Usher (or USSHER), JAMES, in Dr Johnson's phrase 'the great luminary of the Irish church,' was born in Dublin, January 4, 1581. His father, Arland Usher, one of the clerks in Chancery, was a gentleman of good estate and family; his uncle, Henry Usher (c. 1550-1631), was his predecessor as Archbishop of Armagh. A brother of his mother's was that Richard Stanihurst who with his sister and father turned Roman Catholic, translated the first four books of the Aeneid into English hexameters, and wrote the Description of Ireland for Holinshed's Chronicles. At thirteen Usher entered the newly-founded Trinity College, Dublin, being its second scholar and eighth fellow elected by merit. His father had intended him to study law, but his death in 1598 left the young scholar free to follow his natural bent. He first made over all the family property to his brother and sisters, only keeping enough for his support during his studies. The learned Catholic Thomas Stapleton's Fortress of Faith led him at twenty to the study of the Fathers, and their writings he read systematically every day for eighteen years. At nineteen he argued publicly with success against the Jesuit Henry Fitzsymons; in 1600 he took his Master's degree, and was chosen Catechist reader in his college; in 1601 he received both orders on the same day, and shortly after was appointed to preach at Christ Church on Sunday afternoons before the Lord Deputy. About 1603 he became Chancellor of St Patrick's, and in 1607 he was chosen professor of Divinity in Dublin, which office he held for thirteen years. He often visited England, and became an intimate friend of Camden, Selden, Bodley, Cotton, and Evelyn. In 1620 he was made Bishop of Meath, Privy-councillor for Ireland in 1623, and Archbishop of Armagh in 1625. He took part in 1634 in the convocation which drew up the canons of the Irish Church. He had Quarles as his secretary down to the outbreak of the Rebellion. Usher left Ireland for England in 1640, and it was on this journey that Wodrow tells us in his Analecta he paid a visit at Anwoth to Samuel Rutherford. During the Irish rebellion in that year all his property save his books was plundered. He continued to live in England, declined to sit in the Assembly of Divines at Westminster, and for about eight years was preacher at Lincoln's Inn. He was constant in his loyalty to the throne, yet was treated with more than indulgence by Cromwell. In his last years he lived with his son-in-law, Sir Timothy Tyrrell, at Cardiff, under the roof of the dowager Lady Stradling at St Donate, Glamorganshire, and of the dowager Countess of Peterborough, in whose house at Reigate in Surrey he died, 21st March 1656. Cromwell gave him a splendid burial in the Erasmus Chapel of Westminster Abbey, allowing the Church of England burial service to be used on that occasion alone.
Usher stands distinguished amongst the theologians of any age, not more by his vast learning and sagacity than by his charity, his sweetness of temper, and his humility. We are told that at the close of his long conferences with the learned Puritan Dr John Preston the good archbishop would say: 'Come, doctor, let us say something about Christ before we part'—a thoroughly characteristic story. He was Calvinistic in theology, and moderate and tolerant in his ideas of church government. As an eirenecon he proposed a modification of episcopacy which failed to commend itself to the zealots of either side—this was published by Dr Bernard in 1658 as The Reduction of Episcopacy to the Form of the Synodical government in the Ancient Church. Of his numerous writings the greatest is the Annales Veteris et Novi Testamenti (2 vols. folio, 1650-54), which gave us the long accepted chronology of Scripture, the Creation being fixed at 4004 B.C., &c. As early as 1647 we find from the Stationers' Hall Registers that Fuller was labouring at an English translation of this work, which appeared in 1658 under Usher's own name only. Fuller acknowledges in his Church History that his 'wares' were from the 'storehouse of that reverend prelate—the Cape merchant of all learning.' He says further: 'Clean through this work, in point of chronology, I have with implicit faith followed his computation, setting my watch by his dial, knowing his dial to be set by the sun.'
Usher's Discourse of the Religion anciently professed by the Irish and British (1632) and Britannicarum Ecclesiarum Antiquitates et Primordia (1639) opened up new ground, giving in Gibbon's phrase 'all that learning can extract from the rubbish of the dark ages;' in his SS. Polycarpi et Ignatii Epistolæ (1644; cum appendice Ignatianæ, 1647) he supported the authenticity of the Middle Form of the much contested letters of Ignatius (q.v.); the Calvinistic Body of Divinity (1645) was published without his consent, and part of it was denied to be his; his De Græca Septuaginta Interpretum Versione Syntagma (1655) was the first attempt at a real examination of the Septuagint. There is a complete edition of his writings by Professor Elrington and Dr J. H. Todd (17 vols. 1841-48-62-64); Lives by Nicholas Bernard (1656), Richard Parr (1686), Elrington, and Carr (1895). See also W. Ball Wright, The Ussher Memoirs (Dublin, 1889).