Two quotes define the life of His Grace, James Ussher of Armagh. The first, written in 1624, partly explains his meteoric rise: "I dined at court, and 'twixt four and five I kissed the King's hand and had conference with him touching my sermon." And the second is that for which he is, maybe unfairly, almost exclusively remembered - that the world began "on the entrance of the night preceding the twenty-third day of October in the year 710 of the Julian period".
James Ussher was born in 1580, studied at Trinity, and took orders in the year of the Battle of Kinsale. Shortly afterwards he became Chancellor of St Patrick's, and in 1607, Professor of Divinity at Trinity. Like most people of his faith in those days, he was denominationally intolerant, and exerted what influence he had to have the laws against the Catholics rigidly enforced.
Ussher became a frequent visitor to London where he moved in influential circles. He so impressed King James I he was appointed Bishop of Meath in 1621, and the friendship blossomed to the extent that James, as one of his last acts before he died, appointed Ussher Archbishop of Armagh in 1625.
As Archbishop, Ussher became widely known as an advocate of learning, and as a defender of the value of both secular and sacred books. With the Revolution of 1640, however, his property was confiscated, and he retired to England where he spent most of the remainder of his life. It was there, in 1650, he arrived at his famous conclusion about the beginnings of the world.
Ussher's methodology was simple. According to Genesis, Adam begat a son called Seth when he was 130 years old, and lived on for another 800 years to reach the grand old age of 930. The lively Seth, in turn, had a son when he was 105, and this son, Enos, begat Cainan when he was a mere stripling of 90. And so it goes on through a long list to reach Mathusala and Noah. By continuing the analysis using bits and scraps of information given in succeeding chapters, Ussher reached a stage where the happenings described overlapped with confirmed historical events - and so Ussher was able to pinpoint the creation as having been on October 22nd, 4004 BC.
Archbishop Ussher was described as being "of an erect carriage, of vigorous constitution and temperate habits which allowed a life of incessant study". He died 345 years ago today, on March 21st, 1656, and "the Lord Protector of England, Oliver Cromwell, gave him burial in Westminster Abbey in the Erasmus Chapel".