USHER, James, a distinguished archbishop of the Irish church, remarkable alike for the liberality of his sentiments respecting church government, and for the constant advocacy which Calvinism received at his hands, was born in Dublin on the 4th of January 1580. His family was founded in Ireland by an Englishman named Nevil, who took the title, as he exercised the functions, of usher to King John about 1185. His uncle on the father's side, Henry Usher, was Archbishop of Armagh from 1595 to 1613, and his uncle on the mother's side was Richard Staneyhurst, who became a Roman Catholic, and who translated four books of the Aeneid into English hexameters, besides writing several theological and historical treatises, now almost entirely forgotten.

If there is anything in having distinguished ancestors, James Usher could obviously reap the advantage of it. He is said to have been taught to read by two aunts who had been blind from their cradle, and as soon as he had mastered that preliminary to all book-learning, he was sent to a school kept by two political emissaries of King James of Scotland—viz., Mr (afterwards Sir) James Fullerton, and Mr James Hamilton, subsequently created Viscount Clanboy. Usher used often afterwards to attribute every excellence in letters to which he had attained, to the superior instructions which he gained from those young Scots.

In 1593, Usher entered Trinity College, just opened the same year, and in 1598, having already attained a high academic distinction, he resolved to study for the church. He was, accordingly, created deacon and priest in 1600 by his uncle the aforementioned archbishop, and was soon after appointed afternoon preacher in Christ Church, Dublin. Having made various visits to England, he had the good fortune to make the acquaintance of many distinguished men, and he usually spent the most part of his time at the great libraries of Oxford, Cambridge, and London. In 1607, he was chosen professor of divinity, and for the next thirteen years he devoted himself to the discharge of that office. In 1612 he took his degree of D.D., and published next year a work which he never completed, entitled De Ecclesiaram Christianarum Successione et Statu. Dr Usher had all along been a firm adherent of Protestantism under the Calvinistic form, so that with the looseness of his views on the divine right of Episcopacy, he was accused by his enemies of having leanings to Puritanism. Presbytery would have been perhaps a more exact designation for his creed, so far as it was known or could be stated. In time, however, this Puritanical notion was got wormed out of the head of the king, and Dr Usher was nominated to the see of Meath. In 1623, he was made a privy councillor of Ireland, and next year, while on a visit to England, he was chosen archbishop of Armagh and primate of all Ireland. He published, in 1631, Godeschalci et Praedestinariane Controversiae ab eo mote Historia (the first Latin book printed in Ireland); in 1632, Veterum Epistolae Hibernicarum Sylloge; in 1638, Emanuel, or a Treatise on the Incarnation of the Son of God, an excellent performance; and in 1639, his highly celebrated Britannicarum Ecclesiaram Antiquitates.

In 1640, a band of rebels plundered his house at Armagh, and as he was then living securely at Oxford, where he had just published Certain Brief Treatises, it was judged advisable that he should not return to Ireland in the meanwhile, in the troubled state of that country. He lived for the most part, in future, with his son-in-law, Sir Timothy Tyrrell, at Cardiff, and with Lady Peterborough in London. Archbishop Usher published in 1644 an edition of the Epistles of Polycarp and Ignatius. In 1647, he gave to the world his De Romana Ecclesia Symbolo, which was followed next year by the learned Dissertatio de Macedonum et Asianorum Anno Solari; in 1658, Dr Bernard brought out Usher's Reduction of Episcopacy to the Form of the Synodical Government in the Ancient Church; in 1650–64, appeared his Annales Veteris et Novi Testamenti. Such constitute the chief works of Archbishop Usher. He died in his seventy-sixth year, at Ryegate in Surrey, on the 21st of March 1656. He left an only daughter to mourn his loss. Various additional works were gathered from his papers after his death. The life of the Archbishop has been written by Dr Richard Parr, and prefixed to a collection of his lordship's letters, dated London, 1686; it has likewise been written, in Latin, by Dr Bates, in the Collectio Batesiana, and by Dr Smith, in the Vita Eruditissimorum. A complete edition of the works of Archbishop Usher was some years ago published by the University of Dublin, in 17 vols., under the editorial care, first of Dr Elzington, and afterwards of Dr J. H. Todd.