The family of Jane, descended from the ancient family of Janes of Worcestershire, was settled in Cornwall at an early date. It bore as its arms, arg. a lion rampant az. between 3 escallops gules. It was settled in S. Winnow early in the sixteenth century, and at the beginning of the following century was at Lanhydrock and at Liskeard, at which latter place Thomas Jane was mayor in 1621. His son Joseph Jane was M.P. for Liskeard in 1625 and 1640, and was mayor in 1631, 1635, and 1636. He married Loveday, daughter of William Kekewich, in 1633. He was a whole-hearted Royalist, and when the King was at Oxford, in 1643, he attended him there. In the following year he was one of the Royal Commissioners in Cornwall, and when Charles I came to Cornwall, in 1644, he entertained him in August in his house at Liskeard.

During 1645 and 1646 he carried on a correspondence with Edward Hyde, afterwards Earl of Clarendon, on the condition of the Royalist cause in Cornwall. Liskeard had fallen into the hands of the Parliamentarians, but Sir Ralph Hopton defeated Ruthven on Braddock Down on January 19th, 1643, and recovered Liskeard for the King. Ruthven fled to Saltash, which he fortified with much expedition.

When the Royal cause was lost the vengeance of the Parliament fell on Joseph Jane, and he was nearly ruined by the heavy composition he was forced to pay. In 1650, and again in 1654, he was named Clerk of the Royal Council, but it was an empty honour; Charles II could pay nothing, and the Council could only grumble and plot.

Jane attempted to answer Milton's ????????ast?? in a work, ????? a??ast?? the Unbroken Image, but it was a poor performance. It was published in 1651; Hyde says, however, in a letter to Secretary Nicholas, "the King hath a singular good esteem both of Joseph Jane and of his book."

He had a son, William Jane, baptized at Liskeard, 22nd October, 1645, who was educated at Westminster School, elected student of Christ Church, Oxford, 1660, and graduated B.A. in 1664, and M.A. in 1667, and D.D. in 1674. After his ordination he was appointed lecturer at Carfax. He attracted the attention of Henry Compton, who became Canon of Christ Church in 1669, by his sturdy loyalty and orthodoxy; and when Compton became Bishop of Oxford, he chose Jane to preach the sermon at his consecration, and he appointed him one of his chaplains.

In 1670 he became Canon of Christ Church, and was given the living of Winnington in Essex. In 1679 he received a prebendal stall in S. Paul's Cathedral and the archdeaconry of Middlesex. In May, 1680, he was appointed Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford. This rapid promotion was due in part to the staunch loyalty of his father and the losses of his family on that account, but also to his cool, businesslike abilities, and to his learning, which though not profound was good.

In July, 1683, he framed the Oxford declaration in favour of Passive Obedience, and committed the University to an opinion which subsequent events were calculated to stultify.

As Green says: "The Cavaliers who had shouted for the King's return, had shouted also for the return of a free Parliament. The very Chief Justice who asserted at the trial of the Regicides, the general freedom of the King from any responsibility to the Nation, asserted just as strongly that doctrine of ministerial responsibility, against which Charles the First had struggled. It was the desire of every royalist to blot out the very memory of the troubles in which monarchy and freedom had alike disappeared, to take up again, as if it had never been broken, the thread of our political history. But the point at which even royalists took it up was not at the moment of the Tyranny, but at the moment of the Long Parliament's first triumph, when that Tyranny had been utterly undone. In his wish to revive this older claim of the Crown, which the Long Parliament had for ever set aside, the young King found himself alone. His closest adherents, his warmest friends, were constitutional royalists of the temper of Falkland and Culpepper. Partisans of an absolute monarchy, of such a monarchy as his grandfather had dreamed of and his father had for a few years carried into practice, there now were none."

The clergy in advocating passive obedience were actuated by the sense of the miseries through which England had passed during the Great Rebellion—better to submit under protest than to fly to arms again, better certainly to submit even to what was deemed an injustice or inexpedient, when the Crown was hedged about with restrictions, and when the ministers of the Crown were responsible to the nation. There was, however, a noisy and vehement party that went much beyond this, and one Filmer had worked the theory of Divine Right of the Sovereign into a system, that was accepted by the more crazy and immoderate of the old Tory party, mainly among the clergy; and the Oxford declaration went a long way in this direction. Men were beating about for a theory on which to base Government by a King, they had not grasped the truth that the King represents the people, just as does a President in a Republic, but with the superaddition of Divine ratification and imparted grace for the task of ruling, by unction and coronation. That the Kings of England had ever been elected, and that coronation was the confirmation by God, through the Church, of the choice of the people, had been forgotten through the prevalence of feudal ideas in the Middle Ages. Filmer propounded his doctrine that the Divine Right rested in primogeniture, and the rabid Tories, looking out for a theory, snatched at this for want of a better.

On the very day on which Russell was put to death, the University of Oxford adopted by a solemn public act, drawn up by Jane, this strange doctrine, and ordered the political works of Buchanan, Milton, and Baxter to be publicly burned in the court of the schools.

James II, in hopes of winning the Earl of Rochester to join the Papal Church, desired a disputation between some Roman divines and some of the Church of England, making no doubt that the former would be able to confound the latter. The King bade Rochester to choose English divines, excluding two only, Tillotson and Stillingfleet, dreading the latter as a consummate master of all controversial weapons. Rochester selected Simon Patrick and Jane. The conference took place at Whitehall on November 13th, 1686, but no auditor was suffered to be present save the King.

"The subject discussed," says Macaulay, "was the Real Presence. The Roman Catholic divines took on themselves the burden of the proof. Patrick and Jane said little, nor was it necessary that they should say much; for the Earl himself undertook to defend the doctrine of his Church, and, as was his habit, soon warmed with the conflict, lost his temper, and asked with great vehemence whether it was expected that he should change his religion on such frivolous grounds."

In 1685 Jane had been appointed to the deanery of Gloucester. He resigned the archdeaconry of Middlesex in 1686, but retained the canonries of Christ Church and S. Paul's till his death.

In 1688 James II had fled the kingdom, and the English nation and Parliament had accepted William and Mary as King and Queen of England.

The whole fabric of Divine Right had crumbled to the ground. James had reduced the theory to a reductio ad impossibile. This even the lay cavaliers had recognized. "A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still," and it was so with the more fanatical Tories among the clergy. They refused to take the oath of allegiance to William and Mary, and were thrust out of their cathedral thrones and stalls and livings, and joined the sect of the Nonjurors.

But Jane was not one of them. He had the good sense to acknowledge that the theory he had taken up with some ardour was as impracticable as it was absurd. It was cast in his teeth that he changed his opinion because he desired to retain his benefices. One need not take this view of his conduct. He sought William of Orange at Hungerford, and assured him of the adhesion of the University of Oxford. His enemies said that he hinted at the same time his readiness to accept the vacant bishopric in return for his services in securing this sign of devotion. But nothing is more easy than to make such an accusation, and there is no proof that he did this. However, the fact that the framer of the Oxford declaration should have thrown over the principles advocated therein, laid him open to attack, and a shower of epigrams fell on him. His name Jane gave good opportunity to the wits to liken him to Janus, who looked two ways at once. But he showed no further desire to court the favour of William, and he opposed the projects for Comprehension favoured by the latitudinarians, Tillotson and Burnet. In 1689 two Bills had been introduced into Parliament, a Toleration and a Comprehension Bill. The former was to grant facilities of worship to the Puritans and other Dissenters; the other was a Bill for altering the creed and the formulas and ceremonies of the Church, removing from them whatever might be distasteful to the Dissenters, so that all excuse might be taken from them for separating themselves from the Church. Both the King and Tillotson, who all knew was destined by the King to be Archbishop of Canterbury, and Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury, were eager to get both passed. Tillotson was so latitudinarian that his churchmanship was nebulous. Burnet was the son of a Covenanter who had been hanged, had been brought up in Presbyterianism, had found satisfaction in the ministry of Calvanist pastors in Holland, and had not the faintest conception of the principles of the Church or of its true organization.

The Earl of Nottingham advocated the Comprehension Bill and drafted both. The Toleration Bill passed both Houses with little debate. But it was otherwise with the Comprehension Bill. The first clause in this dispensed all the ministers in the Church from the necessity of subscribing the Thirty-nine Articles. Then it was provided that any minister who had been ordained after the Presbyterian fashion might be eligible to any benefice in the Church without ordination by the bishop.

Then followed clauses providing that a clergyman might wear the surplice or not as he thought fit; it left the sign of the cross optional in baptism; and provided that the Eucharist need not be received kneeling. The concluding clause was drawn in the form of a petition; it was proposed that the two Houses should request the King and the Queen to issue a commission empowering thirty divines of the Church of England to revise the liturgy, the canons, and the constitution of the ecclesiastical courts, and to recommend such alterations as might seem to them desirable.

But this Bill roused serious opposition. It was felt by all who had any respect and feeling for the Church, as one in all times from the Apostolic period, who regarded her claim to maintain the same faith, the same Apostolic constitution and the same sacraments, as from the earliest age of the Church, that this Comprehension Bill if it became law must of necessity alienate them from such a body—drenched with Protestantism, till scarcely a tinge of the old wine of Catholicism remained in her; and would leave them no other course open than to shake off the dust of their feet against her and join the Church of Rome, or the Church of the Nonjurors. Most of the bishops who had taken the oaths to William and Mary were placed on the Commission; and with them were joined twenty priests of note. Of these twenty, Tillotson was the most important as expressing the mind and wishes of the King. He was a latitudinarian, without a spark of feeling for historic Christianity. With him went Stillingfleet, Dean of S. Paul's, Sharp, Dean of Norwich, Patrick, Dean of Peterborough, Tenison, Rector of S. Martin's, and Fowler. But conspicuous on the other side were Aldrich, Dean of Christ Church, and Jane, Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford.

Early in October, 1689, the commissioners assembled in the Jerusalem Chamber. But hardly had they met before Sprat, Bishop of Rochester, started up and denied that the Commission was legal. There was a sharp altercation, violent words were flung about, and Sprat, Jane, and Aldrich withdrew. The strength of the Catholic party was broken, and the rest agreed to sanction nearly all the changes advocated by those who desired to entirely alter the character of the Church.

"They had before them," Burnet tells us, "all the exceptions that either the Puritans before the war, or the Nonconformists since the Restoration, had made to any part of the Church service; they had also many propositions and advices that had been offered, at several times, by many of our bishops and divines upon those heads; matters were well considered and freely and calmly debated; and all digested into an entire correction of everything that seemed liable to any just objection." To guide them, as Burnet admits in his Triennial Visitation Charge of 1704, they were furnished with a great collection of the books and papers in which the Dissenters had at different times set forth their demands. The Commission was prepared to surrender everything. The chanting of psalms, even in cathedrals, was to be done away with. The lessons from the Apocrypha were to be abolished. The Saints' days omitted from the Calendar, the form of absolution altered, remission of sins to be removed from it "as not very intelligible." The cross in baptism, the use of god-parents, the wearing of the surplice were to be optional. Episcopal ordination was not to be required of the Ministry. Kneeling to receive the Holy Communion was left to the choice of the Communicant; the collects, as too concise, were to be blown out with pious bombast.

It is possible that, as Calamy asserts, such alterations as these would have brought over two-thirds of the English Dissenters to the Established Church; but it is certain that it would have driven two-thirds of the members of the Church, lay and clerical, out of her, as having forfeited her claim to be a branch of the Catholic Church, and they would probably have swelled the ranks of the Nonjurors, and made of that communion a body that would have really represented the Church in England.

Owing to the secession of the Nonjurors, sees and benefices had been filled with men who were in sympathy with the views of Tillotson and Burnet, or who were only solicitous to live in the smiles of William. Little resistance, if any, was to be expected from the episcopal bench.

When the Commission had concluded its labours, writs were issued summoning the Convocation of the Province of Canterbury. The clergy were in a ferment throughout England. They thought that the heritage of faith was going to be taken from them. The Toleration Act had removed the disabilities of the Dissenters; they might build their conventicles and preach what and when they liked; why, then, open the doors of the Church to admit them as a flood to swamp the faithful?

When the Declaration of Toleration had been issued by James II, in 1687, removing all disabilities from the Dissenters, on the sole understanding that they should abstain from attacking the Churches of Rome and England, their preachers found that they had nothing to say. They preferred to be under disabilities rather than give up assaults on the Scarlet Woman, Babylon, the Beast, and Prelacy, its shadow.

When Convocation was elected, it became evident to all that the bulk of the priests were against all watering down of the formulas of the Church, her faith, her ritual. The most important office in Convocation was that of Prolocutor of the Lower House. The Prolocutor was to be chosen by the members; Tillotson was proposed by the Protestant party as one whom the King delighted to honour, and who it was well known would be appointed to the Archbishopric of Canterbury when vacant.

On November 20th, Convocation met in Henry VII's Chapel at Westminster. "Compton was in the chair. On the right and left those suffragans of Canterbury who had taken the oath were ranged in gorgeous vestments of scarlet and miniver. Below the table was assembled the crowd of presbyters. Beveridge preached a Latin sermon, in which he warmly eulogized the existing system, and yet declared himself favourable to a moderate reform." In a word, he blew hot and cold with the same breath.

The Lower House listened, unstirred, cold and resolute. Dean Shays, put forward by the members favourable to Comprehension, proposed Tillotson; Jane was proposed on the other side. After an animated discussion, Jane was elected by fifty-five votes to twenty-eight.

The Prolocutor was then formally presented to the Bishop of London, and made, according to ancient usage, a Latin oration, in which he eulogized the Church in England as maintaining the faith as delivered to the saints, and as preserving all the marks of the Catholic Church throughout all ages and all the world; and he very plainly declared that no alteration in a downward direction would be tolerated; and he concluded with the significant and well-known words, "Nolumus leges AngliÆ mutari."

It soon became evident that the Lower House was absolutely determined not to have the proposed alterations made; but the plan they adopted was to shun the discussion of the recommendations made by the Commissioners, so as not directly to reject what they knew lay very near to the King's heart. With this object they adopted a system of tactics that in the end answered their purpose.

"The law," says Macaulay, "as it had been interpreted during a long course of years, prohibited Convocation from even deliberating on any ecclesiastical ordinance without a previous warrant from the Crown. Such a warrant, sealed with the Great Seal, was brought in form to Henry the Seventh's Chapel by Nottingham. He at the same time delivered a message from the King. His Majesty exhorted the assembly to consider calmly and without prejudice the recommendations of the Commission, and declared that he had nothing in view but the honour and advantage of the Protestant religion in general and of the Church of England in particular.

"The bishops speedily agreed on an address of thanks for the royal message, and requested the concurrence of the Lower House. Jane and his adherents raised objection after objection. First they claimed the privilege of presenting a separate address. When they were forced to waive this claim, they refused to agree to any expressions which implied that the Church of England had any fellowship with any other Protestant community. Amendments and reasons were sent backward and forward. Conferences were held at which Burnet on one side and Jane on the other were the chief speakers. At last, with great difficulty, a compromise was made; and an address, cold and ungracious compared with that which the bishops had framed, was presented to the King in the Banqueting House. He dissembled his vexation, returned a kind answer, and intimated a hope that the assembly would now at length proceed to consider the great question of Comprehension." But this was precisely what they were resolute not to consider. They had made up their minds on the subject already, but they were unwilling to fly too openly in the face of the King. As for trusting the bishops to stand firm on any principle, the Lower House knew that this was not to be expected. When had the bishops of the Established Church, since the Reformation, ever shown firmness and united action on any principle, except once, and that was to oppose general Toleration?

So soon as the clergy were again assembled, a fresh difficulty was started. It was mooted that the Nonjuring bishops had not been summoned, and they were to be regarded as bishops of the Catholic Church quite as certainly as were those nominees of the King who had been intruded into their vacated thrones.

Then it was complained that scurrilous pamphlets were hawked about the streets, and the people were being worked into a temper of opposition to Convocation. It was asked why Convocation should be called together to emasculate the Church, if it was to be suffered to be jeered at by pamphleteers.

Thus passed week after week. Christmas drew nigh. The bishops proposed, during the recess, to have a committee to sit and prepare business. The Lower House rejected the proposal; and it became plain to every one that it was determined not to consider one of the suggested concessions to Protestant prejudice.

Moreover, it soon became evident that the Dissenters themselves did not desire Comprehension. Their ministers were petted and made much of by the well-to-do yeomen and the rich merchants in country and town. They lived on the fat of the land, snapped up wealthy widows and bought broad acres. Whereas the needy country parson was hard pressed to wring the tithes from his parishioners. While the walls of exclusion of Jericho stood, the rams' horns brayed against them daily, and seven times on the Sabbath; but so soon as the walls were prostrate, and every man could go up into the city and take up his quarters there where he liked, the rams' horns would have to be laid aside as superfluous lumber.

The King was disappointed and offended. What he did was to prorogue Convocation for six weeks, and when those six weeks had expired, to prorogue it again, and many years elapsed before it was again suffered to assemble.

That Convocation of 1689 saved the Church of England from dissolution into a formless, gelatinous, and invertebrate mass.

Burnet himself, though disappointed at the time, felt afterwards that the determination of the Lower House had saved the Church at a time of crisis. "There was," he says, "a very happy direction of the providence of God observed in this matter. The Jacobite clergy who were then under suspension were designing to make a schism in the Church, whensoever they should be turned out and their places should be filled up by others. They saw it would not be easy to make a separation upon a private and personal account; they therefore wished to be furnished with more specious pretences, and if we had made alterations in the Rubrics and other parts of the Common Prayer, they would have pretended that they still stuck to the ancient Church of England, in opposition to those who were altering it and setting up new models. And, as I do firmly believe that there is a wise providence that watches upon human affairs, and directs them—so I have observed this in many instances relating to the Revolution ... by all the judgments we could afterwards make, if we had carried a majority in the Convocation for alterations, they would have done us more hurt than good."

Burnet was morally and intellectually incapable of seeing that it was a case of conscience, of stantis vel cadentis ecclesiÆ, and he attributed the motives of the recalcitrant clergy to political prejudice.

On Jane's return to Oxford, he found another opportunity of defending the Church, by framing the decree of 1690, which condemned the "Naked Gospel" of Arthur Burge.

Jane had no hopes whatever of preferment from William, if he cared for it. In 1696 it was even rumoured that the King meditated turning him out of his professorship, because he had not signed the "Association for King William." But on Anne's accession, all his fears were at an end. It would appear from a letter of Atterbury that at Oxford the University desired to get rid of him, because he neglected giving lectures on Divinity, and left the work to be discharged by a subordinate named Smallridge.

In 1703 Bishop Trelawny appointed him to the Chancellorship of Exeter Cathedral, which he exchanged for the precentorship in 1704, but he retained his Regius professorship to the end. Undoubtedly it was a great pleasure to him in the decline of his life to be back in the West Country.

He resigned the precentorship of Exeter in 1706, and died on the 23rd February, 1707, at Oxford, and was buried in Christ Church.

The writer of his life in the Dictionary of National Biography sums up his career with these words: "Jane was a clerical politician of a low type; Calamy says of him, 'Though fond of the rites and ceremonies of the Church, he was a Calvinist in the respect of doctrine,' and the pleasantest thing recorded of him is his kindness shown at Oxford to the ejected Presbyterian, Thomas Gilbert."

Calamy, as a Dissenter, was prejudiced against Jane; and I do not see that he was of a low type of polemical cleric—because when he saw that the theory of government he had embraced would not bear the test of experience, he had the courage to reject it. Every man is liable to make mistakes; it is only the brave man who can acknowledge that he has been mistaken.

Nor was Jane alone. Compton, Bishop of London, and several other bishops, had appealed to William of Orange to come over and help the people and the Church of England to be free from a tyrannous and subversive despotism. The Earl of Danby, under whose administration, and with his sanction, a law had been proposed, which, if it had passed, would have excluded from Parliament and office all who refused to declare on oath that they thought resistance to the King in every case unlawful—he had seen the mistake as well, and had invited William over.

As Macaulay says: "This theory (of passive obedience) at first presented itself to the Cavalier as the very opposite of slavish. Its tendency was to make him not a slave, but a free man and a master. It exalted him by exalting one whom he regarded as his protector, as his friend, as the head of his beloved party, and of his more beloved Church. When Republicans were dominant the Royalist had endured wrongs and insults which the restoration of the legitimate government had enabled him to retaliate. Rebellion was therefore associated in his imagination with subjection and degradation, and monarchical authority with liberty and ascendancy. It had never crossed his imagination that a time might come when a King, a Stuart, could prosecute the most loyal of the clergy and gentry with more than the animosity of the Rump or the Protector. That time had however arrived. Oppression speedily did what philosophy and eloquence would have failed to do. The system of Filmer might have survived the attacks of Locke; but it never recovered from the death-blow given by James."

Jane changed his opinion indeed, but so did nearly the whole of the Tory party and of the clergy of the Church.