Paul's in 1619 collated him to two rectories, St Benet Paul's Wharf (on 15 June) and the small church of St Benet Sherehog (on 6 July). From 1618 to 1623 he also preached at St Gregory by Paul's. He served as chaplain to Henry Montagu, first earl of Manchester and chief justice of king's bench, and the dedicatees of his numerous published sermons included such influential men as Ellesmere, Montagu, Donne and William Herbert, third earl of Pembroke. Pembroke and Manchester also received the dedication of Adams's Works (1629), and his extensive Commentary (1633) on the second epistle of Peter was dedicated to the eminent civil lawyer and judge Sir Henry Marten.

Adams ‘was esteemed an Excellent Preacher’ by his contemporaries (Walker, 2.164), and a modern assessment holds that he is ‘one of the more considerable buried literary talents of the seventeenth century’ (Chandos, 156). Sermon titles such as Mystical Bedlam (1615), The White Devil (1614), The Devil's Banquet (1614), and The Gallant's Burden (1612) exemplify his lively style. Although Adams was described by Robert Southey as ‘the prose Shakespeare of puritan theologians … scarcely inferior to Fuller in wit or to Taylor in fancy’ (DNB), he was a Calvinist episcopalian rather than a puritan. Like puritans he craved careful observation of the sabbath and was deeply hostile to Rome, the Jesuits, and the papacy, as well as to idleness, over-indulgence in worldly pleasures, and conspicuous consumption in all its forms. His sermons abound in statements that puritans would have admired. For example, at Paul's Cross in 1623 he thundered against London's:

innumerable swarmes of … men and women, whose whole imployment is, to goe from their beds to the Tap-house, then to the Play-house, where they make a match for the Brothel-house, and from thence to bed againe … What an armie of these might bee mustred out of our Suburbs? (The Barren Tree, 1623, 48–9

When James I sought a Spanish marriage for Prince Charles, Adams denounced ‘the Romish Idols’ and Solomon's disastrous love of ‘idolatrous women’; he concluded that ‘when Religion and Superstition meet in one bed, they commonly produce a mungrell generation’ (The Temple, 1624, 34–5). Unlike puritans, however, he endorsed kneeling to receive communion and castigated the ‘fond scrupulositie’ of those who demanded such a rigid ‘conformitie to the primitive times, as if the Spouse of Christ might not weare a lace or a border, for which she could not plead prescription’. For Adams the outcome of the abolition of episcopacy that some puritans sought would have been a nightmarish ‘Anabaptisticall ataxie or confusion’ (Works, 931, 933).

From the 1610s through the mid-1620s Adams was highly visible in print, but for reasons which are unclear he spent the latter part of his career in obscurity, publishing nothing after 1633. Although two of Adams's powerful patrons, Pembroke and Ellesmere, were gone from the scene before 1630 Manchester remained a potent figure in the 1630s, but the connection yielded no obvious further advantage. Adams held the rectory of St Benet Paul's Wharf until sequestered during the civil wars, but thereafter continued to live in the rectory house. In a posthumously published work, God's Anger and Man's Comfort (1653), he referred to his ‘neccessitous and decrepit old age’. In his will, dated 12 April 1651, he stated his desire to be buried in the churchyard with few friends attending and ‘without any Funerall Service’ (Walker rev., 42). The small bequests to several grandchildren (the highest 10 shillings) are the only evidence that he had married; the fact that the grandchildren had two other surnames indicate that he had at least two daughters. He died in 1652, and was buried on 26 November.