bridge between elite society and the mass of the population. One of the great collections of them which
survives was put together by Samuel Pepys, Secretary to the Navy, a member of the highest-level
bureaucracy of his day, but he enjoyed the cheap literature as well as the learned works that he had in his
library. And it could be read also of course by members of the middling and lower orders. It must have
had its impact on the common stock of images and symbols and understandings and simple information
of rich and poor alike, and it fostered a popular literacy which could be turned to other uses.
If you take the chapbook romances with their tales of knights and giants and so forth, which were being
published in the seventeenth century, and you marry them together with the Bible, what you end up with
is John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. He was someone who was steeped in this popular literature. He
wrote Pilgrim's Progress in order to provide a religious adventure story which turned out to be the second
most important book ever published in English.
To conclude then, whether or not we want to talk about an educational revolution in this period, the
educational changes did constitute a very significant break with the past. However limited, however
circumscribed by class or gender, they did open up new areas of potential in society and culture.
Something momentous was gradually happening across the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries;
something which I think one can reasonably say without exaggeration was one of the great transforming
processes of the early modern period. Okay.
Right. Well next time I'll take up the political narrative again, turning to the religious problems and
political problems of the early seventeenth century.
Lecture 18 - Street Wars of Religion: Puritans and Arminians
Overview
Professor Wrightson reviews the conflicts which developed within the Church of England in the early seventeenth century and
played a role in the growing tensions which led to the English civil wars. Wrightson begins by describing the "Jacobethan
consensus" which largely prevailed throughout the reign of James I, characterized by broad-based conformity and adherence to
Calvinist doctrine. However, this consensus was strained by the local activism of Puritans in many areas. The success of these
Puritan efforts at local reformation was uneven across the country and largely depended on whether Puritan clerics were able to
secure the support of secular magistrates in order to enforce godly discipline. He next considers the Arminian movement (antiCalvinist in doctrine and with strong elements of ritualism and clericalism) which destroyed the Jacobethan consensus. He
traces how the rise of Arminianism resulted in the polarization and politicization of religion with Charles I's appointment of
Arminian clerics (notably William Laud) to positions of control of the church and their repression of Puritan opponents.
Chapter 1. Jacobethan Consensus [00:00:00]
Professor Keith Wrightson: Right. Okay. Well, today we return to the main political and ecclesiastical
narrative leading up to the — do you mind? — leading up to the outbreak of the civil wars in the midseventeenth century. We left our discussion of the Elizabethan church two weeks ago with the situation of
relative calm at the end of Elizabeth's reign. If you'll remember, the domestic threat posed by the Catholic
minority was diminishing. Puritan attempts to change the structure of the church through action in
Parliament had been defeated. And to a large extent that relative stability can be said to have persisted in
to the first two decades of the seventeenth century, that is in to the reign of James I who came to the
throne in 1603 and died in 1625.
And indeed the continuities between the end of Elizabeth's reign and the reign of James have led some
historians to speak of what they call a "Jacobethan consensus" in the church during this generation;
Jacobean plus Elizabethan, Jacobethan. The characteristics of that consensus can be perhaps illustrated
with reference to an event at the very start of James' reign. In 1603, as he made his way south from
Edinburgh to be crowned in London, he was presented with what's become known as the Millenary
Petition, getting that name from the fact that it was allegedly subscribed by a thousand ministers of the
Church of England. And it revealed a body of opinion within the church petitioning James in the hope
that he would countenance further reform: further reform in doctrine, in the ceremonies of the church, and
in the quality of the clergy.
That led James to call the Hampton Court Conference in 1604, which was a conference of leading
churchmen in which all strands of opinion were represented. In the course of the conference, James was
very forthright in insisting that he would not countenance any change in the episcopal government of the
Church of England. Twice in the course of the debates he intervened famously with the phrase "No
bishop, no King." He'd had quite enough of the semi-independent Presbyterian Church of Scotland. So
discussion of church government in that sense was not on the agenda. Still it wasn't a confrontation
between James and the Puritan wing of the Church of England. He was very comfortable with the godly
issues that were raised. He was very keen on steps to improve the learning and quality of the clergy. He
agreed that there should be a new English translation of the Bible, the one eventually published in 1611
known in Britain as the Authorized Version or here as the King James Bible. And everyone was very
impressed with the King's doctrinal knowledge. He had had a very thorough theological education in
Scotland. There was no question in other words that James was a godly prince. He was England's
Solomon, as they flatteringly termed him.
So the Hampton Court Conference revealed the existence of continuing differences, differences of
opinion about aspects of the Church of England's structure, but there was a great deal of common ground
and the conference broke up pretty amicably. Let's look at that common ground a little closely — a little
more closely. First of all, there was by the early seventeenth century an essential consensus over doctrine.
Since the late 1580s, most theologians in the universities had been interpreting the ambiguities of the
Elizabethan settlement in an essentially Calvinist way. They tended to accept the doctrine of
predestination, the view that God had predestined those who would be amongst the elect and those who
would be reprobate or damned at the Last Judgment. They also had a widely shared model of the ideal
godly Protestant devotional life based on Biblicism, attendance at sermons, the practice of household
devotions, and a strict 'godly conversation', as they called it; that is, strict personal behavior, strict moral
behavior in daily life.
All of this was supported by a growing vernacular religious literature which tended to support this
approach to religious life. They also shared a common view of the need to entrench Protestant doctrine
and reformed behavior in the population at large. Only a minority might be saved according to Calvinist
doctrine, but no one knew for sure who they were. Therefore, the church must address the whole
population, it must serve the whole population, and it should minister to them. It's interesting for example
that when the 1611 translation was being prepared by a committee of divines, when they'd settled on a
translation of a passage, they used to read it aloud to see if it would be effective when read aloud to
illiterate congregations. They were very conscious of the need to be able to communicate in that kind of
way.
Well, to that end a great deal of stress was placed on the provision of a godly pastorate of teaching,
preaching ministers. And, as we saw when looking at education, a great deal was in fact achieved in that
respect. By the early 1600s, there was also an unmistakable Protestant identity. Despite internal
differences of opinion, most people were conscious of their common membership of a Protestant
confessional family within Europe. Their feelings of religious hostility were directed outwards towards
the threat of what they usually described not as Catholicism but as "Popery." Popery was the supposed
antithesis of reformed religion, characterized as a church which was based not on the pure, unvarnished
word of scripture but on human errors, corrupted by false doctrine and superstitious practices, and
increasingly seen as alien.
Chapter 2. Puritan Reformation [00:07:12]
Okay. Well, there's a good deal to be said for this notion of a Jacobethan consensus in the generation
which spanned the last years of Elizabeth and the reign of James. But, if the church was indeed at relative
peace it was enjoying a period of stability that was in many ways fragile. One mustn't overdo the element
of consensus, and by the 1620s there was increasing evidence of that consensus being subject to
destabilizing forces. And there were two of them in particular to emphasize. First of all, there was the
process of what one can call Puritan reformation down in the parishes, and secondly there was the
Arminian reaction at the center, and I'll look at each of these in turn.
Well starting with the Puritans. The Puritans, as we've already seen, were those that contemporaries
thought of as, in the phrase of the time, the "hotter sort of Protestants." Those who were most committed
to furthering the reformation. And by furthering the reformation they meant not simply conformity to a
Protestant religious settlement; they also had the ambition of galvanizing the religious life of the whole
nation. As one of them put it, they sought "a reduction of all things disordered," be it in religion or in
social morality, a reduction of it to the model of God's requirements as revealed in scripture, as they saw
it. These were of course people of fervent faith and astringent personal religious life. It's best revealed in
the way they monitored their own lives in the spiritual diaries that they often kept, straining by
examination of their own behavior to achieve the sanctification of personal life which would give them
assurance of their election. Assurance that they were amongst the elect, those who would be saved; an
assurance which often simply didn't come to many of them, but they kept struggling.
And that struggle bred a kind of spiritual anxiety which perhaps underlay their often vigorous activism.
They sought reassurance often in action. These were not just formal members of the church living their
lives within a general framework of Christian belief and practice. They were seriously religious people
and their religion shaped their whole lives. The trouble was that it not only shaped their lives but not
infrequently impacted also on the lives of others. Amongst the clergy those of puritanical inclination were
amongst the most conscientious and the most active in the task of evangelizing the people. Whatever their
private preferences as to forms of church government, most of them had long ago abandoned any serious
attempt to transform the church by political action. They'd withdrawn from that after the 1580s. Instead
they conformed more or less to the requirements of the church for the sake of the larger task of spreading
the word; evangelizing.
Protestantism seemed to them to demand popular enlightenment. It demanded a dispelling of what they
viewed as the darkness of popish ignorance and superstition, and godly ministers entered upon that task
with very high expectations. When one reads their works they often speak initially of the mass of the
population as "hungry sheep unfed." They describe them as "fields of corn ripe for the harvest" or they're
"babes crying for the milk of good doctrine," and what could stand against the word if it was brought to
them? Unfortunately for that optimistic position, they often found that their own parishioners tended to
disappoint their high hopes of evangelical success.
A parish ministry day by day, week by week, year by year, could often be a deeply disillusioning
experience. Richard Greenham, who was one of the most famous of the early Puritan preachers — he was
the minister of Dry Drayton near Cambridge, a man much sought after for advice by other Puritans —
Richard Greenham finally resigned his living at Dry Drayton after twenty years of effort, effort which had
him not only preaching on Sundays and on weekdays but even going out and standing by the fields as his
parishioners went out to work on their farms to talk to them about matters of religion and so forth. After
twenty years of this effort, he gave up because of what he called "the untractableness and unteachableness
of that people."
And there gradually grew up in the early decades of the seventeenth century alongside the literature of
sermons and devotional works, what one can perhaps describe as a literature of godly disillusionment, in
which people reflected upon their lack of success in the evangelizing movement. And such literature very
often contained a very somber assessment of the state of popular religion in England, and I'll give you
some quotations from the kind of things they tended to say. They were deeply concerned about the fact
that the people were ignorant of doctrine, uninstructed in what they saw as saving doctrinal knowledge.
To give some examples from these works: "the poor people do not understand so much as the Lord's
Prayer." "If any question be put to them as concerning religion, they grow as mute as fishes." "Men can
talk understandingly about ways of the world, but they can scarcely speak a word of sense about matters
of salvation." "Our sermons are but a breath from us and a sound to them" — because they didn't
understand the half of it.
These are all quotations from works of this kind. They said that the religion of the people remained one of
"formality and blind devotion." That's a common phrase, "formality and blind devotion," reliance upon a
ritualistic repetition of one's prayers; turning up at church services more as a gathering of neighbors than
as a congregation of the faithful; more concerned with who they saw at church than with what they heard;
and confident that this was enough, that this was a good life, which in the eyes of the godly ministers, of
course, it wasn't. The people were 'superstitious'. They still adhered to practices which they were too
ignorant to recognize as being hangovers from the dark age of popery. They practiced magic, they visited
cunning folk, and they were "profane" people who did not appreciate the need to sanctify their lives
according to the word of God and who maintained forms of customary behavior offensive to God.
They swore; they drank to excess; they indulged in what one minister described as "light, lewd, and
lascivious dancing;" they broke the Sabbath either by working in their farms and workshops or by their
leisure activities; hanging out in the ale house as soon as they got out of church. As one preacher put it,
"every parish hath a profane and ignorant multitude who are born with a pope in their belly," by which he
meant they were directed by their fleshly appetites — "born with a pope in their belly are not yet
redeemed from that gross supervision — superstition — and vain conversation which they have received
by tradition from their fathers." In short, they were prisoners of popular custom rather than followers of
the precept of scripture.
But there was a remedy for all of this and these condemnatory jeremiads tended to be followed rapidly by
calls for the pursuit of reformation of these disorders by a dual policy, a policy of "word and sword."
Ministers and secular magistrates, whether they be parish officers or justices of the peace, the leaders of
towns or parliamentary members, they should all act together. The word of the minister would "reform
the inside" of the people; the sword of the magistrate would "conform the outside"; word and sword.
Well, such recommendations didn't fall on deaf ears, and where godly ministers and like-minded local
officers and magistrates supported one another, as they sometimes did, this kind of answer to the cultural
failings of the reformation, its failings to adequately communicate with the people down in the parishes,
led to what's been characterized as widespread cultural conflict in the early seventeenth century, right
down at the level of the locality.
Many forms of customary popular culture in the parishes were attacked. Feasts and festivities, Sunday
dancings and so forth were often put down partly because they were held on the Sabbath day, partly
because they tempted people to profane behavior, notably drunkenness and the incitement of lust. One
study by Ronald Hutton in The Rise and Fall of Merry England shows how gradually these traditional
feasts and festivals disappeared all over southeastern England and were gradually retreating into the north
and west where they continued to survive. There was also widespread attack, at local level, upon such
things as the numerous alehouses which the people frequented — many of them were suppressed — and
at such common everyday sins as profane swearing, for example swearing "By God" in the course of
conversation. The arrest book for the town of Dorchester, which was dominated by a Puritan group from
the 1610s onwards, is quite interesting on market days. It reveals numerous cases of people arrested on
market day for swearing in the marketplace, or for getting drunk in the taverns around the market. That
was a field day for reformation.
As a result, some communities became well known as models of godly discipline. Often they were small
towns, places like Banbury in Oxfordshire, which was known for what was described, approvingly, as its
"precise course of government," its imposition locally of stricter standards of reformation. Or Dorchester
in Dorset, which I've already mentioned, under its patriarch, John White, or indeed Stratford-on-Avon in
Warwickshire, where the local Puritan group triumphed after a sharp tussle with their opponents: the
opponents in fact including a number of friends and associates of the retired playwright William
Shakespeare.
Other communities remained uneasily divided. They were prone to occasional eruptions of conflict
brought on by reforming initiatives: local attempts to tighten up on standards of church attendance, to put
down ale houses or whatever was the case, and there might be no lasting victory, just a continuing tussle
between the two sides. Still others remained relatively untouched.
A number of historians have looked at all of this and tried to interpret its broader implications. David
Underdown, for example, in the study of what was going on in the west of England, has speculated about
the possible association between different local social and economic structures and different degrees of
proneness or susceptibility to the outbreak of this kind of religious conflict. He asks why some places
seem to have been able to exclude such conflict, whereas others were deeply divided and riven by it. Why
did the Puritan word take root so much better in some places than in others?
In the east of England, especially the counties of East Anglia, where the Puritans very much called the
tune by the second quarter of the seventeenth century, a number of scholars, William Hunt, myself and
others, have suggested that religious impulses for reformation and greater discipline were superimposed
in these areas upon other forms of social tension; that the Puritan ministers tended to win their converts
principally amongst what were known as the better sort of parishioners, the more prosperous leaders of
the parish, the more literate people, and that local struggles were aimed primarily at disciplining the poor
and the young of their communities. In other words that religious anxieties and social anxieties reinforced
one another, one mutating into the other.
Still others have insisted that the whole thing was purely a religious matter, that if there was a corrugation
or a segmenting of local populations according to one or another religious persuasion, it was simply a
matter of the introduction of particular religious messages and the intensity with which those beliefs were
held in particular places.
So there are different takes on the unevenness of Puritan success, but what one can say in general is that it
was very uneven. Nevertheless, all agree that such conflict existed in many parishes, in many towns and it
was all part and parcel of the local history of the reformation in its most advanced form. Obviously, it
depended first and foremost upon the communication of the demand for a more stringent reformation into
the localities. Those places which were least troubled by all this were those where these demands were
never heard. There was never a minister of Puritan persuasion, or a town council of Puritan persuasion,
there to instigate such reformatory programs. For whatever reason they found no local constituency of
supporters. But the outcome, where conflict did break out, tended to depend crucially on whether the
'godly' or those who resisted them had most control in local decision-making power. Town councils,
parish vestries and so forth and who controlled them were often crucial to the success or failure of these
reformatory movements. It's all part of the way that the long-term outcome of the reformation and the
long-term development of the nature of English Protestantism was being settled and fought out in
dispersed, diffuse actions taking place all over the kingdom, though rather more common in some parts of
the kingdom than in others. And gradually, by the 1620s, it gave rather different complexions to the
Church of England in different localities. East Anglia was predominantly Puritan. One survey of the
ministers of the three counties of East Anglia for example reveals that by the 1630s two thirds of them
could be described as Puritan in inclination. This was a great area of Puritan strength. There were other
counties also which shared that. The north and the west tended to see much less Puritan activity. Other
counties were much divided.
And in the course of it all the term "Puritan" acquired a new layer of meaning. Within the Jacobean
church Puritans could not easily be distinguished by their theology, they couldn't easily be distinguished
by their ethical teachings — both of them were essentially mainstream. But what did distinguish them
was their intensity and their activism. They were defined in a sense by a godly activism which, when it
was unleashed in a particular local context, tended to maximize stress over religious issues. That's where
they got defined, in such contexts. No one chose to call himself a Puritan; it was a term of abuse. They
were labeled as Puritans by their opponents in such conflictual contexts. As Patrick Collinson, one of the
greatest historians of Puritanism, has put it, Puritanism was "not a thing definable in itself." It was "one
half of a stressful relationship." "One half of a stressful relationship" — the relationship that arose in
some parishes through the impact on local society of the fervent pursuit of reformation.
Chapter 3. Arminian Reaction [00:25:59]
Okay. Let's turn now to the other destabilizing group, the Arminians. And before we go any further with
this let me stress Arminians, A-r-m-i-n, not Armenians. Every year when we have the examination
sinister groups of Armenians turn up destabilizing the Church of England. [Laughter] There was indeed
an Armenian community in northwestern Europe at this time. They were vitally important in the trade
networks which linked northwestern Europe to the east and they were there. But they had nothing
whatever to do with the troubles of the Church of England. So "Arminians."
The Arminians were another minority who occasioned a good deal of conflict in the early Stuart church,
but this time they can be defined more easily in terms of theology. Theologically, they comprised a
minority of English churchmen who rejected Calvinism. They rejected the Calvinist doctrine of
predestination. Rather than believing that only the elect were predestined to salvation, they believed, more
traditionally, in the universality of God's grace and in the free will of all mankind to choose salvation. So
they're theologically distinct. They had their antecedents in the late sixteenth century amongst those
theologians who did not interpret the Thirty Nine Articles in a Calvinist manner but remained closely —
closer — to more traditional teaching and indeed to Lutheran teaching in their views.
In the early seventeenth century, they came to be labeled 'Arminians' after a Dutch theologian who took
this position, Arminius of Leiden. His criticism of Calvin was deemed so important at the time that it was
a subject of a major conference of the reformed churches, the Synod of Dort, which met in 1618 at which
Arminius' teachings were denounced. But Arminianism also existed amongst a minority of English
churchmen and it had certain distinctive features in England. In the Netherlands, Arminius was operating
within the context of the Dutch Reformed Church with its Congregational structure. The English
Arminians existed in the context of a church with a traditional Episcopal system of church government
and a highly traditional form of prayer book ceremonial. The English Arminians tended to link their belief
in the doctrine of free grace to other beliefs connected to the structure of the Church of England. They
believed in episcopacy, not simply as a form of church government amongst many others but as a
divinely sanctioned form of church government. They were very keen on the structure of hierarchical
authority in the church. They were also very keen on the sacraments as a means of grace, as a way of
coming to God. For example, they restored the significance of the altar, rather than of the communion
table, and the significance of the communion service as something more than just a commemoration of
Christ's sacrifice. They tended to play down preaching, preaching so dear to the heart of Puritans as the
essential means of communication. Arminians tended to play down preaching and to place more
emphasis, as an element in worship, upon ritual, upon the performance of the sacraments. They spoke of
the beauty of holiness. They thought that participation, reverent participation, in services and rituals of
great beauty, had a spiritual function.
They also had a very high notion of the dignity of the priesthood. They were very clericalist in that sense,
and their most prominent spokesmen were leading clerics; people like Lancelot Andrewes, the Bishop of
Winchester, Bishop Richard Neile, the Bishop of Durham, and above all William Laud. All of these
names are on your handout. William Laud, who started as an Oxford academic, was Master of St. John's
College, Oxford, and later moved on to be Dean of Gloucester Cathedral and then to other higher offices
in the church as I'll describe.
The Arminians were a minority even amongst the bishops of the church under James I. That became clear
at the very end of James' reign in 1624 when Richard Montagu, an Arminian who was the Dean of St.
Paul's Cathedral in London, published his non-Calvinist interpretation of the Church of England's Thirty
Nine Articles of Religion. This publication by Montagu was widely attacked. Indeed, he was reproved
and his interpretation was rejected by the Archbishop of Canterbury himself, who was doctrinally a
Calvinist.
To most members of the church at this point in time, the beliefs and the practices of worship which were
favored by the Arminians looked very suspicious. They looked like backsliding. They looked like
backsliding towards Rome, and indeed although the Arminians were undoubtedly Protestants, they were
very much closer to traditional Catholic teaching in many respects, including the fact that they regarded
the Catholic church itself as being a true church, albeit a corrupted one, rather than seeing it as in fact the
work of Antichrist, which was the conventional extreme Protestant interpretation.
Well, all of this might have just remained a matter for theological debate at the academic level if it hadn't
been for two facts. First of all, some of the Arminians were of a singularly combative and authoritarian
frame of mind. They were equal in their determination to impose their will to any of the most fervent
Puritans, whom on the whole they detested. And secondly in the 1620s the Arminians succeeded in
winning over to their side the young Prince Charles, the future Charles I. He was persuaded by people of
Arminian convictions that their brand of religion was more suited to a monarchy. He liked it.
Well, in 1625 Charles came to the throne on the death of James I and, as head of the church, he rapidly
seized the opportunity to advance Arminians in the church and to exclude Calvinists. And it all happened
remarkably quickly. In 1626, the Duke of Buckingham, Charles' favorite and mentor, was appointed
chancellor of the University of Cambridge where he used his power as chancellor to forbid the teaching of
predestination. In 1627, William Laud and Richard Neile were appointed to the royal privy council, a
very unusual move. It had been rare for even the highest clerics to be admitted to the center of power in
that kind of way. But Charles did it. In 1628, Charles as supreme head of the church insisted that an
Arminian interpretation of the Thirty Nine Articles of Religion, the same interpretation which had been
denounced when put forward only four years earlier, was the only valid interpretation.
In the same year William Laud was promoted to be Bishop of London. That was a crucial office, not only
presiding over the metropolis, of course, but it was also an office which gave the bishop the power to
control the licensing of all books which were printed and published in London. And Laud used that power
of control of the press to further his own views and to silence his critics by refusing licenses for the
publication of their works. In 1630, Laud was appointed Chancellor of the University of Oxford with
predictable results as regards theological teaching at Oxford. In 1632, Richard Neile was appointed
Archbishop of York, governing the northern province of the church. And finally in 1633 on the death of
his predecessor, George Abbot, Laud was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury.
So, in only eight years the Arminians, with Charles' help, had captured the Church of England; they held
all the most important positions. If Puritan activism in the parishes had done a good deal to disturb the
localities and to create tensions over religion down in the provinces, the Arminian victory in the church
utterly shattered the Jacobethan consensus within which Puritan evangelists in the localities had been able
to shelter. William Laud simply detested Puritans. More than that, he detested Calvinists and he defined
all Calvinists as Puritans. He drove them together out of their shared hostility to what to them seemed to
be innovations in the church, alien innovations which were suspiciously popish looking, a program of
change in the church which filled them with dread.
All of this served, from both sides, to politicize religion at the national level in a way that really hadn't
been known since the 1580s. In 1626, Laud had preached a sermon to Parliament, when it met, alleging
the existence of a Puritan and Presbyterian conspiracy to undermine the Church of England from within,
and he denounced all those who didn't share his own views as being Puritan subversives. In 1628, many
members of Parliament, when it met again, reciprocated by condemning Laud and the Arminian
innovations which had been introduced in the meantime, and they began indulging in their own name
calling. One member of the House of Commons, Francis Rous, declared "an Arminian is but the spawn of
a papist." In the House of Lords, the Earl of Bedford, a Puritan aristocrat, described Arminians as, to
quote him, "the little thief put in at the window of the church to unlock the door."
"The little thief put in at the window of the church to unlock the door." To unlock the door to whom? To
popery of course, and its European champions whose successes in the 1620s in the Thirty Years War,
which had been raging in Europe since 1618, just exacerbated the sense of English Protestants of being
embattled against powerful enemies and exposed to a resurgent Counter Reformation Catholicism. The
war which was going on in Germany was in fact immensely complex in its origins, but to outside
observers it looked like an essentially religious struggle, and in the 1620s the armies of Spain fighting
against the Netherlands and the armies of the Austrian emperor, a Catholic of course, were winning and
seemed to be driving back Protestantism in Germany. All this fueled the paranoia of those who observed
it all from outside.
Well, the rise of feeling of that kind should have warned Charles I. It would almost certainly have warned
his shrewd and canny father, King James. But Charles appears to have been indifferent to the polarization
of opinion. He lacked his father's political good sense and he allowed William Laud to press ahead.
Between 1630 and 1632, when he was Bishop of London, Laud was extremely active in East Anglia, part
of which fell under the bishopric of London, in rooting out Puritans, in calling them before him to be
examined on their beliefs, in suspending them, indeed in ejecting them from the church. Many of them
joined the migration to New England, sometimes taking key members of their congregations with them.
The Minister of Terling in Essex for example, a parish — little parish — down in central Essex, left when
browbeat — after being browbeaten — by Laud and deprived of his living and took with him thirteen
members of his community. They founded Roxbury, Massachusetts.
In 1633, once he had become Archbishop of Canterbury, Laud ordered that communion tables should be
removed from their position close to the center of the chancel and they should be placed at the east end of
the church like altars, suitably dressed in appropriate cloths, and railed in to create a holy space at the east
end of the chancel. This was anathema to Puritans, but he required it, and he used his metropolitan
visitation as archbishop to demand conformity to this new ritualism in every church. Church wardens who
refused to obey were hauled before him and sometimes punished. In 1633, he also issued what was
known as the Book of Sports, a declaration in the King's name that traditional sports, festivities and
leisure activities would be permitted upon Sundays, and every minister was ordered to read it out in his
church. This again was anathema to Puritan ministers. Many refused to do it and they were punished and
deprived of their livings.
Altogether, throughout the Arminian controlled church, a new and stricter definition of the nature of
Anglican conformity was being rigorously enforced by Laud, and he had a very sharp way indeed of
dealing with dissidents. Three of the most famous dissidents who smuggled in anti-Arminian books from
the Netherlands to escape Laud's censorship of the press, were arrested in 1637, '38, and severely
punished by Laud acting from the Court of Star Chamber of which he was a leading member. They were
pilloried; they had their ears slit off, for example.
Chapter 4. Results [00:42:18]
And the result of all this? Well, one result was a far more rapid growth of the Puritan colonies in New
England than would otherwise have been the case. Thousands of the most dedicated of the Puritan clergy
and groups of their lay followers finally despaired of England, despaired of the hope of reformation in
this context and left to create a godly commonwealth of their own in the New World.
And within England? Well, it's possible that in some, perhaps many, parishes some aspects of Laud's
Arminian policies were perhaps not unwelcome. One could say that it was a way of putting an end to the
parochial controversy and reasserting order and discipline in the church. Some may well have welcomed
that. It offered a doctrine of salvation which was somewhat easier and more generous than Calvinist
predestination, perhaps closer to the needs and understandings of simple folk. And perhaps the brand of
religious practice focused on the prayer book and the sacraments which was something which might be
more inclusive at the level of the parish, less individually demanding on the population.
Perhaps. All these positive features have been suggested in an interesting book by Judith Maltby on
attitudes towards the Prayer Book in this period. But in many parishes it was also the case that the
policies of William Laud and the Arminians themselves brought conflict. There was widespread alarm at
their ceremonial innovations. There was widespread suspicion of their ultimate intentions. There was
widespread resentment and frustration amongst the godly folk who remained in English parishes that the
reformation had been stopped, that perhaps it was being reversed before it had even been half won.
That in itself was a new cause for discontent, a new cause for controversy, a new cause for what have
been called "street wars of religion." A source of increased bitterness in such controversies, a bitterness
which spilled over into political life, sharpening and intensifying other sources of conflict which were
coming to light between the royal government and members of the political nation. And it's to those other
sources of conflict that I'll turn next time.
Lecture 19 - Crown and Political Nation, 1604-1640
Overview
Professor Wrightson reviews the events leading up to the outbreak of the English civil wars and assesses the various
historiographical interpretations that have been advanced to explain the war. He notes that while it is essential to appreciate the
various long-term causes of the conflict, we must also recognize the role of contingency in the period leading up to the war. He
then describes tensions between the crown and the political nation under James I and Charles I with particular attention to the
role of the Duke of Buckingham, growing dissatisfaction with royal policy and the increasingly acrimonious tone of
parliaments in the 1620s. The fresh start represented by the period of "personal rule" 1629-40 is then considered, with an
emphasis on the anxiety aroused by royal financial expedients (notably Ship Money) and religious policy. He ends with the
violent response to the attempt by Charles I and Laud to impose prayer book worship on the Scottish church, which triggered
the collapse of Charles attempt to rule without calling parliament.
Chapter 1. A High Road to Civil War? [00:00:00]
Professor Keith Wrightson: Right. Well, I want to attend today to some of the political developments of
the early seventeenth century.
In reading about and discussing the Tudor monarchy, we looked at the development of a political system
which was in many ways highly centralized but at the same time increasingly participatory and
consultative. In certain matters of state the royal will was supreme and the prerogative power of the
monarch was paramount and yet, as Mark Kishlansky says, "the constitutional position was that
monarchical power was limited by the evolution of its practice."
The prerogative power of the prince could not override the liberties of the subject enshrined in law and
the monarch was also expected to have an eye to the views and the interests of the broader political
nation, those who governed the localities and who acted, in a sense, as brokers between the royal
administration and the nation at large. Well, to that important extent the effectiveness of government and
the maintenance of political stability depended on the relationships between the crown and the 'political
nation'. As we move in to the seventeenth century the essential point to grasp perhaps is that these
relationships were never fixed. They contained certain gray areas, there were certain tensions, certain
ambiguities, and there was nothing new about that. From time to time they'd surfaced under Elizabeth and
they'd been on the whole handled and resolved. In the final analysis the interests of the crown and the
political nation were expected to run together, and there was also a strong emphasis in the political culture
of the time on trying to achieve harmony and consensus. Open conflict was regarded as a sign of failure
in the political process.
And yet, despite all of that, in the mid-seventeenth century that system collapsed. In 1642, civil war broke
out between the crown and the parliament. In 1649, King Charles I was put on trial by a High Court of
Justice formed from parliament and executed and a republic was declared which lasted for over a decade.
Now these were political events of quite extraordinary radicalism for the seventeenth century. Kings had
been deposed and replaced in the past; kings had been killed in battle; kings had sometimes been