USHER (or US5HER), JAMES (1581-1656), Irish divine and archbishop, was born in the parish of St. Nicholas, Dublin, on Jan. 4, 1581. He was sent to a school in Dublin opened by two political agents of James VI. of Scotland, who sought to secure a party for James in Ireland in the event of the queen's death. In '594 Usher matriculated at the newly founded university of Dublin, whose charter had just been obtained by his uncle, Henry Usher, archbishop of Armagh. He graduated M.A. in 160o, became a fellow of Trinity College, and was ordained in 1601. In 1607 he became regius professor of divinity and also chancellor of St. Patrick's cathedral, Dublin. In 1613 he published his first printed work, though not his first literary composition Gravissimae Quaestionis de Christianarum Ecclesiarum, . . . His torica Explicatio, wherein he took up the history of the Western Church from the point where Jewel had left off in his Apology for the Church of England, and carried it on from the 6th till past the middle of the 13th century. James nominated him archbishop of Armagh in 1625. As archbishop he discountenanced (1629) Bishop William Bedell's proposal to revive the Irish language in the serv ice; he shared in drafting (1634) the code of canons of the Irish Church, and defeated the attempt to make the Irish Church con form exactly to the doctrinal standards of the English. In 1640 he paid another visit to England on one of his usual scholarly errands, meaning to return when it was accomplished. But the Great Rebellion of 1641 prevented his return. Usher pleaded in vain with Charles I. not to abandon Strafford. By way of compensation for the loss of his Irish property he received the temporalities of the vacant see of Carlisle. In 1643 he declined a seat in the Assembly of Divines at Westminster. He quitted Oxford in 1645 and went into Wales, where he remained till 1646, when he returned to London, and was in 1647 elected preacher to the Society of Lincoln's Inn, an office which he continued to hold until near his death. In 1648 he conferred with Charles I.
in the Isle of Wight, on the abortive negotiations with parliament on the question of episcopacy. In 1650-54 he published the work which was long accounted his most important production, the An nales V eteris et Novi Testamenti, in which he propounded a now disproved scheme of Biblical chronology, whose dates were in serted by some unknown authority in the margin of reference editions of the Authorized Version. In 1655 Usher published his last work, De Graeca LXX. Interpretum Versione Syntagma. He died on March 20, 1656, in Lady Peterborough's house at Rei gate, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Usher's works are very numerous, and were first collected by C. R. Elrington and J. H. Todd, Dublin (1847-64, in 17 vols.). See Life by Carr (1895) ; W. B. Wright, The Ussher Memoirs (1889).