Cooke, Henry

Cooke, Henry (1788–1868), Presbyterian champion of trinitarian orthodoxy and political parson. Cooke emerged as a public figure in 1821, when the appointment of a self‐confessed Arian, William Bruce, to the chair of Hebrew and Greek in the Belfast Academical Institution, where most of the Synod of Ulster's ordinands were trained, provoked Cooke, then minister of Killyleagh, Co. Down, to launch a campaign against Arianism in the college and in his church. Initial responses to his campaign were discouraging, but the acknowledgement of Arian opinions by Henry Montgomery and other ministers during a government inquiry into the affairs of the institution enabled Cooke to attack them in the Synod, eventually achieving their secession and a reaffirmation of theological orthodoxy

This second subscription controversy had political overtones, and after his victory Cooke became openly identified with conservatism in politics. However, many Presbyterians who had supported him theologically opposed him politically, particularly on the issue of tenant right. They did not approve his publication of ‘the banns of marriage’ between presbyterianism and the Church of Ireland at Hillsborough in 1834, and his deathbed appeal to Protestant electors in 1868 to vote Tory to save the church from disestablishment fell largely on deaf ears. Perhaps the only political issue on which he spoke for Presbyterians in general was his opposition to O'Connell's repeal movement. Significantly it was Orangemen and not Presbyterians who erected his statue in the centre of Belfast. In death as in life Cooke has remained a controversial figure in Irish Presbyterianism, honoured by some and vilified by others.

Bibliography

Holmes, R. F. G. , Henry Cooke (1981)

R. F. G. Holmes