A statue of Henry Cooke, an Irish presbyterian leader of the early and mid-nineteenth century, on a traffic island on College Avenue, Belfast.
"Henry Cooke came of a family of puritan settlers in County Down from Devonshire. He was the youngest son of John Cooke, tenant farmer of Grillagh, near Maghera, County Londonderry, by his second wife, Jane Howie or Howe, of Scottish descent, and was born on 11 May 1788. From his mother he derived his force of character, his remarkable memory, and his powers of sarcasm. A vivid impression, retained through life, of the events of 1798—the Irish Rebellion—influenced his political principles. After struggling for an education in rude country schools, he matriculated at Glasgow College in November 1802. Owing to illness he did not graduate, but he completed the arts and divinity courses, not shining as a student, but taking immense pains to qualify himself as a public speaker. Fresh from Glasgow, he appeared before the Ballymena presbytery in the somewhat unclerical attire of blue coat, drab vest, white cord breeches and tops, proved his orthodoxy on trial, and was licensed to preach.
Early career -
Cooke's first settlement was at Duneane, near Randalstown, County Antrim, where he was ordained on 10 November 1808, though only twenty years of age, as assistant to Robert Scott, with a salary of £25 Irish. Here his evangelical fervour met with no sympathy. On 13 November 1810 he resigned the post, and became tutor in the family of Alexander Brown of Kells, near Ballymena. He speedily received a call from Donegore, County Antrim, and was installed there at Temple-Patrick presbytery, on 22 January 1811. This congregation, vacant since 1808, had chafed under an Arian ministry, and had shown its determination to return to the old paths by rejecting the candidature of Henry Montgomery. Cooke began at Donegore a systematic course of theological study; and by leave of his presbytery he returned, soon after his marriage, to Glasgow, where he spent the winter sessions 1815-16 and 1816–17, adding chemistry, geology, anatomy, and medicine to his metaphysical studies, and taking lessons in elocution from John M. Vandenhoff. He had been in the habit of giving medical aid to his flock. In 1817-18 he attended classes at Trinity College and the College of Surgeons, Dublin, and walked the hospitals. He was a hard student, but with his studies he combined missionary labours, which resulted in the formation of a congregation at Carlow.
Shortly after his return from Dublin, Cooke was called to Killyleagh, county Down, and resigning Donegore on 6 July 1818, he was installed at Killyleagh, at Dromore presbytery on 8 September. The lord of the manor, and the leading Presbyterian at Killyleagh, was Archibald Hamilton Rowan. Rowan's younger son, Captain Rowan, an elder of Killyleagh, was attached to the older theology, and secured the election of Cooke, who was allowed to be 'by no means bigoted in his opinions'. In fact, while at Donegore he had been 'led to join in Arian ordinations', a laxity which at a later period he sincerely lamented.
In 1821 English Unitarians sent John Smethurst of Moreton Hampstead, Devon, on a preaching mission in Ulster. Favoured by Rowan (the father) he came to Killyleagh, where Cooke and the younger Rowan confronted him at his lecture in a schoolroom. Wherever Smethurst went Cooke was at hand with a reply, inflicting upon the Unitarian mission a series of defeats from which it never recovered. In opposing, later in the same year, the election of the Arian William Bruce to the chair of Hebrew and classics in the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, Cooke was unsuccessful, and he was discouraged by the result of his appeal on the subject to the following synod (at Newry, 1822). He preached in the spring of 1824 as a candidate for First Armagh, but was not chosen.
Belfast ministry and Irish Presbyterianism -
On 12 October 1828 a unanimous call had been forwarded to Cooke from the congregation of Mary's Abbey, Dublin. But his place was in Belfast, and to there he moved, to a church specially built for him in May Street, and opened 18 October 1829. From this time to the close of his active pastorate in 1867 his fame as a preacher drew crowds to May Street. The calls upon his pulpit services elsewhere were not infrequent; hence the story, told by Classon Porter, that 'his people once memorialled their presbytery for an occasional hearing of their own minister'. Established in Belfast, he became not merely the presiding spirit of Irish Presbyterianism (he was elected moderator of assembly in 1841 and 1862), but the leader and framer of a Protestant party in the politics of Ulster. To this consummation his wishes tended, when he purged the synod. The political principles of the Arian chiefs were as dangerous in his estimation as their lax theological notions. Till the election of 1832 Belfast had been a stronghold of liberalism. Cooke turned the tide. So completely did his work transform the relations of parties that even Montgomery, in later life, dropped his political liberalism.
At the Hillsborough meeting (30 October 1834) Cooke, in the presence of forty thousand people, published the banns of a marriage between the established and Presbyterian churches of Ireland. The alliance was to be politico-religious, not ecclesiastical, a union for conserving the interests of Protestantism against the political combination of the Roman catholic, 'the Socinian, and the infidel'. Still more thoroughly did he succeed in his political mission by his dealing with O'Connell's visit to Belfast in January 1841. Cooke's challenge to a public discussion of facts and principles was evaded by O'Connell. The anti-repeal meeting which followed O'Connell's abortive demonstration was famed in Ulster. Almost his last platform appearance was at Hillsborough on 30 October 1867, when, in his eightieth year, Cooke spoke against the threatened disestablishment of Protestantism in Ireland. On 5 March 1868 he attended the inaugural meeting of an Ulster Protestant defence association. In the same sense was the address (24 October 1868) to the Protestant electors of Ireland, penned almost on his deathbed.
Cooke's Presbyterianism was of the most robust type; he would not rank himself as a 'dissenter', claiming to be a minister of 'a branch of the church of Scotland'. But he was anxious to support the establishment of Protestant Christianity as 'the law of the empire'. When, in 1843, the general assembly of his church passed a resolution recommending its members to secure the return of Presbyterian representatives to parliament, Cooke formally withdrew from the assembly, and did not return to it until 1847, when the resolution was rescinded. In the non-intrusion controversy which divided the church of Scotland Cooke used all his influence with the government to obtain concessions satisfactory to the liberties of the church, and on the day of the disruption (18 May 1843) gave the encouragement of his presence and voice to the founders of the Free church."
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