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In 1547 Archbishop Thomas Cranmer preached a pithy and dramatic sermon at the coronation of King Edward VI, urging the royal youth to renew the scriptural role of young King Josiah of Judah in his own kingdom. In the early 1560s, Queen Elizabeth I berated Dean Alexander Nowell, in his own Cathedral Church of St Paul's, for subversion of her Protestant religious settlement through his ill-judged gift to her of a presentation copy of the Book of Common Prayer, enriched with devotional pictures. Both events are still repeatedly to be met with in accounts of the English Reformation, and the first has recently become something of a fixture in references to King Edward, but there is one problem: neither of them happened. They are fictions created by Robert Ware of Dublin (1639-97).1 This Irish gentleman, second son of the distinguished Irish antiquarian and historian Sir James Ware (1594-1666), had an acute historical imagination, but he was also a liar and a forger, whose criminal deceptions had a malign effect on the politics and historiography of his day, and have shown remarkable staying power since. Although Ware was unmasked by three late Victorian scholars, and by others since in passing, his forgeries still pollute the historical pool of sources about English and Irish history. Hence, Ware needs to be exposed afresh, in an effort finally to exorcise him from our understanding of the sixteenth century. Turning our gaze on Ware may also reveal something about the preoccupations and temptations to which historians are prone, even in modern historiographical practice.
Robert Ware's background was in the Irish Protestant governing group that maintained a fierce loyalty to the episcopally ordered established Protestant Church of Ireland through all the vicissitudes of the seventeenth century: they were what in the eighteenth century would be termed 'the Ascendancy'. Ware was born at the heart of this embattled elite and lived in the parish of St Werburgh, in the shadow of Dublin Castle and a street away from Christ Church Cathedral. His father, Sir James Ware, was a graduate of Trinity College Dublin and a protégé of the great James Ussher, sometime vice-provost of Trinity and vice-chancellor of Dublin University, and later archbishop of Armagh....