God’s FURY, England’s FIRE

by Braddick, Michael

  Once he became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633 Laud used his powers of visitation – to send questions to the lower clergy and churchwardens demanding reports about conformity and standards of practice – to promote the new ceremonialism. These initiatives were not universally disliked, nor were they only grudgingly enforced in every parish. Anti-Puritanism was an established strand of opinion, just as anti-popery, and these reforms might give comfort to ordinary worshippers. They drew on ceremonial traditions which can be identified much earlier in English Protestantism than the rise of anti-predestinarian divines, and owed something at least to Charles (who was not an Arminian): it was not simply an expression of the theological preferences of William Laud. Nonetheless, it was the use of the metropolitan visitation in the mid-1630s – enquiry into parochial practice in response to the archbishop, not the diocesan bishop – that caused friction in many places.103

  Clearly, to many Protestants this campaign smacked of idolatry and superstition, rather than edification.104 And although this was the more immediate experience of Laudianism, shifts in theological taste were manifest in what preaching was available – both who was licensed and who was not. Thus, to opponents of these policies, the church was simultaneously promoting idolatry and suppressing the preaching of the Word: substituting popery for the edifying exposition of scripture. As in Scotland, the boundary between what edified and what was idolatrous could be marked out polemically in terms of popery. On the wrong side of the line stood the whorish allurements of Babylon, ensnaring the unwary believer into an anti-Christian captivity. Any parish church might become an arena for the battle against popery; far more than was the case with the secular complaints, these policies lent themselves to simple sloganeering.

  Laudianism was made to look worse by the presence of actual Catholics at the royal court. Charles’s wife, Henrietta Maria, was allowed to practise her religion freely by the marriage treaty: her faith was a matter of state. It was also very devout, and public. Inigo Jones designed a beautiful chapel for her at Somerset House, decorated in a style very offensive to many Calvinist sensibilities. The dedication service attracted hundreds of observers and at its consecration in 1635 papal mass was sung amidst festivities lasting three days. A dozen Capuchins – the vanguard of Catholic reform in France – were sent to minister to her. She also protected other Catholics at the court and from 1636 George Con, a papal representative, was permanently resident at Henrietta Maria’s court. Ironically, Laud was resentful of the influence of both Henrietta Maria and Con, but the association of Laudianism with Arminianism, and of both with a court friendly to Catholicism, produced a heady mix of provocations to the godly. At the same time, a shift in foreign policy towards neutrality in the Thirty Years War, which was effectively a shift to a pro-Spanish policy, fuelled the suspicion that the King was being influenced by a Catholic conspiracy: the Spanish monarchy was routinely assumed to be a secular arm of papal ambitions. ‘Court Catholicism became associated with papal meddling, Spanish intrigue, and repressive domestic policies, and the king with all of these’. Rumours of the King’s imminent conversion were taken seriously inn Rome.105

  Even with a full-blown episcopacy it was very difficult simply to impose the Laudian programme, however. Lay influence was entrenched in the institutions of the church. For example, the crown and its bishops did not have secure control over parochial appointments. The right to present men to parochial appointments, ‘livings’, was often attached to a piece of land, and that land was often in the hands of laymen. Although whoever was presented had to be licensed by a bishop, the bishop and the crown did not control the patronage of the church. Nor could the ecclesiastical authorities easily prevent the development of parallel forms of religious practice. Attendance at parish church was enforced, but it was not straightforward to prevent other, supplementary, gatherings. Moreover, a shortage of preaching in the early years of the Reformation had encouraged private benefactors, especially corporations, to establish lectureships – paid preaching posts not attached to a parish. In the mid-1620s the Feoffes for Impropriations had been established to purchase alienated church revenues and use them to fund preaching: a laudable project, but one which threatened Laudian discipline over the teaching of the church. It was closed down, but the provision of preaching outside the parish church was difficult to abolish; not least, of course, because it was often blameless and helpful to the cause of reformation as the ecclesiastical hierarchy understood it.106

  Ecclesiastical authorities were dependent on local people to volunteer information about local practice and for the imposition of sanctions. The church courts, responsible for enforcing observance of the rites of the established church, also depended on participation. Business could be brought before them by individuals – instance business, akin to civil actions in the secular courts – or by churchwardens – office business, akin to the criminal law. Churchwardens, like constables, took account of local opinion in the discharge of their office. In either case, it was difficult for ecclesiastical authorities simply to implement or enforce policies. The inquisitorial power that they did possess lay in the visitation – the power to demand answers to specific questions. But there was no easy way to check the accuracy of the replies and so once again the ecclesiastical authorities were to a significant degree in the hands of their inferiors. Finally, some ecclesiastical policies demanded action from secular officeholders: for example, in fining recusants (those not attending church). Local officeholders often appear to have responded to local preferences in interpreting their obligations, favouring the maintenance of good local relations over the national imperative of religious unity.107 In other words lay influence in the church intersected with local self-government in ways that limited the practical power of the head of the church.

  All this did not mean that local practice was automatically at odds with official policy, but it did mean that the propagation of the faith, and even the nature of the faith that was propagated, was coloured by local lay preferences. Administrative patterns allowed for distinctive local responses to official policy on how to submit with one’s fingers crossed, as it were. Thus, even if at a certain time on a certain day everyone in England could be made to bow to the altar, this uniformity of practice might still have concealed a great variety of belief: what bowing meant, if anything, could not be, as it were, divined. Lay influence within the church made the promotion of reformation dependent on a degree of voluntarism, and that voluntarism produced plurality.

  As with secular matters, consent in the localities was usually informed. Protestant worship, like local administration, served as an education. Parishioners were expected in church each Sunday, on pain of a fine imposed by the government, not the ecclesiastical authorities. Those who came heard a powerful message about Christian submission, but also about Reformation history. Worshippers attending their local parish church were frequently encouraged to place their local experiences in the context of a larger, international and apocalyptic history of the Christian community. In March 1629 the minister at St Helen’s, Ashby-de-la-Zouch, delivered a powerful sermon on the need for Protestant solidarity across the whole of Europe: ‘Say not thou art a member of the Church of England, thou art a member of the Church of France, or of Germany, or of Bohemia: for all the Churches of the world that profess the same faith and religion, are but one body’. He went on to lament the lack of ‘fellow-feeling with their miseries’. Although these sufferings were commonly heard and talked about, and news circulated in the corantos, as much as any other news, it was treated ‘as if a matter that concerns not us at all’. This indifference risked provoking God ‘by our profane stupidity’.108

  Of course, the need for the harangue suggests that many of his audience did not acknowledge these truths, but as war raged in Germany, a war perceived by many as crucial to the future of the church, it seemed to some observers that they were witnessing the battles of the last days. Many Scots had gone to serve in these wars, and some Englishmen too: ac
cording to one estimate 3,000 volunteers each year from 1562 to 1642, not counting those in the service of the English crown. Collections for distressed Protestants, and to support wounded veterans of the wars, were relatively common in English parish churches.109

  Local worship was also about the celebration and formation of local community, of course. It was a ritual moment of common prayer in which hierarchy was reconciled with community. The moral and spiritual boundaries of community were physically represented in the decoration of the church and the disposition of its internal spaces. Pews were increasingly likely to be personally allocated, the best seats going to the local quality, their social inferiors ranged behind them. This was in fact one common problem in railing off the altar, that it might disturb the seating arrangements which were so carefully calibrated to reflect the local social order. Through the ritual year communal life was marked out and reproduced – even the physical boundaries of the community were marked by Rogation-tide processions, when the minister ‘beat the bounds’ with his parishioners. The life cycle was marked out by communal events – baptism, marriage and death. In a ritual much despised by the godly but promoted by the Laudians, women were formally received back intothecongregation after childbirth, a ceremony known as churching. Sinners did public penance and were readmitted to the bosom of the Christian community. Ritual forms might carry a considerable freight of local social and political significance; and that significance was in turn located within an apocalyptic scheme that embraced the whole Christian community.110 Sin and popery in (as it might be) Ashby-de-la-Zouch had a potentially cosmic significance, and Protestant preachers were anxious to make that clear. Episcopal authority in England therefore provided the framework for a participatory, and active, Christian practice; and that practice was, by principle, socially and politically engaged.

  Although lay influence diluted the power of the head of the church, it was not nullified. As we have seen, during the 1630s, as episcopal powers were brought to bear, there was a distinct change in tone in many localities and changes to the internal arrangements of many churches. Some people, among them both the humble and very influential, clearly felt concerned about the future of reformation. During the 1630s, some of the godly in England fled to the New World (along with those motivated by more secular concerns), hoping to establish a new Zion, and many others seem to have gone to Europe.111 But separation from a church in which the Word and the sacraments could be found was no easy step. Even after the church did begin to appear popish, there were powerful reasons for thinking that the cloud might pass, and that in the meantime enough of the Word, the true sacraments and of religious discipline was present to allow a good Christian to endure with a good conscience. The ideals of the common prayer gave a powerful incentive to stay, and to hope for better days.112

  Central to this agonizing problem was the common Reformation view that reform should produce a purified church, not a sect or heresy. Arguments between those who stayed and those who left were to become quite heated once the tide of Laudianism had been turned back in England. For those who felt these difficulties, however, the way forward was not clear and for those who stayed it was not clear how far resistance should go. The Covenanters” publicists recognized the dangers of setting religious obligations against political duties and had thought carefully about the limits of legitimate resistance: for many reformers a world reformed in line with scripture was a hierarchical one, in which everyone knew their place and their calling. Active encouragement of civil and political unrest was clearly ungodly and religious diversity in England did not automatically create rebels.113

  Those who stayed, and protested loudly, might fall foul of Laudian authoritarianism. Most famously Henry Burton, John Bastwick and William Prynne stood trial before Star Chamber in 1637 as a result of publishing offensive tracts. Their sentence was the pillory and to have their ears cropped. Prynne’s ears had already been cropped, but the remaining stumps came off nonetheless, and his cheeks were branded ‘SL’ for ‘seditious libeller’. Burton’s left ear was cut so close to the head, and so clumsily, that he lost a lot of blood. Throughout it all they bore their sufferings with Christian patience, turning their punishment into an example of the futility of physical punishment in the face of godliness. All three had been in trouble before without exciting nationwide sympathy, and their publications were acknowledged even by many of the godly to have gone far beyond the bounds of acceptable public criticism. They were given ample opportunity to speak at their trials, and to seek some relatively mild punishment, but there is a suspicion that they sought martyrdom. Certainly, in the pillory, they were transformed into suffering saints. Both during and after their brutal public mutilations they were given a warm welcome. Prynne was feasted in St Alban’s and Chester, for example, and the Privy Council came to think that it had lost a propaganda battle. The spectacle prompted Sir Thomas Wentworth to remark to Laud that ‘A Prince that loses the force and example of his punishments loses withal the greatest part of his dominion’.114 Of course, hardly any anti-Laudians ran the risk of similar treatment, but through their transformation into Puritan martyrs these three came to represent the more general suffering of the godly under Laud’s episcopal authoritarianism. Their views were not universally liked, their preferred mode of expression even less so, but these were men of status – a doctor, a lawyer and a divine. That status should have protected them from this fury; their sufferings became a symbol of something much bigger.

  William Laud and Sir Thomas Wentworth (soon to become the Earl of Strafford): the two royal advisers held most responsible for the misgovernment of Charles’s kingdoms

  Grumbling, foot-dragging and some sharp intakes of breath at the mutilation of the Puritan martyrs were a fair exchange for the problems of a decade earlier, perhaps. There was an informed, principled and critical public in England, but it was not ungovernable. It is true that there were many grievances in the 1630s, but they did not all irritate the same people to the same extent, and there were few Englishmen who would have argued that royal government was not in itself a good thing. Things had been much easier in the absence of war, and of parliaments. Clearly, however, some secular policies were producing tensions between the crown and some of its natural governors in the localities. Charles won his legal battles but there is little doubt that in some minds the imaginative use of the prerogative to raise money, associated as it was with a reluctance to call parliaments, represented a shift in the balance of the constitution. There is also little doubt that this question of legality hampered administration either because of principled objection or because it offered plausible cover for tight-fistedness. It was probably both, but in either case legal debate gave public airing to constitutional questions, and these were of relevance to lives of the middling sort, and open to discussion at relatively humble levels of English society.

  Opposition to Laudianism made a connection between religious and civil liberties – it was partly driven by a fear of clerical authority. The Reformation in England rested on statute and threats to it arising from episcopal authority were easily connected in the minds of the godly with the threats posed by an extensive view of the royal prerogative. It was as much clerical ambition as popery that made Laudianism seem threatening, or at least the religious ‘innovation’ was identified by opponents with an expanding royal prerogative.115

  It was not only Puritans who were anxious about Laudianism, therefore. Central aspects of Calvinism in England appealed beyond the ranks of those known as Puritans and it is not possible to draw a distinction between hotter Protestants and others simply on the grounds of their attitude towards Calvinism: the doctrine of predestination had held together people who were divided on questions of ceremony and church government. By the same token, it was not only Puritans who might sympathize with the plight of the Covenanters – Calvinists who were similarly offended by Laudian policy – and such sympathy as there was did not necessarily depend on an admiration of Scottish practice either.
Most English people would probably not have willingly signed up to join the church of Alexander Henderson, but many of them might see in that church a potential ally against Laudianism.

  For men schooled in English history and Renaissance values, as local magistrates were, there were abstract principles at stake here. Classical values of republican virtue, manifest in active citizenship, were widely known among the English gentry; so too was a deep attachment to the ‘ancient constitution’, unique liberties which formed the inheritance of Englishmen, and which they owed a profound duty to protect. Of course, their opposition might arise from narrow local interest or even self-interest and personal ambition, but the ethos and practice of Stuart government dignified their opinions as crucial to the health of government. Renaissance republicans were not necessarily more altruistic than twenty-first-century democrats, but the principles they asserted still mattered to the conduct of government. Informed local officeholders, when making judgements about particular policies, were equipped with the knowledge and understanding to arrive at an independent view about the direction of religious and political affairs. Their education might tell them that this independent view, their ‘discretion’, was a personal virtue essential to their public role.