On Laudianism: Piety, Polemic and Politics During the Personal Rule of Charles I 9781009306812, 9781009306829

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ON LAUDIANISM

Laudianism was both a way of being Christian and a political ideology. This definitive account establishes the theological roots and political resonances of Laudianism and shows how it was based on the recuperation of the theological principles and ecclesiastical and pietistic ambitions that underpinned it. Peter Lake shows how the Laudians’ famous obsession with the beauty of holiness contained a plan for the reinvigoration of both the church and the state. It represented a self-conscious reaction against the long-term evils of puritanism and of the immediate political crisis of the 1620s, caused in turn by the evils of (an often puritan) popularity. The result was a coherent account of the theological, liturgical and political essence of the Church of England. On Laudianism explores how this intensely controversial movement, and the strong reactions it provoked, helped cause the English Civil War, but over the long term provided one of the visions of the national church, one that has been in contention to define ‘Anglicanism’ ever since. Peter L a k e  is University Distinguished Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of twelve books, including Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge University Press, 1982) and Bad Queen Bess?: Libels, Secret Histories, and the Politics of Publicity in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth I (Oxford, 2015). He is Fellow of both the Royal Historical Society and the British Academy and has published widely on the religious and political history of post-reformation England.

C a mbr idge Studies in E a r ly Moder n Br itish History series editors Michael Braddick Professor of History, University of Sheffield Krista Kesselring Professor of History, Dalhousie University Alexandra Walsham Professor of Modern History, University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Emmanuel College This is a series of monographs and studies covering many aspects of the history of the British Isles between the late fifteenth century and the early eighteenth century. It includes the work of established scholars and pioneering work by a new generation of scholars. It includes both reviews and revisions of major topics and books which open up new historical terrain or which reveal startling new perspectives on familiar subjects. All the volumes set detailed research within broader perspectives, and the books are intended for the use of students as well as of their teachers. For a list of titles in the series go to www.cambridge.org/earlymodernbritishhistory

Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8E A, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009306812 DOI: 10.1017/9781009306829 © Peter Lake 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2023 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ Books Limited, Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lake, Peter, author. Title: On Laudianism : piety, polemic and politics during the personal rule of Charles I / Peter Lake. Description: Cambridge ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2023. | Series: Cambridge studies in early modern British history | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023006101 (print) | LCCN 2023006102 (ebook) | ISBN 9781009306812 (hardback) | ISBN 9781009306829 (ebook) Subjects : LCSH : Church of England – History – 17th century. | Laud, William, 1573–1645. | Charles I, King of England, 1600–1649. | Great Britain – History – Personal Rule, 1629–1640. | Great Britain – History – Civil War, 1642–1649 – Causes. | Great Britain – Church history – 17th century. | Political theology – Great Britain – History – 17th century. | Church and state – Church of England. | Kings and rulers – Religious aspects – Church of England. Classification: LCC BX5075.A5 L35 2023 (print) | LCC BX5075.A5 (ebook) | DDC 283/.42–dc23/eng/20230509 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023006101 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023006102 ISBN 978-1-009-30681-2 Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

Acknowledgements page ix List of Abbreviations xv Introduction

1

P a r t I  L a u d i a n i s m : W h e r e I t C a m e F r o m  1 A Trinitarian and Incarnational Theology

47

2 Andrewes’ Political Theology

59

3

66

Andrewes’ Anti-Puritanism

4 Puritan Politics

80

5 The Tree of Repentance and Its Fruits

85

6 Absent Presences: The Role of Predestination in Andrewes’ Divinity

93

7 The Visible Church and Its Ordinances 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4

Preaching The Sacrament Prayer Outward Reverence in the Worship of God

101 101 103 108 113

P a r t I I  L a u d i a n i s m : W h a t I t W a s  Holy Pl aces 8 The House of God

121

9 The House of God and the Beauty of Holiness

133

v

vi

Contents

10 The Beauty of Holiness and Ceremonial Conformity

10.1 ‘Locus Terribilis’, the Church as a Site of ‘Holy Fear’ and Necessary Reverence 10.2 Necessary and Edifying Ceremonies, or the Integral Link between Body and Soul 10.3 Significant Ceremonies

11 Church Ceremonies, the Authority of the Church and the Authority of Scripture 11.1 Scripture 11.2 From Church Triumphant to Church Militant, and Back Again 11.3 Tradition 11.4 The Laudians and the Argument from Things Indifferent 11.5 Squaring the Circle, the Minimum and Maximum Cases for Conformity

139 139 142 146

151 151 154 156 157 159

Holy Or dina nces 12 Prayer

165

13 Preaching

173

14 The Sacrament and the Altar

179

15 The Sacrament and the Social Body of the Church

189

16 The Altar and Visible Succession

196

15.1 Clerical and Lay 15.2 Godly and Profane

16.1 Tabernacle, Temple and Church 16.2 ‘The House of Prayer’ and ‘The Gate of Heaven’: Church Triumphant and Church Militant Meet at East Knoyle 16.3 Altar, Priest and Sacrifice in the Early Church 16.4 Episcopal Succession 16.5 Priest, Altar and Sacrifice in the Church of England

189 193

196

199 203 207 211

Holy Times 17 The Feasts and Festivals of the Church, or Putting the Sabbath in Its Place

221

18 Sunday Sports and the Re/constitution of the Christian Community and the Social Order

235

19 The Sabbath and the Laudian Attitude to Authority

246

Contents

vii

Pa r t I I I   L au di a n i s m : W h at I t Wa s n ’t  20 Order, Puritanism and the State of the English Church

259

21 Puritan ‘Privacy’, or the Forms of Puritan Voluntary Religion Anatomised

266

22 A Religion of the Word and the Question of Authority

288

2 1.1 Preaching and Extempore Prayer 21.2 Sermon-Gadding and the Puritan Lecture 21.3 Conventicle-Keeping

22.1 Appealing to the People and Undermining Social and Gender Orders 22.2 Clergy or People? 22.3 The Authority of Scripture and the Testimony of the Spirit: Who Decides?

266 277 281

290 295 298

23 Puritanism, Popularity and Politics

308

24 Of Moderate Puritans and Popular Prelates

317

25 The Puritan Threat, the Church of England and the Personal Rule as a Period of Reformation

337

23.1 Puritan Popularity as a Political Threat 2 4.1 On the Impossibility of Puritan Moderation 24.2 On the Non-existence of Moderate Puritans 24.3 Popular Prelates: A Category Mistake

309

317 324 331

2 5.1 ‘The Wonder of the Christian World’ 338 25.2 A Right Royal Reformation 340 25.3 King and/or Bishop? 341 25.4 Reformation as a Return Ad Fontes345

Pa r t I V   L au di a n i s m a n d Pr e de s t i n at ion  26 Laudianism, Puritanism and Arminianism Revisited

353

27 The Language of Mystery

360

28 Fatal Necessity

366

29 Predestination, the Positive Case: Of Justice and Mercy, Prescience and Predestination

376

30 Faith, Hope and Charity

401

31 Effort without Merit, Reward without Desert: Repentance, Amendment and the Works of Penitence

410

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Contents

P a r t V  L a u d i a n i s m a s C o a l i t i o n : t h e C ons t i t u e n t Pa r t s  32 Dis-aggregating, or the Pleasures and Benefits of Splitting

433

33 Of Converts, Collaborators and Apostates: Puritans

435

34 Of Converts, Collaborators and Apostates: Calvinist Conformists, or Humphrey Sydenham and Robert Sanderson Compared

444

35 Of Apparatchiks, Zealots and Coming Men

476

34.1 Sydenham’s Calvinism 34.2 Sanderson’s Calvinism 34.3 Anti-Puritanism 34.4 Laudianism? The Case of Robert Sanderson 34.5 Laudianism? The Case of Humphrey Sydenham 34.6 What Was in It for Laud? Or the Ambiguities of ‘Moderation’ 3 5.1 Skinner, Laurence, Heylyn Show How It’s Done 35.2 That’s (Not) the Way to Do It! Peter Studley, Peter Hausted and the Local Politics of the Rise of Laudianism 35.3 Coming Out and Moving Up

444 453 458 464 464 470 476

480 486

36 The Laudian Avant Garde: Young Men in a Hurry: Cambridge University in the 1630s

492

37 The Laudian Avant Garde: Old Men in a Hurry

518

38 Tacking and Trimming: Negotiating the End of the ‘Laudian Moment’

541

39 Conclusion to Part V

563



568

37.1 Robert Shelford 37.2 James Buck 37.3 Edward Kellett

38.1 Robert Sanderson 38.2 Peter Heylyn

Conclusion

518 524 530

541 549

Index601

Acknowledgements

This book has been an inordinately long time in the making, and, in the course of working on it, I have accumulated many debts. The most serious are owed to Nicholas Tyacke, Kenneth Fincham and Anthony Milton, listed here in the order in which I met them. I first encountered Nicholas at the Hurstfield seminar in the mid-1970s. At that point he quite understandably viewed me with some suspicion, as a mouthy young interloper. Subsequently, we became colleagues in running the seminar together, and I think he has learned to at least tolerate me and I have come to value him both as a scholar and a friend. This book owes its very existence to the research platform and conceptual framework provided by his work. When I started out as a graduate student, I viewed the field through the lens provided by his seminal article of 1973, which I first read the night before I took finals that same year. Taking it as a sort of starting point, my initial response was something along the lines of ‘yes, of course, but …’. In consequence, I seriously underestimated the sheer novelty and impact of Nicholas’ work. It was the controversies of the 1980s that made me realise that whether you agree with everything he has ever said, or not – and of course Nicholas’s research has moved on in myriad directions since the 1970s – anyone who fails to take his work – viewed both as a conceptual framework and a body of research – into proper account is doomed completely to misunderstand the period. This is an opinion that subsequent developments in the field have not led me to revise. Throughout almost the entire course of my career, I have relied implicitly upon Nicholas’ judgement, erudition and sense of humour. Nicholas read the typescript at its greatest extent and his comments, detailed and acute as always, were a great help in reshaping it. I met Ken Fincham in the early 1980s when he came to London to work with Nicholas. Ken is a master of the records and workings of the national church in the post-reformation. He is also a political historian of ix

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great insight. His scholarship and erudition are extraordinary, and he has always been extremely generous with his time and learning. Ken is also the (unknowing) author of a great (but as yet unwritten) book on Laud. I learn something new in almost every conversation we have on things early Stuart and I am enormously grateful for the time he has spent over the years saving me from error and pushing me in the right direction. I also met Anthony Milton in the 1980s when he came to London to attend the Russell seminar. We are both Clare men, but despite that we hit it off almost immediately. Anthony is enormously learned and does not suffer fools, and so I am always both surprised and gratified that he puts up with me – it is with some trepidation that I now trespass so egregiously on his turf. At a very busy time, Anthony read through an early version of the text, and his comments have done a great deal to improve and reshape it, as has, at the last gasp as it were, his seminal England’s second reformation (Cambridge, 2022). Nicholas, Ken and Antony are some of my oldest and best friends in the academy and their work has played a role in the writing of this book far greater than any number of footnotes could acknowledge, and so it is a pleasure to be able to record my very considerable personal and scholarly debts to them, and also to the Institute of Historical Research, where the vast majority of our conversations on this and other topics have taken place. History is a collaborative enterprise and the Institute is a setting that enables a great deal of improvised collaboration; at formal seminars certainly, but far more in the tea room and the penumbra of watering holes scattered around Senate House. And here I should mention in particular the pick-up seminar that convenes, or at least used to convene, at the Skinners’ Arms. I have also, of course, accumulated other debts. I first met Peter MacCullough when he was a graduate student in the English department at Princeton. Ever since he has always been more than helpful in setting me straight on any number of questions. As you will see, at certain crucial points in what follows, I rely implicitly on his scholarship and judgement. I have also known Lori-Ann Ferrell for far longer than either of us would care to admit, and again I owe her a considerable debt for advice and friendship over the past thirty or so years. Her early work on Andrewes has had a foundational influence on my own thinking, and her recent research on the Parker Society has provided an incentive to revisit this material and a new perspective from which to view it. Michael Winship also read the manuscript and made his usual invaluably rigorous comments. The magisterial scholarship of Peter Nockles has also been a major influence, and he kindly read a version of the conclusion/epilogue with a generosity and attention it did not deserve.

Acknowledgements

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It was Bill Bulman’s work on Lancelot Addison that first re-awakened my interest in the Laudians. At a workshop at Vanderbilt, Bill talked about Lancelot Addison, Brent Sirrotta about the non-jurors and Robert Ingram about the early eighteenth century, and I got flash backs to the late 1980s and early 1990s, and my then obsession with Laudianism. Again, Bill has been very tolerant in listening to me talk about my own stuff, when I probably should have been talking about his. At a late stage he read the whole manuscript and made any number of crucial objections and observations. I owe a great deal to his interest and advice. I also owe very considerable thanks to a much earlier generation of Princeton graduate students. When I arrived at Princeton Sandeep Kauchik and David Como were my first students and both had to put up with a great deal of talk about Laudianism and various un/deservedly obscure divines of the early Stuart period. Their friendship and humour, not to mention their drinking habits, made my arrival in New Jersey a good deal less unpleasant than it otherwise might have been. The same is true in spades of Bill Jordan. It is one of my great regrets that Sandeep’s thesis on John Williams as political operator never saw the light of day. The more I learn about Williams, the better Sandeep’s work seems. Admittedly, he went on to better and more interesting things, appropriately enough, as a political consultant, but for the rest of us sad obsessives, still banging on about the rights and wrongs of early Stuart ecclesiastical politics, that was a real loss. Dave’s work on antinomianism is in many ways a study on the impact of Laudian Arminianism on godly circles and his work in that vein, as well as his conversation and advice, have played a crucial role in shaping this book and much else besides. Everyone should have such students. As usual I have talked at length about this book to Ann Hughes, Richard Cust, Tom Cogswell and Michael Questier. Michael and Tom read the whole thing in early draft, and Tom’s comments, purveyed during a walk down the tow-path of the Regents Park Canal and in the garden of The Constitution, encouraged me to set off in some new directions; directions which I am now in the process of pursuing in collaboration with Noah Millstone. As always, Noah’s comments and insight have done much to improve this book. I should also acknowledge years of scholarly exchange and friendship with Andrew Foster, upon whose bailiwick I am trespassing here, probably more than I should be. The careful reader of this book will detect the very considerable influence of Patrick Collinson. My initial interest in the topic, and the overall context in which I came to set it, were framed by – indeed, in some sense, conceived in reaction to – aspects of Collinson’s work. But as ever with

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Collinson, it was (and is) very unwise, if not impossible, just to disagree with him. Indeed, at its most general level, the argument of this book might be thought to represent an appeal from Collinson’s work of the 1980s and early 1990s, summed up in his The religion of protestants (Oxford, 1982) and its pendant articles, to that of the 1960s and 1970s, most notably his great monograph The Elizabethan puritan movement (London, 1967) and the essays collected in Godly people (London, 1983). Either way, Patrick Collinson was an indubitably great historian, and it is a pleasure to be able, once again, to acknowledge his extraordinary oeuvre as a continuing source of provocation and insight. As those last remarks imply, disagreement and irritation can be at least as great a stimulus to thought and writing as agreement, and in that sense I also owe a considerable debt to Peter White’s Predestination, policy and polemic (Cambridge, 1992) and Alec Ryrie’s Being protestant (Oxford, 2013). Both are books that I take to be wrong on a number of levels, but their wrongness on Laudianism, and their account of the relations between polemic, theology and devotion, provided me with strong inducements to return to this material and finally get this book done. Similar provocation was provided by the work of Kevin Sharpe and Mark Kishlansky. As I try to explain in the Introduction, the relation of this book to Kevin’s analysis of the Personal Rule is anything but straightforwardly adversarial. Indeed, I like to think that my version of Laudianism fits Kevin’s interpretation of the Personal Rule rather better than his. Of late, the more misguided bits of Kevin’s work have received a shot in the arm from a series of articles by Mark Kishlansky. While this book is written in sharp disagreement with Kevin and Mark, I offer it now in respect and affection for two remarkable historians who liked nothing better than an argument and of whom I was quite inordinately fond. Although, I must admit that their mortality-induced incapacity to answer back probably made this an easier book to finish than it otherwise might have been. As for institutional rather than personal support, I received fellowships at the Folger Shakespeare Library in 1986–7 and at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1989–90, which enabled me to do a great deal of the early research and a certain amount of the initial writing. By a weird quirk of fate, the final touches were put to the manuscript during the autumn of 2021, at the start of a second stint at the Institute, this one funded by the Mellon foundation. I am grateful to both institutions, and to my then colleagues at Royal Holloway for letting me go on unpaid leave as often as they did. Sir John Elliot was a wonderfully tactful and encouraging presence at the institute, who helped to make my stay there in many ways the

Acknowledgements

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turning point in my scholarly career – ironically by allowing me the time and mental space to move beyond the concerns that have now, at long last, produced this book. I should also like to thank the participants in a workin-progress seminar run by Francesca Trivellato whose comments greatly improved both the introduction and focus of the book. The time to just read, research and think about what one is reading, afforded by Institutions such as the Folger, the Institute, the National Humanities Centre and the Huntington has played an incredibly important part in my own career, and stands in marked contrast to the proposalled, goal-orientated, impact-befuddled, REF-dominated ways in which research in the humanities is all too often ‘supported’ in the UK. At places such as the Folger, the Huntington, and the Institute at least, the days of the curiosity-driven individual researcher are decidedly not dead. A great deal goes back to my first visit to the Folger, for it was there, intending to write an altogether different book, that I did the initial research that has led (finally) to this one. In particular, I would like to acknowledge a personal debt to the late Betsy Walsh, of whose death I learnt just as I was finishing the typescript. I arrived at the Folger a nervous traveller and a neophyte in all things American. The simultaneous outbreak of the Iran–Contra affair, and Washington’s brief reign as the ‘murder capital of America’, did not help me feel at home, although both prompted hours of fascinated study of different sections of the Washington Post. Betsy’s sympathy and kindness made my time at the Folger a great deal more congenial than it otherwise might have been. Inadvertently, by lending me a very small, black and white TV, she was responsible for what threatened, for some years, to become a rather unhealthy obsession with basketball. In many ways the presiding spirit of the reading room at the Folger, Betsy will be much missed. It was during that trip to Washington that I met my wife, Sandy Solomon, who has now lived (intermittently) with this book for the best part of thirty years. Perhaps the worst of many low points was reached on a very slow train from Cambridge to Kings Lynn. This was in the days before electrification had penetrated the fens, when the noise and reverberations generated by the train created an impression of greet speed, belied by the snail’s pace at which the countryside outside appeared to be passing by. I attempted to improve the shining hour by reading San a paper on Lancelot Andrewes, which, from the looks of alarm etched upon their faces, clearly convinced everyone else who tried to enter the carriage that I was some sort of religious lunatic, and she some sort of hostage. I would like to assure her that it will not happen again, and offer her this book,

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which she is not, I hasten to add, under any obligation to read (again), as some sort of apology. I have been able to complete this book under the absurdly generous terms and conditions of employment afforded to me at Vanderbilt and in the congenial climate created by my colleagues in the history department there, amongst whom I would like particularly to thank, in no particular order, Joel Harrington, Helmut Smith, Paul Lim, Laurie Benton and Jim Epstein. Finally, I should like to thank the present and former editors of this series and Liz Friend-Smith, firstly, for their patience – this book partially fulfils a contract signed in the late 1980s – and secondly for their astute, sympathetic and almost entirely helpful suggestions and criticisms.

Abbreviations

J. A., Historical narration (1631)  J. A. of Ailward, An historical narration … concerning God’s election and the merit of Christ his death (1631) Andrewes, Sermons  The works of Lancelot Andrewes (Library of AngloCatholic Theology, 11 vols, Oxford, 1841–1854), vols 1–5 Aston, Broken idols  Margaret Aston, Broken idols of the English reformation (Cambridge, 2016) Balcanquall, The honour (1633)  Walter Balcanquall, The honour of Christian Churches, delivered in a sermon (1633) Balcanquall, Large declaration (1639)  Walter Balcanquall (for Charles I), The Large declaration (1639) Boughen, A sermon (1635)  Edward Boughen, A sermon preached at Paul’s Cross (1635) Boughen, Two sermons (1635)  Edward Boughen, Two sermons; the first preached at Canterbury, at the visitation of the Lord Archbishop’s peculiars in St Margaret’s church, April 14, 1635. The second at Paul’s Cross, 18 April, 1630 (1635) Boughen, Decency and order (1638)  Edward Boughen, A sermon concerning decency and order in the church, preached at Woodchurch in the diocese of Canterbury, April 30, 1637 (1638) Browning, Public prayer (1636)  John Browning, Concerning public prayer, and the fasts of church (1636) Buck, Treatise (1637)  James Buck, A treatise of the beatitudes (1637) Burton, For God  (1636) Henry Burton, For God and the king, the sum of two sermons (1636) Chown, Collectationes (1635)  Thomas Chown, Collectiones theologicarum quarundam conclusiones, ex diversis authorum sententiis, perquam brevis sparsim excerptae (1635) xv

xvi

List of Abbreviations

Dow, Discourse (1636)  Christopher Dow, A discourse of the Sabbath and the Lord’s day (1636) Dow, Innovations (1637)  Christopher Dow, Innovations unjustly charged upon the present state and church (1637) Duncan, Of worshipping (1660)  Eleazor Duncan, Of worshipping God toward the altar (1660) Elborow, Evodias and Syntyche (1637)  John Elborow, Evodias and Syntyche, or the female zealots, … set forth in a sermon at Brentwood in Essex, Feb. 1636, at the metropolitical visitation of … William Laud, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury (1637) Featley, Obedience (1636)  John Featley, Obedience and submission, a sermon preached at St Saviour’s Church in Southwark, at a visitation on Tuesday, 8 December … 1635 (1636) Fincham and Tyacke, Altars restored  Kenneth Fincham and Nicholas Tyacke, Altars restored: the changing face of English religious worship, 1547–1700 (Oxford, 2007) Fisher, Duty and dignity (1636)  Jasper Fisher, The priest’s duty and dignity, preached at the triennial visitation at Ampthill, 1635 (1636) Hampton, Grace and conformity  Stephen Hampton, Grace and Conformity: the reformed conformist tradition and the early Stuart Church of England (Oxford, 2021) Hardwick, Conformity with piety (1638)  William Hardwick, Conformity with piety requisite in God’s service. A visitation sermon, preached at Kingston upon Thames, September 8, 1638 (1638) Hausted, Ten sermons (1636)  Peter Hausted, Ten sermons (1636) Heylyn, Coal (1636)  Peter Heylyn, A coal from the altar (1636) Heylyn, History (1636)  Peter Heylyn, The history of the Sabbath (1636) Heylyn, Antidotum (1637)  Peter Heylyn, Antidotum Lincolniense (1637) Heylyn, Brief (1637)  Peter Heylyn, A brief and moderate answer to Henry Burton (1637) Heylyn, Tares (1659)  Peter Heylyn, The parable of the tares (1659) Hoard, God’s love (1633)  Samuel Hoard, God’s love to mankind, manifested by disproving his absolute decree for their condemnation (1633) Hoard, Church’s authority (1637)  Samuel Hoard, The church’s authority asserted, in a sermon preached at Chelmsford at the metropolitical visitation of … William Laud, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury … March 1 1636 (1637)

List of Abbreviations

xvii

Hoyle, Reformation  David Hoyle, Reformation and religious identity in Cambridge, 1590–1644 (Woodbridge, 2007) Ironside, Seven questions (1637)  Gilbert Ironside, Seven questions of the Sabbath briefly disputed (1637) Jackson, Diverse (1637)  Thomas Jackson, Diverse sermons with a short treatise befitting these present times (1637) Jackson, Sapientia clamitans (1638)  Thomas Jackson, Sapientia clamitans, wisdom crying out to sinners to return from their evil ways (1638) Kellett, Argier (1628)  Edward Kellett, A return from Argier (1628) Kellett, Miscellanies (1633)  Edward Kellett, Miscellanies of divinity (Cambridge, 1633) Kellett, Tricoenium Christi (1641)  Edward Kellett, Tricoenium Christi (1641) Lane, The Laudians  Calvin Lane, The Laudians and the Elizabethan Church (London, 2013) Laud, A speech  William Laud, ‘A speech delivered in the star chamber … at the censure of John Bastwick, Henry Burton and William Prynne’ in The works of William Laud (Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology, 8 vols., Oxford, 1847–1860), vol. VI. Laurence, Two sermons (1635)  Thomas Laurence, Two sermons; the first preached at St Mary’s in Oxford, July 13, 1634, being Act Sunday. The second in the cathedral church of Sarum, at the visitation … William, Archbishop of Canterbury, May 23, 1634 (Oxford, 1635) Laurence, A sermon (1637)  Thomas Laurence, A sermon preached before the king’s majesty at Whitehall, 7 February, 1636 (1637) Marsh, ‘“Common prayer” … the view from the pew’  Christopher Marsh, ‘“Common prayer” in England, 1560–1640: the view from the pew’, Past & Present, 171 (2001), pp. 66–94 Marsh, ‘Sacred space … the view from the pew’  Christopher Marsh, ‘Sacred space in England, 1560–1640: the view from the pew’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 53 (2002), pp. 286–311 Marsh, ‘Order and place … the view from the pew’  Christopher Marsh, ‘Order and place in England, 1580–1640: the view from the pew’, Journal of British Studies, 44 (2005), pp. 3–26. Mede, The name altar (1637)  Joseph Mede, The name altar anciently given to the holy table (1637) Mede, The reverence (1638)  Joseph Mede, The reverence of God’s house (1638)

xviii

List of Abbreviations

Mede, Churches (1638)  Joseph Mede, Churches, that is, appropriate places for Christian worship (1638) Milton, Catholic and reformed  Anthony Milton, Catholic and reformed: the reformed and Catholic churches in English protestant thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge, 1995) Milton, ‘The creation of Laudianism’  Anthony Milton, ‘The creation of Laudianism; a new approach’, in Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust and Peter Lake, eds., Politics, religion and popularity in early Stuart Britain (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 162–84 Milton, Second reformation  Anthony Milton, England’s second reformation: the battle for the Church of England, 1625–1662 (Cambridge, 2021) Milton, Heylyn  Anthony Milton, Laudianism and royalist polemic in seventeenth century England: the career and writings of Peter Heylyn (Manchester, 2007) ODNB  Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 60 vols, (Oxford, 2004) Parry, Glory, laud and honour  Graham Parry, The arts of the Anglican Counter-reformation: glory, laud and honour (Woodbridge, 2006) Pocklington, Sunday no Sabbath (1636)  John Pocklington, Sunday no Sabbath. A sermon (1636) Pocklington, Altare (1637)  John Pocklington, Altare Christianum (1637) Prideaux, The doctrine (1634)  John Prideaux, The doctrine of the Sabbath delivered in the act at Oxon, 1622 (1634) Quelch, Church customs (1636)  William Quelch, Church customs vindicated, in two sermons preached at Kingston upon Thames, the other at the first metropolitical visitation anno. of … William, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury … the one at the visitation at Brentwood in Essex (1636) Read, A sermon (1636)  Alexander Read, A sermon preached April 8 1635 at primary visitation of … Richard, Lord Bishop of Winton, 1628 (1636) Reeve, Christian divinity (1631)  Edmund Reeve, The Christian divinity contained in the divine service of the church of England (1631) Reeve, Catechism expounded (1635)  Edmund Reeve, The communion book catechism expounded (1635) Robartes, God’s holy house (1639)  Foulke Robartes, God’s holy house and service (1639) Rogers, A visitation sermon (1633)  Francis Rogers, A visitation sermon preached April 5 1630 at the Lord Archbishop’s triennial visitation (1633)

List of Abbreviations

xix

Rogers, Strange vineyard (1623)  Nehemiah Rogers, A strange vineyard in Paleastina (London, 1623) Rogers, A sermon (1632)  Nehemiah Rogers, A sermon preached at the second triennial visitation … of William Laud, Lord Bishop of London (1632) Sanderson, Two sermons (1635)  Robert Sanderson, Two sermons preached at two several visitations (1635) Sanderson, Twelve sermons (1637)  Robert Sanderson, Twelve sermons, whereunto are added two sermons more (1637) Sanderson, XXXIV sermons (1671)  Robert Sanderson, XXXIV sermons (1671) Shelford, Five discourses (1635)  Robert Shelford, Five pious and learned discourses (1635) Sherley, The excellence (1662)  William Sherley, The excellence of the order of the church of England under episcopal government, set forth in a sermon at the visitation at Blandford, 1640 (Oxford, 1662) Skinner, A sermon (1634)  Robert Skinner, A sermon preached before the king (1634) Strode, A sermon (1660)  William Strode, A sermon preached at a visitation, held at Lynn in Norfolk, June 24 1633 (1660) Studley, Looking glass (1633)  Peter Studley, Looking glass of schism (1633) Swan, A sermon (1639)  John Swan, A sermon pointing out the chief causes, and cures, of such unruly stirs as are not seldom found in the church of God. Preached at Sawston … Cambridge … in the Archdeacon of Ely, his visitation, held the 19 September, 1638 (1639) Swan, Profanomastix (1639)  John Swan, Profanomastix, or a brief direction concerning the respects we owe to God at his house (1639) Sydenham, Jacob and Esau (1626)  Humphrey Sydenham, Jacob and Esau opened and discussed by way of a sermon at Paul’s Cross (1626) Sydenham, Moses and Aaron (1626)  Humphrey Sydenham, Moses and Aaron, or the affinity of civil and ecclesiastical power (1626) Sydenham, Arian (1627)  Humphrey Sydenham, The arraignment of the Arian (1627) Sydenham, Athenian (1627)  Humphrey Sydenham, The Athenian babbler (1627) Sydenham, The waters (1630)  Humphrey Sydenham, The waters of Marah and Meribah (1630)

xx

List of Abbreviations

Sydenham, Royal passing bell (1630)  Humphrey Sydenham, The royal passing bell, or David’s summons to the grave (1630) Sydenham, Sermons (1637)  Humphrey Sydenham, Sermons on solemn occasions (1637) De templis (1638)  R. T., De templis. A treatise of temples (1638) Tedder, A sermon (1637)  Richard Tedder, A sermon preached at Wymondham in Norfolk at the primary visitation of … Matthew, the bishop of Norwich, on the 3rd June … 1636 (1637) Towers, Control  S. Mutchow Towers, Control of religious printing in early Stuart England (Woodbridge, 2003) Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists  Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The rise of English Arminianism, c. 1590–1640 (Oxford, 1987) Ussher correspondence  The correspondence of James Ussher, ed. Elizabeth Anne Boran, 3 vols. (Dublin, 2015) Wall, A sermon (1635)  George Wall, A sermon at the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury his metropolitical visitation held at All Saints in Worcester … June 3 1635 (1635) Weever, Ancient funeral monuments (1633)  John Weever, Ancient funeral monuments (1633) White, Treatise (1635)  White, A treatise of the Sabbath day (1635) White, An examination (1637) White, An examination and confutation of a lawless pamphlet (1637) Whyte, Unlocking  William Whyte, Unlocking the church (Oxford, 2018) Widdowes, Schismatical (1630)  Giles Widdowes, The schismatical puritan (1630) Widdowes, Lawless (1631)  Giles Widdowes, The lawless, kneeless, schismatical puritan (1631) Wigmore, The meteors (1633)  Michael Wigmore, The meteors, a sermon preached at a visitation (1633) Williams, Holy table (1637)  John Williams, Holy table name and thing (1637) Wren, A sermon (1627/8)  Matthew Wren, A sermon preached before the king’s majesty (1627/8) Yates, Convert (1620)  John Yates, The true convert (1620) Yates, A treatise (1637)  John Yates, A treatise of the honour of God’s house (1637)

Introduction

This book is an attempt to reconstruct the ideology underpinning the ecclesiastical policies of the Personal Rule. Its most basic contention is that such an ideology existed, and therefore that those policies did not merely represent a tidying-up exercise, the transaction of business as usual, through the pursuit of traditional ideals of uniformity, order and obedience, by a regime peculiar only in the intensity of its concern for, and the pertinacity of its pursuit of, such ideals. Rather we are dealing with something far more all-embracing and ambitious; a full-scale remaking, a true reformation, of the English church, based on a coherent vision of what that church ought to look like and of what the salvific mission of the visible church was, a vision at odds with a good deal that had passed for normal, or even orthodox, amongst English protestants in the decades since the Edwardian reformation and Elizabethan settlement. The book argues that the scale and ambition of that project cannot be fully appreciated merely by looking at what those in control of the Caroline church, that is, the Laudians, did – impressively comprehensive though their actions in many domains were. Here I am referring to the altar policy, to their new model conformity and its attendant assault on various sorts of puritan ‘disorder’, and to their displacement of absolute predestinarianism, sabbatarianism and a version of anti-popery, centred on the identification of the pope as Antichrist, from the hegemonic positions they had, more or less consistently, enjoyed over the preceding decades. No one even cursorily acquainted with the seminal work on these topics of Nicholas Tyacke, Ken Fincham, Anthony Milton, Ken Parker, John Fielding or indeed Tom Webster could doubt both the ambition and the real reach and effect of Laudian policies in these and other areas.1 However, I would 1

Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists; Fincham and Tyacke, Altars restored; Milton, Catholic and reformed and Heylyn; Kenneth Parker, The English Sabbath (Cambridge, 1988); John Fielding, ‘Conformists, puritans and the church courts: the diocese of Peterborough, 1603–42’, University of Birmingham, PhD

1

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argue that the significance and impact of those actions can only be fully appreciated when what the Laudian and Caroline authorities did is set within the ideological and theological context of what they, their acolytes and supporters, said about what they were doing; about why they were doing it and about the nature of the forces opposing them. Not that I am positing anything like a neat division between actions and objects, on the one hand, and ideology, theory or theology, on the other. To take the issue of the altar policy as an example, one could depict the resulting controversy as composed of two distinct parts; on the one hand, an abstruse theological debate about the senses in which the sacrament could or could not be conceived as a sacrifice, and therefore the communion table be conceived as an altar; on the other, a series of local disputes almost literally about moving the furniture. The first of concern only to those with an interest in such arcane matters, the second to churchwardens, and perhaps archdeacons, charged with maintaining the physical plant of the church in some sort of good order and for paying for and effecting whatever changes that demanded. In historiographical terms the first aspect would command the attention of historians of Christian doctrine and the second that of local historians. But, in fact, that was not the case. The situation that the Laudians were seeking to change involved the communion table being used as just that, a table, except when the sacrament was actually being administered; and even then, it remained merely a physical aid to a series of essentially spiritual acts and transactions – a ‘utensil’ in Bishop Williams’ wonderfully acute turn of phrase. This was a state of affairs that Laudian theory or theology rendered utterly unacceptable and, as we shall see later, the Laudians regarded the customary uses to which the communion table was put out of service time as a form not merely of profanation, but even of sacrilege. Now, the people who used the table in such ways – as a place where tax records could be drawn up, money collected and disbursed, school taught, or something that glaziers might use as a bench, when repairing the church windows – almost certainly did not think that they were profaning the church, still less committing sacrilege. Rather, in the communion table, and the various liturgical and social uses and practices associated thesis (1989); John Fielding, ‘Arminianism in the localities: Peterborough diocese, 1603–1642’, in K. Fincham, ed., The early Stuart church (Basingstoke, 1993), pp. 93–113; John Fielding, ed., The diary of Robert Woodford, 1637–1641 (Camden Society 5th series, Cambridge, 2012); Tom Webster, Godly clergy in early Stuart England: the Caroline puritan movement, c. 1620–1643 (Cambridge, 1997), parts III and IV; Peter Lake and Isaac Stephens, Scandal and religious identity in early Stuart England: a Northamptonshire maid’s tragedy (Woodbridge, 2016).

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with it, the division between the secular and the spiritual, the sacred and the profane, and various distinct approaches to the nature and practice of outward worship, were being worked out and experienced on a quotidian basis. What we are dealing with here was therefore a conflict between different versions of divine worship and the division between the sacred and the profane; one worked out in and through a negotiation between quotidian practice, and what were taken to be the demands of the prayer book, the other expressed in explicit theological assertion, and rather different readings of what the prayer book required, by the Laudians. A similar clash over the appropriate relationship between secular and spiritual notions of hierarchy and degree occurred when the Laudians attempted to reorder the pews in the church, so that no one could sit ‘above the altar’ and the sight lines of the congregation through to the altar and the celebration of the sacrament would be left unobstructed. Noting ‘some connection between Protestantism and pews’, and pews and preaching, Christopher Marsh observes that before the 1630s ‘ideally benches pointed towards the pulpit’, rather than the communion table or the altar.2 Initially, reseating schemes and the construction of pews had been a largely lay initiative, and certainly not the result of any episcopal direction. Indeed, between 1603 and 1630 Marsh finds that the vast majority of visitation articles scarcely mentioned church seating at all. Thus he concludes that, on their own initiative, ‘a substantial number of parishes had already been “ordering” their seats and “beautifying” their churches, long before Laud came to prominence’,3 albeit in ways that seemed to the Laudians anything but orderly, beautiful or conducive to true worship rightly conceived. We confront again radically different versions of the nature of worship and of the relation between the sacred and the profane, the secular and the spiritual, the one inscribed in the current physical layout and liturgical practices of various parish churches and the other contained in Laudian theology and emergent best practice. The two were brought into contact, and sometimes conflict, in the 1630s, when bishops like Laud, Walter Curle, Matthew Wren, John Towers and Richard Montague – the usual suspects, in fact – bombarded churchwardens with a range of questions on the subject of pews,4 which were reordered, removed from the chancel, wrenched from their current position to face east, reduced to a uniform size. This could cause trouble. Marsh finds that in the diocese of 2 3 4

Marsh, ‘Sacred space … the view from the pew’, pp. 292–3. Marsh, ‘“Common prayer” … the view from the pew’, p. 85. Marsh, ‘Sacred space … the view from the pew’, p. 296.

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Chester, in the period between 1580 and 1640 there were an average of less than five seating disputes a year, but ‘the 1630s produced between five and twenty such cases each year. Many parishes were ordered to alter their seats so that none was higher or grander than others. The gentry and yeomanry of Cheshire did not welcome this intrusion and often took out their frustrations on one another in the church courts.’5 While the energetic reforming attempts of the Laudians thus caused disruption and alarm, Marsh observes that, due to a good deal of foot-dragging, the Laudians did not, in practice, achieve anything like the uniformly dramatic effects that their rhetoric implied and instructions demanded. ‘Even the dangerously energetic Bishop Wren had frequently to settle for modifications to chancel seating, rather than its wholesale removal’, Marsh concludes. As even Richard Montague was forced to concede, ‘the bishop is no ubiquitary, that he can discover everything done’.6 Typically, then, the Laudians managed to cause considerable upset without achieving the transformative results they desired, and which, according to their own theories, were necessary if their project were to work its transforming effects on the English. In seeking to change the position of the communion table, and reorder the church around it – thus, as they claimed, defending it from various sorts of abuse – the Laudians did not have to up the ante by converting the table, name and thing, into an altar. A case could have been made simply in terms of decency and order, that is to say, of the need to protect the table from the unwanted attentions of stray dogs and errant glaziers, and the looming presence of grotesquely oversized pews. And at times such a case was made; famously, by Bishop Piers of Bath and Wells in a position paper of 1634/5 which justified the policy because it was legal, that is to say, entirely in line with the Elizabethan injunctions; convenient, in that it allowed more space for communicants, and rendered the presiding clergyman more audible; fitting, in that none could now sit above God’s table; expedient, in that now the parish churches were emulating the practice of their mother church, the diocesan cathedral; and decent, since all sorts of profanation could now be avoided.7 The existence of that minimalist rationale allowed many of those appalled by the theological implications and wider purposes of the altar policy ultimately to accept, and even to endorse, it. Thus Stephen Hampton has 5 6 7

Marsh, ‘Order and place … the view from the pew’, p. 20. Marsh, ‘Sacred space … the view from the pew’, pp. 298–9; Marsh ‘“Common prayer” … the view from the pew’, p. 84. Fincham and Tyacke, Altars restored, p. 220; Lambeth Palace Library Mss 943, pp. 475–7.

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shown how in his Of the institution of the sacrament of the blessed body and blood of Christ of 1631, Bishop Thomas Morton had directly confuted the notion that the sacrament was a sacrifice, to be offered by a priest, on an altar, rather than a communion table. Morton was a famous anti-papal polemicist and his ostensible target here was popish error. However, by 1631, it would have been clear enough that his arguments were also directed against certain persons and practices in the contemporary English church. Moreover, by using arguments directed at the papists to address some of the central contentions of the Laudians, Morton was also implicitly equating Laudianism with popery. His tract therefore represented an implicitly aggressive, even somewhat daring, polemical act. However, when in 1635, Morton produced a second edition of the book, he added the remarkable aside that ‘all this notwithstanding, you are not to think that we do hereby oppugn the appellation of priest and altar, nor yet the new situation therefore in our church for use as convenient, and for order more decent’. William Prynne, for one, was convinced that that passage must have been inserted against Morton’s will. For all that Morton had continued to denounce ‘“Romish opinion and doctrine” about the words priest and altar’, thus reinforcing his ‘opposition to the idea that the eucharist was a sacrifice, or the communion table an altar’, he had also nevertheless performed, in print, what amounted to a volte face, conceding the legitimacy of the altar policy, and, in the process, restricting the reach of his critique of ‘popery’ to the church of Rome. There was now clear blue water between Morton and the more radical ‘puritan’ critics of the altar policy like Prynne. And Morton had been enabled to do all that by the existence of the minimum position, outlined by the likes of Bishop Piers.8 But ultimately, as we shall see in Part II, that minimum case was not how the Laudians really conceived, or ultimately chose to justify, the moving and railing in of the communion table. On the contrary, they came to insist on calling, and treating, the table as an altar, thus quite literally creating a controversy about altars, where there did not, in fact, have to be one. I say they chose to do that, but, in fact, that is only partially true, since when they did decide to deal with the issue in extenso in print, the Laudians were in fact responding to moves made, and to some extent in terms set, by Bishop John Williams. Williams had first staked out his position on the altar well before there was any such thing as a national Laudian altar 8

Hampton, Grace and conformity, pp. 216–22, 229–30.

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policy. He had done so in his manuscript letter to the vicar of Grantham, which was in fact a position paper, indeed a manifesto, which circulated widely in manuscript. (Williams only took to print in 1637 after he had been attacked by Peter Heylyn.) In both those texts, Williams exposed to public view, indeed to public derision, central aspects of the Laudian programme, without criticising Laud, or any of his fellow bishops, much less the king, but rather by unloading instead on the lowly vicar of Grantham. And so, through a critique of Laudian liturgical overreach and doctrinal excess of an almost painfully self-conscious moderation, orthodoxy and legalism, Williams had been able both to play to the puritan gallery and to establish himself in the public mind as a prelate of great experience and court connection but with a very different world view from that being pushed in pulpit and press, and ultimately in every church in the kingdom, by the Laudians. Definitively on the outs with Charles (and the Laudians), Williams was taking considerable risks in an attempt to establish himself as the obvious alternative to Laud should such a thing become necessary. One might imagine that so direct a challenge positively demanded a response, and yet it took the Laudians literally years to decide to reply to Williams in kind. And when they did it was only after the altar policy was well under way, with every appearance of royal backing, and as but a part of a concerted legal and propaganda campaign to destroy Williams as a viable alternative to Laud and Laudianism. Accordingly, apologists like Heylyn and Pocklington threw the kitchen sink at Williams, deploying not only what I call below their ‘minimum position’, centred on order, obedience and decency, and the church’s authority over things indifferent, but also their ‘maximum’ one, in which the theological rationale for, and the both practical and theological implications of what they were doing were laid bare. Arguably, it was that shift that created the ‘altar controversy’. Of course, it could be argued that Pocklington and Heylyn’s decision to go all-in was at least in part a function of the weakness of the legal and liturgical case in favour of the altar policy. If Williams was winning on that ground, then a switch would have to be made to other arguments and sources, if, that is, Williams were to be definitively seen off, the altar policy properly vindicated and the outlines of acceptable speech on the topic effectively redrawn on the back of Williams’ ruin. Either way, in going for broke, the Laudians ended up not merely revealing, but asserting with some considerable force, their fundamental beliefs, not only about the divine presence in the world, the church and the sacrament, and the appropriate human responses thereto, but also about the sacrifice they

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took the sacrament to be, and the nature of the altar upon which that sacrifice had to be offered. Theology, and indeed polemic, thus mattered a great deal. In this context, by theology I mean the theoretical terms in which the new policy was described and legitimated. The stakes were raised by the fact that what was being overturned was not just the puritan conspiracy of Laudian fantasy, but rather customary practices, and everyday objects, like pews, in which members of the laity had a variety of both social and spiritual investments and which had come to embody a series of beliefs and assumptions about the relations between the sacred and the profane, the parish ‘community’ and the church, the clergy and the laity. Thus, because of the pervasive reach of the altar policy into almost every parish in the land, Laudian theology took on a far wider and more explosive significance than any merely theoretical account, however tactless or confrontational, of the real presence, or of the nature of the sacrament as sacrifice, would or could have done. Thus it is, that, in what I take to be an exemplary mix of different sorts of historical scholarship, Fincham and Tyacke have been able to show that it was a combination of novel theologising, political calculation, administrative ambition and changes in quotidian practice that made the altar controversy so significant, and indeed so controversial.9 Hence the propriety, indeed the necessity, of focusing an account of Laudianism on the 1630s, since Laudianism as conceived here was not merely an ideology, or world view, but rather the product of the application and working out, in the particular political context provided by the Personal Rule, of a set of principles, priorities, prejudices, of aesthetic and spiritual predilections, that can be traced back to the 1590s, and the work of Hooker, Harsnet, Howson and Andrewes. On this view, Laudianism was in equal parts world view, movement and moment. The decision to enter into full-on public controversy about the altar paralleled that to allow the legality of ship money finally to be tested in the courts. In both cases, the choices to go public, which were made within months of each other in 1637,10 had been self-consciously delayed for some years. Once taken, they invited, indeed they virtually forced, the critics of the regime to respond in kind. In the process, what might have otherwise remained implicit disagreements, expressed in myriad disputes about local customs and interests – in the case of the altar, about where the table had 9 10

See their Altars restored, esp. chapters 4, 5 and 6. This is a topic that Noah Millstone and I hope to discuss at length elsewhere, in a book that we are tempted to call 1637, year of destiny. No doubt cooler heads will prevail.

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Introduction

always stood; about who should pay for the new dispensation, or under whose remit, or in whose jurisdiction, such matters actually belonged; in that of ship money about the relative burden to be borne by this locality or that county11 – now tended to be subsumed into altogether more polarising and totalising views of the matter. In the ensuing exchanges about the altar what the Laudians were really concerned with was revealed with crystal clarity. Unattractively rebarbative and pedantic as the resulting polemical works so frequently were, it would still be a mistake to write them off as so much ‘preachers’ talk’, arcane disputes of concern only to a certain sort of clergyman, or later, historian of Christian doctrine, and as such unworthy of the attention of the modishly cultural historian hot in pursuit of ‘lived religion’. On the contrary, such texts were, or rather they revealed, what I take to be the heart of the matter. Hence the choice of sources upon which this book is based. Since I am concerned here with the public legitimation of the Laudian project I have chosen to concentrate, for the most part, on printed sources; that is to say, on tracts, sermons, polemical works and apologetics produced during the 1630s. Here I have privileged court, visitation and consecration sermons and tracts written in self-conscious defence of the central aspects of the Laudian programme. And here the altar policy and the assault on what the Laudians viewed or presented as ‘puritan’ sabbatarianism play a central role. The fact that the materials I will be dealing with here were printed matters twice over. Firstly, it means that they reached audiences far wider than those who first heard them delivered in the pulpit and, secondly, that, being licensed, they had received the imprimatur of official approval, in a period when the authorities were coming increasingly to care about control of the press, and in which their opponents and critics were starting to monitor intensely, and with increasing alarm, what they took to be a major shift in just what one was and was not allowed to say in public and in print.12 Insofar as I have used manuscript sources and texts published 11

12

For the ways in which tensions raised by ship money could be contained within the conduct of various local disputes, until, that is, they couldn’t, see P. Lake, ‘The collection of ship money in Cheshire during the sixteen thirties; a case study of relations between central and local government’, Northern History, 17 (1981), pp. 44–71. There is a considerable debate on this topic. See J. B. Williams, ‘The Laudian imprimatur’, The Library, 5th series, 15 (1960), pp. 96–104; Sheila Lambert, ‘The printers and the government 1604– 1637’, in R. Myers and M. Harris, eds., Aspects of printing from 1600 (Oxford, 1987), pp. 1–29; Sheila Lambert, ‘State control of the press in theory and practise: the role of the Stationers Company before 1640’, in R. Myers and M. Harris, eds., Censorship and the control of the press in England and France, 1600–1910 (Winchester, 1992), pp. 1–32; Sheila Lambert, ‘Richard Montague, Arminianism

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after the 1630s, I have limited myself to those first delivered in high-profile public places such that contemporaries would have taken them as reliable guides either to royal, or episcopal or archiepiscopal preference and policy. Hence the stress in what follows on a remarkable run of court sermons preached by Robert Skinner throughout the decade, or on the sermons also preached at court by Peter Heylyn in the late 1630s but only printed, as The parable of the tares, in 1659. My subject is thus what one might call the public transcript of the Laudian church and the Personal Rule. To reconstruct that transcript, I have read these texts against one another, looking for central organising themes, common concerns, images, authorities and styles of argument. While I have not suppressed, and indeed, at times have highlighted, areas of internal tension and even contradiction both within the works of individual authors and the corpus as a whole, at least in the first four parts, the identification of differences between these texts and authors has not been my main priority. On the contrary, given the nature of the exercise, I have, of necessity, tended to privilege commonalty of concern and argument over diversity, agreement over disagreement. This has not been hard, since, as I try to show in what follows, these texts do, to a remarkable extent, cohere around a number of central themes and concerns. At stake were both positive ideals, which these authors did their best to exalt to the level of unquestioned common assumption to which no one, or at least no one of genuine Christian orthodoxy or virtue, could object, and negative stereotypes with which no good Christian or loyal subject could or would allow themselves to be associated. If, then, that cracker-barrel historiographer, J. H. Hexter, is right that all historians are, by temperament or basic approach, either ‘lumpers’ or ‘splitters’,13 then this book is, for the most part, that is, in its first four parts, an exercise in lumping. Its method relies on the aggregation of insights, opinions and quotations taken from myriad sources generated during the 1630s to construct something like the Laudian view of the world. Such an approach has two main downsides, the one substantive and the other more personal. The personal downside is that I am, by preference or instinct, at least as much splitter as lumper. I am not the sort of extreme

13

and censorship’, Past & Present, 124 (1989), pp. 36–68; Arnold Hunt, ‘Licensing and religious censorship in early modern England’, in Andrew Hadfield, ed., Literature and censorship in Renaissance England (Basingstoke, 2007), pp. 127–46. What I take to be the definitive discussion of the matter is in Anthony Milton, ‘Licensing, censorship and religious orthodoxy in early Stuart England’, Historical Journal, 41 (1998), pp. 625–51. See his essay ‘The burden of proof’ in his On historians (Cambridge, MA, 1986).

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nominalist who views all such general terms of art as puritan, or Laudian, with suspicion and distaste. On the contrary, I have, over the years, put altogether too much time and energy into justifying the salience and centrality of the term puritan and its cognates for the analysis of the religious history of the post-reformation period, and spent even more time attempting to refine somewhat clunky neologisms like conformist Calvinist or avant-garde conformist for the same period and purpose. Indeed, I firmly believe that without such general categories, which in themselves represent compressed or implicit acts of generalisation and categorisation, meaningful historical analysis and argument become almost impossible.14 But I also think such terms can all too easily become reified or hypostatised, operating as excuses not to think about the material in front of us, rather than as aids to that process. For that reason, most of my books on this sort of topic have not been extended model-building exercises, general accounts of the nature and salience of such terms and subjects in general, but rather about the actions and reactions of specific persons and groups, in the course of which such terms of art can be defined and redefined, applied and reapplied, both by the historian and by the historical actors he or she is studying, as we, as it were, watch them in action, inhabiting and working out in their own thought and practice the tendencies and tensions implicit in the general terms of analysis being used to describe their behaviour. In other words, I have tended to write about persons rather than categories, or at least to ground my use of the crucial categories in the thought and action, the doings and sayings, of particular groups and individuals. This book diverges rather sharply from that model. It is, at least in its first four parts, in Hexterian terms, an extended exercise in lumping; or, as a jaundiced observer might see it, in egregious source-mining. As such, it is vulnerable to the sceptical gaze of the committed splitter; that is to say to someone, who, for whatever reason – be it methodological, temperamental or ideological – is inclined to view the existence of the coherent whole being conjured here with a certain scepticism, and who is accordingly determined to split, that is, to disaggregate, distinguish and analyse in isolation the materials being so sedulously compressed together in the first four parts of this book. And such sceptics are anything but in short supply, there being no lack of historians, not to mention apologists for certain styles of Anglicanism, who want to see the ecclesiastical policies of Charles I and Laud as the conduct of conformist business as usual, and 14

Cf. the preface to the 1990 paperback edition of Nicholas Tyacke’s Anti-Calvinists.

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the Personal Rule itself as merely a series of piecemeal expedients, cobbled together to meet the exigencies of the moment, rather than as any attempt to do anything at all definitive to either the structure or the ideology of the church or the state. I do not think that there is any theoretical, methodological or procedural magic bullet with which such objections can definitively be dispelled, or the consequent disagreements adjudicated. The best one can do, certainly the best I can offer here, is to marshal a range of evidence, a multiplicity of authors and opinions, of quotations and tropes, of means and modes of exposition and argument, juxtaposed, compared and contrasted, each with the other, to demonstrate – indeed, I would go so far as to say ‘prove’ – that the commonalties and coherences being outlined in this book are not mere inventions, products of the pattern-making impulses, the presuppositions and prior interpretative commitments of the author, but rather real expressions of an ideology and a movement that can meaningfully be termed Laudian. As Patrick Collinson once observed, particularly when making a case of this sort, ipsissima verba represents the highest form of proof. One has to be able to demonstrate that a range of persons said these things, in this way, across a range of different texts or venues. How things were said matters almost as much as what was said, and the recurrent use of the same or similar images, tropes or texts is crucial to the analysis. Hence the density of quotation in what follows. I only met Bernard Bailyn once. Inevitably, he asked me what I was working on. In response, I described a (slightly more grandiose) version of what has subsequently become this book. He sniffed and said that that sounded merely descriptive, and as such so very different from the book ‘brother Pincus’ was working on about the revolutionary origins of modernity. I fear I cannot recall precisely what I said in reply. I wanted to observe that the whole revolutionary origins thing had surely been done before, but of course I did no such thing and merely mumbled something along the lines of as long as the description involved was accurate that was all right with me. Certainly, thirty years later, my wimpish riposte to Bailyn still provides the ultimate apologia for this book having taken the form that it has. For, leaving the ‘merely’ to one side, there is a significant sense in which the book’s ambitions remain descriptive; that is to say the delineation, evocation and analysis of an ideological position, a theological style and mode of worship, argument and being of some significance both in the history of Stuart England and indeed of ‘Anglicanism’ over the longue durée. But the creation of a static tableau, a recuperation and delineation of an ideal type, is not the main or only aim of the book. There is admittedly

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and inevitably something of that going on, but while, at base, this is an attempt to reconstruct a collective view of the world or mental set, the book also tries throughout to advert to the internal tensions and contradictions within the position thus evoked and to portray the sometimes rather different priorities espoused by many of the people here deemed Laudian. If not eccentric, then at the very least decidedly distinctive characters like Robert Shelford, Edward Kellett, James Buck, Edmund Reeve, Peter Heylyn, Robert Sanderson, Thomas Jackson or Humphrey Sydenham have all to be given their due. Individual voices have to be allowed to emerge from a choral arrangement of quotations and sentiments that might otherwise threaten to flatten out all such differences of tone and priority. And finally, for all that there must, of necessity, be a static quality to much of the analysis; we have to remember that this book is based, in large part, on what were essentially political and polemical texts, quintessential livre de circonstances. And thus a certain amount of attention has to be paid to those very circumstances, and to the ways in which various individuals and texts responded to them. One of the notable features of this body of texts is that they were authored by figures of at best the second, or middle, rank; young coming men, hoping to make a name and a career for themselves, by pushing what they took to the official line; anti-Calvinist lags emerging from decades of Calvinist hegemony and, as they saw it, untoward puritan influence, to at last have their say about true religion and the church of England; renegade ex-puritans, anxious to make their way and prove their reliability as spokespersons and supporters of the new order. Some of these people had always been carriers of these views, committed avant-garde conformists of confirmed opinion and rabidly anti-puritan instinct. Others were newcomers, some of whom went all-in, while others remained half-hearted or partial converts to the Laudian way. Such people bought-in only to parts of the Laudian agenda, which they talked up with unwonted enthusiasm in order the more effectively to ingratiate themselves with the authorities and thus make up for some of their otherwise rather unLaudian opinions, preferences and contacts. Some of these men went further than many of their seniors and mentors at the centre of the establishment perhaps wanted them to go, or certainly were prepared to go themselves. Thus was created what we might term a sort of Laudian avant garde; a cadre of young, but also sometimes of rather old, men in a hurry, daring to say the unsayable, to épater, if not les bourgeois, then certainly the denizens of the fading episcopalian Calvinist and moderate puritan establishments.

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Thus while there might well have been a solid ideological core to Laudianism, Laudianism itself was an ideological synthesis and the Laudian party a coalition, the central members of which knew very well that there were all too many people out there who hated everything they stood for, and that, consequently, if they were to prevail, they would have to bring along with them large numbers of people who were not anything like card-carrying Laudians. There is, in short, a political story or stories to be told here, a narrative to be constructed, and a coalition to be dissected and analysed, even as the essential coherence of the Laudian position is being not merely asserted but (as I hope) demonstrated. Part V is where a great deal of that work is done, but it is also going on throughout the preceding parts, which are intended to trace particular disputes, and outline certain internal tensions and differences of opinion or emphasis, as well as to expound general ideological positions and theological principles. Virtually all of the texts cited in this book were in some sense polemical; both proscriptive and prescriptive, they were all concerned not merely to make a case for something, but to do so while in contention with a very different, ‘puritan’, view of the matter. This explains the detailed attention given in Part III to the phenomenon of Laudian anti-puritanism, which emerges not as a simple prejudice or set of prejudices, cobbled together from the caricatures and stereotypes of the previous fifty or so years, but rather as a complex ideological construct, without a proper understanding of which much that was distinctive about the Laudian synthesis cannot properly be captured. Far from being mere knock-about name-calling – although, as we shall see, there was a great deal of that going on here – many of the texts analysed in this book also contained large amounts of formal theology and expressions of serious piety. They nearly all sought to make cases about specific issues and policies of urgent contemporary resonance on the basis of scriptural evidence or first principle, adduced to prove their own position orthodox and the (‘puritan’) positions they were arguing against heterodox. They also contained a vision of the holy and an account of how God’s immanent presence in the world was both contained within and shown forth by the physical spaces, the liturgical structures and sacramental practices of the visible church. That divine presence was supposed to elicit a complex, intellectual but also, more importantly, an affective and bodily response. Crucial here was the active participation of the believer in public prayer and corporate worship, iteratively conducted according to the rhythms of the liturgical year and the book of common prayer. The central point, around which this style of piety was organised was provided

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by the divine presence in the sacrament and the works of repentance and amendment that were supposed to precede, attend and be prompted by its reception. Accordingly, in various asides, prayers and spiritual ejaculations, a number of these texts contained extended exercises in what might be called the sacramental sublime. At stake was a deeply Christocentric piety, which, through the contemplation and application of Christ’s sacrifice for the sins of fallen humanity, was supposed to bring the believer to a saving faith; a faith not merely attended by, but in some fundamental sense also composed of, hope and charity, and the complex structures both of feeling and outward works, directed towards God and one’s fellow Christians, that constituted, and gave outward expression to, those saving virtues or graces. On this basis, at least some of these texts felt able to offer the true believer a foretaste of the joys of heaven and an intense, albeit fleetingly transcendent, union with Christ, to be experienced in this life in and through the inner workings and outward observances of Laudian piety. If, as Alec Ryrie has argued,15 zeal and emotional intensity really were the distinctive hallmarks of post-reformation English protestantism, then Laudianism most definitely did represent a way of ‘being protestant’ in post-reformation England. Not only were the texts under discussion here heavily polemical in nature, they were drenched in what we might term ‘politics’. Indeed, it is one of the major claims of this book that Laudianism, as it emerges from the current analysis, constituted the political theology, the ideology both animating and legitimating the policies of the Personal Rule, without an appreciation of which we cannot hope to understand the Caroline project as a comprehensive programme of reformation and renewal; or, to appropriate another, rather more famous, Eltonian phrase, as an (admittedly failed) attempt at a genuine ‘Caroline revolution in government’. What do I mean, in this context, by the term, ‘political theology’? I mean a vision of the relations between God and his creation, between God in Christ and fallen humanity, that contained within it, not merely a vision of how sinful humans might be saved, but also of how the church, and therefore the commonwealth, ought to be ordered to facilitate that process. Involved here was a vision of order, of the right relation between spiritual and secular power, between church and state, prince and bishop, ruler and ruled. Inherent in Laudianism was not merely such a vision of order, but a programme for how the requisite virtues and attributes, the obedience, reverence and awe, appropriate to both the divine and royal 15

Alec Ryrie, Being protestant (Oxford, 2013).

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presences, might best be inculcated and sustained in ordinary Christians and subjects. In this way, Laudian reformation represented not merely a means to put the church to rights, in the process making plain, and available to all, the terms upon which a both just and merciful God offered salvation to fallen humanity, but also a way to restore order and obedience to the workings of the polity. By converting the ordinary members of the church into good Christians, Laudianism promised to turn them into good subjects as well, in the process providing ample legitimation for the secular, as well as for the ecclesiastical, policies of the Caroline regime. Moreover, it did all this while providing a complex, modulated and aggressively vituperative account of those elements in contemporary culture, society and politics – that is, the puritans – whose malign influence had to be identified, denounced and expelled if the cause of true order in church and state were ever to prevail. Here my work intersects in slightly complex ways with that of Kevin Sharpe. Teaching the topic to generations of undergraduates, I have come to splice insights culled from Sharpe’s monumental study of the Personal Rule of Charles I with others drawn from Richard Cust’s brilliant analysis of Charles’ political style, and in particular from his account of Charles’ vision of popularity and its discontents.16 I gradually produced a synthetic account of the period which saw the Personal Rule as a calculated response to a very particular Caroline vision of the 1620s as a crisis of popularity, caused by the influence, within parliament, of a group of self-servingly populist politicians, known both to Charles and his father, as tribuni plebis, and, outside of it, by a rout of equally self-serving and populist puritan ministers.17 Using Sharpe’s account as my prompt-book, I came to regard the Personal Rule as a sustained and purposive attempt to re-educate the English people in the habits of obedience and hierarchy that, at least as it seemed to Charles I, the crisis of the 1620s had stripped out of them. In making that case, I attributed a crucial role to Laudianism, as Sharpe did not, but otherwise much of my account was entirely congruent with, indeed parasitic upon, central aspects of Sharpe’s analysis of the Personal Rule. After all, he had stressed Charles’ reform of the structures, manners and mores of the court; the reforming and aesthetic values underlying the masques of the period; 16

17

Richard Cust, Charles I, a political life (Harlow, 2005); Richard Cust, ‘Charles I and popularity’, in Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust and Peter Lake, eds., Politics, religion and popularity (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 235–58. P. Lake, ‘From revisionist to royalist history; or, was Charles I the first Whig historian?’, Huntingdon Library Quarterly, 78 (2015), pp. 657–81.

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Charles’ drive towards the restoration of order in the relations between the centre and the localities, the crown and the nobility and the conduct of local governance. It was easy enough to fit my version of Laudianism in here as the centre piece of a comprehensive plan to re-educate the English in the ways of proper Christian obedience and order. But here lay the rub, because, for Sharpe, Laudianism did not really exist; rather all that was involved in the ecclesiastical policies of the Personal Rule was ‘Anglican’ business as usual, the pursuit, albeit with peculiar intensity, of entirely traditional notions of unity, uniformity and obedience. Sharpe had absolutely no truck either with the notion of a preceding ‘Calvinist consensus’ or reformed status quo ante being disrupted by Arminian innovation, or with any account of Laudianism as a distinctive or novel ideology.18 In this way both Laud and indeed the church of England were rescued from the taint of theological parti pris, and Sharpe’s hyper-revisionist account of the politics of the Personal Rule, or indeed the origins of the civil war, from that of ideological commitment or conflict. Despite what I take to be its self-evident wrong-headedness, this view of the matter has not gone away. Indeed, it has recently received a shot in the arm from a series of articles by Mark Kishlansky on the kingcraft of Charles I and on the tenor of Caroline ecclesiastical politics, which Kishlansky characterised – in complete agreement with Sharpe and indeed 18

And in so doing, Sharpe was both drawing upon and contributing to the disputes of the 1980s, occasioned by the work of Nicholas Tyacke. The controversy was sparked by an essay by Peter White, ‘The rise of Arminianism reconsidered’, Past & Present, 100 (1983), pp. 34–54. This prompted immediate responses from William Lamont and Nicholas Tyacke published under the same title in Past & Present, 107 (1985), pp. 227–31 and 115 (1987), pp. 201–29, and an article by Peter Lake, ‘Calvinism and the English church, 1570–1635’, Past & Present, 114 (1986), pp. 32–76. White further explicated his position in a monograph, Predestination, policy and polemic (Cambridge, 1992) and a chapter, ‘The via media in the early Stuart church’, in Fincham, ed., The early Stuart church, pp.  211–30. Also see P. Lake, ‘Predestinarian propositions’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 46 (1995), pp. 110–23. Sharpe was mixing and matching the not entirely compatible work of Peter White and Julian Davies. Where White saw a seamless web of Anglican moderation and unity disrupted by puritan extremism and anti-popish moral panic and paranoia, Julian Davies gave us a vision of an effectively evangelical, but again moderate, church of England being disrupted and destroyed, not by Laud or Laudianism, but by the Caesaro-papism of Charles I; hence the title of his book, The Caroline captivity of the church of England (Oxford, 1991). In his magisterial The Personal Rule of Charles I, Kevin Sharpe retained White and Davies’ strangely dogged vindication of Laud from anything remotely resembling a theological agenda, while abandoning Davies’ account of the transformational effects on the church of the policies of the Personal Rule, and indeed his almost wholly hostile picture of Charles I, for White’s seamless web of Anglican moderation and continuity. Thus, for Sharpe, but not for Davies, Charles, as well as Laud, was rescued from the taint of any very positive theological or ecclesiological agenda, in favour of an intellectually conventional, albeit institutionally and legally aggressive, commitment to a recognizably ‘moderate’, and entirely ‘traditional’, ‘Anglican’ status quo ante. Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (London and New Haven, 1992), chapter 6.

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with the Laudians themselves – as a showdown between a conventionally conformist authority and a radical puritan opposition.19 This desire to defend Laud from the charge that he had any ideological or theological commitments to speak of has complex roots. Most obviously, it stems from a certain vision of Anglicanism that sees ‘moderation’, in the sense of the absence of theological parti pris, of (either reformed or Catholic) zeal, as a distinctive, even a defining, characteristic, not only of the national church, but also of the national character. The impulse here is both to save Laud for ‘Anglicanism’ and ‘Anglicanism’ from certain versions of Laud. Also in play is a tendency, not so much Marxist as Tawneyesque, and held in common by Hill and Trevor-Roper, to see Laudianism in predominantly administrative and material terms as a (doomed) attempt to revive versions of the social (and political) orders rendered untenable by the pace of social and economic change, and thus as an equally doomed bid to restore the fortunes of the clerical estate to their former glory. In both the Hill and Trevor-Roper versions, theology, indeed any self-consciously religious vision of the church, or the life of faith, had little or nothing to do with it.20 It has been perhaps the 19

20

Mark Kishlansky, ‘A whipper whipped: the sedition of William Prynne’, Historical Journal, 56 (2013), pp. 603–27. Also see his ‘Martyrs’ tales’, Journal of British Studies, 30 (2014), pp. 334–55 and his ‘Charles I: a case of mistaken identity’, Past & Present, 189 (2005), pp. 41–80. See Christopher Hill’s Economic problems of the church (Oxford, 1956), esp. part III, ‘The church triumphant’, and his Society and puritanism in pre-revolutionary England (London, 1964), and Hugh Trevor-Roper, Archbishop Laud (London, 1940). For the closest parallels to Tawney in TrevorRoper’s life of Laud, see pp. 168–70, which draw very heavily on R. H. Tawney, Religion and the rise of capitalism (London, 1948), pp. 174–9. For Hill’s solitary, but far more expansive, gesture towards Tawney see Economic problems, p. 338, where Hill claims that while Tawney had been concerned with religion and the rise of capitalism his own more ‘pedestrian’ effort was about ‘the church and the rise of capitalism’. The main difference between Hill and Trevor-Roper is that while the Tory paternalist, Trevor-Roper, plays up the beneficence towards the poor of Laud’s ‘social policy’, the Marxist, Hill, concentrates on Laud’s drive to restore the material fortunes and independence of the clerical estate. Like Hill’s, Trevor Roper’s was an almost wholly materialist vision of Laudianism. ‘To him [Laud] the church was a great social institution, designed to praise God with its voice, but with its hand to regulate the anti-social appetites of individuals by the imposition of external justice’ (Trevor-Roper, Laud, p. 95). ‘The church was being restored to its old position, its old constitution, its old doctrine, and, as far as possible, its old wealth’ (ibid., p. 338). ‘Laud was trying to revive the Middle Ages, not only in ceremonial but in economics; and not only in ecclesiastical economics … Such a policy meant dealing violently with history’ by attempting to ‘to set the clock back a hundred years’. Thus, ‘the case against Laud is not that his ideals were bad but that they … were at least a century out of date, and could not be realized’ (Hill, Economic problems, pp. 12, 340–1, 345). Just like Hill, Trevor-Roper insisted that in seeking to ‘undo a revolution of a hundred years by a reaction of a dozen years’ Laud was doomed to fail (Trevor-Roper, Laud, p. 435). For Trevor-Roper, as for Hill, religious doctrine and practice were epiphenomenal, mere outward forms, both legitimating and masking what was really going on. ‘Since the emphasis of the time was upon ecclesiastical forms, and since the new movement had assumed a religious colouring, its opponents naturally appealed to, and idealized, the doctrine and ecclesiastical organization against whose abuses the

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single greatest contribution of Nicholas Tyacke to emphasise the centrality of ideas, of theological commitment and argument, to the English postreformation condition. In that respect, as in so many others, in this book I am merely following in Tyacke’s footsteps. As Anthony Milton has definitively shown, Laudianism involved a fundamental recalibration of the English church’s relationship with both the church of Rome and the foreign reformed churches.21 As we shall see, that recalibration in part produced, and was in part produced by, the elevation of a complex entity the Laudians called puritanism to the status of the defining other of their vision of true religion, the visible church and the life of faith. This enabled the Laudians to present the contemporary politico-religious scene as a choice between themselves and something they called puritanism, and to cast their own position as both the essence of the English national church and the soul of moderation. Laudianism’s moderation resided in its status as a carefully calibrated via media between the two extremes which were taken to define it; a now admittedly somewhat etiolated version of popery and a very considerably pumped-up vision of puritanism. Here was a classic instance of ‘moderation’, as Ethan Shagan has described it, that is, as an act of – in this instance, theological, polemical and political – aggression directed at the extremes in terms of which the moderate middle in question is being defined.22 The fact that the Laudians presented themselves in this way must, of course, feature prominently in any analysis of what they were trying to do, and might be thought to give them a good claim to be the first ‘Anglicans’. Certainly, a good many later ‘Anglicans’ – crudely High Churchmen and Anglo-Catholics – have tended to accept them as such. (The texts reprinted by the Library of Anglo-Catholic theology were carefully chosen to support such claims, thus providing an ‘Anglican’ origin myth self-consciously distinct from that constructed by the rival Parker Society.23) But for us to

21 22 23

reformers had claimed to rebel.’ Laud’s policy ‘was covered over by the accepted varnish of an appropriate religious doctrine’ (ibid., pp. 434–5, italics added), doctrine dismissed as merely ‘metaphysical findings’, and as such of interest only to benighted clergymen, and entirely incapable of explaining the fierce opposition to Laud and Laudianism evinced by various ‘prosperous landlords and business men’ (ibid., p. 432). In sum, in Trevor-Roper’s account of Laud the overall interpretation is Tawney’s, the asides and apothegms about men and affairs are Trevor Roper’s, and the anecdotes mostly Heylyn’s and Hacket’s. Milton, Catholic and reformed, passim. See Ethan Shagan, The rule of moderation (Cambridge, 2011). Research being undertaken by Lori Anne Ferrell promises to transform our knowledge of these issues. But also see the seminal works of Peter Nockles, discussed, and shamelessly appropriated, in the Conclusion. These are: his monograph The Oxford movement in context (Cambridge, 1992); ‘A disputed legacy: Anglican historiographies of the Reformation from the era of the Caroline

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follow suit would be less than wise; indeed it would be to fall victim to what we might call the Anglican fallacy, or, better yet, the myth of Anglican essentialism,24 that is, implicitly to assert or assume that there exists, or ought to exist, a unitary position, which epitomises the value system, the religious style or spiritual identity of the national church; a position either inherent in that church’s foundation documents and early history, or palpably emergent thereafter. But what if no such position ever existed? What if ‘Anglicanism’ is not a position at all, but a condition, even a pathology – one endemic in a national church, comprehensive in its claims on the spiritual and moral lives of the English, self-consciously, indeed aggressively, ‘moderate’ in its self-image, but which yet contains within itself multiple, at times all but mutually exclusive, versions of that church’s origins, essence and mission? On this view of the matter, claims to ‘moderation’ would function as a way to keep the conflict over who should control or speak for the church within bounds, and thus to preserve the unity of the thing being fought over.25 For the object in contention had always been, and had to remain, a national church; viewed in crudely material terms, a nexus of wealth, status, patronage, institutional power and charisma; viewed theologically, a local embodiment of the unity, catholicity and apostolicity of the true church; and viewed ideologically, an instantiation of the nature of Englishness, and thus a supposed source of national meaning and unity. And so, by definition, if the thing being contended for were to break up, there would be nothing left worth controlling. From the outset, the Laudians’ view of the past, present and future of the English church was self-evidently not the only one available to contemporaries. Laudianism was merely one response to the post-reformation condition of the English church, and to the ambiguous legacies of the different reformations that had created that condition; a response comparable in its aggression, coherence and radicalism to the Presbyterian movement.26 In that sense, Laudianism was one of a number of ways of being protestant,

24

25 26

divines to that of the Oxford Movement’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 83 (2001), pp. 121–67; ‘Anglicanism “represented” or “misrepresented”? The Oxford Movement, Evangelicalism and history: the controversial use of the Caroline divines in the Victorian Church of England’ in Sheridan Gilley, ed., Victorian churches and churchmen (Woodbridge, 2005), pp. 308–69; ‘The Reformation revised? The contested reception of the English Reformation in nineteenth century’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 90 (2014), pp. 231–56. Compare and contrast the series introduction to the Oxford History of Anglicanism by Rowan Strong with the introduction to volume one in the series by Anthony Milton, ed., The Oxford History of Anglicanism, vol. 1 (Oxford, 2017), pp. xvii–xxvi and 1–27. Milton, Second reformation, passim, but esp. chapter 1 and conclusion. See Milton, Second reformation, p. 508.

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just one of the modes of reformation available in and to the English postreformation church. In the terms set by Anthony Milton’s England’s second reformation, Laudianism was the first and triggering attempt at reformation that set off the wave of differently constituted attempts at reformation that engulfed the national church during the period between 1625 and 1662.27 When viewed in terms both of its immediate effects and its longerterm impact on the history of ‘Anglicanism’, there was precious little that was ‘moderate’ about Laudianism. We can see as much in the following decades when, as Anthony Milton has argued, many contemporaries went to great lengths to ‘distance their own position from the policies of the Laudian decade and often to clarify their own position by defining it against a Laudian “other”. But this of course gives Laudianism a powerful influence in its own right as a destabilizing “moment” for all those affected by it – supporters and opponents alike.’ What Milton terms ‘the shockwaves’ would be felt throughout, indeed would arguably have a shaping influence upon, the subsequent history of ‘Anglicanism’ down to the nineteenth or even the twentieth century; a point to which I shall return in the Conclusion, and one which goes some way towards explaining why so much of the recent historiography on the English post-reformation can be read as a series of attempts to legitimate different versions of Anglicanism, through the explication of their roots in the immediate aftermath of the reformation/s – Henrician, Edwardian, Elizabethan and Caroline – that created the English national church in the first place.28

The Backstory This book is concerned essentially with the 1630s, and an analysis that largely restricts itself to evidence culled from that decade naturally leaves itself open to the question of where this all came from. And so, before entering into the main part of the book, I want to spend some time outlining my position on this question. I take the strand of thought and feeling that links Hooker to Laudianism to have been a response to a set of quintessentially English and protestant tensions and dilemmas, consequent upon the ‘but halfly reformed’ nature of the English church. As I argued in Anglicans and Puritans? and 27 28

Cf. Ryrie, Being protestant and Milton, Second reformation. For more on which see Milton, Second reformation and the discussion of Tractarianism in the conclusion of this book.

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elsewhere, until the 1590s conformist attempts to defend the ecclesiastical status quo from puritan attack were framed within, and limited by, a series of ideological positions and assumptions central to that church’s metastruggle with popery. The Foxeian account of the English church’s relationship with its own past, which emphasised continuity with the doctrine of the true church, maintained through gathered groups of true believers huddled together within, but not of, the Antichristian church of Rome, only made things worse, since it inhibited the development of iure divino claims about episcopacy to match those being made by the Presbyterians about the discipline. And, of course, underpinning everything was the Calvinist predestinarianism that passed for orthodox amongst Elizabethan protestants. This meant that, as an established national church, the church of England was committed both to a very capacious vision of the Christian community and a predestinarian theology ill-suited to infusing that vision with any very positive spiritual or affective content. The easiest way to address that problem was, of course, to adopt a Presbyterian reformation of the national church’s basic structures of government and practice. Absent that, the best that could be hoped for was the rather wintery Calvinist fatalism peddled by John Whitgift in his exchanges with Thomas Cartwright.29 And then there was the crisis of status visited upon the parish clergy, and the clerical estate more generally conceived, by the reformation, which stripped the church of a great deal of its wealth and power and transferred huge amounts of ecclesiastical patronage from the church to the crown and the laity. At the same time, protestantism brought with it a new vision of the clerical calling, and therefore a new rhetoric of clerical status and authority, centred on the word preached, now established as ‘the ordinary means of salvation’, and as the central, defining function of the clergy, who were no longer to be conceived as priests, but as ministers of the word. This last ideological change was visited on the church as a demand; one that, lacking the trained personnel to provide anything resembling a preaching minister in every parish, and the material resources necessary to acquire and sustain such a ministry in a hurry, it could not meet. The resulting contradictions left the church open to a series of ‘puritan’ criticisms, to which, until the rise of Laudianism, the hierarchy and its conformist defenders found it very hard to respond, either at the practical 29

For which see Peter Lake, Anglican and puritans? (London, 1988), chapter 1.

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or polemical level.30 Again, before Laudianism, the most coherent and comprehensive solution to these problems was provided by the impossibilist utopianism of the Presbyterian platform. For that basic protestant commitment to the word preached, combined with the need utterly to reject the will worship and idolatry taken to be the essence of popery, seriously inhibited the development of arguments about the centrality of corporate worship and public prayer; about the religious role or spiritual value of outward ceremony; and about a sacrament- rather than a sermon-centred style of worship and piety. All and any of which would have made the defence of the controverted ceremonies, and of a church lumbered in altogether too many places with an unpreaching ministry, a great deal easier than it, in fact, was. The resulting log jam or impasse only started to break up in the very late 1580s and 1590s, under the impact of the intensely anti-puritan moment that started with the campaign against Martin Marprelate, continued through the final assault on the classis movement and culminated in the triumphalist print campaign conducted by the likes of Richard Bancroft, Matthew Sutcliffe, Richard Cosin, Hadrian Saravia, Thomas Bilson and, last but by no means least, Richard Hooker. In that moment of anti-puritan fervour and moral panic, fuelled by the increase in separatist activity consequent upon the collapse of the classis moment, and – for professional anti-puritan ideologues like Bancroft – the almost absurdly convenient Hacket conspiracy, things became thinkable and sayable (in public) that had not been so before. Here the most obvious example is the iure divino theory of episcopacy.31 Implicit, but never quite formulated, in conformist polemic for years, that 30

31

In many ways, the best analysis of these difficulties remains Hill’s Economic problems. The Laudians’ practical attempts to address the resulting contradictions dominate both Hill’s and Trevor-Roper’s largely materialist account of Laudianism, discussed in fn. 20. On these issues also see the groundbreaking works of Rosemary O’Day and Felicity Heal, most especially O’Day’s seminal monograph The English clergy (Leicester, 1979) and Heal’s Of prelates and princes (Cambridge, 1980). Also see Andrew Foster, ‘Church policies of the 1630s’, in R. Cust and A. Hughes, eds., Conflict in early Stuart England (Harlow, 1989), pp. 193–223, and Ken Fincham, Prelate as pastor: the episcopate of James I (Oxford, 1990). I hope to address elsewhere the rival, puritan, conformist and Laudian clericalisms, elicited by this conjuncture, not to mention the various ‘sectarian’ reactions provoked by those differently structured clericalisms. A foretaste of that approach is to be found in my Anglicans and puritans? Also see Lake, ‘Conformist clericalism? Richard Bancroft’s analysis of the socio-economic roots of presbyterianism’, in W. J. Sheils and Diana Webb, eds., The church and wealth, Studies in Church History, 24 (Oxford, 1987), pp. 219–29, and Lake, ‘Richard Kilby: a study in personal and professional failure’, in W. J. Sheils and Diana Webb, eds., The ministry: clerical and lay, Studies in Church History, 26 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 221–35. W. D. J. Cargill-Thompson, ‘Sir Francis Knollys’ campaign against the iure divino theory of episcopacy’, in C. R. Cole and M. E. Moody, eds., The dissenting tradition (Athens, OH, 1975), pp. 39–77.

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notion went from outlier to new orthodoxy in a matter of four or five years, while those attempting to articulate the traditional anti-prelatical, Erastian, iure humano arguments that, for decades, had kept such clericalist assertion in check, were reduced to an irrelevant impotence. But in many ways, the iure divino case for episcopacy was the least of it. Far more profound and potentially transformative shifts were taking place, as it were, beneath the surface of the anti-puritan rant frothing out of the press and the pulpit. Here the central example is Richard Hooker and his Laws of ecclesiastical polity. Ostensibly another work of anti-Presbyterian polemic, and self-consciously presented as but the logical outcome of premises and assumptions basic to the conformist defence of the church since Whitgift, Hooker’s book, in fact, effectively recast the public worship and piety of the English church, the vision of the Christian community instantiated within it, and the relation of that church to its own past and the church of Rome. It also produced a vision of the clerical function no longer dominated by preaching. For all his avowed conservatism, Hooker’s was a radical vision, that, on certain topics, put him at almost as great a variance with previous conformist thought as with puritanism. The result was not readily reconcilable with the tenets of predestinarian orthodoxy or commonplace. Despite, or perhaps we should say, because of that, predestination was not a subject upon which Hooker chose to dwell in the Polity. However, that actual or potential incommensurability did not go unnoticed by some of his more reformed contemporaries, and when Andrew Willett brought the subject up, in the course of a screed which accused Hooker of all sorts of popish or crypto-popish error, Hooker felt compelled to respond. He did so in the uncompleted, and therefore unpublished, Dublin fragment. The fragment is a deeply ambiguous, perhaps even genuinely ambivalent, and very likely duplicitous text, the depths of which have been plumbed to best effect in a brilliant book by Nigel Voak.32 32

Lake, Anglicans and puritans?; P. Lake, ‘Presbyterianism, the idea of a national church and the argument from divine right’, in P. Lake and M. Dowling, eds., Protestantism and the national church in sixteenth century England (London, 1987); P. Lake, ‘Business as usual? The immediate reception of Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 52 (2007), pp. 456–86; P. Lake, ‘The “Anglican Moment”? Richard Hooker and the ideological watershed of the 1590s’, in Stephen Platten, ed., Anglicanism and the western Christian tradition (Norwich, 2003), pp. 90–121, 229–33; Nigel Voak, Richard Hooker and reformed theology: a study of reason, will and grace (Oxford, 2003). I take this last to be as close to a definitive account of these issues as we are likely to get. It certainly renders my own attempt (in Anglicans and Puritans?) to address something like the same issues both inadequate and jejune.

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However, other of Hooker’s contemporaries were not so reticent about the issue, and the early 1590s saw a direct assault on some of the central tenets of Calvinist orthodoxy being launched in London, at court and Paul’s Cross, by Lancelot Andrewes and Samuel Harsnet. Thence the dispute spread to Cambridge University where William Whitaker delivered a point by point refutation of Harsnet’s sermon before a distinguished lay audience which included the Earl of Essex. Whitaker’s screed then provoked a response within the university, first from William Barrett, and then from Peter Baro. Thus began the affair that culminated in the Lambeth Articles. If Whitaker’s speech was an attempt to attract the support of the Essexian tendency at court, the Cecils, père et fils, became engaged on the other side, and the affair ended with the queen threatening Whitgift with a praemunire for daring to define the doctrinal position of the English church without royal authority.33 What we are seeing here was an attempt, started in London by Andrewes and Harsnet, two men with court connections, to turn the current wave of anti-puritanism into an equally strong wave of anti-Calvinism, extending the newly triumphant conformist assault on the puritans over the issues of conformity and church government into an equally aggressive campaign on the theology of grace. The aim was to equate certain opinions on predestination with a newly virulent sense of the puritan threat, and then to use the current wave of anti- puritanism to outlaw those same doctrinal opinions now deemed divisively and subversively puritan. In effect, this was to invert the puritan position on these matters, which on the basis of the assumed Calvinism of the church of England’s doctrine, had asserted that, with the English reformation having been fully realised in the realm of doctrine, all that remained was to complete it in the realm of discipline or church government. Now here was a certain sort of avant-garde conformist arguing that not only were puritan views on church government a filthy foreign import, a strain of subversive and populist poison introduced into the English church straight from Geneva, but that the predestinarian theology that currently passed for orthodox was another example of the same syndrome; a nexus of error brought in from abroad and justified by the spurious and excessive authority falsely attributed by the puritans to various foreign reformed divines, Calvin and Beza prominent amongst them. This was a considerable risk, because as a number of scholars, perhaps most notably Patrick Collinson, Nicholas Tyacke and Diarmaid 33

Lake, ‘The “Anglican Moment”’. I hope to deal with these matters at length elsewhere.

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MacCulloch, but also long before them the Georges,34 have pointed out, an essentially predestinarian soteriology had been accepted as orthodox throughout Elizabeth’s reign by a whole range of divines and laypeople who could not remotely be accused of being puritans. In order to succeed, therefore, the likes of Harsnet and Andrewes, and then of Barrett and Baro, would have had to convince a good many such people – Archbishop Whitgift prominent amongst them – that they had been in error, which was something they signally failed to do. The resulting exchanges were scarcely a success for either side. Amongst the anti-Calvinist insurgents, Barrett withdrew to the continent and converted to Catholicism and Baro was driven from the university with Whitgift’s connivance. Harsnet got the dressing-down of his life from Whitgift, and, as he told the 1624 parliament, never handled the crucial issues in public again. Anti-Calvinists like John Overall, Whitaker’s successor as Regius Professor of Divinity, and Lancelot Andrewes, however, lived to fight another day. As for the Calvinists, the failure of the Lambeth Articles to turn previously shared assumptions and presumed consensus into numbered doctrinal points, formal guidelines within which all future discussion of the theology of grace would have to be conducted, left the way open for the likes of Overall and Andrewes to raise their heads above the parapet and nibble away at the de facto Calvinist hegemony that still prevailed in the Jacobean church. In 1599, Overall again said some quite remarkably provocative things. Hauled before the Consistory, the heads found that, since the Lambeth Articles had failed to achieve any sort of official standing, there was nothing they could do, except impotently bluster and admonish. In a brilliant article, Anthony Milton has shown how, throughout the next reign, in a series of anonymous position papers, which circulated widely in manuscript, Overall continued to do exactly the same thing, fostering the anti-Calvinist cause by stealth.35 As we shall see in Part I, the court sermons of Lancelot Andrewes performed something of the same function, in broad daylight. Also in the late 1590s, John Howson performed a similar manoeuvre, trying to drive a coach and horses though the sermon-centric, emergently 34 35

C. H. and Katherine George, The protestant mind of the English reformation (Princeton, NJ, 1961); also see Lake, ‘Calvinism and the English church’. Anthony Milton, ‘“Anglicanism” by stealth: the career and influence of John Overall’, in K. Fincham and P. Lake, eds., Religious politics in post-reformation England (Woodbridge, 2006), pp. 159–76. On Andrewes see Nicholas Tyacke, ‘Lancelot Andrewes and the myth of Anglicanism’, in P. Lake and M. Questier, eds., Conformity and orthodoxy in the English church, c. 1560–1660 (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 5–33.

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Sabbatarian, style of piety that was coming to characterise great swathes of the late Elizabethan church. He did so by aggressively championing the status of the church as a house of prayer rather than as a site of preaching, a mere lecture hall, as he put it, and by lauding the full cycle of holy days prescribed by the national church, in preference to the narrow emphasis on Sabbath-day worship that Howson took to be typical of the puritans. Again, here was a vision of the clerical role, and of public worship, no longer dominated by preaching. Like the earlier kerfuffle about predestination, this one, too, started in London, with two sermons at Paul’s Cross, before being transferred back to Oxford, where Howson was vice chancellor, and Henry Airay, the fearsome moderate puritan provost of Queens, mobilised a rout of younger, puritan-inclined fellows against him, much like Whitaker and the other Calvinist heads had done to Barrett and Baro in Cambridge. The result in Oxford, just as it had been in Cambridge, was something of a draw. While Howson’s views went unanathematised, his career remained under a cloud for some years. To the George Abbotts of this world, he was a marked man.36 If we put all of these straws in the wind together with Hooker’s Polity, we start to see a gathering assault on Elizabethan reformed orthodoxy. In sermons preached in prominent London pulpits, as well as in print, a range of coming men in the conformist camp sought to use the fiercely anti-puritan mood of the moment to change the subject from Presbyterianism and non-conformity to central features of the reformed consensus of the late Elizabethan church, which were now to be typecast as puritan. Crudely put, through the deployment of the anti-puritan rhetoric of the day, the likes of Hooker, Andrewes, Harsnet and Howson were trying to turn an anti-puritan moment into an anti-Calvinist one. Or rather they were trying to style as puritan a whole range of doctrines, assumptions and practices that had not been thought of in that way before. In so doing, they developed and announced, to what turned out to be a rather hostile world, many of the central features of what would come to be called English Arminian or Laudian religion. While nearly of the people involved in these manoeuvres – Harsnet, Andrewes, Hooker, Howson, Hadrian Saravia – enjoyed some sort of, 36

Lake, ‘The “Anglican Moment”?’; C. M. Dent, Protestant reformers in Elizabethan Oxford (Oxford, 1983), pp. 208–18. On Howson and Abbot see Kenneth Fincham and Nicholas Cranfield, eds., ‘John Howson’s answers to Archbishop Abbot’s accusations at his “trial” before James I at Greenwich, 10 June 1615’, in Camden Miscellany, Camden 4th series, 34, Camden Miscellany, 29 (London, 1987), pp. 319–41. For the best and most recent account of the Lambeth Articles see Nicholas Tyacke, ‘The Lambeth Articles (1595) and the doctrinal stance of the Church of England’, English Historical Review, 137 (2022), pp. 1022–117.

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often quite close, connection to Whitgift and Bancroft, we are probably not dealing here with the workings of a coherent faction, directed from the top down, but rather with a group of freelance men on the move; reacting dialectically and dialogically against many of the central aspects of contemporary reformed culture; chaffing against the conventional limits that that body of shared assumptions had (to that point) placed upon the conformist defence of the English church; rejecting, with genuine revulsion, what they took to be the excesses of the puritan godly; and consequently seeking to exploit the extreme anti-puritanism of the moment in order to be able to think and, more importantly, to say, things that had previously been pretty much unsayable. That the whole thing, at best, went off at half cock, was due to a number of factors, but perhaps most importantly because their erstwhile mentors and patrons just did not agree with them. Both Bancroft and Whitgift remained formal predestinarians in theology – if Leif Dixon wants to know what a ‘credal Calvinist’ looks like, he should look again at Whitgift or Bancroft – and while neither of them wanted to make the church of England a harsher environment for the likes of Andrewes or Harsnet to thrive in, they were not about to sanction or promote the sort of sweeping ideological change that these men were trying to initiate.37 The outcome was something of a fudge, the nature and consequences of which have been rendered familiar by the work of Anthony Milton, Nicholas Tyacke, Kenneth Fincham, Peter McCullough, Lori Anne Ferrell and others.38 Andrewes and Neile, Overall and Buckeridge, and latterly Howson and Harsnet, were all able to make their way into the establishment of the Jacobean church, and articulate, in some of the most prominent pulpits in the land, the central values of what I have termed avant-garde conformity.39 But they did so without mounting a direct challenge to the predestinarian hegemony that continued to characterise the Jacobean and even early Caroline church.40 Their presence at or near the centre of the ecclesiastical establishment, even during the archiepiscopates 37 38

39

40

See Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, pp. 33–4. Also Tyacke, ‘Lancelot Andrewes’. Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists; Milton, Catholic and reformed; Fincham, Prelate as pastor; Peter MacCullough, Sermons at court (Cambridge, 1998); Peter MacCullough, ‘Avant garde conformity in the 1590s’, in Milton, ed., The Oxford history of Anglicanism, vol. 1, pp. 380–94; Lori Anne Ferrell, Government by polemic: James I, the king’s preachers and the rhetorics of conformity (Stanford, CA, 1998). P. Lake, ‘Lancelot Andrewes, John Buckeridge and avant garde conformity at the court of James I’, in L. L. Peck, ed., The mental world of the Jacobean court (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 113–33, quotations at 303–8. For the notion of Calvinist hegemony rather than ‘consensus’ see Lake, ‘Calvinism and the English church’. And for the central insight that what was at stake here was not so much agreement about what one ought to believe or say on the subject of predestination as a sort of ‘negative consensus’,

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of George Abbott and Toby Matthew, and latterly in the increasingly coherent and purposive form of the so–called Durham House faction,41 provides a discernible link between the avant garde of the 1590s and the emergent Laudianism of the later 1620s and 1630s, which is one reason this book opens with an analysis of Andrewes’ XLVI sermons. It is, of course, remarkable just how many of the major players in the ‘rise of Arminianism’ – Andrewes, Overall, Harsnet, Neile, Montague, Howson – had been either central participants in, or, at the very least, interested spectators of, the disputes of the 1590s. The relative prudence, indeed one might even say stealth, of their subsequent behaviour undoubtedly owed a good deal to the bruising experience of the 1590s, the memory of which probably goes a good way towards explaining why the next full-frontal assault on Calvinist orthodoxy had to wait until an outbreak of heavily politicised anti-puritanism at least as intense as anything that had happened during the 1590s. This time around the crisis was caused by the Spanish match, or rather by the virulent response elicited by the match from many erstwhile moderate puritans and evangelical Calvinists. These were men in whom protestant or even puritan zeal had not precluded, but had rather prompted, an active involvement in a variety of local and national, secular and ecclesiastical establishments. In short, they were men upon whose loyalty, obedience and zeal the regime had previously been able to rely for the maintenance of various sorts of order. This was the dispensation evoked (and perhaps somewhat idealised) in Collinson’s Religion of protestants. It was a concordat broken, not by the rise of Laudianism or Arminianism, but rather by the Palatinate crisis and James’ response thereto. Now no longer containable by the carrot-and-stick policies, the balance of one faction against another, that were the essence of James’ kingcraft, the overt opposition of such men to the match made them seem like puritans indeed, charter members of the populist conspiracy to undermine royal and episcopal authority which James had always been convinced was out there, and which now seemed altogether too close to home.42

41 42

a common sense of what it was unacceptable to hold or publicly maintain, see David Como, ‘Puritans, predestination and the construction of orthodoxy in early seventeenth century England’, in Lake and Questier, eds., Conformity and orthodoxy, pp. 64–87; also see Como, ‘Predestination and politics in Laud’s London’, Historical Journal, 46 (2003), pp. 263–94. For which see Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, chapter 5. On James’ style of rule see K. Fincham and P. Lake, ‘The ecclesiastical policy of James I’, Journal of British Studies, 24 (1985), pp. 169–207. On the impact of the Spanish match see Peter Lake, ‘Constitutional consensus and puritan opposition in the 1620s: Thomas Scott and the Spanish match’, Historical Journal, 25 (1982), pp. 805–25; Thomas Cogswell, ‘England and the Spanish match’, in Cust and Hughes, eds., Conflict in early Stuart England, pp. 107–33.

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This played into the hands of those avant-garde conformist or protoLaudian bishops around the king who had been warning throughout the reign about the puritan threat. And it was at the height of the crisis, not so much about the match, as about the prospect of war with Spain, that the first direct assault on the Calvinist orthodoxy of the post-reformation church since Harsnet and Andrewes, Barrett and Baro in the 1590s was launched by Richard Montague in his two books A new gag for an old goose and Appello Caesarem. The furore that those texts provoked became integrally mixed up in the wider political crisis of the 1620s, in ways that have been well chronicled elsewhere.43 Certainly, this is not the place to repeat that story. Suffice it to say that that crisis made it all the easier for various Arminians and proto-Laudians to make their pitch to the king, that, in the face of the outbreak of populist disorder and puritan demagoguery with which he was confronted, Laudianism provided by far the most acute diagnosis of what was wrong, and by far the most effective treatment for a kingdom plunged into disorder and dysfunction by the crisis of the 1620s.

The Laudian Offer-Sheet, or Matthew Wren Previews the Personal Rule Probably the best and most overt single example of that pitch for royal support made by the Laudians in the late 1620s is provided by a quite remarkable sermon preached before Charles I, early in 1628, by Matthew Wren.44 Wren lambasted ‘them that pretend (forsooth) to fear God, but yet fear not the king’.45 Since humanity was comprised of both ‘bodies’ and ‘spirits’, Wren proclaimed that our fear of God and the king had to take a physical, as well as a spiritual, form, and that meant that, when in the presence of God, ‘I will adore thee with such expressions of humility and reverence, as of right do appertain to a creature to his creator.’46 43 44

45 46

Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, chapter 6; Cust, Charles I, pp. 82–103; Conrad Russell, Parliaments and English politics, 1621–1629 (Oxford, 1979). The title page dates the sermon to 1627 but Sue-Ellen Towers has re-dated it to 1628 on the basis that it was preached on Sunday 17 February, and Sunday fell on that day in 1628, and not 1627. As Towers points out, the licensed manuscript of the sermon survives in Trinity College, Cambridge, with a personal licence from the king, while the printed title page proclaims the sermon to have been ‘printed by command’. S. Mutchow Towers, Control of religious printing in early Stuart England (Woodbridge, 2003), p. 169. That the title page dates it to 1627 implies that it was rushed through the press immediately after its delivery at court. I should like to thank Nicholas Tyacke for many discussions on this point. Wren, A sermon (1627/8), p. 3. Ibid., pp. 14–15.

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‘’Tis not enough that our minds and affections are inwardly endued with it, but such expressions withal we must make, as that performance of the duty may be witnessed.’ ‘The duty we acknowledge is, that we do fear God, and but by that which is to be read in our outward deportment, neither God nor man will bear us witness, that we do fear him.’47 All of which led Wren to an excoriating condemnation of what he termed ‘the epidemial profanation of our times’ and, in particular, the hypocrisy of the puritans: Holiness good store (forsooth) in heart and in mind, religion in the belly and the brain, oh, we are so full of that, we are ready to burst with it, it runs out many times at our mouth, with ‘stand farther off, I am holier than thou’; yea, and we are good men (you must know) and exceeding godly, such as fear God, and hear his word duly. That’s true, we have a great deal of religion in our ears too. But yet higher or lower though we have none. None upon our heads, for a due reverence before him; none in our knees, to bow at his blessed name; none for our bodies, to cast them down and worship. Especially not in his house, in the most sacred presence of God. No, the less a-do there, the better, the less superstition. Do but come in confidently, and, without any more stir, sit down, and be covered and hear, and who dare say that we fear not God?

All of which left no room for what Wren termed ‘adoration or any beauty of holiness’ in God’s ‘worship’.48 Faced with the demand for such expressions of outward worship, ‘for uncovering, and standing, and kneeling, and bowing’, the puritans replied that this was all needless ‘for God who, as himself is a spirit, and so he requires but to be worshiped in spirit and truth, and he knows our hearts well enough’.49 This was a complete misapprehension, for what was required for true worship was a total congruity between inward and outward. Christians must have both the fear of God ‘truly within, in their hearts, and, without all profane contempt, express it also duly, in the outward worship of him’.50 Left unaddressed, the lack of such due worship would, in time, Wren warned, lead to the loss of all religion;51 indeed, it would not merely lead to, it was itself a form of, atheism. After all, the fear of God required ‘the worship of him and that due worship of him required so much beauty and 47 48 49 50 51

Ibid., p. 11. Ibid., pp. 15–16. Ibid., p. 18. Ibid., p. 20. Ibid., p. 19.

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reverence’. And that meant that all our ‘jack-fellow’52 familiarity with our God, ‘all our saucy and careless demeanour before him, all negligent and perfunctory performance of our religion, all slight and unlawful expressions in it, as in God’s presence, are the foulest scorn and abasement that may be, ungodding him no less in true construction, then does rash and unadvised blasphemy’.53 In a remarkable passage, Wren epitomised and paraphrased decades of anti-puritan satire and stereotyping, to characterise the pervasive hypocrisy of the puritans as a direct product of their lack of due worship before God. This it was that prompted them to burst (in private) with envy and malice, with hatred and all uncharitableness, to backbite and slander, to cross and hinder, to censure and condemn, to wallow also in oppression and usury, in falsehood and wrong, in lust and uncleanness, in pride and hypocrisy, in contempt and disobedience, in schism and faction, both ecclesiastical and civil, and yet, notwithstanding all this, to make full accompt, that our running to church and crying out for sermons, our defying the devil, and railing against Antichrist, our pretending of conscience, and finding fault with the state and times, our singing of psalms, and talking of scripture, our casting up of the eye, and making of sour faces, must be proof enough to any man, that we fear God extraordinarily.54

In their own eyes the puritans might be ‘the great professors of this religion, they that take upon themselves, above others, to be this God’s chiefest sons and servants, and to have all the best consciences by far’, but in reality they represented a clear and present danger not merely to order in the church but also in the state. The puritans ‘stumble and make a doubt of performing such a reasonable and seemly worship to their God; and as for their king, they not only stand in great suspense, but dispute it also fiercely, whether (for all his vicinity to God) he can of right be invested with so divine a privilege’.55 So great was their sense of inherent spiritual superiority that they now ‘count it a shrewd wrong to be but told what’s right’ and, if any display, to God, ‘a better devotion’, or to the king, ‘a better allegiance’ than they, they were immediately besmeared with the charges of ‘dangerous superstition’ and ‘ambitious flattery’. By this logic ‘they reckon them that stand least upon points with God in worshiping of him, the godliest men and the best Christians’ and ‘them that stand most 52 53 54 55

Ibid., p. 17. Ibid., p. 33. Ibid., pp. 23–4. Ibid., p. 34.

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upon points with the king, against obeying of him, the best subjects, or (as it now goes current in their own coin) “good patriots”’.56 All of which, Wren triumphantly concluded, was scarcely surprising. Since the king was ‘the very image of that eminence in God for which God is feared’,57 it was therefore ‘impossible for him that feareth not the king, whom he hath seen, to fear God, whom he hath not seen’.58 And so, Wren muttered darkly, ‘without this other, the fear of the king’, it was doubtful if anyone – and here, as always, the primary referent was the puritans – would ever truly see the face of God.59 But the opposite was also true, for there could be ‘no right fear of the king, if God be not first feared. He that fears God, but for fear of the king and his laws, in truth makes the king his God, and he that fears the king more than God, in heart wishes there were neither king nor God.’60 This was to invert the traditional conformist argument that since the current standards of outward worship and reverence in the church were matters indifferent, and thus subject to royal authority, failure to observe them represented disobedience to the crown. As Wren was quick to remind his audience that was still true,61 but it was no longer quite the main point. For Laudians like Wren, rather than obedience to the ruler it was now the expression of an awed reverence towards the presence of God that provided the major rationale for outward conformity in the church. And so, if, for much of this sermon, Wren grounded the irreverence displayed by the puritans towards God in the church, on their refusal to cede due honour, reverence and obedience to the king in the state, the reverse was also true. The English – but especially the puritans amongst them – would never become good subjects until they first became good Christians, worshiping God in the approved Laudian manner. ‘For what ’ere is pretended for the king, yet it is fraud, not fear, craft, not allegiance, plain brokage, and not obedience, unless it first issue from the throne of heaven, spring from true devotion, and be founded upon religion.’ Likewise, ‘what ere is professed for God (as where have we not swarms now of great professors?) yet it is not fear, but faction, not devotion, but hypocrisy, not religion, but abomination, unless it fall down

56 57 58 59 60 61

Ibid., p. 35. Ibid., p. 29. Ibid., p. 27. Ibid., p. 29. Ibid., p. 41. Ibid., p. 37.

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before the throne upon earth also, be the life of spotless allegiance and the quickening soul of all civil obedience’.62 There, in the linked outcomes of ‘true devotion and right worship’ in the church, and of ‘spotless allegiance’ in civil affairs, are the dual aims of the Laudian reformation of the 1630s, being articulated, with crystal clarity, in 1628. Wren’s sermon was, in effect, a manifesto, or offer sheet, for the Laudian programme, being proffered to the king, in the midst of the political turmoil of the late 1620s, not merely as the right thing to do for the church, but as a way out of his current political difficulties as well. As re-dated by Sue-Ellen Towers, the sermon falls into the middle of the period, after the collection of the forced loan, when, as Richard Cust has shown, the council and court were riven by debates about whether, in order to continue the war effort, the regime should have renewed recourse to parliament or continue with the ‘new counsels’, of which the loan itself was such a spectacular example. Cust shows that Laud himself was prominent in arguing for the latter course. Wren’s sermon was thus intended to play a role, perhaps even a major role, in persuading the king to press on without parliament, and in explaining just how such a course of action, once adopted, could be justified to the political nation. Except that, as Cust explains, very much against his own political instincts, not to mention those of the Duke of Buckingham, at the last Charles was persuaded to revert to the traditional, parliamentary way.63 We might, then, see Wren’s sermon as a bid to provide the ecclesiastical counterpart, and theological mood music, for what in the end was a political road not taken; at least, not until the 1630s. Having summoned the 1628 parliament, in order to secure parliamentary funding for the war, Charles did not do what might be thought to have been the logical thing and simply throw Richard Montague to the wolves. Instead, he protected him, first as a royal chaplain, and later by promoting him to the episcopal bench. But neither did the king endorse anything like an explicitly Arminian or proto-Laudian agenda. If subsidies were to be secured from a House of Commons anything but well disposed to the likes of Montague or Wren, then the prospect of a return to something like a moderate version of the (‘Calvinist’) status quo ante had to be left on the table. Thus, just as, in the Duke of Buckingham’s absence in France, Joseph Hall been elevated to the see of Norwich in 62 63

Ibid., pp. 41–2. Richard Cust, The forced loan and English politics (Oxford, 1987), pp. 72–90.

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November 1627, so now Archbishop Abbott was allowed to play a leading role in the 1628 parliament, hauling over the coals the likes of Sibthorpe and Mainwaring, proto-Laudian divines who had used the crisis created by the Forced Loan to weaponise what will emerge in Part I as the political theology of Lancelot Andrewes in order to come out with explicitly absolutist accounts of the subject’s duty to obey the king and pay up. In 1629, Sir Humphrey May reported in parliament that Laud and Neile had appeared on their knees before the Privy Council to deny that they were Arminians of any sort. Richard Montague was reported as having made a similar claim. Meanwhile the bishops preaching sermons before the Lords included the likes of Joseph Hall and John Williams; the latter of whom had also gone out of his way to establish his moderate Calvinist bona fides in 1627 by penning his letter to the vicar of Grantham and then repeated the trick in 1628 by publishing his Perseverantia sanctorum. Williams was also one of just three bishops – the other two were Abbot and Harsnet – to vote for the petition of right.64 During this period, while things hung in the balance, it remained possible, not merely to preach court sermons glossing the Thirty-nine Articles in a Calvinist sense, but also to publish the results, as Henry Leslie had done in his sermon on regeneration of 1627, which appeared in print, complete with a dedication to the Earl of Montgomery.65 Different versions of a proclamation calling in Montague’s works were drafted, some more critical of Montague than others. Similarly, Joseph Hall, Robert Sanderson, and even John Cotton, penned versions of a ‘moderate’, hypothetical, universalist take on Calvinist orthodoxy.66 John Preston had taken a similar line at the York House conference.67 These position papers were designed to fulfil essentially the same function that the Lambeth Articles had been intended to serve in 1595; that is to say, provide basic propositions to which all the major players should accede, and function thereafter as limits or 64

65 66

67

Cust, Forced loan, pp. 85–90; Richard Cust, ‘Charles I, the Privy Council and the parliament of 1628’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 2 (1992), pp. 25–50; Cust, Charles I, pp.  62–133; Mark Parry, ‘The bishops and the Duke of Buckingham, 1624–1626’, History, 100 (2015), pp. 640–66. Henry Leslie, A sermon preached before his majesty at Wokin on Tuesday 28 August 1627 (1627). Peter Lake, ‘The moderate and irenic case for religious war: Joseph Hall’s Via Media in context’, in S. Amussen and M. Kishlansky, eds., Political culture and cultural politics in in early modern England (Manchester, 1995), pp. 55–83; Peter Lake, ‘Serving God and the times: the Calvinist conformity of Robert Sanderson’, Journal of British Studies, 27 (1988), pp. 81–116; Como, ‘Puritans, predestination’. See Jonathan Moore, English hypothetical universalism: John Preston and the softening of reformed theology (Grand Rapids, MI, 2007); now see the seminal account in Hampton, Grace and conformity, esp. chapters 2, 3, 4.

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parameters within which all further discussion of the controverted points would be contained. Certainly, any of the proposed forms of words could have provided the basis for some sort of doctrinal concordat, whereby Montague would repudiate his more extreme opinions, embrace the proffered formulae as what he had really meant or believed all along, and thus make the issue of ‘Arminianism’ disappear. In so doing, many of these men – Hall and Preston almost certainly – were serving what one might term the Herbert or Pembroke interest; a line that wanted the internal divisions around Arminianism to be finessed away to allow a return to a sort of godly, and national, unity behind the war with Spain. Others, like Warwick and Saye, at whose behest the York House conference had been called, wanted the religious issue settled firmly in the Calvinist interest before going forward. As Christopher Thompson has shown, these divisions were to surface again in the 1629 parliament.68 In the event, Montague’s Appello Caesarem was called in by a royal proclamation of 17 January 1629, which studiously avoided any criticism of his actual opinions. This was the day after Montague himself (along with Sibthorpe, Mainwaring, Cosin and Thomas Jackson) had all received a full royal pardon. In return, Montague was not forced to accept any particular gloss on his own position, or on that of the church of England, still less to embrace the articles of the synod of Dort, as some of the wilder rumours proclaimed he was about to do. On the contrary, Charles set his face against any such attempt further to clarify the position of the English church on the controverted issues. In a declaration prefixed to the articles of religion, of November 1628, and referenced in his later proclamation of January 1629, Charles had affirmed that ‘the articles of the church of England … do contain the true doctrine of the church of England, agreeable to God’s word’ and had decreed that, since everyone who had subscribed thereto had, by definition, accepted ‘the true, usual, literal meaning of said articles’, in future ‘all curious search be laid aside and these disputes [about predestination] be shut up in God’s promises, as they be generally set forth to us in holy scriptures, and the general meaning of the articles of the church of England … and that no man hereafter shall either print, or preach, to draw the article aside anyway, but shall submit to it in the plain and full meaning thereof,

68

Christopher Thompson, ‘The divided leadership of the House of Commons in 1629’, in Kevin Sharpe, ed., Faction and parliament (Oxford, 1978), pp. 245–84.

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and shall not put his sense or comment to be the meaning of the article, but shall take it in the literal and grammatical sense’.69 ‘If, by reading, preaching, or making books, either pro or contra, concerning these differences, men begin anew to dispute’, Charles warned, ‘we shall take such order with them, and those books, that they shall wish they had never thought upon these needless controversies’. While the appointments of Laud to London, Neile to Winchester, Harsnet to York and Montague himself to Chichester left no doubt as to which way the winds of episcopal and archepiscopal preferment were blowing, as Charles himself admitted, ‘in those curious points, in which the present differences lie, men of all sorts take the articles of the church of England to be for them’.70 That left available the question of what the declaration of November, and the line taken in the proclamation of January, would actually mean in practice. For what were fairly obvious political reasons, this liminal period lasted through the end of the 1629 parliament, with Charles hoping that what Christopher Thompson terms ‘the cosmetic measures taken before the session’ would be enough to satisfy the Commons.71 They weren’t, but it was only after parliament had been dissolved in March that the die was finally cast. Thus, when, later in March 1630, Bishop Davenant preached a sermon at court glossing article 17 in what he took to be the accepted (moderately Calvinist) sense, he was not only informed that he had gravely offended the king, he was also denounced by Samuel Harsnet before the Privy Council for breaching the royal declaration and forced to beg royal forgiveness on his knees before Charles himself. By the summer, presentation copies of Lancelot Andrewes’ XCVI sermons, edited by Laud and Buckeridge and dedicated to the king, were being distributed to the great and the good. This edition of Andrewes’ sermons, curated by Buckeridge and Laud, was the summa or magnum opus, which I (mistakenly) asserted in an article of 1992, Laudianism lacked. When I made that comment, I was stupid enough not to have given anywhere near enough thought to the circumstances under which that Andrewes edition was first printed, and unlucky enough to have been writing some years before the publication of 69

70 71

S. R. Gardiner, The constitutional documents of the puritan revolution (Oxford, 1962), pp. 75–6; ‘By the king, a proclamation for the suppressing of a book, entitled Apello Caesarem, or, An appeal to Caesar’, 17 January 1629. Gardiner, Constitutional documents, p. 76. Thompson, ‘The divided leadership’.

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Peter McCullough’s seminal article on that topic.72 In other words, I was reading Andrewes’ sermons as exclusively late Elizabethan and Jacobean documents, each preached at a particular time and place and using them as a window into ‘the mental world of the Jacobean court’. As such, I argued, they provided a crucial connection between the world of Richard Hooker in the 1590s and that of Montague, Laud and Wren in the 1620s and 1630s.73 But as Peter McCullough points out, in the form in which they have come down us – religiously reproduced in the Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology edition of Andrewes’ works – the XCVI sermons is not a Jacobean, but rather a Caroline text; one admittedly based entirely on things that Andrewes said and wrote during Elizabeth and James’ reigns, but shaped, after Andrewes’ death, by Laud and Buckeridge, at the behest of Charles I, into a definitive statement of their own – ‘Laudian’ – position, at the very moment when that position was about to become the animating ideology of the Personal Rule. This provides the other reason why the book opens with an extended analysis of the Andrewes volume. On the one hand, it might seem grotesque to compare the high moral seriousness and theological sophistication, the patristic learning, philological precision and sonorous prose of Andrewes’ sermons to Wren’s screed of 1628, or indeed to much of what follows. However, it must be admitted that, like other of the texts analysed in this book – one thinks here particularly of the sermons of Thomas Laurence, Robert Skinner and Peter Hausted – Wren’s sermon does indeed read rather like a Lancelot Andrewes knock-off. Moreover, as we shall see, pace Nicholas Lossky, Andrewes’ own sermons contained enough intemperately hyperbolic exaltation of royal authority, and more than enough rebarbative denunciation of puritan popularity and presumption, hypocrisy and sacrilege, to render such a comparison far from unreasonable. But if, like the Wren sermon, Laud and Buckeridge’s edition of Andrewes operated as a sort of Laudian offer sheet, proffered to a monarch brought to the end of his tether by a fatal combination of puritan zeal and tribunician popularity, it also provided something that mere squibs like Wren’s sermon could not. For, as gathered together by Laud and Buckeridge, Andrewes’ sermons represent as close to a systematic statement of the Laudian position as it 72 73

Peter McCullough, ‘Making dead men speak: Laudianism, print and the works of Lancelot Andrewes, 1626–1642’, Historical Journal, 41 (1998), pp. 401–24. Lake, ‘Lancelot Andrewes, John Buckeridge’.

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is possible to get. As Peter McCullough has argued, in organising the sermons around the great feasts of the Christian year, Laud and Buckeridge gave the volume the appearance of a theologically rounded account of the Christian life, as lived through the public ordinances of the visible church and the basic rhythms of the liturgy; a comprehensive and coherent vision of true Christianity, of the life of faith, of the nature and salvific mission of the visible church, and of the right relation of that church to secular authority, and, therefore, of what true order would look like in a properly reformed Christian church and commonwealth. All of it grounded on what Andrewes presented as Trinitarian and Christological first principles, absolutely fundamental to the Christian faith. Furthermore, the edition wrapped the Laudian position not only in the memory of the sainted Bishop Andrewes, but also of King James. In his funeral sermon preached by Buckeridge and in the dedication to Charles himself, Andrewes’ virtue was compared to that of the greatest fathers of the church, and his learning lauded to the skies.74 This lent the, often aggressively controversial, positions contained within the text at least some claim on a long-standing, late Elizabethan, Jacobean, and indeed, with the current dedication to Charles I, a newly minted Caroline, respectability. After all, not only had Andrewes been James’ favourite preacher, most of these sermons had been delivered at court, many in the royal presence. Then and there ‘they had given great content to the religious and judicious ears of your royal father’, and here and now they had attracted the patronage of his equally religious and learned son, who had not only given ‘strict charge’ that Andrewes’ papers be ‘overlooked’ and ‘all that were found perfect’ printed, but continued to look benignly on their publication, even now, as they were about to appear before the public. This was important ‘“because the days are evil”’, and because ‘too many among the people choose rather to have their humour fed than their souls edified, and carry partial ears even to the church of God’,75 it was inevitable that ‘some will look asquint upon worth, and malign that which they cannot equal’. Accordingly, Laud and Buckeridge begged the king ‘to commend this work to your protection’, since, ‘under your majesty’s favour’, ‘we have been only servants … in making them ready for the press, but authors of nothing in them’.76 74 75 76

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, p. xvi. Ibid., p. xvii. Ibid., pp. xiv, xix

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In other words, the fault, if any fault there were, lay with the sainted Bishop Andrewes and Charles I, who was the real animating force behind the book, rather than with Laud and Buckeridge, who had merely been deputed, as loyal servants to the crown, to bring these sermons before the public. They dedicated them now to Charles in the ‘hope’ ‘that God will so bless your majesty in your government, your people in their loyalty, the preachers in their wisdom, added to zeal and diligence, that the hearts and hands of all men shall be joined together to preserve God’s worship in truth, your majesty’s throne in honour, the church in religious devotion, and all your people in religious obedience and union’.77 After the mayhem with which the 1629 parliament had just ended, and coming immediately before the decidedly controversial opinions outlined, with such subtlety, coherence and aggression, in the main body of the text, these were not the anodyne sentiments that, at first, they might appear. Thus, what rapidly became the Personal Rule opened with a comprehensive statement of intent, not so much, in the modern argot, a mere ‘mission statement’, but more a laying down of fundamental assumptions and first principles. For that reason this book opens with an extending reading of Andrewes’ XLVI sermons. Thereafter, as those principles were developed and applied, through the concrete policy initiatives, of the Personal Rule, accompanied by myriad macro- and micro-aggressions, inflicted both through the sort of polemical discourse analysed in this book and the workings of the church, and indeed of various secular courts, up to and including Star Chamber, it was all downhill from there. Certainly the Andrewes edition was not followed by any similarly magisterial statements of principle or intent, but rather by a whole slew of livres de circonstance, works of apologetic and polemic, pamphlets, sermons, precisely the sort of texts, in fact, out of which the XLVI sermons had itself been composed by Buckeridge and Laud. The reasons for this are not far to seek. Laud himself was notably careful about his public statements, and Neile not given to any sort of public theological pronouncement at all. Moreover, having once achieved, if not complete power over the church, then at least predominant influence within it, Laud, Neile and their episcopal colleagues became consumed by the transaction of business. As bishops, that is to say, as both administrators and, both local and court, politicians, they had their hands full; on the one hand, bending the arcane and proverbially resistant structures and 77

Ibid., pp. xviii–xix.

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mechanisms of the church to their purposes, and, on the other, playing the game of both local and court politics, in order to secure the consistent political backing necessary to bring reformation, Laudian style, to fruition. As John Fielding and Tom Webster have shown, in densely puritan areas like Essex or Northamptonshire it took a full court press, sustained by incessant episcopal attention, to bring local puritan ministers, and their lay supporters and acolytes, under control. In the diocese of London, when the intense gaze of Laud was replaced by that of the more distracted Juxon, things could slide backwards at an alarming rate. As explicated by the brilliant researches of Ann Hughes, the diary of Thomas Dugard shows how the somnolent regime of a seat-warming time-server like the aged Bishop Thornborough, combined with the proximity of active lay patrons like Lord Brooke or Viscount Saye and Sele, could allow the local activities of the godly, both clerical and lay, to proceed more or less uninterrupted throughout the Personal Rule.78 The other crucial factor here was the political risks involved in overt polemicising on the cutting edge of doctrinal and pietistic innovation. If memories of what had happened to Barrett and Baro in the 1590s had begun to fade, what had nearly happened to Richard Montague and Laud himself in the 1620s was there to remind people like Laud of the stakes. Indeed, the whole course of Laud’s career to this point had given him good reason to know that there were people out there who hated him, and that at the first sign of political trouble he might well be amongst the first to be sacrificed to the newly emboldened critics of the regime and its ecclesiastical policies. Letting other, lesser fry, take the risks and carry the can might well have seemed like a good idea. And here the instance of Andrewes’ sermons provides us with a paradigmatic example. Of course, Andrewes was no apparatchik, but he was dead, which meant that, as we have seen, a version of his position, assembled by Laud and Buckeridge, could be pushed above the parapet, complete with a dedication to the king that made Charles himself personally responsible for the decision to go public. In this way, a rendition of the Laudian position, red in tooth and claw, could be announced to the world, without any personal risk accruing to any living Laudian, and certainly not to Laud himself. And that leaves us with the terminological question. If the originator of the avant-garde conformist position was Hooker, and if the great 78

Ann Hughes, ‘Thomas Dugard and his circle in the 1630s: a “parliamentary–puritan” connexion’, Historical Journal, 29 (1986), pp. 771–93; John Fielding, ‘Opposition to the Personal Rule of Charles I: the diary of Robert Woodford’, Historical Journal, 31 (1988), pp. 769–88. Webster, Godly clergy, part III: ‘“These uncomfortable times”: conformity and the godly ministers, 1628–1638’.

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ideologist of what I am calling Laudianism was, in fact, not Laud, but Lancelot Andrewes, and if the drivers of ideological change during the Personal Rule were the men whose books and sermons are analysed in this book, why call the thing itself Laudianism? The answers to that question are various, and while none of them is, in itself, wholly satisfying, I think that, cumulatively, they make a decent case. The first reason is convenience. Since, as I hope to prove, what I am calling Laudianism did in fact exist as an identifiable and coherent theological and pietistic position, we have to call it something. Given the structure of the literature, the obvious candidate might be thought to be Arminianism. But since one of the major claims made by this book is that the phenomenon under discussion here is not satisfactorily characterised or defined solely in terms of the theology of grace, that will hardly do. Secondly, Laud has emerged from the most recent research,79 as well as from the vituperation directed at him by his contemporaries, as the presiding figure behind the ecclesiastical policies of the Personal Rule, to the furtherance and legitimation of which nearly all of the texts under discussion here were dedicated. Other people may have been impeached, imprisoned, driven into exile or hiding, but Laud alone was executed. Clearly his enemies, but not only his enemies, thought of him as the central organising figure. After all, the leading Laudian apologist, Peter Heylyn, was later to hail Laud as the English Cyprian in a book that, as Anthony Milton puts it, ‘doubled as an apologia for the Laudian movement’.80 Laud may have been notoriously reticent about his own theological views, but at every turn, from the mid-1620s on, he is to be found at the centre of the action. He was the presiding spirit, and the guiding administrative hand, behind the religious policies of the Personal Rule, and, when push came to shove in 1637, in his speech at the trial of Burton, Bastwick and Prynne, he produced a brief but pungent endorsement of all the central features of Laudianism as it will emerge in this book. 79

80

Here the stand-out work has been done by Kenneth Fincham and Leonie James. See James, ‘This great firebrand’: Laud and Scotland, 1637–1645 (Woodbridge, 2017); Fincham, The further correspondence of William Laud, Church of England Record Society, 23 (Woodbridge, 2018); Kenneth Fincham, ‘Annual accounts of the Church of England’, in Melanie Barber, Stephen Taylor and Gabriel Sewell, eds., From the reformation to the permissive society: a miscellany in celebration of the 400th anniversary of Lambeth Palace Library, Church of England Record Society, 18 (Woodbridge, 2010), pp. 63–149; Kenneth Fincham, ‘William Laud and the exercise of Caroline ecclesiastical patronage’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 51 (2000), pp. 69–93; Kenneth Fincham, ‘The restoration of the altars in the 1630s’, Historical Journal, 44 (2001), pp. 919–40. Also see Nicholas Tyacke, ‘Archbishop Laud’, in Kenneth Fincham, ed., The early Stuart Church (Basingstoke, 1993), pp. 51–70. Milton, Second reformation, p. 503.

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Added to which, the term Laudian already exists. Rather than some neologism, it seems both convenient and sensible to use it to refer to the entity being recuperated and analysed in this book. The most recently canvased alternative – ‘Carolinism’ – has not only failed to catch on, for what are, I think, fairly obvious reasons, but it was expressly designed to ‘save’ Laud from the taint of what is here being called Laudianism, the ‘blame’ for which was to be shifted wholly onto Charles I; a position with which I have no sympathy and which the research of Fincham and others has revealed to be nonsense.81 And so Laudianism it is.82 As for the book itself, Part I is an explication of the vision of true religion and the mission of the visible church contained in Andrewes’ XLVIsermons. Parts II to IV are based on the effusions, the official and semi-official dicta, of the Personal Rule, laced with the freelancing efforts of a variety of others, all seeking, in one way or another, to defend, extend or associate themselves with the official line. Part II is concerned with what the Laudians had to say about the divine presence in the world and the church, and the consequences thereof for the ordinances, public prayer and corporate worship of the visible church, in general, and in particular for the signature ecclesiastical policies of the Personal Rule; most notably the altar policy and the campaign against what was taken to be the ‘puritan’ Sabbath. Part II is thus organised around the dual conceits of holy places and holy times, and the consequences of the Laudians’ vision, and reform, of the church for their conception of the Christian community, and therefore of order in church and state. Part III deals with Laudian anti-puritanism, and represents an analysis of what we might term the defining other of the Laudian project. Accordingly, the structures and organising concerns of this part mirror those of the previous one. Part IV is concerned with the relationship between Laudianism as it will have emerged from the preceding analysis and the doctrine of predestination. This is primarily because of the substantive, indeed central, significance of that topic within the religious life of the period, and Laudianism in particular. But it is also because of the key role that ‘the rise of Arminianism’ played in the ground-breaking (‘revisionist’) work

81 82

Davies, Caroline captivity; for an effective critique of Davies’ claims see Fincham, ‘William Laud’, and Fincham, ‘The restoration of altars’. Also see Fincham and Tyacke, Altars restored. See the eminently sensible discussion of this issue in Ian Atherton’s seminal account of Viscount Scudamore, perhaps the best-documented and certainly the most well-known example of a lay Laudian, in Atherton’s Ambition and failure in Stuart England: the career of John first Viscount Scudamore (Manchester, 1999), pp. 76–9.

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of Nicholas Tyacke,83 and Conrad Russell, and in the subsequent reaction against that work; a reaction which has rendered both Arminianism, defined as a set of opinions about the theology of grace, and the question of the relationship of Arminianism thus defined with the wider ecclesiastical policies of the 1630s, controversial, in what are, in my view, largely unhelpful ways. Certainly, for all the very considerable insights of Nicholas Tyacke’s work,84 the disputes of the 1990s left more to be said on this question and Part IV is my attempt to say at least some of it. Part V is designed to disaggregate, or split, the materials so determinedly lumped together in the central three parts of the book. The aim here is to show not only that the conclusions reached here can survive the sceptical gaze of the splitter, but that the process of disaggregating these materials actually confirms and broadens those conclusions, showing, in outline at least, how, through the assemblage of a coalition of true believers and rabidly anti-puritan Calvinist conformists, of new converts and apostates, of hangers-on, turncoats and fellow travellers, ideological change, that is to say, the rise of the ideology delineated here, was actually effected. It also shows how, with the debacle in Scotland in full swing, the Laudian moment started to come apart at the seams, and how at least some of the major players responded to that process. I have deliberately postponed the analysis of the careers and background of my cast of characters until Part V, both to avoid repetition and to bring the prosopographical and factional analyses together in one place. 83

84

Not that Tyacke can accurately or adequately be characterised as a revisionist. There was a revisionist aspect to his early work on the rise of Arminianism. The appearance of Tyacke’s seminal article on ‘Puritanism, Arminianism and counter-revolution’ in Russell’s edited collection the Causes of the English civil war (London, 1973), pp. 119–143, together with the prominence of what came to be known as the Tyacke thesis in Russell’s own account of the 1620s (in his Parliaments and English politics) perhaps led to their views being equated in ways that obscured what were, even then, significant differences of emphasis. Certainly, Tyacke has always displayed a decidedly unrevisionist belief in the power of ideas, in this case of theology, and thus of ideological debate and division, to shape events. Moreover, for all that he was accused – by me, amongst others – of collapsing puritanism into the ‘Calvinist consensus’ of the early Stuart church, that was only ever true of his early work. Latterly, he has been a vocal proponent of the continuing existence, throughout the period, not merely of distinctively puritan bodies of thought and feeling, but of puritanism as something rather more like a movement, and certainly as a carrier of certain political values, and therefore as a focus for opposition to various, not merely religious, aspects of early Stuart rule. While initially I thought he might have pushed that case a bit far, latterly I have come around to his view of the matter. See his Aspects of English protestantism, c. 1530–1700 (Manchester, 2001), esp. chapters 1, 2 and 4. The positions advanced there have been considerably developed and explicated in his more recent articles: ‘The puritan paradigm of English politics, 1558–1642’, Historical Journal, 53 (2010), pp. 527–50 and ‘Revolutionary puritanism in Anglo-American perspective’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 78 (2015), pp. 745–69. Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, passim, esp. chapter 8.

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Part I

Laudianism: Where It Came From

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chapter 1

A Trinitarian and Incarnational Theology

The starting point for any discussion of the theological roots of what emerged as Laudianism is Lancelot Andrewes and the starting point for any discussion of the divinity of Lancelot Andrewes is Christ. For Andrewes’ was an intensely Christocentric and Trinitarian version of the life of faith, the nature and mission of the church and clergy, and indeed of order in church and state. Virtually everything that Andrewes believed about those subjects was grounded upon, and can be read off from, his handling of the figure of Christ. Christ was the mediator between a fallen humanity and a just and merciful God. Having fallen with the first Adam, all humankind rose with the second.1 The parties set in conflict by sin ‘are God and we; and now this day [Christmas Day] he is both. God before eternally, and now, to-day, man; and so both, and takes hold of both, and brings both together again.’2 By taking on our nature Christ opened up the possibility for all humanity to become once more, with him, the sons of God.3 By thus restoring the relationship between God and humankind, Christ had also ended the struggle which sin had caused between the different attributes of God. For with Adam’s fall ‘mercy and peace’ had been set at war with ‘truth and justice’. With two divine attributes for us and two against us, our salvation thus hung on the balance.4 Then Christ took on our nature ‘that … he might make to God … a complete, full, every way sufficient satisfaction’.5 Christ thus was a ‘a sacrifice – so, to be slain; a propitiatory sacrifice – so, to be eaten’,6 offered to God for the sins of the 1

2 3 4 5 6

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, pp. 216–17, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 5 April 1607. Also see vol. 1, p. 141, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 25 December 1614. For the first and second Adam see vol. 2, pp. 214–20, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 5 April 1607. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, p. 145, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 25 December 1614. Ibid., pp. 150–1. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, pp. 179–81, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 25 December 1616. Ibid., p. 184. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, p. 296, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 12 April 1612.

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world, a sacrifice that in fully satisfying God’s justice, reconciled it with his mercy. And so, in and through Christ, God’s mercy was finally enabled to emerge as the triumphantly predominant divine attribute.7 Christ, then, brought unity and peace between ‘heaven and earth’, God and fallen humanity,8 within the divine nature itself, and between the various persons of the Trinity, all now united in their saving purpose.9 Andrewes was adamant that Christ died for all.10 ‘The Lord hath laid upon him the iniquity of us all. “All”, “all”, even those that pass to and fro, and for all this regard neither him nor his passion.’11 This being so, the crucial question became ‘how to incorporate ourselves … how to have our part and fellowship in this trade or mystery’. Andrewes’ answer to that question was couched in predictably Christocentric terms. For, according to him, ‘the perfection of our knowledge is Christ’,12 but to come to this knowledge it was necessary, as Andrewes put it, to look on Christ ‘with the eye of faith’.13 In order to help his auditory do that, Andrewes presented them with a series of verbal tableaux drawn for the great climacterics of Christ’s progress ‘from the cratch to the cross’,14 many of them presented, fittingly enough, in a series of court sermons preached on the great festivals of the Christian year: at Christmas, Ash Wednesday, Good Friday, Easter Sunday and Whitsun. At Christmas, of course, Andrewes dwelt on the fact and significance of the incarnation. On Good Friday, his attention shifted to Christ’s sufferings on the cross. For if ‘the perfection of our knowledge is Christ’, then ‘the perfection of our knowledge in, or touching Christ, is the knowledge of Christ’s piercing. This is the chief sight; nay, as it shall after appear, in this sight are all sights.’15 Accordingly Andrewes placed heavy and repeated emphasis on the extreme personal sufferings undergone by Christ, in the process producing some passages of positively ghoulish intensity.16 7

See Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 4, pp. 320, 328, 270. It was no accident that these passages emphasising our complete reliance on God’s mercy should have occurred in his gunpowder-plot sermons, for in each case Andrewes was engaged in the refutation of popish notions of merit. 8 Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, p. 217, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 25 December 1619. 9 Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, pp. 275–6, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 25 December 1623. 10 Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, p. 301, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 12 April 1612, being Easter day. 11 Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, p. 150, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 6 April 1604. 12 Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2. p. 122, preached at court, 25 March 1607, being Good Friday. 13 Ibid., p. 128. 14 Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, p. 163, preached at Greenwich, before the king, 29 March 1605, being Good Friday. 15 Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, p. 122, preached at the court, 25 March 1607, being Good Friday. 16 To pluck two such examples out of many see Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, p. 52, preached at St James’ before Queen Elizabeth, 30 March 1603, and vol. 2, pp. 354–5, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 9 April 1615, being Easter day.

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Andrewes produced such word pictures not merely as rhetorical and exegetical tour de force, but primarily because it was only by looking insistently and repeatedly at the figure of Christ crucified that, just as had been the case with ‘the brazen serpent’, we could appropriate or properly partake of the benefits of his sacrifice. This was something that we had to do not only ‘with attention’, but ‘oft, again and again, with iteration’.17 Of course, as his own often fiercely appalling word pictures made clear, it was not a pretty sight and, therefore, more often than not, we had to force ourselves to look. For if we did not look at Christ crucified ‘in the here and now’, we would be forced ‘to look, in terror, at Christ in glory and judgement’ on the last day.18 In looking so intently at Christ on the cross, what would we see? Since it was for our sins that he had died, our sins in fact that had killed him,19 we would first ‘behold ourselves and our wicked demerits, in the mirror of his passion’.20 But we would also see something else; we would see ‘Christ’s love’. For ‘being spread and laid waste on the cross, he is liber charitatis … every stripe as a letter, every nail as a capital letter … his bleeding wounds as so many rubrics, to show upon record his love towards us’.21 In looking at Christ crucified we must ‘not look superficially on it’ but ‘“pierce into it”, and enter even into the inward workmanship of it’. In so doing, ‘his wounds they are as windows, through which we may well see all that is within him … “the nails and spear head serve as keys to let us in”. We may look into the palms of his hands, wherein, saith the prophet, he hath graven us, that he might never forget us. We may look into his side, St John useth the word “opened”’ and ‘we may, through the opening, look into his very bowels, the bowels of kindness and compassion that would endure to be so entreated. Yea that very heart of his, wherein we may behold the love of our salvation to be the very heart’s joy of our savior.’22 Such a sight, Andrewes insisted, could not but ‘make some tears to run from us, or, if we be dry eyed … yet make some sighs of devotion, some thoughts of grace, some kind of thankful acknowledgement to issue from our souls’. Initially, so dreadful a sight must induce a hatred of our 17 18 19 20 21 22

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, p. 128, preached at court, 25 March 1607, being Good Friday. Ibid., pp. 135–6. Ibid., p. 126. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, p. 166, preached at Greenwich, before the king, 29 March 1605, being Good Friday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, p. 180, preached at Greenwich, 29 March 1605, being Good Friday. Ibid., pp. 178–9.

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own sin,23 but Christ’s death must not, and could not, be only a source of self-loathing and sorrow. It must also bring us comfort, for the sight of Christ on the cross was ‘medicinal’, providing ‘comfort to the conscience, stung and wounded with the remorse of sin’. For, Andrewes asked, ‘What sting so deadly but the sight of this serpent will cure it …?’24 But Christ crucified had to be more than a source of comfort. His death was not only a sacrifice made for our benefit, but also ‘“a pattern”, an example to follow’. ‘To this he calleth us; to have a directory use of it, … And sure, as the church under the law needed not, so neither doth the church under the gospel need any other precept than this one, inspice et fac, “see and do according to the theory showed unto thee in the mount”; to them in mount Sinai, to us in mount Calvary.’25 For there, at Calvary, we were shown, in the clearest possible terms, the personification of faith, patience, humility, perseverance and love. In his death, we were taught to die, ‘to die to sin’, as persons ‘crucified, we neither move hand, nor stir toward it, both are nailed down fast’.26 Similarly, in his rising, we were taught to rise to a ‘new conversation’, to walk in newness of life. This move led Andrewes, and therefore leads us, from Good Friday to Easter Sunday. For Christ having taken on the role of mediator at Christmas, and sacrificed himself on Good Friday, God’s justice was now satisfied, and Christ ‘was no longer justly, but wrongfully detained by death’. And, in having taken on human nature at the incarnation, and died on the cross, in rising on the third day, he took us with him.27 But he did so now, not merely ‘as the son of God, as he lived before all worlds, but as the son of man, in the right of our nature’. The final consummation of the union between God and man was thus completed by Christ’s ascension unto glory with his father: ‘For here now rising, and upon his ascending, he adopts us; and by adopting, makes us; and by making, pronounces us his brethren, and so children to his father.’28 Thus, Easter represented the completion of the cycle begun at Christmas: His resurrection was a second birth, Easter a second Christmas … By the hodie genui te of Christmas how soon he was born of the virgin’s womb, he 23 24 25 26 27 28

Ibid., pp. 181–2. Ibid., p. 179. Ibid. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, p. 200, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 6 April 1606, being Easter day. Ibid., p. 197. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 55, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 21 April 1622, being Easter Day.

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became our brother, sin except, subject to all our infirmities; so to mortality, and even to death itself. And by death, that brotherhood had been dissolved, but for this day’s rising. By the hodie genui te of Easter, as soon as he was born again in the womb of the grave, he begins a new brotherhood, founds a new fraternity straight; adopts us, we see, anew again by his fratres meos, and thereby he that was … ‘the first begotten from the dead’ … [becomes] ‘the first begotten’ in this respect, ‘among many brethren’. Before he was ours, now we are his. That was by the mother’s side – so he ours. That is by … the father’s side – so we his. But half- brothers before, never of whole blood till now. Now by father and mother both, fratres germani, fratres fraterrimi, we cannot be more.29

At this point Andrewes paid particular attention to the harrowing of hell. Christ, he claimed, had, in person, descended to the nether regions and there “loosed the pains of hell”, trod upon the serpents head, and all too bruised it, took from death his sting, from hell his victory, that is his standard… Seized upon … the ragmen roll that made so strong against us, took it, rent it, and so rent “nailed it to his cross”; made his banner of it, of the law cancelled, hanging at it banner wise, and, having thus spoiled principalities and powers, he made an open show of them … and having made a full and perfect conquest of death, “and of him that hath the power of death, that is the devil”, he rose and returned thence this morning, a mighty conqueror.

Andrewes evoked Christ returned in triumph from hell, his clothes red with his own blood, shed on the cross, but now also with the blood of his enemies. Here was the risen Christ, ‘mighty to save’ – a saving power attributable first to his ‘miraculous suffering … but secondly’ to his ‘mighty subduing and treading down hell and death, and all the power of Satan’.30 Now, just as Christ’s crucifixion elicited from the true believer a loathing of sin and a love of Christ, so here, as Andrewes put it, ‘Christ’s resurrection had some more peculiar interest in good works.’31 For we should ‘fashion ourselves like to Christ’ and, in the case of Easter, this meant by ‘dying and rising’, to ‘caste ourselves in the same molds, express him in both as near as we can’.32 ‘When Christ died, sin to die in us; when Christ rose again, good works to rise together with him. Christ’s passion, to be 29 30 31 32

Ibid., pp. 57–8. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, pp. 66, 68, 73, 75, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 13 April 1623, being Easter day. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 82, preached on Easter day, 1624. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, p. 188, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 6 April 1606, being Easter day.

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sin’s passion; Christ’s resurrection good works’ resurrection. Good Friday is for sin, Easter for good works.’33 But, for Andrewes, Christ was not only a propitiatory sacrifice, necessary, in purely forensic terms, to tip the scales of divine justice in favour of fallen humanity;34 nor was he only a model of the spiritual progress and godly conversation, characteristic of the true Christian. He was also the source of the enabling grace through which sinful humanity could rise from sin to newness of life. Here Andrewes had resort to another set of vivid and bloody images; of the pelican, feeding her young with her very heart’s blood,35 and of ‘“the true vine”’, pressed three times ‘to make wine of him’; once ‘in Gethsemane, that made him sweat blood’; then ‘in the judgement hall, Gabbatha, which made the blood run forth of his head, with the thorns; out of his whole body, with the scourges; out of his hands and feet, with the nails’; and finally ‘at Golgotha, where he was so pressed that they pressed the very soul out of his body, and out ran blood and water both, … saith St Augustine, out came both sacraments, “the twin sacraments of the church”’.36 For Andrewes, both sacraments had a medicinal effect in sinful humanity. They represented ‘a sovereign restorative to recover us of the devil’s poison’.37 Whether sin be conceived as ‘an outward soil in the soul’, or as ‘some inward pestilent humour of the soul and conscience’, ‘the water mixed with his blood’ which had poured from Christ’s side to form the two sacraments provided a potent ‘electuary or potion’ ‘for the purging of’ fallen humanity. Thus, Andrewes held that, while the stain of original sin was removed in baptism, ‘the laver of regeneration’, ‘the actual sins of our persons’, were removed ‘by the cup of the New Testament, which we bless in his name’.38 33 34

35 36 37 38

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 83, preached on Easter day, 1624. Here Lossky envisions Andrewes leaving a largely Anselmian western tradition to ‘rejoin the major current that is found in the whole tradition of the Eastern Fathers, of St Irenaeus, of St Athanasius of Alexandria, of the Cappadocian fathers, and many others, later than what is generally called the Golden Age of the Fathers’. This is a move entirely typical of Lossky’s vision of Andrewes, whom he sees leading what he terms a ‘patristic renaissance’; one based predominantly on the Greek fathers, whose project, Lossky describes, in a quotation from his father Vladimir, as the transformation of ‘“the theology of concepts into contemplation, dogmas into experience of ineffable mysteries”’; or, elsewhere, as a ‘theological integration by the reunification of theology and prayer’. Nicholas Lossky, Lancelot Andrewes, preacher (1555–1626) (Oxford, 1991) pp. 188, 344, 351. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 4, p. 331, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 5 November 1615. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 70, preached at Whitehall, 13 April 1623, being Easter day. Ibid., p. 72. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, p. 113, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 25 December 1612.

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Andrewes was adamant that the sacrament was not only a purge or a medicine against sin, but also a seal and a sacrifice.39 He excoriated those ‘among us who fancy only a sacrament in this action’ – the fractionem panis or breaking of the bread – ‘and look strange at the mention of a sacrifice; whereas we not only use it as nourishment spiritual, as that it is too, but as a means also to renew a “covenant” with God by virtue of that sacrifice as the psalmist speaketh … And the old writers use no less the word sacrifice than sacrament, altar than table, offer than eat; but both indifferently, to show there is both.’40 While the sacrifice was made ‘in general, pro omnibus’, the sacrament operated ‘in particular, to each several receiver, pro singulis’. Thus was ‘that which is common to all, made proper to each, while each taketh his part of it; and made proper by a communion and union, like that of meat and drink, which is most nearly and inwardly made ours, and is inseparable forever’. The sacrament, then, was Christ’s body, but not ‘his body as now it is’, that is to say ‘glorified’ in heaven, but as ‘then he was when he suffered death, that is passable and mortal’. And thus ‘we are in this action not only carried up to Christ, (sursum corda,) but we are also carried back to Christ as he was at the very instant, and in the very act of his offering … By the incomprehensible power of his eternal spirit, not he alone, but he, at the very act of his offering, is made present to us, and we incorporate into his death, and invested in the benefits.’ Of course, Andrewes was quite prepared to admit that: to speak after the exact manner of divinity, there is but one only sacrifice … ‘properly so called’, that is Christ’s death. And that sacrifice but once actually performed at his death, but ever before represented in figure, from the beginning; and ever since repeated in memory, to the world’s end. That only absolute, all else relative to it, representative of it, operative by it. The Lamb but once actually slain in the fullness of time, but virtually was from the beginning, is and shall be to the end of the world. That the centre, in which their lines and ours, their types and our antitypes do meet.41

Thus the sacrament deserved the name sacrifice in precisely the same way that the paschal lamb of the Passover had deserved it. That had been a prefiguring type of Christ’s unique sacrifice, bringing the benefits of that 39 40 41

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, p. 296, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 12 April 1612, being Easter day. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, pp. 66–7, one of the sermons on the ten commandments, preached at St Giles Cripplegate, 9 January 1602. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, p. 300, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 12 April 1617, being Easter day.

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sacrifice to the Jews; this was a commemoration of that sacrifice, an antetype, likewise distributing the same benefits and effects to Christians.42 Christ’s role as the ‘corner stone’ of the spiritual temple that was the church, had thus been discharged in full ‘when he joined the lamb of the Passover and the bread of the eucharist, ending the one and beginning the other, recapitulating both lamb and bread into himself’; making ‘that sacrament, by the very institution of it, to be as it were the very corner-stone of both the Testaments’.43 Not only a sacrifice, the sacrament was also ‘the seal of our redemption as whereby the means of our redemption is applied to us; the body and blood, one broken, the other shed of him, whom God sealed to that end, even to redeem us. And by and with these, there is a grace imparted to us; which grace is in the very breath of the Holy Spirit, the true and express character of his seal to the renewing in us the image of God whereunto we were created.’44 Thus the seal of the Holy Spirit, active in the sacrament, was also ‘the seal of “God’s acceptation” of us’ and our works in Christ. ‘For this indeed is the true receiving, when one is received to the table, to eat and drink, to take his repast there; yea … to take, and to take into him “that body, by the oblation whereof we are all sanctified”, and that blood “in which we have remission of our sins”.’45 Such talk of the Holy Spirit serves to shift Andrewes’ (and our) attention from Easter Sunday to Whitsun. For it was then that the Holy Spirit came into its own as a seal on the testament established by Christ’s birth, life and sacrifice on the cross. For Andrewes, Whitsun was the greatest of the Christian festivals. It was the culmination of the other feasts, which were, he claimed, ‘as nothing, any of them or all of them, … without this day, the feast which now we hold holy to the sending of the Holy Ghost’. ‘A testament we have and therein many fair legacies, but till this day nothing administered – “the administrations are the Spirit’s”.’46 Whitsun sealed and completed the work of Christmas and Easter. ‘The Holy Ghost is the alpha and omega of all our solemnities. In his coming down all the feasts begin; at his annunciation, when he descended on the blessed 42 43 44 45 46

Ibid., pp. 300–1. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, p. 288, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 24 March 1611, being Easter day. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, p. 219, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 23 May 1613, being Whit-Sunday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 343, preached at Greenwich, before the king, 16 May 1619, being Whit-Sunday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 108, preached at Greenwich, before the king, 8 June 1606, being Whit Sunday.

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virgin, whereby the son of God did take our nature, the nature of man. And in the Holy Ghost’s coming they end, even in the descending this day upon the sons of men, whereby they actually became partakers … “of his nature, the nature of God”.’47 Here, then, was the culmination of the entire Christian year.48 According to Andrewes, there were only three occasions on which the component parts of the Trinity had been ‘known solemnly to have met; at the creation of the world; once again, at the baptism of Christ, the new creating of it; and here now the third time, [Whitsun] at the baptism of the church with the Holy Ghost’.49 Here the cycle of creation and redemption, of the Christian year and of the life of faith, was completed. And it was, of course, entirely appropriate that the circle should thus have been closed by the action of the Spirit, for the Holy Ghost, Andrewes explained, is ‘the essential unity, love and love knot of the two persons, the father and the son; even of God with God. And he is sent to be the union, love and love-knot of the two natures united in Christ, even of God with man.’50 By the phrase, the ‘baptism of the church’, Andrewes was referring to the breathing of the spirit into the apostles by Christ. This was the foundation day of the church and the occasion of Andrewes’ most exalted statements on the value of the word preached. For it was, after all, impossible to receive the Holy Ghost ‘unless first we hear; hear that there is one to receive … First, notice of his being, and then, sense of his receiving. And indeed, the hearing of him is a way to his receiving, for though not every that hears receives, yet none receives but he hears first.’51 Andrewes conceived of preaching as the passing of the spirit from the speaker to his audience, as one torch was lit by another. There was, therefore, a direct line of such spiritual torches stretching back through the church to the apostles and their direct inspiration at Whitsun by the Holy Spirit; an inspiration that provided both a model for, and a promise of, the inspiration of future generations of preachers, and their auditories, by the Holy Ghost. 47 48 49 50 51

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, pp. 145–6, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 27 May 1610, being Whit-Sunday. Ibid., p. 148. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 380, prepared to be preached, Whit-Sunday 1622. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 113, preached at Greenwich, before the king, 8 June 1606, being WhitSunday; also see vol. 1, p. 216, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 25 December 1619. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 182, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 31 May 1612, being Whit-Sunday.

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As we have seen, Andrewes tended to associate different divine ordinances with different persons of the Trinity, and hence with different Christian feasts. Preaching went with the Holy Ghost and Whitsun; baptism and the sacrament went with Christ (and the God who sent him) and thus with Christmas, Good Friday and Easter. The succession, indeed the cycle, of the great Christian festivals was thus also equated with distinct stages in the cycle of redemption and associated accordingly with different stages in the life of faith and the conversation of the true Christian. We have therefore a series of concentric circles or rather cycles, the cycle of redemptive history, the cycle of the Christian year and the cycle of the life of faith. Thus Lossky speaks of Andrewes’ ‘whole conception of the place of the Passion in the work of salvation, and of a “liturgical” approach to time, where past, present and future in some mysterious way coexist, where the “already” and the “not yet” meet together’.52 The result he writes, is a ‘contemplative vision of the mystery where the cycles and the passages of time have their centre at once immovable and dynamic in God. The seasons of the year are inscribed in the design of creation and redemption and thus receive their true meaning.’ While they retain ‘their temporal dimension’, ‘they also participate in the liturgical reality, where the cycle is not repetitive but reiterative. As a modern theologian has said, “reiteration is not repetition, but the ever-renewed accomplishment of a unique moment”.’53 Andrewes’ tendency to differentiate between the persons of the Trinity, and the different divine attributes, and to associate them, thus differentiated, with different aspects of the processes and interactions whereby fallen humanity was saved, was balanced by an insistence that these divergent operations, and the persons and attributes behind them, were all part of an integrated whole.54 For, of course, the spirit was involved in the workings of the sacrament, as well as in those of the word preached; of course, Christ, as the word made flesh, could be found in the operation of effectual 52

53 54

Lossky, Lancelot Andrewes, p. 163. It is surely in time thus conceived, rather than in anything remotely resembling the early Stuart period, that Lossky seeks to locate what he terms Andrewes’ ‘mystical’ theology. Cf. Owen Chadwick’s remark (in his review of the French edition of Lossky’s book in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 38 (1987), pp. 471–2) that ‘Lossky wants to see him as timeless, which he is; but this journal is committed to the proposition that no man is timeless.’ Lossky, Lancelot Andrewes, p. 95. Cf. Lossky, Lancelot Andrewes, p. 335, where he notes that Andrewes ‘avoids … systematic expositions concerning the intratrinitarian life. At the very most there are one or two allusions that reveal his immense respect for the unfathomable mystery. On the other hand, he speaks abundantly of the “economic” Trinity, that is to say the Trinity in its relations with the creature and in its manifestations ad extra.’

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preaching, as well as in that of the sacraments. ‘Water’ and ‘blood’, cleansing and reparation, repentance and comfort, fear and love, could all be prompted by both sacraments, as well as by the word preached, and all were necessary components of every stage of the Christian life. These different agents and ordinances were merely present at different times, in different quantities and for different purposes. As Andrewes explained, after the new world of the Christian church had been created at Whitsun, all was as it would remain until Christ came again in glory. And hence it was no accident that many of Andrewes’ Whitsun sermons ended with intimations of the second coming. Andrewes accordingly claimed to be able to see the continuing co-operation between the persons of the Trinity, and the different divine attributes, working itself out in and through the institutions, ordinances and operations of the visible church. What was at stake here was not only the interaction between the word, the sacraments and prayer, but also the very constitution and government of the church itself. For Andrewes saw each person of the Trinity bringing to the church a particular element or aspect, essential to its right working. This trinity he described as made up of ‘gifts, administrations and operations’. ‘1. By “gifts” is meant the inward endowing, enabling, qualifying, whereby one, for his skill, is meet and sufficient for aught … 2. By “administrations” is meant the outward calling, place, function or office, whereby one is authorized lawfully to deal with aught … 3. By “operations” is meant the effect or work done, wrought, or executed by the former two.’ Of these, the first came by the spirit; the second fell to Christ and, since God was ‘the father, almighty, which showeth might and power’, ‘so the work is his peculiar’.55 In pursuance of this vision Andrewes presented episcopacy not, as the conventional version of the iure divino theory of episcopacy had it, as a creation of the apostles, but rather as a direct emanation of Christ’s sovereignty over his church. Remarking, as early as January 1593, in a sermon preached in St Giles Church, London, that ‘touching the form’ of church government, ‘many imaginations have lately been raised, in these our days especially’, Andrewes claimed that it ‘is certain’ that at the first ‘the government of Christ’s people consisted in two degrees only’ – the twelve apostles and the seventy disciples– ‘of both which our savior Christ himself was the author’. ‘In the place of the twelve succeeded the bishops, and in the place of the seventy, presbyteri, priest, or ministers.’ All of 55

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, pp. 380–2, prepared to be preached on Whit-Sunday, 1622.

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which rendered episcopacy an ordinance of directly divine and not merely apostolic provenance.56 Elsewhere, in a sermon prepared for Whit Sunday, 1622, he observed that in Acts 28:20 it was said ‘of the Holy Ghost’, ‘posuit vos episcopi, “that he placed them bishops”; and they are chief offices. So that offices are from the other two, [persons of the Trinity] as well as from Christ.’57 56 57

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, pp. 63–4, one of the sermons on the ten commandments, preached at St Giles Cripplegate, 9 January 1593. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 381, prepared to be preached on Whit-Sunday, 1622.

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chapter 2

Andrewes’ Political Theology

Andrewes was insistent that our subjection was not to the individual office holder, but to God: ‘whose hands soever we feel, whose countenance soever we behold, we must yet look up higher, and see God in every government’.1 Of the many forms of government, monarchy was by far the best.2 To prove which assertion, Andrewes cited the divinely sponsored development of the government of the Jews, ‘from Joshua, a captain, to the judges; from the judges, to Eli, Samuel, priests’ and thence to kings’.3 Thus the claim that there was ‘“no king in Israel” … was noted as a defect in gross or at large, but even in Israel, God’s own chosen people’.4 Indeed, for Andrewes, Christ himself was a model of kingship.5 It was, therefore, no accident that kings should be called the Lord’s anointed, ‘Christus domini’.6 In Hebrew, the words meant ‘my messiahs’, in Greek literally ‘my Christs’. Thus were princes ‘made synonymi, both with God and with Christ’.7 At times, Andrewes spoke of kings in terms reminiscent of the language he employed concerning both Christ and the sacrament, as mediators between heaven and earth, God and fallen humanity. ‘For as it is true that they reign in and by him, so is it likewise true he reigns in and by them. They in God, and God in them, reciproce. He in them as deputies, they in him as author or authorizer. He by their persons, they by his power.’8 This meant that the true fear of God would express 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, p. 18, preached at Greenwich, before Queen Elizabeth, 11 March 1599. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, pp. 176–7, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 24 March 1606, being coronation day. Ibid., p. 177. Ibid., pp. 178–9. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, pp. 279–80, preached at Whitehall, 24 March 1611, being Easter day. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 4, p. 50, preached at Holdenby, before the king, 5 August 1610, being the anniversary of the Gowrie conspiracy. Ibid., pp. 54–5. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 4, p. 285, preached at Whitehall, 5 November 1614.

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itself through, and indeed could only strengthen, reverent obedience to the prince: ‘For if it be a true time deum, it strengthens time regem, it weakens it not.’ But, as Andrewes claimed the gunpowder plot showed all too well, this was a proposition that the papists were seeking simply to invert, by making ‘time deum to blow up time regem’, which, in effect, was to make ‘the Catholic faith to overthrow the catholic fear of God’.9 Rounding on the Jesuits as ‘traitors to kings, the overthrow of kingdoms in what state soever they get footing’, Andrewes explained that Antichrist was not ‘only called Antichrist because he is an adversary to Christ the Lord, but also because he is an enemy to the anointed of the Lord’, whom he would destroy ‘with sword, with fire, with poynardo, with poison, with powder’.10 And so Andrewes found nothing incongruous or disproportionate in directly comparing ‘1. our saviour’s exaltation by his resurrection, [and] 2. our sovereign’s exalting, and making head of this kingdom’.11 Later in the same sermon, in a sideways glance at both the papists and the Presbyterians, he used the monarchical power conferred on the risen Christ, over both ‘the quick and the dead’ and ‘heaven and earth’, as the basis for an excursus on the idiocy of those that ‘would be acephali, “headless”’12 and ‘polycephali, have a consistory of heads, “many heads”, as many as the beast of Babylon’.13 On Andrewes’ account, then, God personally chose and maintained in power all kings, just as he had David, who was ‘“a person representing all kings”’; particularly those that, ‘with David, serve and worship God in truth. We do safely therefore, what is said to him, apply to them all, since he is the type of them all.’14 Power was transferred from God to the king; it thus went unmediated from one single (monarchical) source to another. Preaching at Whitehall on 5 November 1613, on the text ‘by me kings reign’, Andrewes proclaimed that ‘this same per me here is an answer to all. “Who made you, Moses, a ruler?” He whose name is “I am” sent me. Who gave Christ his authority? He that “sanctified” him, and sent him to be the Messias of the world. And here now, kings by whom? Per me, by him too. These words of his, charta regia, this their charter royal; and he that gave it 9 10 11 12 13 14

Ibid., p. 303. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, pp. 242–3, a sermon preached before two kings, 5 August 1606. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, p. 271, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 24 March 1611, being Easter day. Ibid., p. 279. Ibid., p. 280. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 4, p. 77, preached at Burleigh, before the king, 5 August 1614.

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them, will warrant it for good, and bear them out against all the per mes in the world.’15 Thus, Andrewes concluded, they that rise against the king are God’s enemies; for God and the king are so in league, such a knot, so straight between them, as one cannot be enemy to the one, but he must to the other. This is the knot. They are by God, of or from God, for or instead of God. Moses’ rod, God’s; Gideon’s sword, God’s; David’s throne, God’s. In his place they sit, his person they represent, they are taken into the fellowship of the same name. Ego dixi, he hath said it, and we may be bold to say it after him, they are Gods, and what would we more? Then must their enemies be God’s enemies.16

It was, therefore, as true of ‘David in his of jewry’ as it was of ‘ours in his of Great Britain’ that ‘the health and safety of his kingdom [is] fast linked with the king’s health and safety’. ‘Verily, all our weal or woe dependeth on their welfare or decay. Therefore bless we them, and they that bless them, be blessed, and they that set themselves against them accursed, even with the capital curse, the serpent’s, all our enemy; as the first of all, so the chief of all, from God’s own mouth.’17 This was a position that Andrewes defended against those (both papists and Presbyterians) who wished to derive the power of kings from the people. The logic of his own argument outed such theories as, quite literally, the spawn of Satan. ‘Kings’, he proclaimed, are ‘neither “chosen” nor “exalted” by the people, but by God out of the people. Not they, out of themselves, but God, out of them. Mark that point well.’18 These strictures applied whether the prince in question was a Constantine or a Theodosius, or a Tiberius or a Nero. ‘It is not the man, it is “the ordinance of God”, we owe and perform our subjection to. We yield it not to Tiberius, but to Caesar, and Caesar is God’s ordinance, be Tiberius what he will.’19 Similarly, Andrewes asserted, against both the papists and the Presbyterians, that kings were directly responsible for both church and state. ‘Sion’ and ‘Jerusalem’ remained utterly interdependent, and the king’s power extended equally over both spheres.20 ‘They that are enemies to David, are enemies to Sion: so near neighbourhood between David and Sion, the king and the church, as there is between his palace and the 15 16 17 18 19 20

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 4, p. 278, preached at Whitehall, before the king, November 1613. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 4, pp. 13–14, preached at Rumsey, before the king, 5 August 1607. Ibid., p. 15. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 4, p. 79, preached at Burleigh, before the king, 5 August 1614. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, pp. 132–3, preached at Whitehall, 15 November 1601. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 4, pp. 16–17, preached at Rumsey, before the king, 5 August 1607. Also see vol. 5, p. 179, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 24 March 1606.

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temple; both stand upon two tops of one and the same hill.’21 God had joined in one kingdom ‘the house of Israel and the house of Aaron; that is, the two estates, civil and ecclesiastical … God himself hath severed them, and made these two but to meet in one, not’, as both the Presbyterians and the papists would have it, ‘one to malign and consume the other’, but rather so that ‘the happy combining of these two is the strength of the head and the strength of the whole building’.22 The history of Israel and of the primitive church, not to mention more recent events in England, all showed ‘how much the church’s welfare hath gone by the good and blessed inclination of kings’. Here Andrewes cited Jotham, Ahaz, Hezekiah and Manasseh, under the law, Constantine, Constantius, Julian and Jovian from the early church, and ‘at home the last four princes before his majesty, and the waxing and waning, the alteration and alternation of religion, under them’.23 The workings of secular and spiritual authority were, therefore, utterly interdependent and mutually reinforcing: ‘Moses we need, to see our forces led against Amalek, for safeguard of that little we hold here in this life; and Aron no less, to preserve our free hold upon eternal life; … Moses may not be spared from sitting and deciding causes … No more may Aaron, whose Urim giveth answer in doubts no less important; and who not only with his Urim and Thummim giveth counsel, but by his incense and sacrifice obtaineth good success for all our counsels.’24 Moreover, as Andrewes explained, ‘Moses needeth Aaron’ ‘for his continual putting the people in remembrance that they be subject to principalities … strengthening mainly Moses’ debita legalia, “duties of parliamentary and common law”, by his debita moralia, “duties of conscience and divinity”’, and thus augmenting Moses’ capacity to constrain his subjects’ ‘actions’ with the clergy’s power to monitor and control ‘all the thoughts accessary to action’.25 Since kingship therefore was ‘sacred’, it was no less sacrilegious to ‘touch Moses than the holy mount, … no more touch David, than the holy ark’.26 For there was something miraculous in all government. ‘The rod of government’, Andrewes intoned, ‘is a miraculous rod’. For ‘when 21 22 23 24 25 26

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, p. 16, preached at Rumsey, before the king, 5 August 1607. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, p. 283, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 24 March, being Easter day. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 4, p. 16, preached at Rumsey, before the king, 5 August 1607. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, p. 33, preached at Greenwich, before Queen Elizabeth, 24 February 1590. Ibid., p. 35. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 4, p. 55, preached at Holdenby, before the king, 5 August 1610.

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we see this tumultuous and tempestuous body, this same sea of popularity kept in quiet calm, and infinite millions ebbing and flowing as it were, that is stirring and standing still, arming and disarming themselves, killing and being killed, and all at the monosyllables of one person … let us see God sensibly in it’.27 For Andrewes, therefore, ‘the people’s only felicity is to serve and be subject to one that is constant – for otherwise we see now how wavering a thing the multitude is’. Just as James had remained constant in his espousal of the cause of true religion, so God had shown himself to be the king’s greatest supporter and protector. Andrewes found practical demonstration of God’s presence behind the throne in his repeatedly providential, indeed, at times frankly miraculous, deliverances of monarchs out of the hands of their enemies; a point illustrated copiously in these sermons from the annals of the Jewish kings and more particularly and pointedly from James’ own experience both in Scotland and in England. For had not the events of the Gowry conspiracy definitively proven that ‘he that is the founder of kings will be the confounder of all conspirators. Carry it as closely as they can, his “hand” shall find them out, find them out and smite them. Smite them and plague them, plague them here and forever. This is the covenant made with David, in the name of kings.’28 Having in one Gowry sermon compared the protection afforded to King David and King James,29 in the next Andrewes argued that, although David’s deliverance had been undoubtedly providential, having taken place on ‘a fought field’, ‘his army must take part of the praise’. King James’ experience, however, had been very different. In ‘regard’ of the ‘strange operation’ of divine providence that had rescued James from the Gowries, Andrewes ‘confidently affirmed’ that ‘God’s hand was much more eminent in this than in that, praised be his name for it.’30 In a sermon on the anniversary of the gunpowder plot Andrewes went even further, ascribing James’ deliverance then to ‘mere inspiration, immediately from God, by making that come into the king’s head, which neither did nor would have come into any man’s head else; the more sure that it came from God, since so great a salvation was wrought by it’.31

27 28 29 30 31

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, pp. 20–2, preached at Greenwich, before Queen Elizabeth, 24 February 1590. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 4, pp. 87, 94, preached Burleigh, before the king, 5 August 1614. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, pp. 251–3, a sermon preached before two kings, 5 August 1606. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 4, p. 22, preached at Rumsey, before the king, 5 August 1607. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 4, p. 395, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 5 November 1618.

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On occasion, Andrewes could draw decidedly pointed applications out of his political theology. Thus, Andrewes explained that just as we have ‘things that are Caesar’s and things that are God’s’ we should yield both readily and willingly ‘both to both’. Not that we have any choice in the matter; the crucial term was reddere not dare, to give back both to the church and the king what was already theirs, rather than to give to them things that were not only ours, but ours freely to give or withhold.32 While this had obvious consequences for the laity’s obligations to pay their tithes, it also had implications for the subject’s duty to supply the monarch with taxation. On this point Andrewes was quite explicit; according to scripture all the usual forms of royal revenue, ‘the fees due to his courts of justice’, ‘the custom, Luke 5. 13’, ‘the tax, 1 Sam I. 25’, ‘the fines, Ezra 7. 26’, ‘the confiscation, Ezra 10. 8’ were all ‘quae Caesaris. But these’, Andrewes admitted, ‘are current and ordinary’ charges, owed by all to the prince, in time of peace. But our obligations went further than that, ‘for extraordinary occasions cannot be answered with ordinary charges … when war cometh … war admits no stint, but as occasions call for it, supply must be ready’. Thus, he concluded ‘the indictions of war, which we call subsidies, are part of quae Caesaris too’,33 and ‘what is paid to the prince or to God is not to be termed a donative, gratuity or benevolence, but of the nature of things restored which, though they be in our keeping, are in very deed other men’s. And they that reckon of them as matters merely voluntary must alter Christ’s Reddite needs, and teach him some other term.’34 The sermon in which Andrewes made these comments was preached at the end of Elizabeth’s reign in November 1601. While Andrewes was less forthcoming on such topics during James’ reign, these sentiments were entirely congruent with the attitudes to divine right kingship that he defended then. If his readers of the 1630s chose to apply such claims to the fraught politics of the 1620s and the forced loan, or indeed to the Personal Rule and ship money, they would have been drawn to only one conclusion. Thus had Andrewes’ intensely Trinitarian incarnational theology also became a political theology, one with rather detailed implications for how the church and state in the here and now ought to be, and, on his account, were now being organised and governed in Jacobean England. 32 33 34

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, pp. 133–4, preached at Whitehall, 15 November 1601. Ibid., p. 138. Ibid., p. 134.

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But the full extent of the immediately contemporary resonances, indeed of the sheer polemical bite, of Andrewes’ sermons can only recuperated when they are viewed from the perspective provided by those aspects of the contemporary politico-religious scene that Andrewes found most obnoxious. We need, therefore, to turn to his complex, multi-vocal account of the puritan threat. For, as we shall see, it was against a nexus of errors best described as puritan that Andrewes insistently and incessantly defined his own version of what a properly Christocentric, Trinitarian brand of Christianity ought to look like.

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chapter 3

Andrewes’ Anti-Puritanism

Andrewes saw his vision of order in church and state as under threat from both puritanism and popery. On the popish side, Andrewes placed great emphasis on the papists’ denial of the Royal Supremacy and legitimation not merely of resistance but what they called tyrannicide, and Andrewes termed the capacity ‘to kill Kings by divinity’, observing that, while such practices were ‘no new thing’, ‘this gear is but newly raked up from hell again’, by the Jesuits.1 While ‘Christ had but one’ spiritual function – ‘to feed, to save’ – the papists claimed two – ‘pascere et occidere’.2 Indeed, they made king killing meritorious3 – a contention Andrewes sought to prove by citing the experience of the gunpowder plotters, who ‘went for absolution’ but ‘received a flat resolution it was not only no sin, but would serve to expiate their other sins’.4 Here, Andrewes concluded, was the true ‘mystery of the seal of iniquity’.5 The powder plotters had gone not to any old Catholic priest but to a Jesuit, and Andrewes homed in on the society as the bearer of the most noxious versions of these doctrines. According to Andrewes, the standard Catholic claim that the early Christians had refrained from resisting their persecutors, not because it was a sin to do so but rather because they lacked the means to do it successfully, was ‘not the divinity of the old Christians, but of the new Jesuits’.6 It was such claims, beliefs and practices, he concluded, that most clearly demonstrated both that the pope was indeed Antichrist and that the Catholics were no part of the true church of the dove,7 since they were 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 4, p. 160, preached at Windsor, before the king, 5 August 1622, being the anniversary of the Gowry conspiracy. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 4, p. 254, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 5 November 1609. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 4, p. 141, preached at Burleigh, before the king, 5 August 1616. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 4, p. 265, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 5 November 1612. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 4, pp. 141–2, 145, preached at Burleigh, before the king, 5 August 1616. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, p. 355, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 5 November 1616. Also see Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, p. 242, a sermon preached before two kings, 5 August 1606. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, pp. 242–3, a sermon preached before two kings, 5 August 1606.

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infused with what he termed a ‘new misshapen Holy Ghost’ that, ‘instead of an olive branch’, had ‘a match light in her beak or a bloody knife’,8 and sent her devotees into the world to ‘take arms, depose, deprive, blow up’, rather than to bring peace.9 ‘Jesuits they may be, but Christians, sure, they are none’ was Andrewes’ rather sour conclusion.10 However, for all that, there can be no doubt that, in the sermons collected by Laud and Buckeridge, it was the puritan threat that preoccupied Andrewes. Here was Andrewes’ sinister twin, the defining other, against which he defined his own position. His treatment of puritanism started off conventionally enough, with Presbyterianism. On his account, the Presbyterians denied the unity of church and state instantiated in the person and power of the prince. Rather than one head, they would have ‘many heads’.11 Like his conformist predecessors, for Andrewes the Presbyterians were ‘the Anabaptists of our age, by whom all secular jurisdiction is denied. No law makers they, but the evangelist; no courts, but presbyteries; no punishments, but church censures. These  rise against the very estate of the kings.’12 For, he maintained, change and disorder in the church – what the Presbyterians falsely called ‘reformation’ – could not but spill over into the state;13 indeed, it would lead inevitably to republicanism – ‘a government of states’, as he called it.14 However, if Presbyterianism was a staging post on the road to Anabaptism and republicanism, the first step was not espousal of the discipline but rather puritan non-conformity. Of course, disputes about ceremonies and outward observance, mere adiaphora, might at first seem trivial, but those conversant with ‘Satan’s method’ knew otherwise. ‘In itself, in his own nature, a rite is not so much. This is much, that by it they learn to break the church’s orders, and that thereby they are fleshed to go on to greater matters.’15 A dispute over ‘a matter of rite’ could end up calling in question ‘the vital parts of religion, preaching, prayer, the 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 255, preached at Greenwich, before the king, 29 May 1615, being Whit Sunday. Ibid., p. 253. Ibid., p. 254. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, pp. 280–1, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 24 March 1611, being Easter day. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 4, p. 11, preached at Rumsey, before the king, 5 August 1607. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, p. 35, preached at Greenwich, before Queen Elizabeth, 24 February 1590. Also see vol. 4, p. 12, preached at Rumsey, before the king, 5 August 1607. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 4, p. 306, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 5 November 1614. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, p. 409, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 5 April 1618.

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sacrament’. ‘If the contentious humour be not let out, it will fester straight and prove to an impostume.’16 All this was standard stuff, but Andrewes’ critique of puritanism broke new ground, or rather developed a line of argument first adumbrated by Richard Hooker, when he sought to characterise the puritan threat not only as a programme for further reformation but also as a religious style – one which, while he did indeed seek to elide it with Presbyterianism and non-conformity, in fact spread far wider than the ranks of Presbyterians or even non-conformists, to include great swathes of contemporary hot protestant commonplace, one is even tempted to say ‘orthodoxy’. Throughout his sermons, Andrewes denounced those who reduced religion to the mere imparting and assimilation of information. People now behave, he lamented, ‘as though Christian religion had no law points in it, consisted only of pure narratives – believe them and all is well; had but certain theses to be held, dogmatical points, matters of opinion, and true it is, such points there be, but they be not all’.17 For such people ‘divinity’ had become mere ‘sophism and school points and at the best a kind of ecstasy about God’.18 Piety had become a matter of the repetition of ‘certain curious and quaint terms and set phrases, wherein a great part of many men’s religions do now-a-days consist’.19 Andrewes maintained that in his day faith was the virtue in greatest demand; faith now defined in largely intellectual terms. Andrewes berated those who held ‘that so a man knew and embraced certain dictates and positions, they would deliver him; live how he list, he could not choose but be saved’. Such people ‘entitled themselves Gnostics, that is, men of knowledge’ and called ‘all other Christians that could not talk like them, simplices, “good simple souls”’.20 Worse still, there was an equally noxious error abroad that reduced repentance to ‘a matter merely mental or intentional’ and held that ‘good notions in the brain’, or ‘good motions in the mind’, would serve as the fruits of repentance.21 For Andrewes, the inevitable result was hypocrisy – of which the ideal type was provided by the Pharisees, whose knowledge had been great, 16 17 18 19 20 21

Ibid., pp. 407, 409. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, p. 288, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 25 December 1624. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, p. 311, preached at Whitehall, before Queen Elizabeth, 4 March 1598, being Ash Wednesday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, p. 38, preached at the Spittle, 10 April 1588, being Wednesday in Easter week. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, p. 58, preached at St Giles, Cripplegate, 9 January 1592. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, p. 439, from a sermon prepared to be preached, 10 February 1624, being Ash Wednesday.

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but the practical fruits of whose knowledge, virtually non-existent. In a remarkable passage, Andrewes compared the hypocrite with a stage player. Both, he claimed, were obsessed with appearances, with cutting a figure before an audience. ‘The hypocrite’s whole labour is his look. Blame him not for he is nothing but look; nothing but face and case, but a very outside only.’ ‘In this they suit very well with players whose names they bear. It is a very fit resemblance for them that are nothing but resemblance.’ Andrewes made his case through the example of an actor playing the part of a prince. In the case of real princes, ‘outward pomp or show is the less part by far’. What really mattered were ‘the regal qualities, the princely virtues … a religious heart, high wisdom, heroical courage, clemency, like that of God without measure or end’. But for the actor merely playing a prince, or for the hypocrite merely performing the outward signs of piety, all that signified was appearance. ‘Gesture and gait, the carriage of his countenance, to say his part, to pronounce and act it well, that is all that is cared for by him, or that is looked for at his hands. And even so it fares here’, with religion. ‘Contrition of spirit, a broken heart, unfeigned humility, truth in the inward parts’, these are most requisite in the true fast. It skills not a whit for any of these in the stage fast; so he can set his countenance well, have the clouds in his forehead, his eyes somewhat hollow, certain wrinkles in his cheek, carry his head like a bull rush, and look like leaven, all is well. As for any inward accomplishment, he never takes thought of any. Vultum only it is, he goes no farther. Only to be like, to be sicut, as one, though indeed none.22

The piety of the Pharisees had thus consisted only of knowledge, often concerned with curious questions and with outward works and formal observances, performances of piety, both of their own devisal, not the simple saving knowledge and good works required of them by God.23 For Andrewes, this confusion between their own will and works and those of God amounted to a worship of not images but their own imaginations. ‘For to worship images, and to worship men’s own imaginations, comes all to one.’24 Andrewes identified this tendency as ‘the disease of our age … There hath been good riddance made of images; but for imaginations, they be daily stamped in great number, and instead of the old images set up, 22 23 24

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, p. 409, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 6 March 1622, being Ash Wednesday. For works see Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, p. 197, preached at Greenwich, before the king, 1607; for theological quibbles see vol. 5, p. 347, sermon V of ‘a preparation to prayer’. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, p. 387, preached in Durham Cathedral, before the king, 20 April 1617, being Easter day.

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deified and worshipped, carrying the names and credit of the “apostles’ doctrine”, government etc.’25 That last remark led back to Presbyterianism, but for Andrewes the classic contemporary expression of pharisaical hypocrisy, and indeed idolatry, was the cult of the sermon. At present, he lamented, the church was full of ‘sermon-hypocrites’. Here Andrewes reverted to his image of the hypocrite as stage player. Quoting Petronius to the effect that ‘“all the world was like a stage or theatre”, scarce a true face in it, all in a manner personate’, he then proceeded to quote Christ himself telling us ‘that there want not that make his church a very stage, and play with religion and every part of it, so carrying themselves in things pertaining to God as if they had some play or pageant at hand. It is but too true this. If you will set up a stage, I will find you actors for it enow.’ The scene is in the 33 of Ezekias, ‘O let us go hear the word’, and the prophet adds, ‘so was the fashion then’, for fashion it was. And thither they come, and when they are come, here sit they, but their heart is elsewhere, wandering where it will. Either they attend not, or if they do, it is to make jests. Or, at the best it is but as ‘they hear a song of one that hath a pleasing voice’, and no more comes of the sermon than of the song.26

So egregious had this sermon-cult become, Andrewes complained, that ‘for the common man it skills not’ what the sermon was about; ‘it contents him well enough’ so long as it was a sermon.27 For both the people and the soi disant godly, it was as though ‘he that hears so many sermons a week cannot choose but be saved; but it will not be. No; here stand we preaching, and hearing sermons; and neither they that hear prophesying, nor they that prophesy themselves’ will be saved merely for doing that.28 Various strands in Andrewes’ critique of puritan religion came together in the theme of sermon hypocrisy. Firstly, this obsession with the word ‘preached’ was clearly linked to the all too common conflation of faith with knowledge and of divinity with mere intellectual speculation. Thus, sermons were praised only because of ‘some point or other … handled 25 26 27 28

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, p. 55, the second sermon preached on the ten commandments, at St Giles Cripplegate, 9 January 1592. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, pp. 406–7, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 6 March 1622, being Ash Wednesday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 140, preached at Greenwich, before the king, 24 May 1608, being Whit Sunday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 319, preached at Greenwich, before the king, 24 May 1618, being Whit Sunday.

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peradventure not amiss’,29 and the auditory thought their job done if they praised the performance with the right combination of insight and enthusiasm. Andrewes lamented that it was enough for all too many of his contemporaries ‘to cry … sir you well said, you have made us a good sermon … we never heard a better’. As for those who took the sermon seriously enough to discuss it afterwards, they talked only ‘about some petty speculative point, some subtle objection, somewhat over tending to curiosity of knowledge, rather than conscience of practice’.30 ‘“You hear and you commend”, saith St Augustine; “well, thanks be to God! Good seed you receive, good words you give back … Yet when all is done, good brethren, good words are but leaves, and it is fruit, fruit is it that we preach for.” Not the fruits of your lips, they be but leaves; but fructus operis, that fruit.’31 All of which produced Christian professors high on their own knowledge. For these great hearers … reckon themselves the only people, as if knowledge should ‘die with them’. And being men of knowledge consequently freest from error of any men alive. They pity much the blindness of former times; but as for them they see light clearly, and are not deceived you may be sure. Therefore, this seemeth very strange to them, and in evil part they needs must take it, to be holden for men deceived.

‘In our saviour’s time’, such had been ‘the Pharisees’,32 and no doubt, in such pen-portraits, Andrewes’ auditory were supposed to see the Pharisees de nos jours, the puritans, being conjured before them to the life. Such people also tended to confuse the promptings of their own fancies – ‘human imaginations’, as Andrewes termed them – with the testimony of the spirit. ‘Some such’ will receive none, admit of at no hand no other Holy Ghost but their own ghost, and the idol of their own conceit, the vision of their own heads, the motions of their own spirits, and if you hit not on that that is there in their hearts, reject it, be it what it will … that in effect say with the old Donatist … ‘that they will have holy is holy’, and nothing else. Men, as the apostle speaks of them, causeless ‘puffed up with their own fleshly mind’.33 29 30 31 32 33

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, p. 423, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 26 February 1623, being Ash Wednesday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, pp. 193–4, preached at Greenwich, before the king, 1607. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, p. 423, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 26 February 1623, being Ash Wednesday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, p. 197, preached at Greenwich, before the king, 1607. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 275, preached at Greenwich, before the king, 19 May 1616, being Whit Sunday.

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Such tendencies were rendered worse by the control over the purse strings and patronage of the church now exerted by many lay men, which enabled ‘men that have itching ears “to heap to themselves teachers according to their lusts,” which may fill their heads full with new inventions’.34 I wish it were not true, this; that humours were not sometimes mistaken, and mistermed the spirit. A hot humour flowing from the gall, taken for this fire here, and termed, though untruly, the spirit of zeal. Another windy humour proceeding from the spleen, supposed to be his wind here, and they that filled with it, if nobody will give it to them, taking to themselves the style of the godly brethren.35

But all this was mere illusion. Let them but go to Elias vision, and inform themselves of this point. There came first ‘a boisterous whirlwind’, such an one as they wish for – but no God there. After it, a rattling ‘earthquake’; and after it, crackling flashes of fire – God was in none of them all. Then comes a soft still voice – then comes God. God was in it, and by it you may know where to find him.36

The result was what Andrewes styled ‘a scenical, theatrical, histrionical godliness’ – an outward form that let you know precisely ‘to whose company they belong and whose they are that get them St Paul’s … “vizor or mask of godliness”, and make of it St Peter’s … “a cloak or cover for bad intent”’.37 Amongst the preachers this involved ‘volubility of utterance, earnestness of action, straining the voice in a passionate delivery, phrases and figures, these all have their heat, but they be but blazes’. Preachers who ‘come in passion’, warned Andrewes, ‘move for the present, and make us a little sermon-warm for the while; but after, they flit and vanish, and go their way – true mark leave they none’. It was a different sort of preacher, endued ‘with the evidence of the spirit in the soundness of the sense’, what Andrewes termed the ‘“wisdom of speech”’, whose sermons acted like ‘a nail red hot, that leaveth a mark behind, that will never be got out’.38 You could see the difference in the hysterical and histrionic effects wrought upon the laity by the extreme emotionalism of certain so-called godly 34 35 36 37 38

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, p. 229, preached at Chiswick in the time of pestilence, 21 August 1603. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, pp. 132–3, preached at Greenwich, before the king, 24 May 1608, being Whit Sunday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 267, preached at Greenwich, before the king, 19 May 1606, being Whit Sunday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, p. 407, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 6 March 1622, being Ash Wednesday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, pp. 141–2, preached at Greenwich, before the king, 24 May 1608, being Whit Sunday.

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preachers. “With some spring within, their eyes are made to roll, and their lips to wag, and their breast to give a sob; all is but Hero’s pneumatica, a vizor, not a very face; “an outward show of godliness, but no inward power of it at all”.’39 So bad had things become that Andrewes felt able to ask ‘the corps, the whole body of some men’s profession, all godliness with some, what is it but hearing a sermon? The ear is all, the ear is all that is done and, but by our ear-mark, no man should know us to be Christians.’ The result, he proclaimed, was a grotesque absurdity. It was as though ‘all one’s body should be nothing but an ear; and that were a strange body!’40 This, then, was an age obsessed with taking in knowledge by the ear, to the virtual exclusion of all other modes of devotion or religiosity. ‘In at our ears there goes I know not how many sermons, and every day more and more, if we might have our wills.’ ‘In it goes in, but brings nothing out, nothing’; ‘all in hearing in a manner, none in doing what we hear’.41 Indeed, all too often seemingly godly persons used their hearing habit as a cover for sin. ‘So they serve God, and hear lectures, as the term is, they take themselves liberty to pay no debts, to put their money out to usury, to grind their tenants, yea, and so they miss not such a lecture in such a place, they may do anything then.’42 Central to the speculative doctrines after which men hankered was predestination. Here Andrewes drew a distinction between the revealed and hidden will of God. ‘The one is that which the prophet calls “the counsel” or “thought of his heart”; the other is that will of his word, wherein he declareth and openeth to man what his will is.’ Of these, only the second was a proper concern for fallen human kind. ‘For the secret will of his heart is voluntas adoranda non scrutanda; he that curiously searcheth the glory of heavenly things shall not enter into glory’, and chief amongst these heavenly things, not to be sought into on pain of damnation, was predestination. ‘God’s “judgements,” which are the fountain of reprobation, are abyssus magna, and his mercy, extended to all that by faith apprehend the same, is abyssus et profunditas, “a great depth.” Therefore we are not curiously to enquire and search out of God’s secret touching reprobation or election, but to adore it.’43 But, Andrewes lamented, such a profane 39 40 41 42 43

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, pp. 274–5, preached at Greenwich, before the king, 19 May 1616, being Whit Sunday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, p. 421, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 26 February 1623, being Ash Wednesday. Ibid., p. 420. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 4, p. 379, preached at Whitehall, 5 November 1617. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, pp. 397–8, sermon XI on the Lord’s Prayer.

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touching of the sacred mysteries was all too prevalent. ‘I pray God he be well pleased with this licentious touching, nay tossing, his decrees of late; the sounding the depth of his judgements with line and lead, too much presumed upon by some in these days of ours.’44 ‘Judicia eius abyssus multa’, saith the psalmist, ‘his judgements are great and deep’. St Paul, looking down into it, ran back and cried, ‘O the depth!’, the profound depth! Not to be searched, past our fathoming or finding out. Yet there are in the world that make but a shallow of this great deep, they have sounded it to the bottom. God’s secret decrees they have them at their fingers’ ends, and can tell you the number and order of them just, with 1,2 3, 4 and 5. Men that must sure have been in God’s cabinet, above the third heaven, where St Paul never came.45

Elsewhere Andrewes compared the presumptuous certitude of those who ‘with their new perspective’ ‘think they perceive all God’s secret decrees, the number and order of them clearly’ with that displayed by the pope himself.46 Such presumption could produce serious error. ‘Men, when their brains are turned with diving into God’s secrets, may conceit as they please’, and predestinarian speculation could easily lead to the conclusion that God was the author of sin and ‘no man can ever entirely love him whom he thinks so evil of as to be the author of evil’.47 Similarly, the notion of absolute reprobation could lead to an image of God as some sort of ‘tyrant’, ‘sentencing men to death only at his pleasure, before they have offended him at all’.48 Such desperation-inducing thoughts were obviously to be avoided at all costs. It was, Andrewes claimed, the task of the minister to teach only those things ‘that will procure you to love God the better; not that will alien your minds, or make you love him the worse’.49 And so it was clear what Andrewes meant when he warned that ‘the sublimity of this point is so high we cannot reach it. There is a part of divinity that dazzles; if we look too long on it, we may well lose our sight.’50

44 45 46 47 48 49 50

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 32, preached at Whitehall, 1 April 1621, being Easter day. Ibid. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 328, preached at Greenwich, before the king, 16 May 1619, being Whit Sunday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 363, preached at Greenwich, before the king, 20 May 1621, being Whit Sunday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, p. 230, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 25 December 1619. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 363, preached at Greenwich, before the king, 20 May 1621, being Whit Sunday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, pp. 228, 230, preached at Greenwich, before the king, 25 December 1619.

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For Andrewes the practical effects of predestinarian error led either to desperation and alienation from a God perceived to be a tyrant or to a presumptuous security. In practice, it was the latter threat that dominated his concerns. For according to Andrewes ‘a great many think that presumption in being secure of their salvation is good divinity’,51 which misconception led to the fatal illusion that they were ‘God’s darlings, and God doth so dote on them, that he will not suffer them in any case to receive the least hurt that may be’.52 For such people ‘it is no more but out of the font to leap straight into heaven; from predestination we leap straight to glorification, it is no matter for mortification, there be no such degrees’.53 And so, all too many Christians felt free to leave what was, for Andrewes, the crucial work of repentance until their death bed, safe in the knowledge that, whatever happened, God would save them. In the process, they entirely omitted the repentance and the good works necessary to satisfy God’s justice, flying instead straight to God’s certain favour in Christ. Such told themselves that ‘we have Christ to our savior’, and on that basis ‘make a short cut and step to Christ straight, and lay hold on him by faith, without any more ado’, and thus ‘vainly imagine to come to remission of sins, per saltum, over repentance’s head’.54 Andrewes lambasted those ‘Christian professors’ who ‘entertain with stipends such as are come to this phrenzy, I will call it, to say what needs any satisfaction [for sin]? What care we whether justice meet or no? That is, in effect, what needs Christ? Cannot God forgive offences to him made, of his free goodness, of his mere mercy, without putting his to all this pain?’55 In this mode, all too many preachers played up the gospel at the expense of the law, God’s mercy at the expense of his justice. We have gospelled it so long that the Christian law is clean gone with us, we have lost it … I shall tell you what is come by the drowning of the term ‘law’. Religion is even come to be counted res precaria. No law, – no, no; 51 52 53 54

55

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, p. 531, sermon V of ‘seven sermons upon the temptation of Christ in the wilderness’. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, p. 521, sermon IV of ‘seven sermons upon the temptation of Christ in the wilderness’. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, p. 530, sermon V of ‘seven sermons upon the temptation of Christ in the wilderness’. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, p. 428, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 26 February 1623, being Ash Wednesday. Here it is worth emphasising that, as Lossky insists, for Andrewes, repentance was ‘not so much a sadness brought on by regret, as a permanent awareness of human frailty before God’, ‘a state of being before God’, pp. 127, 129. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, p. 184, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 25 December 1616.

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Andrewes’ Anti-Puritanism but a matter of fair entreaty, gentle persuasion … The reverent regard, the legal rigour and power, the penalties of it are not set by. The rules – no reckoning made of them as of law writs, none, but only as physic bills; if you like them you may use them, if not, lay them by. And this comes of drowning the term ‘law’. And all for lack of praedicabo legem.56

Andrewes made a parallel point about Christian liberty. A positively superstitious fear of superstition and hypocrisy had now driven people to a licentious liberty. If an excess of zeal had ‘in the old time, filled the world with many a superstitious imagination’, ‘in our days’, an extreme reaction in the opposite direction had filled the world with ‘riot and licentious liberty, as bad as the former, yea a great deal worse’.57 Fasting was now equated with superstition and all outward observance with hypocrisy. We had so fallen behind the examples of the ancient church ‘as to all but lose sight of them quite’.58 Andrewes complained of those that ‘take to themselves – a Christian liberty they call it, and that forsooth humbly, simply and modestly; but indeed – an unchristian licentiousness, proudly, lewdly and malapertly, to call in question what they list; and to make queries of that which the Christian world hath long since resolved and ever since believed …’.59 When such men wished to assure themselves of salvation, instead of inspecting their works, they pondered the state of their minds and souls. Such introspective navel gazing, such empty speculation, Andrewes deprecated. Maintaining that ‘it is not good trying conclusions about souls’,60 he asked, ‘as for what is in the heart … “who knows it”? Not we ourselves; our own hearts oft deceive us.’ This way, therefore, lay self-deceit and ‘hypocrisy, that, by certain pins and gins, makes show of certain works and motions as if there were spirit, but surely spirit there is none in them. Vain men they are, that boast of the spirit without the work; hypocrites they are, that counterfeit the work, without the spirit.’61 This nexus of errors had deeply deleterious consequences for attitudes towards, and conduct during, public worship. People now behaved as 56 57 58 59 60 61

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, pp. 288–9, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 25 December 1624. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, p. 60, preached at St Giles, Cripplegate, 9 January 1602, one of the sermons on the second commandment. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, pp. 394–6, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 14 February 1621, being Ash Wednesday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 183, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 31 May 1612, being Whit Sunday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, p. 451, a sermon prepared to be preached, 10 February 1624, being Ash Wednesday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, pp. 193–4; p. 183, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 31 May 1612, being Whit Sunday.

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though God had made only their souls and not their bodies, offering him only spiritual, and not outward physical, worship. But this was a great mistake, for God had made our souls, our bodies and our substance, ‘and if our worship be inward only, with our hearts and not our hats as some fondly imagine, we give him but one of three; we put him to his thirds, bid him be content with that, he gets no more than inward worship’.62 Consequently, Andrewes lamented, it was now ‘a plausible theme, not to burden the church with ceremonies; the church to be free, which hath almost freed the church of all decency’.63 Things had come to such a pass that some justified their refusal to kneel in prayer, or at the sacrament, ‘as casting out the spirit of bondage’.64 While, on the one hand, the emancipation of the church from the bondage of popish superstition was all well and good, on the other, that impulse could be taken a deal too far, with the baby of a reverent decency and uniform outward worship being thrown out with the bath water of popish excess. ‘To reform churches, and then seek to dissolve them, will be counted among the errors of our age’, Andrewes intoned. ‘Christ was far from it. He that would not see it [the temple] abused, would never endure to have it destroyed; specially not when he had reformed the abuses’,65 a service that Andrewes held the authorities in church and state had long since performed for the post-reformation church of England. ‘That we set ourselves to drive away superstition, it is well; but it will be well too that we so drive it away, as we drive not all reverend regard and decency away with it also. And are we not well toward it?’ asked Andrewes.66 After all, as Andrewes told the court at Easter 1615, ‘sacrilege the apostle ranks with idolatry, as being full out as evil, if not worse than that … for what idolatry but pollutes, sacrilege quite pulls down’.67 And ‘which of the two extremes’ – idolatry or sacrilege – ‘religion worse endureth, as more opposite unto it’ was a nice question. ‘For believe this, as it may be superstitiously used, so it may irreligiously be neglected also.’68 62 63 64 65 66 67 68

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, p. 262, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 25 December 1622. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, p. 408, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 5 Apr l 1618, being Easter day. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, p. 338, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 24 April 1614, being Easter day. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, pp. 346–7, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 9 April 1615, being Easter day. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, p. 337, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 24 April 1614, being Easter day. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, p. 351, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 9 April 1615, being Easter day. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, p. 337, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 24 April 1614, being Easter day.

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It was precisely to avoid such an outcome that ceremonies were necessary in the worship of God, ‘for without them neither comeliness nor orderly uniformity will be in the church’. Of course, it was left to the authority of individual churches to appoint the requisite ceremonies, hence the duty incumbent ‘on every person’ to inviolably ‘observe the rites and customs of his own church’.69 For too many now acted as though ‘if our minds be one, for the place it skills not; it is but a circumstance or ceremony; what should we stand at it? Yes sure; seeing the Holy Ghost hath taught it so needful as to enter it, we may not pass it over, or leave it out.’70 But that was precisely what many did, with dreadful consequences for the condition of the contemporary church. The slide towards irreverence and disunity lamented in these passages had, Andrewes contended, been considerably exacerbated by the contemporary cult of the sermon, which was in danger of devaluing, if not displacing, the sacrament, which was not now received with either the frequency or the reverence due to it. Preaching on the text noli me tangere, at Whitehall on Easter day 1621, Andrewes remarked that nowadays that injunction was scarcely needed. Given the current neglect of the sacrament, ‘we have no need, God wot, to be preached to of not touching, we are not so forward that way …. This is now out of season.’71 As for those that did receive, Andrewes remarked, ‘I know not how many both touch and take otherwise than were to be wished.’ The puritans, of course, would not kneel to receive – a refusal unprecedented in the history of the church – since present at these holy mysteries were ‘his name, and more than his name, even the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ; and those not without his soul; nor that without his deity’, and still they would not kneel.72 Moreover, many others had grown a good deal ‘too homely’ in their attitude to the sacrament.73 In such exalted matters, the greatest care was required, and even the slightest impropriety or lapse could lead to ‘an abuse of the sacrament’, let alone the behaviour more fitting the dinner table, than the house of God,

69 70 71 72 73

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, pp. 60–1, preached at St Giles, Cripplegate, 9 January 1602, one of the sermons on the second commandment. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, pp. 113–14, preached at Greenwich, before the king, 8 June 1606. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 35, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 1 April 1621, being Easter day. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, p. 335, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 24 April 1614, being Easter day. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 30, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 1 April 1621, being Easter day.

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affected by all too many of his contemporaries.74 ‘As in the gesture and speech both, some are as if they were hail fellow, even familiar with God.’75 ‘Our holiness is grown too familiar and fellow like, our carriage there can hardly be termed service, there is so very little of the servant in it.’ ‘No servants there, but bidden guests, hail fellows, homely and familiar, as one neighbor with another.’76 In this vein Andrewes lambasted contemporary behaviour and posture in church. ‘Covered we sit, sitting we pray; standing, or walking, or as it takes us in the head, we receive; as if Christ were so gentle a person, we might touch him, do to him what we list, he would take all well, he hath not the power to say noli to anything’ but rather had to suffer ‘the hand of presumption’, the ‘scornful eye’, ‘the stiff knee’, without tears.77 74 75 76 77

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, p. 409, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 5 April 1618, being Easter day. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, p. 338, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 24 April 1614, being Easter day. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 4, p. 374, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 5 November 1617. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, pp. 33–4, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 1 April 1621, being Easter day.

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chapter 4

Puritan Politics

Andrewes, then, conceived puritanism as a nexus of errors operative at the distinct, but also integrally linked, levels of formal theological speculation, private belief and piety, and public worship. But the subversive effects of puritanism were not limited to religion, both private and public. On the contrary, at least on Andrewes’ account, these religious errors and pathologies had directly political consequences. Andrewes established these links through the key organising concepts of popularity, hypocrisy and presumption. As the extended comparison between the hypocrite and the stage player was designed to show, for Andrewes, ‘vain glory’ was ‘the ground of hypocrisy ever …. The hypocrite’s end is as the player’s end, both to be seen.’ Thus it was that neither performed without an audience: ‘You never see the play begin till the spectators be come, so many as they can get; nor no more shall you see’ a puritan perform godliness ‘unless there be some to eye and note it’.1 Hence, it was but a short step from hypocrisy to popularity, for there is no animal so ambitious, no chameleon so pants after air, as doth the hypocrite after popular praise; for it he fasts, and so hungry and thirsty he is after it as you shall hear him even beg for it. ‘Honora me coram populo hoc,’ saith one of them – it is Saul … ‘Loquimini in auribus populi huius,’ saith another – it is Abimolech. ‘O give it out in the people’s ears I am thus and thus.’ Mark ‘the people eyes’ and ‘the people’s ears’, for hypocrisy is ever popular; for their, for men’s applause, all in all … to have it whispered ‘that is he’, to be magnified up and down in the people’s mouth, that is even the consummatum est of all this stage-devotion.2

The drive for popular praise and a following amongst the people lay at the root of puritan non-conformity. ‘With some all is not worth a rush, if they 1 2

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, p. 409, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 6 March 1622, being Ash Wednesday. Ibid., p. 411.

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see not farther than their fellows, nay their betters then; if they find not somewhat to find fault with, if it be but a ceremony, and to pick a quarrel with a ceremony is easy.’ Thus, Andrewes asked his court audience at Easter 1618, ‘why should any love to be “contentious”? Why? It is the way to be somebody. In time of peace, what reckoning is there of Wat Tyler, or Jack Straw? Make a sedition, and they will bear a brain with the best … This makes we shall never want contentious persons, and they will take order we shall never want contentions.’3 It was an established tenet of conformist thought that Presbyterianism was the institutional instantiation of puritan popularity, since it established a form of church government which ceded a large role to the people, and, by reducing the clergy to a mere parity, rendered the capacity to appeal to the people a crucial source not only of charisma and influence, but of power in church and state. In practice, this meant the republican form of government, established in and through the discipline in the church, invading the state, in the process reducing kings to the mere playthings and instruments of the godly. Here Andrewes had recourse to the other concept around which his critique of puritanism was organised – presumption. Central to puritan attitudes to predestination and the search for assurance of salvation, presumption also prompted the godly to encroach on the prerogatives and affairs of kings. Thus, Andrewes applied the injunction noli me tangere not only to God and the things that were of God, but to kings and their ‘affairs, secrets of state’. ‘David calleth them … points too high, too wonderful for us to deal with. To these also, belongs this “touch not”.’4 In the next paragraph Andrewes proceeded to associate this sort of secular presumption against kings with the presumption against God involved in detailed, rationalist speculation about the divine decrees. At stake was the stability, even the existence, of the monarchical state. ‘If their state hold not holy’, Andrewes warned, ‘no more will their persons. It hath ever been found, if their crown once go, their life tarrieth not long after.’ Thus, ‘the loose and licentious touching their state … without the regard due to it, as if it were a light matter that might be lifted with every finger, falleth within the reach of this nolite’. For ‘these light and loose touching are but the beginnings of greater evils’.5 (This last aside might 3 4 5

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, p. 408, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 5 April, being Easter day. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 32, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 1 April 1621, being Easter day. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 4, p. 61, preached at Holdenby, before the king, 5 August 1610, being the anniversary of the Gowry conspiracy.

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well constitute one of the few direct allusions to contemporary politics that Andrewes allowed himself to make in these sermons, since he was preaching at court in August 1610, and we might well assume that he was glancing at the decidedly rough touch currently being applied to various flowers of the prerogative during the negotiations over the Great Contract.) After all, Andrewes asked, ‘is there no touch but that of the violent hand? The virulent tongue, doth not that touch too? And the pestilent pen, as ill as both … Yes, they be Satan’s weapons, both tongues and pens, have their points and edges: their points, and prick like a sword; their edges, and cut like a razor.’6 Nor were such dangerous habits the preserve of isolated individuals, elite authors and commentators on events, for ‘multitudes might assay it, as well as single men, and take liberty to themselves, thinking to be privileged by their number’, for now ‘every tongue is walking, and every pen busy, to touch them and their rights which they are to have, and duties which they are to do, and if they do not, then I know not what, nor themselves neither’.7 For Andrewes, the barking of such detractors was tantamount to sedition: For they that, in the end, prove to be seditious, mark them well, they be first detractors, or, as the nature of the Hebrew word is, biters. It is of shen, a tooth; they have teeth in their tongues. Ever the first thing that moves to a sedition is Shimei’s tongue. As at first it did sedition, so it doth still; begin ‘in the gainsaying’, in the contradiction ‘of Korah’. So began he: this Moses and this Aaron, they took too much upon them, do more than they may by law; they would have somewhat taken from them. So Abraham: here is nobody to do any justice in the land. So Jeroboam: Lord, what a heavy yoke is this on the people’s necks. ‘Meddle not’ with these detractors.8

For meddling, like sedition, was, for Andrewes, ultimately ‘a sin of presumption’ and, as such, ‘destructory, a destroying sin’ for those guilty of it: ‘Them and their whole house it eradicates, it pulls all up by the roots.’9 Nor was Andrewes in any doubt that it was the puritans who were the arch-meddlers and detractors of the day. Mistaking the promptings of their own spirit for those of the Holy Ghost, they ‘were ever mending churches, states, superiors – mending all, save themselves’.10 6

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 4, p. 60, preached at Holdenby, before the king, 5 August 1610. Ibid., p. 65. 8 Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 4, pp. 305–6, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 5 November 1614. 9 Ibid., p. 310. 10 Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 133, preached at Greenwich, before the king, 24 May 1608, being Whit Sunday. 7

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Just like the papists, the puritans justified their meddling and carping by setting the fear of God and the fear of the king at odds, ‘as if the fear of the king did abate somewhat from the fear of God, and there were no true fear of God without some mixture of contempt of order and government’. Andrewes ventriloquised the chain of argument in operation here: But if one can grow somewhat bold, somewhat too bold with kings, to teach them their duties, and fear not to ‘speak evil of such as are in authority’, then, lo, he fears God aright. And none of the clergy fears God, but they that use it. Nor none of the laity, but such as bear them in it. And those are the only fear-Gods in the land. Others that think that they may do both, and would gladly do both, may not be allowed to fear God on the right fashion; they fear the face of man. And thus, with their new fear of God they put out of countenance the fear of the king.11

The result was that now no element of the arcana imperii was safe from the tongues and pens of the multitude. Before this jabbering audience, a multitude of puritan preachers preened themselves: ‘men indeed of a tumultuous spirit, but in show indeed zealous preservers of the people’s liberties’. Here, Andrewes allowed himself one of his rare topical allusions, observing in 1616 that ‘marriage matters’, particularly those involving ‘a queen of a contrary religion’ were often the occasion for men to ‘grow godly on a sudden, and wax very zealous, as the fashion is’, using the issue as an ‘occasion to serve many purposes’.12 The allusion here to the issue of the marriage of Prince Charles to a Catholic princess, and hence to the incipient furore over the Spanish match, is clear enough; and in that convulsion of popular religious prejudice, orchestrated through pulpit and press, Andrewes had the perfect example of puritan populist presumption. It is worth noting here that that agitation coincided with the English reverberations of the synod of Dort. The denunciations of predestinarian presumption cited date from 1619 and 1621 respectively. With their side swipes at those ‘with their new perspective’ who sought to number and categorise the divine decrees, those passages represent clear comments on the proceedings at Dort. Those same sermons also contain passages denouncing the presumption of subjects who encroached upon the prerogatives and cross-questioned the doings of princes. They coincide with the period just before and during the early 1620s when the outcry over the Spanish match and the Palatinate was reaching its peak. By bringing these two forms of presumption together, indeed by causally linking 11 12

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 4, pp. 303–4, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 5 November 1614. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 4, p. 136, preached at Burleigh, before the king, 5 August 1616.

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them, Andrewes was able to connect his analysis of puritan predestinarian presumption with wider patterns of political dissent, or, in his terms, of meddling, presumption and sedition. In one peculiarly telling aside from a sermon of 1616, Andrewes made that connection crystal clear, when he denounced the opinion, prevalent amongst ‘some fanatical spirits, in our days, that teach in corners’, that ‘one that is not in a state of grace, can have no right to any possession or place. For they of right belong to none but the true children of God; that is, to none but themselves.’13 One of the two sermons in question here – that preached at Whitehall on Easter day 1621 – did not merely elide puritan predestinarian and political presumption, it also went on to explore the theme of touch in ways that allowed Andrewes to expound his own intensely incarnational eucharistic piety. In so doing that single sermon shows perfectly how, in densely theological, intensely exegetical sermons, Andrewes could also comment on the concerns of the moment, get his (largely anti-puritan) polemical blows in, and press his own intensely Christocentric theologico-political agenda, all at the same time, without ever once seeming to particularise, or to taint the high matter with which his theological discourse habitually concerned itself with the coarse stuff of overt political commentary. 13

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, pp. 277–8, preached at Greenwich, before the king, 19 May 1616, being Whit Sunday.

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chapter 5

The Tree of Repentance and Its Fruits

Having expounded the theological foundations of Andrewes’ position and the image of puritan error against which that position was constructed, it is now time to turn to his positive agenda. A good place to start here is Andrewes’ revaluation of the role of repentance and of good works in the spiritual life of the true Christian. This was the predominant theme of his Ash Wednesday sermons and it is mainly from them that I will be drawing in this chapter. Andrewes’ exposition of this topic was integrally related to his critique of puritan predestinarian error. He stressed faith as a practical, not a speculative, knowledge of Christ, and repentance as a process with real outward effects and consequences. ‘By some’, he complained ‘our conversion is conceived to be a turning of the brain only … a matter merely mental’. But this was a mistake. For ‘to say truth where is conversion mentioned but it is in a manner attended with in corde? And so requireth not only an alteration of the mind, but of the will, a change not of certain notions only in the head, but of the affections of the heart too. Else it is vertigo capitis, but not conversio cordis.’1 In short, true Christians not only, with St Paul, needed faith, but also, with St James, charity.2 In other words, they needed works: ‘For having wherewithal to do good, if you do it not, imprimis, talk not of faith, for you have no faith in you … Nor tell me not of your religion, there is no religion in you; “pure religion is this” … “to visit the fatherless and widows”; and you never learned other religion of us.’3 1

2 3

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, pp. 263–4, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 10 February 1619, being Ash Wednesday. According to Lossky, Andrewes refers here to ‘the biblical notion of the heart as the very centre of man, whence are born his thoughts and intentions, which consequently illuminates and unifies his entire being, body and soil’. ‘The heart then is the place where God comes to visit man and to change by the Holy Spirit the understanding as well as the heart.’ ‘The understanding of the heart, illuminated by grace, gives birth to a knowledge that apprehends being and all reality with a profound awareness at once of the state of sin and of divine pardon.’ Lossky, Lancelot Andrewes, pp. 132, 134–5. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, p. 14, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 25 December 1605. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, p. 36, preached at the Spittle, 10 April 1588.

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Since Christ was the word made flesh it behoved Christians to emulate him by turning ‘the vocal word into a real work’. For, if the mystery of godliness, which was Christ’s incarnation, was a mystery, it was also a manifestation. It followed ‘that therefore our godliness be not only mystical but manifest, as God was. As the mystery, so the godliness of it; great and conspicuous both.’ But, according to Andrewes, that was yet to happen in post-reformation England: ‘As yet the word with us turneth to nothing but wind.’ For that is the complaint now-a-days, we go mystically to work indeed; we keep it under a veil, and nothing manifest but opera carnis, which maketh St James cry … ‘show it me’; and St Paul tells us, that the life of Jesus must not only be had in our spirit, but manifest in our flesh. For godliness is not only faith, which referreth to the mystery …, ‘the mystery of faith’; but it is love too, which referreth to the manifestation … And if faith work by love, the mystery will be so manifest in us, as we shall need no prospective glasses, or optic instruments, to make it visible; all men shall take notice of it.4

Just as we needed not only faith but works, not only speculative, but also practical knowledge, so, we needed the law as well as the gospel. For ‘gospel it how we will, if the gospel hath not the legalia of it acknowledged, allowed and preserved to it; if once it lose the force and vigour of a law, it is a sign it declines, it grows weak and unprofitable, and that is a sign it will not long last’.5 Christ’s sermons, Andrewes argued, were best regarded as ‘so many law lectures; his preaching is our law to live by; and law binds and leaves us not to live as we list. And if that which is preached be law, it is to be heard as a law, kept as a law, to be made our lex factotum, as well as lex fidei. If we hear it otherwise, if we hear it not so, if we lose legem, we may let go praedicabo too and all.’6 For all his insistence that the law must be preached, Andrewes knew, and repeatedly acknowledged, that ‘not to fall nor do amiss at all, is an higher perfection then our nature in state it is can attain to’.7 Thus, the point of preaching the law so assiduously was twofold; firstly, to induce sincere efforts towards obedience, and secondly, to induce an equally sincere repentance, when those attempts to obey the law, and avoid sin,

4 5 6 7

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, p. 42, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 25 December 1607. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, p. 289, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 25 November 1624. Ibid., pp. 299–300. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, p. 339, preached at Whitehall, before Queen Elizabeth, 17 February 1602, being Ash Wednesday.

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failed, as fail they must: ‘If we have not been so happy as to stand and keep our way, let us not be so unhappy as not to rise and turn to it again.’8 There were therefore two essential elements in true repentance – ‘one conversion from sin; the other, contrition for sin’.9 Repentance thus consisted of both ‘mournful bewailing of our life past’ and ‘the breaking off our former sins by works of mercy’,10 which works Andrewes distributed under three headings: ‘1. Works of devotion, as prayer. 2. Works of chastisement of the body, as fasting. 3. Works of mercy, as alms.’11 Such works comprised what Andrewes termed the penal element of repentance. Here, he rejected the papists’ claim that protestants reduced repentance to mere amendment of life. For him, the works of repentance, and in particular fasting, were ‘a tax, a tribute, it hath pleased God to lay upon our sins, and we must bear it’.12 ‘Sorrow, if it have no power to revenge, grows to be a heavy, dull passion; but if it have power, indignation and it go together.’ ‘Who with great indignation cannot but abhor himself for the manifold indignities offered to God’ by his sins?13 For Andrewes, fasting represented an outward sign and bodily expression of that indignation; at once an expression of sorrow and an act of revenge for our past transgressions. There had to be an element of passion – of fear, sorrow, anger and desire, to be precise – in any act of true repentance, and fasting represented the expression of those passions in an act of revenge visited upon our errant flesh.14 ‘Fasting is one of the nails of the cross to which the flesh is fastened, that it rise not, lust not “against the spirit”.’15 Therefore, by the works of repentance we offered a sacrifice to God of ‘1. our soul, by prayer, 2. our body, by abstinence, 3. our goods, by alms deeds’.16 Our thus taking a punishment for sin upon ourselves ‘allures and inclines God to mercy’, acts ‘as a medicinable force, a special good remedy’; and serves to 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Ibid., p. 339. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, p. 359, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 10 February 1619, being Ash Wednesday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, p. 352, preached at Whitehall, before Queen Elizabeth, 17 February 1602, being Ash Wednesday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, p. 443, a sermon prepared to be preached on 10 February 1614, being Ash Wednesday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, p. 366, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 10 February 1619, being Ash Wednesday. Ibid., pp. 372–3. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, pp. 385–6, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 14 February 1621, being Ash Wednesday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, p. 380, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 14 February 1621, being Ash Wednesday. Ibid., p. 381.

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procure ‘God’s favour’.17 Here, Andrewes reverted to a favourite image of his – repentance as a tree. Just as ‘the fruit of the forbidden tree had envenomed our nature, the fruit of this tree to expel it, to recover, or cure us of it’. Only the fruits of this tree were effectually ‘medicinable, of the nature of a counter-poison against our bane, taken by the fruit of another tree’.18 Consequently, at the day of judgement, repentance, defined as a mental act, would count for nothing. ‘Mark it well, this’, Andrewes intoned, ‘it is the fruit of repentance; not repentance itself, but the fruit it is sought for. This is all in all.’19 ‘Before the judgement seat and the fan go over us; and there by these fruits here, and by these fruits only, all shall go, for none is in heaven but by it. Sinners both they in heaven and they in hell; only this difference, they in heaven had these fruits, they in hell had them not. And then seeing they will be all in all, proferte fructus igitur.’20 On the last day, ‘the question shall not be of the highness or lowness of your minds, not of your trust and confidence, or any other virtues, though they be excellent, but of your feeding, clothing, visiting, harbouring, succouring, and in a word, of your well-doing only’.21 All of which was utterly at odds with what he presented as the time wasted by many of his contemporaries on their coldly intellectual, purely mental or internal, notions of faith and repentance. While they were ‘busy aloft on the scaffolds, in our high points of doctrine, the groundsills of religion’, ‘the ground-work, the fundamental point of all the rest’, repentance, ‘decay for want of looking to’.22 Andrewes presented this doctrine as entirely antithetical to the security, presumption and carnal hypocrisy which an abstract concern with the doctrine of predestination wrought in the self-proclaimed godly. What was needed, Andrewes maintained, was a balance between fear and security, anxiety and comfort, law and gospel. For ‘when we consider nothing but the mercy of God’ we lose our awe and reverence of him, and fear of his power, and ‘contrariwise when we cast our eyes too much upon the majesty of power of God the force thereof casts us into an astonishment and 17 18 19 20 21 22

Ibid., p. 388. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, p. 417, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 26 February 1623, being Ash Wednesday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, p. 439, a sermon prepared to be preached, 10 February 1624, being Ash Wednesday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, p. 426, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 26 February 1623, being Ash Wednesday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, p. 36, preached at the Spittle, 10 April 1588. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, pp. 418–19, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 26 February 1623, being Ash Wednesday.

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brings to desperation’. The aim, therefore, was that ‘we neither have … “too much terror” … nor … “too much security”’.23 Therefore, ‘we must not only love him as a father, but fear him as our lord and king. And this mixture shall keep us in the way of salvation, we shall neither too much despair, nor presume of his goodness.’24 True faith was, therefore, to be found midway between distrust and presumption: ‘Distrust is as a water to it, which if it be poured on in abundance, it will make it to be smoking flax, or utterly quench it. Presumption, on the side, is as gunpowder to it, which, being thrown into it, will blow it up, and make it fly all about the house. Christ was to take heed of overheating his house.’25 But if faith represented some sort of middle way between two extremes, in the current circumstances it was presumption that was the problem.26 The antidote to this malaise was a good dose of the law to be applied in the pulpit and internalised by the laity as ‘fear’: ‘In the soul, faith is full of spirit, ready enough to take an unkind heat.’ Fear had accordingly been ‘by God ordained to cool it and keep it in temper, to awake our care still, and see it sleep not in security’.27 Such reactions could be induced in ‘those in a state of sin’ by dwelling on ‘the lake of Sodom’. For those ‘in state of grace’, the example of Lot’s wife would do the trick, about whom Andrewes made two key points. Firstly, he emphasised ‘that she fell, after she had stood long’ and, secondly, ‘that she fell even then, when God by all means offered her safety, and so “forsook her own mercy”’. She had perished ‘at the gates, even hard at the entry of Zoar’, ‘even then when God’s special favour was proffered to preserve her’. ‘This woman had persisted thirty years … This is the grief, that after all these storms in the broad sea well passed, she should in this pitiful manner be wrecked in the haven.’ It was thus crucial, Andrewes argued, that we note ‘the very time, place and presence she maketh choice to perish in, and to cast away that which God would have saved’.28 In that juxtaposition of human choice against God’s salvific will, Andrewes issued a direct challenge to the notion, central to contemporary Calvinist orthodoxy, that a true faith could, neither totally nor finally, be lost. 23 24 25 26 27 28

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, p. 374, sermon VIII on the Lord’s Prayer. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, p. 464, sermon XVIII on the Lord’s Prayer. Also see vol. 3, pp. 350–1, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 4 June 1620, being Whit Sunday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, p. 528, sermon V on the temptation of Christ in the wilderness. Ibid., p. 528. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 336, preached at Greenwich, before the king, 16 May 1619, being Whit Sunday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, pp. 68–9, 73, preached at Hampton Court, before Queen Elizabeth, 6 March 1604.

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Nor was hers an isolated example. Many of the godly, the apparently chosen, had in fact fallen away before the end; the scriptures proved it: Of Christ’s twelve which he had sorted and selected from the rest, one miscarried … and as of Noah’s eight that were saved from the flood, one fell away too; so that of Lot’s four here, and but four in all, all came out of Zoar – one came short. So that of twelve, of eight, of four; yea, a little after, of two, one is refused; that we may remember, few there be that scape from Sodom in the angel’s company; and, of those, few though they be, all are not safe neither. Who would not fear, if one may perish in the company of angels!

The lesson was clear; ‘one end of the abomination of Sodom and the recidivation of Lot’s wife’ was to demonstrate that ‘“they that go not out of her perish, and they that go out of her perish too if they look back”’. If perseverance were ‘the queen of virtues’, these stories showed that she could only be attained ‘if we can possess our souls with due care, and rid them of security’. And to avoid security, in the words of St Bernard, only ‘“fear will do it”’.29 Thus, Andrewes was able to present the propensity of even the godly to fall into potentially damning sin as providential. Quoting St Augustine, he maintained that ‘it is expedient they fall into some notorious sin’, as David, as Peter did, that their faces may be filled with shame, and they by that confusion learn to walk with more humility. ‘The messenger of Satan’ that was sent to the apostle to buffet him, was of this nature, and to no other end sent, but to prevent this malady. In a word, Christ must withdraw – no remedy – that we may grow humble, and being humble, the Holy Ghost may come; for he cometh to none, rests on none, ‘giveth grace to’ none, but ‘the humble’. So we see, that Christ may be and is, even according to his spiritual presence, withdrawn from persons, and for their good.30

Thus it was that fear, humility and repentance – almost the precise antitheses of assurance – emerged in Andrewes’ account as the saving virtues of the Christian professor. But there was something of a paradox in operation here, for as Andrewes explained, in a series of sermons preached on Ash Wednesday, ‘if we find these virtues in us, they are sure pledges of the kingdom of grace, and we may assure ourselves that after this life is ended we shall be received into the kingdom of glory’.31 29 30 31

Ibid., pp. 72–3. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 174, preached at Windsor, before the king, 12 May 1611, being Whit Sunday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, p. 394, sermon X on the Lord’s Prayer.

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But the aim was not to experience fear, humility and repentance as emotional or mental states. The whole point of engendering the fear of God, a sharp sense of sin and a consequent need for repentance, was to drive the believer up what he called ‘the ladder of practise’. This, claimed Andrewes, was the ‘ordinary means’ of salvation.32 (This turn of phrase was extremely unlikely to have been accidental since the claim that preaching was ‘the ordinary means of salvation’ was all but ubiquitous amongst the godly.) Elsewhere Andrewes spoke of ‘the perfect certainty, sound knowledge, and precious assurance you shall have, whereby you shall be assured to be received, because you are sure you are Christ’s, because you are sure you have true faith, because you are sure you have framed it into good works. And so they shall be a foundation to you-ward, by making evident the assurance of salvation.’33 As that mantra-like repetition of the words ‘sure’ and ‘assurance’ was intended to show, Andrewes was not seeking entirely to deprecate the doctrine of assurance, or, still less, to put its very considerable comforts entirely off limits. On the contrary, he was proffering in these sermons an alternative version of assurance, and an alternative route towards its attainment. Opposed as he was to puritan divinity these passages prove that Andrewes’ own position was constructed out of a set of organising concerns, of pastoral and hermeneutic concerns and polemical commitments, held in common with even the most puritan of his contemporaries. The proper relations between law and gospel; the balance between faith and works; the role of repentance, and indeed of works, if not in constituting, then certainly in validating, a true faith; the need to navigate between the Scylla of presumption, or security, and the Charybdis of despair; how assurance might be attained, and, once attained, sustained; all these were the organising concerns around which much contemporary ‘puritan’ practical divinity circled. And Andrewes’ responses to what were essentially the same questions had a great deal in common with those of many a puritan doctor of the soul. Of course, none of this should surprise us. Not only were all of the parties to these exchanges Christian denizens of the post-reformation, they were also all English protestants, many of them of the same or overlapping generations. In the Cambridge University of the late 1580s and 1590s 32 33

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, p. 531, ‘there must ordinary means, and there is a ladder of practice as well as of speculation or contemplation’. Sermon V on the temptation of Christ. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, p. 50, preached at the Spittle, 10 April 1588.

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Andrewes himself had shared the same intellectual and spiritual formation as many of the divines whose views he was now travestying and critiquing before a variety of court audiences. Andrewes, then, was a product of post-reformation English protestantism, his project and position worked out of a common stock of intellectual resources, hermeneutic and rhetorical moves, doctrinal and pastoral conundra, in the course of an extended, albeit fraught, dialogue with what he came to perceive as deviant carriers of subversive and divisive tendencies, entirely alien to the true nature of the English church. In so doing he produced an image of something which we, along with many of his contemporaries, might want to call puritanism, although Andrewes himself hardly ever used the word. But what he tried to cast as deviant, heterodox opinions and practices, first steps on a slippery slope that led inexorably to schism and heresy, we might see as other, rival, claimants to speak for the English church and protestant tradition; a tradition within which Andrewes himself had been trained, and against certain central elements of which he was now in sharp reaction.

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chapter 6

Absent Presences

The Role of Predestination in Andrewes’ Divinity

True to his own dicta Andrewes did not produce anything like a formal treatment of the theology of grace in the sermons collected by Buckeridge and Laud. But he did commit himself to various claims and propositions that had obvious implications for the central doctrines of predestinarian orthodoxy, and it is to those propositions, both negative and positive, and their (often implicit) intellectual and affective consequences, that we must now turn. The belief that Christ had died for everyone was absolutely central for Andrewes. In a divine nature of which justice and mercy were the most notable attributes, Christ’s mediatory sacrifice had ensured that it was now mercy that was predominant.1 God wanted not to condemn, but to save humankind: ‘“I will not their death, I will their conversions”: this is my volo. Nay quoties volui? “How often would I”, at noluistis, “and ye would not”.’2 Andrewes tended to speak not of the elect and the reprobate, but rather of two ‘corporations’ or spiritual bodies – those of Adam and of Christ: ‘Of them that die, they are Adam’s. Of them that sleep and shall rise, that is Christ’s.’ Comparing these two champions, Andrewes asked, ‘look to the persons Adam and Christ; shall Adam, being but a “living soul”, infect us more strongly than Christ, a “quickening spirit”, can heal us again?’ ‘Nay then, Adam was but “from the earth, earthly”, Christ “the lord of heaven”. Shall earth do that which heaven cannot do? Never. It cannot be.’3 The conclusion, then, was obvious – as all had fallen with Adam, so all had risen with Christ. 1 2 3

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 4, pp. 324–5, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 5 November 1615. Also see vol. 4, p. 270, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 5 November 1612. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, p. 345, preached at Whitehall, before Queen Elizabeth, 17 February 1602, being Ash Wednesday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, pp. 215–16, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 5 April 1607, being Easter day.

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But if that were true, if God’s mercy really was stronger than his justice, and if Christ really had died for all, why were not all saved? Here Andrewes replied that while the death of Christ pertains ‘to all’, ‘all pertain not to it. None pertain to it but they that take benefit by it; and none take benefit by it no more than by the brazen serpent, but they fix their eye on it. Behold, consider and regard it; the profit, the benefit is lost without regard.’4 But what precisely did Andrewes mean by that? Could fallen humanity simply reject the proffered grace of God? Andrewes defined the mystical body of Christ, that body for which Christ died and which rose with him, very broadly indeed. His body, Andrewes claimed ‘was his church’.5 ‘St Paul in I Cor. 12. 12. expressly calleth the church, Christ’s body … the first speech Christ ever spake to him, himself calleth the church me.’6 Membership of Christ’s body, the church, Andrewes defined simply in terms of baptism: ‘For in his baptism he put us on, as we “put him on”, in ours.’7 On this basis, he was able to claim that all baptised members of the church received divine grace. From Christ’s death and resurrection there ‘issueth a divine power; from his death a power working on the old man or flesh to mortify it; from his resurrection a power working on the new man, the spirit, to quicken it … this power is nothing else but that divine quality of grace, which we receive from him. Receive it from him, we do certainly.’8 Thus the very day of Pentecost Peter had told the ‘betrayers and murderers’ of Christ that ‘“repent and be baptized, and your sins”, yea even that sin also, “shall be done away, and ye shall receive the Holy Ghost” … Then let no man despair of his part in these gifts, and say, I am shut out of the grant, I have so lived, so behaved myself, never dwell with God I.’ For ‘if a man, though an enemy; this scripture will reach him, if he put it not from him’.9 It was, therefore, safe to conclude that ‘to all save Christ the spirit is given in measure’.10 4

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, p. 155, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 6 April 1604, being Good Friday. 5 Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 245, preached at Greenwich, before the king, 26 May 1615, being Whit Sunday. 6 Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, pp. 49–50, preached at St James’, before Queen Elizabeth, 13 March 1603. 7 Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, pp. 245–6, preached at Greenwich, before the king, 26 May 1615, being Whit Sunday. 8 Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, p. 204, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 6 April 1606, being Easter day. 9 Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 236. 10 Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 154, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 27 May 1610, being Whit Sunday.

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What then made the difference between those who were saved and those who were damned? The difference resided in the various responses of individual Christians to the offer of divine grace. Thus, Andrewes made the point that, if saving divine power was offered to all of us in the gifts of God’s grace, it was up to us to ‘pray and endeavor ourselves that “we receive it not in vain’.11 If all received the gifts of the spirit in some degree, it was up to every Christian to progress from one spiritual gift to the next. If salvation was only promised to those who looked on the crucified Christ ‘with the eye of faith’, it was up to us to force ourselves to look ‘with attention, oft, again and again, with iteration … not a single act, but an act iterated’. Nor should we ‘look upon the outside alone, but to look into the very entrails; and with our eye to pierce him that was thus pierced’.12 ‘By the grace of God’ all had the capacity to ‘so dispose ourselves as we may receive him’ and ‘to be ready wrought to receive the figure of his seal’.13 And so, then, it was up to us to do just that, by avoiding ‘pride, lust, malice’, or ‘whatsoever savoureth of “the gall of bitterness”’.14 We must use all the ordinances of the church – the word, prayer and the sacraments – ‘so, by these spiritual pains and endeavours we come to the bread of life, which feedeth our souls eternally’.15 Elsewhere Andrewes compared Christ to a ‘bone setter’, come to mend the bone of human nature ‘put out of joint’ by ‘Adam’s fall’.16 In that role, Christ enabled men to do good works and thus rendered their fate in the next world dependent on whether or not they performed such works.17

11 12 13 14 15

16 17

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, p. 204, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 6 April 1606. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, p. 128, preached at court, 25 March 1607, being Good Friday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 196, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 31 May 1612, being Whit Sunday; also see p. 217, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 23 May 1613, being Whit Sunday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 197, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 31 May 1612, being Whit Sunday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, p. 326, sermon III of a preparation to prayer. As Lossky puts it, ‘in the Lent and Easter sermons we encounter the theme of the free will of man and the role that it plays in the accomplishment of his own salvation’. And in the Whitsun sermons there was an answering ‘insistence’ ‘on the permanent effort required to put oneself in the dispositions indispensable for receiving the Spirit’. ‘The gift is offered with liberality to all; without exception, there is however, in the very texts that proclaim the good news, a condition. The gift is offered, but it must be received and accepted and not rejected. The acceptance of the gift takes place through repentance and the request for baptism. That clearly implies a free response on the part of man to God who gives himself, but who does not impose himself on his creature.’ Lossky, Lancelot Andrewes, pp. 255, 257. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 96, prepared to be preached on Easter day, 1624. Ibid., p. 94. According to Lossky, this might be thought of as the ‘first resurrection’, which enabled fallen humanity to rise with and through Christ from the effects of sin in this life, so as to able to strive, again in and through Christ and their own efforts, to ascend towards the second resurrection, in the next life. Lossky, Lancelot Andrewes, pp. 177–81.

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Andrewes emphasised that those who fell into sin and failed to rise again through repentance did not do so because ‘they could not’, but because ‘they would not’.18 Christ, therefore, died for everyone; his grace and the gifts of the spirit were offered to all baptised Christians, albeit in different degrees and measures. Christ had restored to all the capacity to do good works, and while sin was inevitable, all were now able to rise again by repentance and the works of repentance. It was only those who failed to do so who would be rejected on the day of judgement. As Andrewes put it, writing of God’s covenant with David, it was only if David stopped behaving as God’s servant that he would lose God’s favour, ‘and unless he lose God, he cannot be lost’.19 And God could only be lost if we failed to keep the terms of his covenant with us, encapsulated in the divine injunctions to ‘“love me”’ and ‘“keep my commandments”’.20 Combined with his insistence, cited in Chapter 5, that even the most godly of God’s servants, like Lot’s wife, could fall into sin and indeed damnation, all this leads, obviously and directly, to a view of predestination from foreseen faith and of reprobation from foreseen sin. Of course, Andrewes was very well aware of the criticisms that such claims would inevitably elicit from his fellow protestants, and consistently took steps to head such objections off at the pass. If Andrewes’ position was dominated by the need to avoid presumption and security, it needs to be remembered that there was more than one likely doctrinal cause of such arrogance, for popery, too, had tendencies in the same direction, albeit ones predicated on an altogether different doctrinal base – the quintessentially popish doctrine of merit. For all his insistence on the need for repentance and good works, Andrewes repeatedly emphasised, as any good protestant had to, that, after the fall, not only was sin inevitable,21 but the corruption of our nature so deep that ‘of ourselves we are not fit so much as “to think” a good thought; … Not so much as to will, “for it is God that worketh in us to will” … Fit to none of these. Then made fit we must be, and who to reduce us to fitness but this “God of peace here that brought Christ from the dead”.’22 Our best righteousness was as but a menstruous cloth, ‘pannus 18 19 20 21 22

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, p. 345, preached at Whitehall, before Queen Elizabeth, 17 February 1602, being Ash Wednesday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 4, p. 82, preached at Burleigh, before the king, 5 August 1614. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 147, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 27 May 1610, being Whit Sunday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, pp. 435–6, a sermon to be preached, 10 February 1624, being Ash Wednesday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, pp. 95–6, prepared to be preached on Easter day, 1624.

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menstruates, English it who will’.23 Whatever virtues or graces we might be able to claim, they were not, in the language of the schools, moral habits rooted in our own souls, but rather spiritual gifts, infused into us ‘“from without”; in us, that is, in our flesh, they grow not, neither they, nor any good thing else’.24 They were thus gifts which took their nature from their source, the Holy Ghost, and not from us.25 Our good works were, therefore, ‘“a thing wrought in us”’; our souls ‘“like a well-watered garden”’, of which Christ was the gardener, who ‘weeds out of them whatsoever is noisome and unsavoury, sows and plants them with true roots and seeds of righteousness, waters them with the dew of his grace, and makes them bring forth fruit to eternal life’.26 All our good works were ‘wrought by us so, as in us also … [God] doth not only co-operate with us from without, but even from within; as I may say inoperate them in us … “working in you” (Heb. 12. 21). Then, if there go another workman to them besides ourselves, we are not to take them wholly to ourselves. But if that other workman be God, we will allow him for the principal workman at the least.’27 Such statements left no room for any claim to be able to achieve salvation on the basis of one’s own merits. On the contrary, as it was only through the operations of the spirit that we are able to produce any good works at all, so it was also only through Christ that our good works – such as they were – were able ‘to please God’.28 Since even after they had received the gifts of the spirit, sinful humanity was still quite unable to keep the commandments perfectly, Christ therefore, had to provide not only a ‘grace active … which relieveth us in the keeping them, but grace passive, too, … which relieves in abating the rigour, when we are called to account about them’. It was only the law thus mitigated in and by ‘the mediator’s hand, that is Christ, whose hands are not so heavy as Moses’, that even persons regenerated by the gifts of the spirit could hope to keep.

23 24 25 26 27

28

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 243, preached at Greenwich, before the king, 29 May 1615, being Whit Sunday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 309, preached at Greenwich, before the king, 24 May 1618, being Whit Sunday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 365, preached at Greenwich, before the king, 20 May 1621, being Whit Sunday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 16, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 16 April 1620, being Easter day. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, pp. 392–3. As Lossky puts it, ‘works, then, had an indispensable value, but penetrated by grace and in union with it’. Or again, ‘the works are certainly ours, but in collaboration, in co-operation with God, which prevents any form of pride and calls for an absolute humility’. Lossky, Lancelot Andrewes, p. 271. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 99, prepared to be preached on Easter day, 1624.

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‘Since all judicial power and proceeding concerning them [our works] is committed over to him’,29 all depended on Christ. At this point, Andrewes had recourse to the distinction between inherent and imputed righteousness. All had to have a claim to inherent righteousness, defined by Andrewes as ‘righteousness done’. Yet before the judgement seat of God ‘righteousness in that sense will not abide the trial’.30 There we needed the perfect righteousness of Christ to be imputed to us, if the scales of divine justice were to be tipped in our favour. We needed works, therefore, and God would accept them in Christ. But there was no sense in which he was bound to do so: ‘If he would, he might refuse; and that he doth not, it is but of his mere goodness; all are but “accepted”.’ ‘God counts them worthy, and his so counting them makes them worthy; makes them so, for so they are not of themselves, or without it, but by it, so they are. His taking our works of righteousness well in worth, is their worth.’ And the principal means through which God did this was the sacrament, ‘the seal of God’s acceptation’.31 There was no room here, therefore, for any notion of merit or moral desert. Andrewes’ was a position designed to refute both popish and puritan forms of presumption. To sum up, Andrewes repeatedly claimed that Christ died for everyone, and that God really did will the salvation of all and that his offer of salvation in Christ could be resisted. Andrewes affirmed that those enjoying a full and effectual faith could fall both totally and finally from grace and that both repentance and the works of amendment were necessary for salvation. More generally, without contravening his own ban on dealing formally with the question in the pulpit, he more than implied a vision of predestination from foreseen faith and of reprobation from foreseen sin. At the same time, Andrewes explicitly rejected what he himself called Pelagian notions of free will and popish notions of merit. He managed to combine an insistence on fallen humanity’s complete reliance of the sacrifice of Christ and the gift of divine grace for salvation with an equal insistence that the offer of grace had to be actively accepted and that good works were necessary for salvation, an outcome that could only be achieved through an active collaboration between the grace of God and the exercise of human choice and moral effort. For even as Andrewes emphasised the corruption of our natures, he acknowledged that we could 29 30 31

Andrewes, Sermons, v. 3, p. 151, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 27 May 1610, being Whit Sunday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, pp. 114, 116, a sermon preached at Whitehall, 23 November 1600. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, pp. 341, 343, preached at Greenwich, before the king, 16 May 1619, being Whit Sunday.

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and must actively collaborate with God in our own salvation, which of course we could only do in and through Christ and under the ameliorating and enabling effects of the Holy Spirit. According to Andrewes, the two main heresies against which he defined his own position on the theology of grace, and which, he claimed, most troubled the church, had both stemmed from attempts to provide philosophically inspired, and abstractly coherent, glosses on basic scripture truth. These heresies he defined as those of Pelagius, who ‘ascribed to man’s free will and ability to keep God’s law, and thereby made void the grace of God’, and that of the Manichee, who made ‘men secure how they lived, because it was ordained what should become of them’. Both were, in Andrewes’ phrase, ‘bastard ships of corrupt philosophy’, the second ‘an imagination issuing from the sect of Stoics and their fatal destiny’, and the first ‘from the sect of the Peripatetics and their pure naturals’. The moral, for Andrewes, was clear: ‘beware of oppositions of science, falsely so called’.32 Thus, despite his occasional recourse to the language of the schools – vide the passage on inherent and imputed righteousness cited earlier in this chapter – Andrewes thoroughly deprecated all such abstract theological speculation, claiming that such flights of doctrinal fancy represented, not only a clear infringement on the majesty of God, but also the source of potentially damning error. But Andrewes did not need to break his own ban on theologising about the mysteries of predestination in order to break definitively with contemporary Calvinist orthodoxy and produce his own alternative account of how Christians might be saved and (a sort of) assurance of salvation achieved. The cautious moderation of his stance was no doubt, in part, a function of the current balance of forces in the English church, where Calvinism still held the upper hand.33 But Andrewes could afford to be this relaxed since what really mattered to him was not the propagation of one carefully defined orthodoxy on the theology of grace as opposed to another, but rather the practical spiritual consequences of the doctrines involved. As we have seen, he objected to the absolute predestinarian views of his contemporaries largely because of the hypocrisy, presumption and disobedience that they prompted in their proponents. Thus, while, in the contemporary showdown between Arminians and Calvinists, it was clear where 32 33

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, p. 56, one of the sermons on the second commandment, preached in St Giles Cripplegate, 9 January 1602. See Nicholas Tyacke’s Anti-Calvinists which has demonstrated that to be the case without doubt. For a slightly different statement of essentially the same case see Lake, ‘Calvinism and the English church’.

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Andrewes’ sympathies lay, all he needed to accomplish his basic salvific purposes was, at the very least, to demote the theoretical views of which he disapproved from their current status as a form of de facto orthodoxy, and, at best, to relocate them under a cloud of both official, and more popular, opprobrium. In other words, he neither needed (nor, in all likelihood, wanted) to replace one set of numbered doctrinal propositions with another. For what mattered to Andrewes – where the positive emphasis of his sermons nearly always rested – was on the role of the visible church in helping the Christian believer ascend the ladder of practice that led, as he put it, from baptism to salvation, and it is to that vision of the visible church, its structures, ordinances and observances, that we must now turn.

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chapter 7

The Visible Church and Its Ordinances

7.1 Preaching For Andrewes, as for any post-reformation English protestant, the obvious place to start, when talking about the ordinances of the visible church, is preaching, which, for all his complaints about the contemporary cult of the sermon, had a major role to play in Andrewes’ account of the workings of the visible church. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Andrewes held, not that preaching was the ‘ordinary means of salvation’, but rather that God ‘saves not any but those he teaches’.1 ‘There is a door shut, this is the key; no opening, no entrance without it, none at all … For how can they possibly be saved, except they call upon God; or call upon him, except they hear?’ ‘Twenty times in the gospel is the preaching of the word called the kingdom of heaven, as a special means to bring us thither.’2 Indeed, the word was the chief means by which the Holy Spirit was communicated to us. ‘The Holy Ghost is “Christ’s spirit”, and Christ is “the word”. And of that word, “the word that is preached” to us is an abstract. There must then needs be a nearness and alliance between the one and the other. And indeed, but by our default, “the word and the spirit”, saith Esay, shall never fail or ever part, but one be received when the other is.’3 After all, the whole history of the church was testimony to the potency of the word preached: ‘by this puff of breath was the world blown round about. About came the philosophers, the orators, the emperors. Away went the mists of error, down went the idols and their temples before it.’4 1 2 3 4

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 69, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 13 April 1623, being Easter day. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, pp. 190–1, preached at Greenwich, before the king, 1607. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 198, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 31 May 1612, being Whit Sunday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 268, preached at Greenwich, before the king, 19 May 1616, being Whit Sunday.

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Andrewes was able to combine this very exalted view of the preacher’s role with the denunciations of the cult of the sermon cited because, while he held that knowledge was essential to salvation, the things it was necessary to know were neither numerous nor difficult to grasp. The current obsession with points of doubt and controversy was therefore completely misplaced; indeed, it represented a serious distraction from what really mattered. Certainly, the current belief that ‘the points of religion that be manifest’ were ‘certain petty points, scarce worth the hearing. Those – yea those be great, and none but those, that have great disputes about them’, was completely wrong: ‘Those that be necessary he hath made plain; those that are not plain, not necessary.’ Indeed, Christian unity would be within reach if ‘men did not delight rather to be treading mazes than to walk in the ways of peace … Controversies would cease, if conscience were made of the practice of that which is out of controversy.’5 Preachers, then, ought not to be obsessed with increasing their flock’s knowledge, they should act rather as ‘the Lord’s remembrancers … employed … as much in calling to their minds the things they know and have forgot, as in teaching them the things they know not, or never learnt’.6 Not that ministers should never deal with the more abstruse areas of Christian doctrine. The point was rather to handle such doctrines in the pulpit, not so as to feed a restless urge to be ‘“always learning”, continually hearing, still at sermons’, but rather to produce a ‘true knowledge which consisteth in the practise’ of Christian virtue and good works.7 Merely the means to a greater end, preaching was not anything like an end in itself, but rather the beginning of a far larger process. For the whole point of hearing the word was to purge us of sin and prompt us to lead a godly life, and that the word alone could not do. As Andrewes observed, ‘prophets spake, but purged not. Purging was ever the priest’s office.’ It was true that the word did have a ‘mundifying virtue … but, not that only, or principally. For the medicine which purgeth ex proprietate, his flesh and blood go to it. “By which will we are sanctified, even by the offering of the body of Jesus”; “that blood of Jesus Christ, cleanseth us from all sin”. These, the true ingredients into this medicine.’8 5 6 7 8

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, pp. 35–6, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 25 December 1607. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, p. 64, preached at Hampton Court, before Queen Elizabeth, 6 March 1604. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, pp. 196, 198, preached at Greenwich, before the king, 1607. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, p. 116, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 25 December 1612.

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7.2  The Sacrament The word might, therefore, convince us of the need for repentance and a good life, but the enabling grace that rendered us capable thereof came primarily in and through the sacrament. For while the effects of the word might be great, they also tended to be short-lived: ‘The word giveth a light, and his brightness showeth in it ad horam, and not much longer. The parts of the sacrament they are permanent, and stick by us.’9 Christ was, after all, directly present to our senses in the sacrament. We could ‘see in the breaking, and taste in the receiving, how gracious he was and is; was in suffering for us, is in the rising again for us too, and regenerating us thereby “to a lively hope”. And gracious in offering us the means, by his mysteries and grace with them, as will raise us also and set our minds, where the true rest and glory are to be seen.’10 For Andrewes, the sacrament ‘was the only visible part of religion’.11 We were, after all, bodily creatures and therefore ‘it hath seemed to his wisdom most agreeable, to make bodily signs the means of conveying the graces of his spirit’.12 Admittedly, on many occasions Christ had announced himself first ‘by the ear rather than the eye’ – as he had to Mary Magdalene. Since, ‘with the philosophers, hearing is the sense of wisdom’ and ‘with us, in divinity, it is the sense of faith’, this was natural enough. But Andrewes observed ‘it is not the only way’, and at Emmaus, for instance, ‘many words he spake to them’ and yet ‘they knew him not, for all that’.13 All the way did he preach to them, even till they came to Emmaus, and their hearts were hot within them, which was a good sign; but their eyes were not opened but at ‘the breaking of the bread’, and then they were. This is the best and surest sense we know, and therefore most to be accounted of. There we taste, and there we see; ‘taste and see how gracious the lord is’. There we are made to ‘drink of the spirit’, there our ‘hearts are strengthened and stablished with grace’. There is the blood which shall ‘purge our consciences from dead works’, whereby we may ‘die to sin’. There the bread of God, which shall endue our souls with much strength; yea, multiply strength in them, to live unto God; yea, to live to him continually; for he 9 10 11 12 13

Ibid. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, p. 322, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 18 April 1613, being Easter day. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 219, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 23 May 1613, being Whit Sunday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 143, preached at Greenwich, before the king, 24 May 1608, being Whit Sunday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, pp. 21–2, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 16 April 1620, being Easter day.

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The Visible Church and Its Ordinances that ‘eateth his flesh and drinketh his blood, dwelleth in Christ, and Christ in him’; not inneth, or sojourneth for a time, but dwelleth continually. And, never can we more truly, or properly say, in Christo Jesu domino nostro, as when we come newly from that holy action, for then he is in us, and we in him, indeed.14

It was on this basis that Andrewes delivered himself of some of those exercises in the sacramentalist sublime with which his sermons were peppered. The sacrament was, he claimed, ‘the food of angels’, and, in receiving the sacrament, we ‘are on earth most near to angelic perfection, then meetest to give glory unto God, then at peace with the whole earth, then a good will and purpose in us, if ever’.15 For the sacrament offered not merely proximity to angels, but to Christ himself: ‘And truly here, if there be an ubi Christus, there it is. On earth we are never so near him, nor he us, as then and there. There in efficacia, and when all is done, efficacy, that is it must do us good, must raise us here, and raise us at the last day to the right hand; and the local ubi without it of no value.’16 As Andrewes explained it, Christ had ordained ‘his last sacrament, as the means to re-establish “our hearts with grace”, and to repair the decays of our spiritual strength; even “his own flesh, the bread of life” and “his own blood”, “the cup of salvation”. Bread made of himself, the true granum frumenti, “wheat corn”. Wine made of himself, “the true vine”. Went under the sickle, flail, millstone and oven, even to be made this bread; “trod, or was trodden, in the wine press alone”, to prepare his cup for us.’17 Christ’s presence in the sacrament, Andrewes explained in a Christmas sermon of 1618, ‘is not altogether unlike Christ in the cratch. To the cratch we may well liken the husk or outward symbols of it. Outwardly it seems little worth, but it is rich of contents, as was the crib this day with Christ in it. For what are they but … “weak and poor elements” of themselves? Yet in them find we Christ. Even as they did this day … “in the beasts’ crib the food of angels”; which very food our signs both represent, and present to us.’18 ‘In the ritual of the old church we find on that cover of the canister, 14

15

16 17 18

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, p. 205, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 6 April 1606, being Easter day. Also see vol. 2, p. 300, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 12 April 1612, being Easter day. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, pp. 213–14, 116, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 25 December 1618. For the same sentiments see vol. 1, pp. 231, 116, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 25 December 1619. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, p. 322, vol. 1, p. 116, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 18 April 1613, being Easter day. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, pp. 169, 116, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 25 December 1615. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, pp. 213, 116, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 25 December 1618.

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wherein was the sacrament of his body, there was a star engraven, to show us that now the star leads us thither, to his body there.’ For the church was now ‘the true Bethlehem, and all the Bethlehem we have now left to come to for the bread of life, – of that life which we hope for in heaven. And this our nearest coming that here we can come, till we shall, by another venite, come unto him in his heavenly kingdom.’19 Thus, Andrewes lamented that, while his contemporaries remained obsessed with the obscurities of doctrinal speculation, what he termed the real ‘mystery of godliness, or exercise of godliness – call it whether you will’, went unregarded. For, Andrewes explained, such ‘mysteries go not all by hearing; no, they be dispensed also’ and ‘men are to esteem of us [the clergy] … not only as of the upholders, but, as of “the stewards”, or dispensers “of the mysteries of God”’, the apogee of which dispensation occurred in the sacrament. ‘Nothing sorteth better than these two mysteries one with the other; the dispensation of a mystery with the mystery of dispensation’, for the sacrament ‘doth manifestly represent, it doth mystically impart what it representeth. There is in it even by the very institution both a manifestation, and that visibly, to set before us this flesh; and a mystical communication to infeoffe us in it or make us partakers of it.’20 But there was something of a paradox involved here, for if the importance of the sacrament lay partly in its capacity to act upon and appeal to the outward senses, its value could also be expressed in terms of its power to penetrate inwardly, to operate directly on what Andrewes termed ‘the whole substance of the soul’, speaking to ‘the understanding part’, while also reaching ‘into the seat of the affections’.21 There was a mystery of incorporation involved here, best understood by recourse to the mystery of the incarnation. For Andrewes detected, operative in the sacrament, ‘a kind of hypostatical union of the sign and the thing signified, so united as the two natures of Christ’; a union from which the fathers had borrowed ‘their resemblance to illustrate by it the personal union of Christ’, which they had then pressed against the heretic Eutyches. Thus, ‘even as in the eucharist neither part is evacuate or turned into the other, but abide each still in his former nature and substance, no more is either of Christ’s natures annulled, or one of them converted into the other, as Eutyches held, but each nature remaineth still full and whole in his own kind’. Since 19 20 21

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, pp. 247–8, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 25 December 1620. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, pp. 43, 116, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 25 December 1607. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 219, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 23 May 1613, being Whit Sunday.

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the analogy worked both ways, or as Andrewes put it both forwards ‘and backwards; as the two natures in Christ, so the signum and signatum in the sacrament’,22 not only did this render both popish or ‘puritan’ error about the nature of the real presence at least as serious as the Christological heresy of Eutyches, it also meant that, by eating the consecrated elements, true believers were literally ingesting Christ. The sacrament, then, was ‘spiritual food’, indeed ‘the uttermost perfection of nourishment’, ‘so called spiritual, not so much for that it was received spiritually’ – it was after all eaten, and thus incorporated into the very physical substance of the believer – ‘as for that, being received, it maketh us, together with it, to receive the spirit’.23 Thus, comparing preaching to the direct action of the sacrament on the soul, Andrewes felt able to describe the former as ‘the outward means’ whereby men were brought to God, while to the latter was referred the truly ‘inward’ task of making us ‘fit and perfect’.24 Of course, both word and sacrament were ‘conduit pipes of his grace, and seals of his truth unto us’;25 both means through which the testimony and regenerating power of the spirit were vouchsafed to us. To draw ‘grace and truth’ out of Christ, we had to use ‘means’, and this involved recourse to both the word and the flesh, ‘grace and truth now proceeding not from the word alone, but even from the flesh thereunto united; the fountain of the word flowing into the cistern of his flesh, and from thence deriving down to us this grace and truth, to them that partake him aright’.26 The previous year he had explained to another court audience that ‘the means by which he giveth the comforter’ were by Christ the Word, and by Christ’s body and blood, both. In tongues it came, but the tongue is not the instrument of speech only but of taste, we all know. And even that note hath not escaped the ancient divines; to show there is not only comfort by hearing the word, but we may also ‘taste of his goodness, how gracious he is’, and be ‘made drunk of the spirit’. That not only by the letter we read, and the word we hear, but by the flesh we eat, and the blood we drink at his table, we be made partakers of his spirit, and of the comfort of it. By no more kindly way passeth his spirit than by his flesh and blood, which are vehicula spiritus ‘the proper carriage to convey it’ … Christ fitted our body to him, that he might fit his spirit to us.

22 23 24 25 26

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, pp. 281–2, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 15 December 1623. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, pp. 143–4, preached at Greenwich, before the king, 24 May, being Whit Sunday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 97, a sermon prepared for Easter day, 1624. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, p. 100, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 25 December 1611. Ibid., p. 100.

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For so is the spirit best fitted, made permeable, and best exhibited to us who consist in both.27

Here were the fruits of the incarnation, the word and the flesh, God and fallen humanity, conjoined in Christ and sacrificed on the cross, and now both shown forth and communicated in the sacrament, proffered there to humanity as the ultimate conduit of the Holy Spirit. As Lossky puts it, ‘in Baptism, in the Eucharist, it is the Holy Spirit who acts, who makes the sacrament authentic. There is no sacrament without Him, and there is no Spirit without the sacrament.’ ‘It appears then that the Church is established out of the pierced side of Christ by both the sacraments, or, more exactly, the Church is established through the unique sacrament, the summit of which is the Eucharist. It makes it possible, therefore, here below, to have a foretaste of the divine life of the Kingdom to come by the real partaking of the glorified body of Christ.’28 For Andrewes, then, the sacrament was the ‘corner stone’ or ‘angle’ of the spiritual temple that was the church. It was the principal means whereby we were united into Christ’s mystical body, first uniting us to Christ ‘the head’, whereby we grow into one frame of building, into one body mystical, with him. And again, uniting us as living stones, or lively members, … ‘one to another, and altogether in one, by mutual love and charity …’ ‘He that eateth of this bread, and drinketh of this cup, abideth in me, and I in him.’ There is our corner in him. ‘All we that partake of one bread or cup, grow into one body mystical.’ There is our corner, either with other. By the same means expressing our thanks for it, and by the same possessing ourselves of it.29

Here then was the ultimate expression, and source, of unity amongst Christians: ‘And we are all made “one bread, and one body”, kneaded together, and pressed together into one – as the symbols are, the bread and wine – so many as are partakers of one bread and one cup, “the bread of life”, and “the cup of blessing” the communion of the body and blood of Christ.’30 Even here, at the highest pitch of spiritual exultation, in its most exalted exercises in the sacramental sublime, Andrewes’ language was performing 27 28 29 30

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, pp. 161–2, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 27 May 1610, being Whit Sunday. Lossky, Lancelot Andrewes, p. 285. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, pp. 288–9, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 24 March 1611, being Easter day. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 239, preached at Greenwich, before the king, 12 June 1614, being Whit Sunday.

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a subtly polemical function. For in these passages, he was echoing the imagery of spiritual building, which the puritans used to evoke and explain the construction of ‘a spiritual temple built only of lively stones’, an entity which they tended to equate with the godly community. For the puritans, that process of edification was the work of the spirit, operating through the preaching of the word, and the mutual admonition and exhortation, in short, the mutual ‘edification’ of the godly. Here Andrewes was appropriating that language for his own, purely sacramental, overtly conformist purposes; using it to establish the national church and its central, divinely ordained, ordinance, as the chief way in and through which Christians were actually integrated into the mystical body of Christ. Thus, through the sacrament were created states of both spiritual and social peace and unity; states to which, as we have seen, Andrewes held that the inherently divisive practices of the godly could not only not aspire, but which they could also not help but actively subvert. All of which meant that the sacrament should not operate as what Andrewes contemptuously called a merely yearly affair, ‘panis annuus’. While he commended, even Andrewes could not quite recommend, the practice of the ‘primitive church’, when the sacrament was received sometimes ‘thrice in a week’. But he was certain that frequent reception was crucial for the spiritual health, and perhaps even for the salvation, of the Christian.31 ‘For as our duty is … to be led … so our duty too … is to be fed by him.’ For ‘“leading he feeds us, and feeding he leads us”, till he bring us whither? Even to a principio, back again to where we were at the beginning; and at the beginning we were in paradise.’32 But the opposite was also true; neglect, ‘either in not caring to come to it, or in coming to it we care not how’, was sure to bring down the plagues of God upon the malefactors; just as Moses told Pharaoh, ‘if they neglected their sacrifice, God “would fall upon them with the pestilence”’, so ‘the sacrament of the Passover, and the blood of it’ was ‘the means to save them from the plague of the destroying angel in Egypt’.33

7.3 Prayer If the sacrament was one divine ordinance whose relations with the word preached Andrewes was concerned to reorder, then prayer was the other. 31 32 33

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, pp. 67–8, one of the sermons on the ten commandments, preached at St Giles Cripplegate, 9 January 1602. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 1, p. 174, preached before the king’s majesty, 25 December 1615. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, p. 228, preached at Chiswick, in a time of pestilence, 21 August 1603.

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Prayer, along with the word and sacrament, was a divinely ordained ‘artery to convey the spirit unto us’;34 it was ‘“the conduit or bucket of grace”’.35 Andrewes described prayer as the means by which ‘we express our desire to draw him [Christ]’. ‘Every attraction or desire’, expressed in prayer ‘hath a promise, by the mouth of our savior Christ himself, that his heavenly father will give the Holy Ghost … “to them that will make petition, seek and sue, open their mouth, and pray for it”.’36 Prayer was the natural accomplice of preaching; together they formed a two-way street linking God to fallen humanity, and humanity to God: ‘the one, prophesy, being God’s tongue to us; the other, invocation, being our tongue to God … prophesy breathes it [the spirit] into us, prayer breathes it out again … prophesy doth infuse, pour in at the ear, invocation doth refundare, or “pour forth back again”, in prayer out of the heart’.37 Using both ordinances ministers discharged the duty of angels, not only through preaching, descending from heaven to earth ‘to teach them the will of God’, but also ascending ‘to the presence of God to make intercession for the people’, via prayer.38 Accordingly, Andrewes felt able to assert that ‘it is the oratory of prayer poured out of our hearts shall save us, no less than the oratory of preaching poured in at our ears’.39 Just like the sacrament, prayer was a source of enabling grace: ‘We, in regard that of ourselves we cannot do the least thing that he [God] requireth, should knock at the gate of his mercy, that he will minister to us ability to do the same.’ And the obvious way to do that was through prayer.40 ‘We cannot come to God, but through prayer’, Andrewes asserted. Prayers were ‘incense’; whereby our ‘wicked imaginations and unchaste thoughts’ were ‘sweetened’ in ‘the nostrils of God’;41 ‘they giveth a sweet smell to all our works, words, and thoughts, which otherwise would stink, and be offensive to the majesty of God’.42 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 128, preached at Greenwich, before the king, 8 June 1606, Whit Sunday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, p. 311, sermon II ‘of a preparation to prayer’. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 198, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 31 May 1612, being Whit Sunday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 311, preached at Greenwich, before the king, 24 May 1618, being Whit Sunday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, p. 356, sermon IV of ‘a preparation for prayer’. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 318, preached at Greenwich, before the king, 24 May 1618, being Whit Sunday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, pp. 301–2, sermon I ‘of a preparation to prayer’. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, p. 324, sermon III ‘of a preparation to prayer’. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, pp. 344–5, sermon V ‘of a preparation to prayer’.

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On this basis, Andrewes claimed that prayer was the ‘higher end’ for which preaching was but the means, since ‘the calling on us by prophesy is but that we should call on the name of God. All prophesying, all preaching, is to this end.’43 The proper business of ‘the church and city of God’ was thus ‘studying how they may, by prayer, “receive mercy, and obtain grace to help them in time of need”’.44 As he told the court on Whit Sunday 1618, since it was not possible to go ‘from prophetabunt … to salvabitur straight’, ‘we must take invocaverit in our way, no passing to salvation but by and through it’: ‘Is the pouring of the spirit to end in preaching? And preaching to end in itself, as it doth with us? A circle of preaching, and in effect nothing else – but pour in prophesying enough, and then all is safe? No; there is another yet as needful, nay, and more needful to be called on, as the current of our age runs, and that is “calling on the name of God”.’ But as things stood, Andrewes explained, ‘it grieveth me to see how light it is set; nay, to see how busy the devil hath been to pour contempt on it, to bring it in disgrace with disgraceful terms; to make nothing of divine service, as if it might be well spared, and invocaverit here be stricken out’.45 Andrewes confirmed his argument for the importance, even the superiority, of prayer, in two ways. Firstly, he argued that while preaching reduced the laity to passivity, as members of an audience, mere recipients of the word preached, prayer stirred them up to an altogether more active involvement in the service: The stream of our times tends all to this. To make religion nothing but an auricular profession, a matter of ease, a mere sedentary thing, and ourselves merely passive in it; sit still and hear a sermon and two anthems, and be saved; as if by the act of the choir, or of the preacher, we should so be (for these be their acts) and we do nothing ourselves, but sit and suffer; without so much as anything done by us, any effundam on our part at all; not so much as this, of calling on the name of the Lord.46

This, Andrewes explained, was ‘a notable stratagem of Satan, to shrink up all our holiness into one part, and into that one’ which was most dependent on the passive response of the audience: ‘where we may be or not be; being, hear or not hear; hearing, mind or not mind; minding, either remember or forget; give no account to any what we do or not do; only 43 44 45 46

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 318, preached at Greenwich, before the king, 24 May 1618, being Whit Sunday. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, p. 347, sermon V ‘of a preparation to prayer’. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 318, preached at Greenwich, before the king, 24 May 1618, being Whit Sunday. Ibid., p. 319.

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stay out the hour, if that, and then go our way, many of us as wise as we came; but all in a manner hearing, as Ezekiel complaineth, a sermon preached no otherwise than we do a ballad sung’.47 Since it was the puritans who were responsible for spreading such errors, this passage in effect enlisted them as agents of the devil in leading the members of the English church away from the true means of salvation. The second perspective from which prayer appeared to enjoy a primacy over preaching involved the relation of the two ordinances to God. For unlike sermons, prayers were a genuine service directed towards God not man: ‘So oft as we resort to the house of God to put up our petitions to God, then we do him service properly, and not only when we are present at a sermon, for then God rather serveth us and attends us, and entreats us by his ministers “to be reconciled to him”.’ Since prayer ‘is part of God’s worship, so the neglect of prayer is a sin’.48 Prayer was our ‘reasonable service of God, because we do therein acknowledge not only our own wants and unworthiness, but also that as God hath in his hands all manner of blessings to bestow on us, if we sue to him for them, “he will withhold no good thing” from us’.49 Prayer was, therefore, the ultimate acknowledgement of human unworthiness and impotence, and of divine power and beneficence. As such, it stood undeniably at the centre of divine service or worship. Moreover, alone of the constituent parts of divine worship, collective prayer replicated here on earth the practise of the saints in heaven, whose ‘constant task was to confess God’s power and goodness’. We ought, therefore, ‘while we live of earth not to speak only with the tongue of men but of angels, not only to confess our wants and to crave a supply from God, but to acknowledge God’s riches, goodness and power’.50 Small wonder, then, that the house of God had become known as the house of prayer. This contemporary usage reflected that of the Greeks and Hebrews. So ‘when we say “at service time”, and “the service book”, and refuse to be present at “divine service”’, we were referring to the practise of public prayer: ‘And God himself seems to go before us, and direct us so to do; for his house he hath named “the house of prayer”, observing the rule, to give it to the denomination from that which is the chiefest service in it.’51 47 48 49 50 51

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 4, pp. 377–8, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 5 November 1617. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, p. 323, sermon III of ‘a preparation to prayer’. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, p. 352, sermon IV of ‘a preparation to prayer’. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, pp. 459–60, sermon VIII on the Lord’s Prayer. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 4, p. 376, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 5 November 1617.

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Andrewes was more than happy to acknowledge the obligation to pray privately, and the value of private prayer. But that did not prevent him from attributing a peculiar potency and significance to public prayer: we must learn to distinguish the liturgy and the public service of God in the church from that private devotion which our savior shall have us perform daily … For God hath promised to accept that worship which we tender unto him in the place consecrated for that purpose; … that is, the public place whither the saints of God from time to time assemble themselves to call upon God together. In his temple does everyone ‘speak his praise’. Our savior Christ did therefore tell them that it was domus orationis, to teach us that the chief end of our meeting there shall be not to make it a public school of divinity and instruction, but to pour out our prayers to God; for private prayers were not enough, unless at times appointed we meet together to pray publicly.52

The potency of the public prayers of the congregation was compounded, Andrewes argued, because those prayers were led by the clergy and ‘God hath a greater respect to the prayers of those that have a spiritual charge, than to those that are of the common sort.’ All of which spoke (once more) to the superiority of prayer over the sermon as an instrument of grace and expression of reverence, since ‘God is more respective to the prayers which they [the clergy] make for the people than the people are heedful to the law of God taught by them.’53 Thus, in the time of distress Hezekiah sent unto the prophet Esay (Isaiah), to entreat him ‘to “lift up his prayer for the remnant that were left”: and so he did, and was heard by God. And in the New Testament, St James’ advice is in time of sickness to “call for the priests”, and they to “pray over” the party, and that prayer shall work his health; “and if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him”. For where the grace of prayer is, and the calling both, they cannot but avail more than where no calling is but grace alone.’54 But if God paid particular attention to the prayers said for the people by their priests, it was the set prayers of the liturgy to which he listened, rather than the extemporised ravings of many a puritan minister, who, by ‘finding fault with a set liturgy, which they call stinted prayers, and giving themselves to imagine prayers at the same instant’, had merely fallen into a different version of popish and pharisaical error: ‘Instead of rosaries and a number of prayers, they bring in the Pharisees’ imagination of “long prayers”, that is, a prayer as long as a whole rosary. And this they take to be 52 53 54

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, p. 357, sermon VI of ‘a preparation to prayer’. Ibid., p. 356. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, p. 231, preached in Chiswick, in time of pestilence, 21 August 1603.

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a great part of holiness, but indeed it is nothing but the former superstition drawn in backward.’55

7.4  Outward Reverence in the Worship of God The capacity to yield service and thanksgiving to God was something that prayer shared with the sacrament. Similarly, unlike preaching, both ordinances encompassed not merely actions directed by God, to fallen humanity, but acts of service, sacrifice and thanksgiving directed Godward by fallen humanity. As such, they both provided major occasions for the display of the external reverence, the physical ceremoniousness and unity that were essential for the proper worship of God. Here again we return to Andrewes’ insistence that religion could and should not be a thing of the mind or spirit alone. ‘He will not have the inward parts only’, Andrewes proclaimed, ‘… no, mental devotion will not serve, he will have both corporal and vocal to express it by. Our body is to afford her part, to his glory; and the parts of our body, and namely these two, the knee, and the tongue. Not only the upper parts, the tongue in our head, but even the nether also, the knee in our leg.’56 Thus, prayer should not be merely mental or silent. As we ourselves ‘have not only a soul but a body also, so our prayer must have a body; our “tongue must be the pen of a ready writer”. We must, at the time of prayer bow our knees, as our savior Christ did. We must “lift up our hearts with our hands”. Our eyes must be lifted up to God “that dwelleth in the heaven”. And, as David says, our bones must be exercised in prayer.’57 The same priorities infused Andrewes’ approach to receiving the sacrament. Discussing Christ’s words to Mary Magdalene, noli me tangere, Andrewes found the key to their meaning in Mary’s irreverent approach towards the risen saviour: ‘The touchstone of our touching Christ, is with all regard and reverence that may be. Bring hers to this, and her touch was not the right touch, and all for want of expressing more regard.’58 On this topic, there could never be too much of a good thing: ‘If he say noli to the want of regard, we know what he will say volo to; that the more 55 56 57 58

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, p. 69, one of the sermons on the second commandment, preached at St Giles Cripplegate, 9 January 1612. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, p. 333, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 24 April 1614, being Easter day. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 5, p. 349, sermon V of ‘a preparation to prayer’. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 29, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 1 April 1621, being Easter day.

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respectively, the better we carry ourselves, the better he will like us. This is sure; he will be appreciated to in all dutiful and decent sort, and he will not have us offer him any other … The best we have I am sure is not too good for Christ. It is better to render account to him a little too much, than of a good deal too little.’59 Nor was it any excuse to claim that our overfamiliarity with Christ in the sacrament was due to an excess of love: ‘Love, Christ loves well; but love, if it be right … “doth nothing uncomely”, keeps decorum; forgets not what belongs to duty and decency, carries itself accordingly.’ It was, after all, ‘a strange kind of love when for love to Christ we care not how we use him, or carry ourselves towards him’. After all, on another occasion Mary Magdalene had indeed been allowed to touch Christ ‘but that time, when she did so touch him, she was upon her knees, down at his feet, another manner of gesture than she here offered’.60 And that was the posture that Andrewes recommended to his audience, both for their reception of the sacrament and for their prayers. As a common gesture of reverence and supplication, kneeling linked prayer to one’s reception of the sacrament. In both the psalms and our liturgy, kneeling was cited as the appropriate gesture for worship. Since ‘it hath ever been the manner in Christ’s church, whether we offer to him, or receive aught offered from him, in thus wise to do it’, Andrewes exhorted his audience, in the most exalted terms to ‘“Come, let us worship and fall down, and kneel before the Lord, our maker.” Shall we ever say it, and never do it? Is not this to mock God? They in the scripture, they in the primitive church, did so, did “bow”. And verily, he will not have us worship him like elephants, as if we had no joints in our knees; he will have more honour of men, than of the pillars in the church. He will have us “bow the knees”; and let us “bow” them in God’s name.’61 Andrewes expressed shock, even disgust, at the puritans’ refusal not only to bow at the name of Jesus, but even to kneel to receive the communion. And yet the same people who would happily receive ‘a patent’, or ‘a pardon’ or some other secular benefit, ‘with all humility … upon their knees’, now ‘strain and make dangerous to bow their knees to receive’ ‘so great, so high, so heavenly a gift’, ‘as if it were not worth so much’.62 59 60 61 62

Ibid., p. 33. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, pp. 30–1, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 1 April 1621, being Easter day. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, p. 334, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 24 April 1614, being Easter day. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 2, p. 335, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 24 Apr l 1614, being Easter day.

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As these excoriating attacks on the puritans implied, Andrewes valued outward ceremony and bodily decorum not only as a way to express obedience to the relevant authorities in church and state, but as a crucial means to express reverence before the presence of God, ensure and perform the unity of the church, and thus to maintain that church’s status as a repository and recipient of the Holy Ghost. As the agent of unity and love between both the persons of the Trinity and fallen humanity and God, it was only natural that the Holy Ghost would be attracted by unity and repelled by its absence. For Andrewes, it was axiomatic that such unity should not be merely mental or spiritual, a question of attitude and opinion, but rather that it should take a physical, bodily form. We should be not only ‘of one mind’, that is unanimity, but also ‘in one place’ too, that is uniformity. Both in the ‘unity of the spirit’, that is, inward, and ‘in the bond of peace’ too, that is, outward … God’s will is, we should be, as upon one foundation, so under one roof; that is his doing … ‘he that maketh men of one mind to dwell in one house’. Therefore, it is expressly noted of this company here, in the text, where they prayed, ‘they prayed all together’; when they heard, ‘they heard all together; when they brake bread, they did it all together. All together ever: not in one place some, and some in another [but all] ‘in one and the self-same place. For say what you will, division of places will not long without division of minds. This must be our ground. The same spirit that loveth unanimity, loveth uniformity; unity, even in matter of circumstance, in matter of place. Thus the church began, thus it must be continued.63

As we have seen, Andrewes tended to associate the irreverence and disunity of which he was complaining in such passages with the contemporary cult of the sermon. By quoting isolated passages from different sermons it would be possible to create the impression that Andrewes was seeking to create a prayer- and sacrament-, rather than a word-centred, view of religion and worship. And so, to a certain extent, he was. However, by the same token, Andrewes’ frequent exalted statements about the value of preaching, not to mention the amount of time and attention he clearly lavished on his own sermons, and his consequent reputation as one of the great preachers of the age, all militate against such a simplistic verdict. Certainly, what Andrewes claimed he wanted to establish was a proper balance between the constituent parts of divine worship and the saving mission of the visible church. On several occasions, he asserted the complete 63

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 114, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 8 June 1606, being Whit Sunday.

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complementarity of the three ordinances – preaching, prayer and the sacraments – as means to assure the spirit’s coming and as conduits of divine grace. They all, he proclaimed, provided an ‘artery’ ‘to convey the spirit unto us’, sites where we might ‘“drink of the spirit”’, ‘means to procure the spirit’s coming’.64 It was not therefore ‘for us to limit or appoint him, how, or by what way, he shall come to us’: ‘For many times we miss, when we use this one or that one alone; where, it may well be God hath appointed to give it us by neither, but by the third.’ However, Andrewes promised that, ‘using them all, he will not fail but come unto us, either to allay in us some unnatural heat of some distempered desire in us to evil. Or as a fire to kindle in us some lukewarm, or some key-cold affection in us to good.’65 Andrewes consequently deprecated the contemporary practice, to which, as we have seen, he himself had recourse when it suited him, ‘of falling to comparisons … as the fond fashion now-a-days is, whether is better prayer or preaching, the word or the sacraments’.66 ‘I love not to dash one religious duty against another, or, as it were, to send challenges between them.’67 That the first word of the sentence immediately following that claim was ‘but’ speaks volumes for Andrewes’ method here. Many of the passages cited in this chapter on the value of preaching ended, literally or metaphorically, with just such a ‘but’. As we have seen, Andrewes characterised ‘the stream of our times’, or ‘the errors of the age’, as systematically favouring preaching. Cumulatively that had produced the positively idolatrous cult of the sermon that (paradoxically enough) he spent pages of his own sermons denouncing. In such circumstances, it would have been positively irresponsible to have merely reproduced, without qualm or qualification, the paeans of praise to the potency and importance of the word preached, of the sort beloved of his contemporaries. Andrewes clearly wanted a balance, but who amongst his contemporaries wanted an imbalance between the word and the sacraments, preaching and prayer? It was just that, on Andrewes’ account, to discover the true balancing point, to re-establish right relations between the word, the sacraments and public prayer, indeed to recover an appropriate sense of the church’s mission tout court, a certain amount, of (hopefully not invidious) 64 65 66 67

Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 128, preached at Greenwich, before the king, 8 June 1606, Whit Sunday. Ibid., pp. 127–8. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 22, preached at Whitehall, before the king, 16 April 1620, being Easter day. Andrewes, Sermons, vol. 3, p. 319, preached at Greenwich, before the king, 24 May 1618, being Whit Sunday.

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comparison was absolutely required. If a tag-team match between the various divine ordinances was to be avoided, a good dose of recalibration and re-evaluation was entirely in order. And in repeatedly undertaking that controversial, but necessary, task there can be no doubt that Andrewes was seeking definitively to shift the balance between the constituent parts of divine worship away from preaching and towards the sacrament and public prayer.68 However much he might emphasise the necessity of preaching and magnify the role at least of preachers like himself, if not of the all too numerous puritan pretenders to the role, Andrewes regarded preaching as but the initial, albeit essential, phase in a larger process whereby the testimony and saving effects of the spirit were transferred to all the baptised members of the national church, in ways that made their salvation possible, if, that is, under the ameliorating effects of divine grace, they responded a-right to the prospect of salvation opened for them by Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. Starting with the word preached, that process was fuelled, indeed we might even say consummated, by the two other ordinances. Precisely because the doctrines necessary for salvation were few in number, and relatively easily understood, humanity’s journey towards God came to be centred not on a quest for knowledge, but on a struggle to lead a godly life, to achieve repentance and perform properly the works of repentance. On Andrewes’ account, once fallen humanity had internalised the core beliefs necessary to salvation, the divine aid necessary to enable them to do those things came primarily through prayer and the sacrament. Through prayer they could ask God for his sanctifying and saving grace, and through the sacrament they could receive it. The role of the preacher was then to remind them of things they already knew, and urge them on in their efforts. This, then, was the proper balance between the outward observances, through which, together with the works of repentance and amendment of life, the true believer was to achieve salvation and the church perform its properly salvific function in a fallen world. 68

Cf. the discussion in Arnold Hunt’s excellent article, ‘The Lord’s Supper in early modern England’, Past & Present, 161 (1998), pp. 39–83.

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Part II

Laudianism: What It Was Holy Places

In the sermons of Lancelot Andrewes, certainly as ordered by Laud and Buckeridge, we see the unfolding of a coherent vision of the mission of the visible church and of the nature of the life of faith – all worked out from Trinitarian and Christological first principles. But in turning to the Laudian works produced in the 1630s, we leave behind a world framed by one controlling intelligence, phrased in one distinctive, indeed decidedly idiosyncratic, style, and enter a far more cacophonous world, composed of many authors and even more texts and voices, all seeking to put their spin on the policies and agendas of the Caroline or Laudian church in the 1630s. What follows is an attempt to impose a certain order on this chaos; to build up from first principles a picture of what the Laudians took to be ecclesiastical and religious order, moving up from the ways in which God’s presence in the world created holy places, to how the ordinances central to his worship shaped space, time and experience, and thus constituted a properly reformed church, Laudian style.

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Part II

Laudianism: What It Was Holy Places

In the sermons of Lancelot Andrewes, certainly as ordered by Laud and Buckeridge, we see the unfolding of a coherent vision of the mission of the visible church and of the nature of the life of faith – all worked out from Trinitarian and Christological first principles. But in turning to the Laudian works produced in the 1630s, we leave behind a world framed by one controlling intelligence, phrased in one distinctive, indeed decidedly idiosyncratic, style, and enter a far more cacophonous world, composed of many authors and even more texts and voices, all seeking to put their spin on the policies and agendas of the Caroline or Laudian church in the 1630s. What follows is an attempt to impose a certain order on this chaos; to build up from first principles a picture of what the Laudians took to be ecclesiastical and religious order, moving up from the ways in which God’s presence in the world created holy places, to how the ordinances central to his worship shaped space, time and experience, and thus constituted a properly reformed church, Laudian style.

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chapter 8

The House of God

According to a whole chorus of writers from the 1630s, the church, conceived as a physical structure, a specific place or site of worship, was the house of God. As the place where ‘our Lord God most holy most doth inhabit’ it was, claimed Robert Skinner in 1634, ‘his proper mansion or dwelling house’.1 According to Walter Balcanquall and John Browning, the church was ‘the house of God and the very gate of heaven’.2 God, of course, was everywhere and accordingly ‘the whole universe is the temple of his [the Christian’s] God, or rather the soul of every Christian is the temple of his God’.3 However, God was present in his church in a very special sense. From such claims an enormous amount of the Laudians’ project can be extrapolated. Here was the bedrock of the Laudian case for reforming the church and, through that process, remaking society. In the peroration of a visitation sermon of 1636 Alexander Read maintained that it is necessary it should be seen there is a God in the world. This cannot be seen by his essence, though it fill the world. It cannot be seen by the hearts of men, they are as hidden from our eye as God himself. In the book of nature he has too much hid himself from the people’s eye, therefore there need other outward expressions of him, which the people are capable of, viz. our outward assemblies, the places of them, and our carriages in them, all which ought to be such as may convey a reverent opinion of him into the people’s heart by the eye.4

Robert Skinner informed the court in 1632 that, since the beginning of the world, God had always manifested his presence more intensely in some places rather than others. Thus in the Old Testament the phrases ‘before the Lord’ and ‘before the ark’ had been taken as synonymous with the place of 1 2 3 4

Skinner, A sermon (1634), pp. 21–2; also see Laurence, A sermon (1637), pp. 16–17. Balcanquall, The honour (1633), p. 12; Browning, Public prayer (1636), p. 23. De templis (1638), p. 119. Read, A sermon (1636), pp. 21–2.

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his service: ‘And was not the temple afterwards called the house of God, and the Lord, never doubt it, is as great a king, and hath his royal presence, as well under the gospel as under the law.’5 ‘We may note it successively in all ages’, Skinner concluded, ‘never any took upon them to worship the Lord, but the place was resolved on. Can we imagine but Cain and Abel had where to bring their sacrifices? … After the flood, Noah had his altar where to adore … and so had Abraham his … Isaac also erected an altar … and had not father Jacob his Bethel, named by himself “the house of God” and “the gate of heaven”? Gen. 28.’ To these places succeeded both the tabernacle and the temple, and then, with the destruction of the temple, ‘Christian temples began to be frequent, which were yet extant afore in St Paul’s time.’6 These structures had been holy because God had occupied them ‘as his proper mansion or dwelling house’. He did so ‘“when the cloud covered the tent, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle”, Exod. 40. 34’, and again ‘at the finishing of the temple [when] “the glory of the Lord filled the house of the Lord”, I Kings, 8 … And can any Christian doubt whether he be present in our Christian congregations, where holy prayers are poured forth, his holy gospel preached, his holy sacraments administered, his most holy body and blood communicated.’7 As Robert Shelford pointed out, ‘God hath made choice of this house before all private houses … In this house God hath put his name and made promises to it, above all places.’ God’s ‘promise of his especial presence, made in scripture’ to ‘such houses [as are] consecrated to his name’, rendered them ‘especially holy, as also because in this house God will bear for the presence of his son. For, as St Chrysostom saith, “where Christ is in the eucharist, there is no want of angels, where such a king is and such princes are, there is a heavenly palace, nay heaven itself ”.’8 In a visitation sermon preached of 1636 Richard Tedder explained that ever since the erection of the temple at Jerusalem by Solomon, ‘God hath been the owner of a house, though the fantastical schismatic would allow him none, … An house God will have of us to whom we are beholden for ours, not a chamber or a parlour, a part of a house, but a whole house, and that not common to others, but proper to himself, which he may call his own, and say, domus mea.’9 5 6 7 8 9

British Library (BL) Additional Mss 20065, fols. 42v–43r. Skinner, A sermon (1634), pp. 16–18. Ibid., pp. 21–2. See Laurence, Two sermons (1635), pp. 20–1, from the first sermon preached at the Oxford Act, 1634, and De templis (1638), pp. 110–12. Also see Laurence, A sermon (1637), p. 16. Shelford, Five discourses (1635), pp. 7–9. Also see Mede, The reverence (1638), p. 16. Tedder, A sermon (1637), pp. 4–5.

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This holiness attached to the place itself was not inherent, but relative, not essential, but derivative:10 ‘Relative it is to God, and not to men, his house it is, not theirs, wheresoever God, men and angels meet and are made known one to another, by voice and vision, there is God’s house and holiness.’11 As Joseph Mede pointed out, ‘the “tabernacle of the Lord was called … the tabernacle of meeting; not of men’s meeting together, as is commonly supposed when we translate it “tabernacle of the congregation”, but of God’s meeting with men’.12 John Yates insisted that ‘it is not holy because an holy people meet there, or for popular presence, which is more likely to pollute than excite to any holiness, or for any qualities in it, to make them more holy, but because of God, whose name it bears and whose presence fills it with the signs of his glory’.13 As another author observed, ‘The word ecclesia, amongst orthodox Christian writers, signifies not only the congregation of the people of God, but the place also where the assembly meets’,14 and that place was holy, and its holiness perpetual. God’s objective presence in his church thus conferred an objective and indelible holiness on the place and all its material fixtures and fittings. Robert Shelford admitted that God’s presence in the church was at its most intense ‘then chiefly when God’s people are met together there’.15 However, the divine presence was not limited to time of divine service.16 The very idea drove William Hardwick into paroxysms of indignation.17 Foulke Robartes argued that ‘we do reverence at our entrance into the king’s chamber of presence and all the while we are there, and specially when we come near the chair of state, though his majesty be not there in person’. Nobody regarded that as superstitious, and we should have the same attitude to similar behaviour in church.18 Robert Shelford, Robert Skinner and John Swan all repeated the image of the church as God’s presence chamber.19 As Skinner explained to the court in 1632, since ‘in 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

For the distinction between inherent and relative holiness, and the claim that ‘the creature is to be esteemed holy in relation to the holy use whereto it is assigned’ see Foulke Robartes, God’s holy house (1639), pp. 2–3. Yates, A treatise (1637), p. 2. Mede, The reverence (1638), p. 16. Swan, Profanomastix (1639), p. 2. De templis (1638), p. 16. Also see Swan, Profanomastix (1639), p. 22. Shelford, Five discourses (1635), p. 15. Swan, Profanomastix (1639), p. 58. Hardwick, Conformity with piety (1638), pp. 12–13. Robartes, God’s holy house (1639), pp. 90–1. Shelford, Five discourses (1635), p. 14; Robartes, God’s holy house (1639), p. 72; Swan, Profanomastix (1639), p. 58.

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attendance on earthly princes all awful observance be little enough for serving and preserving’, while we should beware, with the papists, of ‘judging of religion by outward ostentation’,20 it remained not merely ‘incredible, but impossible’ ‘that too much reverence should be showed in his service’.21 Of course, God’s presence was not uniform throughout the church; it was most intense in those places where his presence was shown forth and applied to true believers in the sacraments (a point to which we shall return). Thus Foulke Robartes likened the relationship between ‘God and the temple, between the oblation and the altar in the Old Testament’ to the relationship now ‘between the communion and the body and blood of Christ under the gospel; the relation doth continue so that whensoever the holy table cometh into our eyes it ought to put us in mind of the mercy of God in the blood and merit of Jesus Christ’.22 And yet while the intensity of God’s presence in the sacraments might produce points of particular spiritual heat, towards which particular reverence was due, the divine presence suffused the whole structure, and all the physical impedimenta used in his worship, with an aura of holiness. While a physical object used in that worship could lay no claim to ‘inherent sanctity’, such a utensil was to be esteemed ‘holy in relation to the holy use whereto it is assigned, and, in this sense times, places, oil, bread and several utensils … when they be applied to divine worship, are holy’. Foulke Robartes went on to describe as ‘holy’ things ‘assigned to the worship of God … immediately as was the tabernacle and the temple, which are therefore holy … the time of God’s worship … men made priests … beasts offered in sacrifice … so the oblation is a consecration … and the altar on which it is laid is holy or sanctified … These, and the like, are therefore holy, because they are for holy use in the very act thereof.’ Robartes endowed the other physical possessions of the clergy, which were only indirectly involved in the worship of God, with this same ‘holiness’. Chief amongst these were ‘those things which concern the maintenance of the priests’, most notably ‘their tithes’. These, like the churches themselves, ‘in regard of the authority of their consecration, are, by God himself, immediately made holy’.23 As Thomas Laurence observed, ‘wheresoever a consecration is, there God especially is, by a peculiar dispensation of his gracious 20 21 22 23

BL Additional Mss 20065, fol. 66v, from a sermon ‘preached before the king, December 9, 1634, at Whitehall’. Ibid., fol. 42v, from a sermon ‘preached at Whitehall, December 18, 1632’ and at Bristol, 1637. Robartes, God’s holy house (1639), pp. 90–1. Ibid., pp. 2–3.

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and merciful presence’.24 The status thus conferred was perpetual: ‘thus to be God’s is to be his in a peculiar manner, and not as other things are’.25 When, in the passage cited, Foulke Robartes had been discoursing on the holiness of the physical objects used in worship of God, he had cited scriptural passages culled from the Old Testament to buttress his position. As should have become clear by now, this was typical of the approach adopted by these writers. Shelford cited the tabernacle, the details of which De templis claimed ‘God himself dictated to Moses’,26 as a warrant for the decoration and embellishment of Christian churches. Alexander Read agreed, observing that when God ‘platformed out his own tabernacle and inspired Solomon to his temple, we see how glorious they were. Not only the buildings, but even the lowest utensils, the snuffers and snuffer dishes … Though we be not bound to take this as a law from God, to make all our temples by, yet we shall do well to make him our pattern.’27 Thus, John Swan observed that the primitive Christians had modelled their churches on Solomon’s temple, and cited St John’s ‘very mystical’ vision in Revelation as evidence that, seeing ‘the visions of things appertaining to the Christians do so frequently allude to the fashions of the Jews’, ‘we are surrogated into their rooms for whom the temple was built and so are to cast the form of our churches after that fashion’. ‘For as the Christian religion is come in place of the Jewish, so are our churches come in place of theirs. Their tabernacle was a pattern of their temple, and their temple a type of our churches, even as all their service was a type of our Christ.’28 And so Foulke Robartes cited the ornaments and images decorating the tabernacle, the temple and the ancient Christian churches to justify the presence in the church of stained glass windows – erected not ‘for any matter of worship … but for history and ornament’ – as well as other forms of the ‘beauty of holiness’ including church plate and music.29 24 25

26 27 28 29

Laurence, A sermon (1637), p. 15. Swan, Profanomastix (1639), p. 57. Also see, p. 22, and Tedder, A sermon (1637), p. 8. In Altars restored, p. 240, Fincham and Tyacke note Laud’s insistence on having new churches like St Giles in the Fields, or merely rebuilt ones like St Katharine Cree, newly consecrated, and that ‘the formal consecration of individual objects within the church was a significant development of the 1630s’. Graham Parry highlights Laud’s adopting as a model a service devised by Lancelot Andrewes, first used to consecrate a chapel at Southampton in 1620. Parry, Glory, laud and honour, pp. 32–7. For the example of St Katharine Cree see P. Lake, The boxmaker’s revenge: ‘orthodoxy’, ‘heterodoxy’ and the politics of the parish in early Stuart London (Manchester, 2001), pp. 298–341. De templis (1638), p. 178. Read, A sermon (1636), pp. 7, 22. Also see Balcanquall, The honour (1633), p. 6. Swan, Profanomastix (1639), pp. 5, 26–7. Robartes, God’s holy house (1639), pp. 46, 54–6. On stained glass in the 1630s and in particular on the increasing use of scenes from the life of Christ up to and including the crucifixion see Fincham and Tyacke, Altars restored, pp. 258–9.

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For contemporaries such claims had visual and even material consequences. As Margaret Aston points out, not only had Phillip II famously modelled the Escorial on Solomon’s temple, two Jesuits, Jerónimo Prado and Juan Bautista Villalpando, had subsequently written a massive threevolume exposition of the vision of Ezekiel in the course of which ‘they had provided the world with the first full-scale image of the temple on the grounds that only by translating Ezekiel’s vision into real architecture could its full mystical import be appreciated’. According to Aston, the book proved ‘enormously influential’. In 1611 John Buckeridge presented a copy to Laud’s college, St Johns, and as early as 1618, in a sermon preached at court before James I himself, he used the temple, the mercy seat and the attendant cherubim as a model for the ‘worship of Christ at his table’. Along with Hooker’s Laws, Andrewes’ Sermons and Laud’s Conference with Fisher, Villalpando’s book was amongst those that Charles kept with him during his captivity at Carisbrooke Castle.30 On this evidence, we might take the Laudians to have been espousing a scripturalism as basic as anything one might want to call puritan. Margaret Aston sees this move as at least in part polemically motivated; ‘designed’, she says, ‘to cut the ground from under Calvinist feet. Against those who claimed to have places of worship cleansed of the improprieties of medieval Roman Catholic churches (ecclesiae), here were temples whose every ornamentation proclaimed their fidelity to the scriptural model.’ Thus the theological and rhetorical citations of the tabernacle and temple might legitimate certain sorts of church decoration – in this instance the cherubim so prominent in Laudian churches particularly in the chancel and on the font. But once in place, such images and objects could themselves be conceived as sending an ideological or theological message about the necessity of church decoration. ‘The cherubim who appeared in the east end of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, and in various parish churches in early seventeenth century England’ were, Aston suggests, in effect, advertising ‘divine authority as the justification for what critics might read as tainted pagan forms. Solomon’s temple, whose structure and decoration had been a model for church builders for hundreds of years’ was here operating as both ‘pattern and defence’. Thus, central aspects of Laudian church decoration were intended ‘self-consciously’ to challenge, indeed to offend, ‘Calvinist proprieties’.31 30 31

Aston, Broken idols, pp. 289–90, 325. For Buckeridge’s avant-garde conformity see Lake, ‘Lancelot Andrewes, John Buckeridge’. Aston, Broken idols, p. 322. On the polemical edge of Laudian scripturalism see P. Lake, ‘The Laudians and the argument from authority’, in D. Brautigan and B. Kunze, Court, country and culture (Rochester, NY, 1992), pp. 149–76.

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Replying to the objection that such Old Testament texts and precedents drawn from the Mosaic law, had been abrogated by Christ, Joseph Mede maintained that ‘in things for which we find no rule given in the New Testament, there we are referred and left to the analogy of the Old’, a claim he used to justify tithes, infant baptism,  ‘derived surely from the analogy of circumcision’, and Sabbath observance.32 Other writers went further. Responding to the same objection that while ‘such outward worship was requisite under the law’ it was ‘not now required’, John Swan argued that the need for holy places consecrated to the worship of God predated the Old Law: ‘for before Judaism began, Jacob acknowledged Bethel, the house of God, to be a place of fear and reverence. He did no sooner perceive that it was an house of God but he presently began to be perplexed, for fear he had not behaved himself so in it as, of right, he knew he ought to do in all such places.’33 Jacob had been acting on the promptings of something other than direct divine precept or command. Robert Skinner explained just what that was. While, as we have seen, Skinner was enthusiastic in his deployment of scriptural example, he was not seeking to ground the sacredness and apartness of churches merely on scriptural inunction or historical precedent. For, search the scriptures as one might, there was no direct divine command prompting Solomon to dedicate the temple, or afterwards Ezra the priest to rededicate it upon its restoration, or the priests under Judas Maccabeus, ‘when it had been polluted’, to do the same. Neither had the ‘Lord commanded Jacob to consecrate a pillar of stone by pouring oil upon it’. Rather, they had all been responding to what Skinner termed ‘rectified reason and godly wisdom, which directed them by a public dedication, as it were by a public declaration, to manifest to the world the religious convenience of sacred places, to sacred uses. And then it follows that as Bethel of old, and the sanctuary, so likewise our Bethels are holy, being solemnly hallowed and devoted in the name of God, and to the glory of God, as they were.’34 Laud himself endorsed this position, citing first ‘the bodily worship’ performed by Moses ‘at the very door of the tabernacle’, and by Hezekiah, and all that were present with him, when they made an end of offering, and indeed to which David called the people when he exhorted them ‘“O come, let us worship and fall down and kneel before the Lord our 32 33 34

Mede, The reverence (1638), p. 12. Swan, Profanomastix (1639), p. 14. Skinner, A sermon (1634), p. 21.

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maker”.’ But having made his case through these examples, he was quick to insist that such practices had not originated in ‘judaical worship’, but had started ‘long before Judaism began’, for ‘Bethel, the house of God, was a place of reverence, Gen. xxviii, 17, and therefore certainly of and to God.’ For Laud, then, to worship God with ‘body as well as soul’ was a universal moral obligation, grounded in the law of nature. And so, he maintained, ‘would I worship in what place soever I came to pray, though there were not so much as a stone laid for Bethel’.35 Citing Hooker, Peter Heylyn agreed, claiming, on that basis, that even Adam had had holy places set aside for worship.36 If the need for a holy place of worship predated the Mosaic law, so it had survived the abrogation of that law. Thus, as John Swan explained, Christ might have ‘said to the woman of Samaria, … that the time was then at hand that God should not be worshipped, either at Jerusalem or at Garazim, but that the true worshipper should worship the father in spirit and in truth, yet did he not say anything for the abolishing of public places purposely consecrated and set apart for public worship’. Christ’s purging of the temple sent the same message, for, claimed Swan, therein Christ showed ‘his zealous forwardness in the preserving of his father’s honour and that, in future times, it should (of right) be as well regarded as before’. Moreover, this was done ‘at the very point of his passion, … when the legal sacrifices of the oxen, sheep and doves had begun (even from the Baptist’s preaching) to be cleared already. Whereby is showed that that holiness and honour, which heretofore was due to God’s house, and to God in his house, should not die with those ending figures of the law, but still abide; extending itself, to the praise and glory of God, so far as the benefit of Christ’s baptism and passion did, and should live as long as either praying or preaching remained.’37 Joseph Mede insisted that, even under persecution, the early Christians had set aside a specific space or site for divine worship. The key Greek word which the fathers used in this context meant not a congregation or assembly, but rather a separate place, a fixed physical location. In the straitened circumstances created by persecution, that church may have been no more than a room in a house, but Mede claimed this was enough 35 36

37

Laud, A speech, pp. 56–7. Heylyn, Antidotum (1637), section 2, p. 69. Also see Robartes, God’s holy house (1639), p. 5, and Mede, The reverence (1638), p. 4, where Robartes grounded the need for holy places on what Robartes called ‘the light’, and Mede, ‘the instinct of nature’; an impulse Mede described as ‘approved of God from the beginning’. Swan, Profanomastix (1639), pp. 14–15, 24.

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to justify Eusebius’ claim that ‘the antiquity of churches or oratories of Christians’ dated ‘from the apostles’ times; yea, to have been an apostolical ordinance’. For Mede, that ordinance of the apostles was in turn built on a divine ordinance taken from ‘the analogy of the Old Testament’. Thus while the early Christians may have avoided the word temple to distinguish themselves from the pagans, under the word ecclesia or oratory they nevertheless enjoyed purpose-built and consecrated churches for divine worship.38 Such a vision of the church as the house of God had certain, very practical, consequences for the Laudians. For if God’s presence in the world was most intense and most manifest in the physical structure of the church, if that church really were the house of God, it should be fitted out accordingly, and humanity should conduct itself within the church with the necessary reverence and respect. The church should, in short, glow with the beauty of holiness; a beauty of holiness, be it noted, not now primarily defined in terms of the spiritual or moral state of the individual members of the Christian community, but in terms of their outward conduct and appearance inside the church, and indeed of the physical or material condition of the church itself. Let us start with the fabric and appearance of the church. Since, for the Laudians, the church was in itself holy, a sacred space set apart from the world for the apprehension and worship of God’s presence in his own house, it followed that, as Walter Balcanquall told the court, ‘they who pervert God’s house, and turn it to any secular use, do deny it to be my house, that is, God’s, as much as they who evert it, pull it down. It is a notable cunning of the devil as to make us believe that’ the church ‘may serve for other uses besides the service of God; to lay lumber in, or things put of the way, in a progress time to serve for a wardrobe, in the country for juries of leets to sit in and consult about their verdicts, and most commonly at the communion table to make their sesses, not only for the poor (which is a church duty), but also for all other compositions where they seldom meet without wrangling and, I am afraid, many times not without swearing’.39 John Pocklington conjured a world in which the Lord’s table might serve ‘as a board for money changers, or a chopping block, or a trestle to lay the beer upon, as I have seen it used, or a glazier’s board, and the chancel his work house, or an outroom, to lay up old rotten 38

39

Mede, Churches (1638), pp. 2–3, 19, 65–6. For a compact summary of the Laudian position, stretching from Bethel, through the tabernacle to the first and second temples, the synagogues of the Jews and the first gathering places of the apostle see Richard Corbet’s consecration sermon for Lincoln College Chapel, of September 1631. Oxford Historical Society, Collectanea IV (Oxford, 1905), pp. 144–5; also see Yates, A treatise (1637), sig. Bv. Balcanquall, The honour (1633), pp. 16–17.

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timber, or vile luggage’.40 The resulting prohibitions included teaching school and traditional forms of festive behaviour attendant upon the rites of passage.41 John Swan summed up the Laudian position: ‘so it be God’s house, he must and will have it all alone’.42 According to Swan, no one, save ‘a bishop or worthy priest, or a religious faithful laic’, might be buried in the church.43 The author of De templis complained of ‘the pride and vainglory’ of those ‘who care not how much the majesty of the sacred places suffer, so they may have their tombs, their arms, and their banners (ensigns of vanity and pomp) erected. St Chrysostom calls the church … the school of humility, and are we not mistaken that think it the only fit place to display our pride?’44 Bishop Corbet of Norwich likewise railed against the elaborate pews of the laity: ‘Pews are become tabernacles, with rings and curtains to them, there wants nothing but beds to hear the word of God on; we have casements, locks and curtains, and for these we love the church. I will not guess what’s done within them, who sits or stands at the communion, but this I dare pronounce, it is to hide some vice, or to proclaim one, to hide disorder, or to proclaim pride.’45 Human pride interfered with the orderly reverence of the church in other ways as well. Both Robert Shelford and John Swan complained of servants who insisted on rising from their knees in prayer to mark the arrival of their masters or mistresses: ‘As if they should say, stay God till my master and mistress be in their seats, and then I will attend on thee again and go forward with thy minister. Is not this to prefer the creature before the creator? Fie on these manners! This is not thy master’s house, but God’s house. Reverence thy master at home and abroad, and reverence thy maker here.’46 Clearly, no considerations of human hierarchy or status 40 41 42 43 44

45

46

Pocklington, Altare (1637), p. 141. Cf. Shelford, Five discourses (1635), pp. 53–4. Swan, Profanomastix (1639), pp. 60, 59; Browning, Public prayer (1636), p. 53. Swan, Profanomastix (1639), p. 4. De templis (1638), pp. 212–13. And here it might be worth remembering that, as Peter Yorke points out, in the refurbishment of certain Oxford chapels, funeral monuments placed close to the altar were moved either to an ante-chapel or the lower body of the building. These included the monument to Richard James, who had been buried in New College chapel as recently as 1629, and, in Magdalene, the displacement of the awesomely severe monument to Lawrence Humphrey by, of all things, a picture of the Virgin Mary. Peter Yorke, ‘Iconoclasm, ecclesiology and the beauty of holiness: concepts of sacrilege and the “peril of idolatry” in early modern England, c. 1590–1642’, Kent University PhD thesis (1997), pp. 177–8. From Bishop Corbet’s charge, delivered at Norwich, April 1634, raising funds for the restoration of St Pauls, in W. Sparrow Simpson, ed., Documents relating to the history of St Pauls (Camden Society, 1880), p. 138. Shelford, Five discourses (1635), pp. 51–2. Also see Swan, Profanomastix (1639), pp. 44–5.

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were to be allowed to obscure or hinder the outward reverence towards God which it was the obligation of every Christian to display in church. All such concerns were to be left behind at the church door. Included in these strictures was the churchyard. John Swan cited various ancient councils to prove that ‘no wanton songs might be sung near unto a church’, and added ‘that no plays or interludes may be acted there’.47 Thomas Laurence cited the practice of the early Christians, who had thought ‘churchyards’ ‘profaned by sports, but the churches themselves even by their feasts of charity. The whole circuit, both before and after Christ, was privileged for refuge.’ When it came to burial practices Laurence explained, ‘none out of the communion of the church permitted to lie there without, and few in the communion of the church admitted here within. Any consecrated ground preferred for interment before that which was not consecrated, and that in a higher esteem which was in a higher degree of consecration, and that in the highest which was nearest the altar.’ Accordingly, the ancient Christians forbade any to ‘build on or near them, [churchyards] to pass or carry through them, … to open shops and stalls upon the doors and walls of God’.48 On this view, the whole church and its environs were sacred space and had to be protected from the polluting presence of the world.49 In a remarkable passage Edward Kellett expressed a visceral revulsion at the pollution to which the sacred environs of the church were currently subject, lamenting that ‘it is too common a fault for women to hold their children out to defile the churchyards; more usual, and more common, for men to be-piss the corners of our churches, and make them their voiding vessels, whilst some wash the filth down into their parents’ mouths, buried nigh that place’. So bad had things become in Exeter, he maintained, that the ‘polluted corners of the cathedral are almost dyed by their urine into another colour, whilst the churchyard hath been the draught unto many, and the very cloisters, the receptacles of their ordures’. ‘I have seen the gutters reek with their urine, whilst the generality of the offenders makes the sin more passable, or esteemed as no sin, and no man seeks for remedy.’ While amongst the Jews ‘the easing of their bodies’ in the camp had been taboo, ‘yet have the enemies to our church emptied and eased their bodies of filth, and filled their souls with sin, by defiling that fair cathedral, even to the great scandal of the passers-by’. Kellett mused that ‘if Christ had 47 48 49

Swan, Profanomastix (1639), pp. 4, 60. Laurence, A sermon (1637), pp. 9–10. Also see Pocklington, Altare (1637), pp. 11–12.

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found one so defiling the temple as our cathedral hath been defiled, he would have struck him dead, with thunder and lightning’. He even encapsulated his message in doggerel verse, maintaining that ‘the churchyard is a sacred place/ Who pisseth there is void of grace’.50 While, on the one hand, Kellett’s might appear to be a perfectly understandable response to an obnoxious practice of which he had first-hand experience, on the other, the sheer visceral disgust of that passage also speaks to the intensity of the Laudians’ sense of the profanation currently being visited on the sacred space of the church by a heedlessly sacrilegious laity, or, as Kellett put it, by ‘the enemies to our church’, by which phrase, for once, he clearly did not mean only the puritans, who were presumably not distinguished from their less zealous contemporaries by the avidity with which they pissed and shat all over Exeter cathedral and its environs. In the visceral disgust stakes, Kellett’s remarks find their closest echo in Laud’s infamous claim in Star Chamber that ‘’tis superstition nowadays for any man to come with more reverence into a church, than a tinker and his bitch come into an alehouse. The comparison is too homely, but my indignation at the profaneness of the times makes me speak it.’ Clearly, Laudian revulsion at the profanation of the church was so deep that it was often expressed in terms of the most basic of scatological and social impurities or taboos.51 50 51

Kellett, Tricoenium Christi (1641), pp. 552–4. Thus Fincham and Tyacke identify ‘the recovery of the church and churchyard as holy spaces, dedicated to the worship of God and protected from the profanity of secular life’ as providing the very ‘heart’ of Laudian reformation. Fincham and Tyacke, Altars restored, p. 239.

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chapter 9

The House of God and the Beauty of Holiness

It was not, however, enough simply to separate the church from the world. According to Robert Skinner, ‘nothing sets off godliness more than greatness … but where greatness and goodness, highness and holiness, sanctity and sublimity meet, there God’s worship is in the full, there God is magnified indeed, and we cannot but hope the Lord will go on to magnify, with the full measure of his blessings. And we shall quickly perceive God’s worship to be advanced, as well by the dignity of the place, as the person.’ ‘Common experience’ said as much, ‘for’, asked Skinner, ‘do we not find ourselves otherwise affected, when we come into a naked, deformed, ruinous temple, adorned with nothing but dust and cobwebs, and when we come into a goodly, reverend and beautiful church, wherein we may behold, on every side, remarkable testimonies of devout magnificence? Doth not the very fabric and fashion and solemn accommodation beget in our hearts a religious regard and venerable thoughts?’1 On a mission to raise funds to restore St Paul’s, Bishop Corbet explained that ‘we admire those things for the most part that are the oldest, and the greatest; old monuments, huge buildings, do affect us above measure; and what’s the reason? For what is ancient comes nearer to God for the antiquity, and what is great, comes near his works for their spaciousness and magnitude; so that in honouring these, we honour God, who old and great do seem to imitate.’2 When Robert Shelford was discoursing on the Holiness of God’s house he chose, as his first characteristic, our duty to adorn and beautify it fit for his greatness, as himself gave pattern in beautifying his tabernacle; there was gold and silver, precious stones, silks, with all precious colours, the most choice woods, and all other things, framed with the best cunning that God inspired Bezaleel and Aholiah and all the 1 2

Skinner, A sermon (1634), pp. 28–9. From Bishop Corbet’s charge, delivered at Norwich, April 1634, raising funds for the restoration of St Pauls, in Simpson, ed., Documents relating to the history of St Pauls, p. 135.

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The House of God and the Beauty of Holiness wise hearted of that time … Comeliness and holiness join hand with each other. Thus saith my text, ‘holiness becometh thy house, O Lord’. This office equity exacteth of us, for, seeing God hath made the world’s great ornament and our … little world for our honour and use, should not we proportion a due ornament for his house and service? A man’s house is his state and the greatest men are esteemed by it.3

According to Foulke Robartes, when such precedents and expectations were compared to the current state of the church, the results were shaming: ‘Anciently there were built for God templa and basilica, sumptuous and goodly churches’ which far outshone the houses of even the greatest nobles. Now, however, things were very different: ‘the palaces of knights and gentlemen draw all men’s eyes upon them, whilst the poor church … standeth, cringing behind, as ashamed to be seen so tattered without her roof, walls and windows, so dusty, sullied and forlorn within, as that the stone doth cry out of the wall, and the beam out of the timber doth answer it, and both complain of an irreligious age, producing men who think not God worthy of so good houses as their own’. ‘In most of our churches’, Robartes asked, ‘besides the bible, the service or common prayer book, with the apology, the priest’s vestments (mean enough), a pewter flagon and a silver cup, what have we else, except we will reckon the bells in the steeple?’ ‘How many mean yeoman be there in many parishes in England whose plate and rich stuff is more worth than all the whole furniture of his parish church?’4 Of course, all of our authors had to acknowledge that, for all that they had been modelled on the temple, early Christian churches had been humble affairs. That, however, had been due only to force of circumstance, ‘the church being under persecution, but when the emperors and princes became Christians, most glorious, so magnificent for structure, so rich for endowments, that, as Moses was glad by sound of trumpet to make proclamation throughout the camp that the people should bring no more materials for the furnishing of the tabernacle, so Christian princes were overruled by their subjects to make edicts of restraint for giving any more to the church’.5 But perhaps the most explicit attempt to describe the ideal church interior was contained in De templis of 1638: ‘The best and most received figure is the long … and the man who enters the west door from the 3 4 5

Shelford, Five discourses (1635), p. 11. Robartes, God’s holy house (1639), pp. 32–3, 48. Also see Weever, Ancient funeral monuments (1633), p. 49, as quoted in Parry, Glory, laud and honour, p. 181. Balcanquall, The honour (1633) p. 7.

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far, beholding the altar where he seriously intends to offer his devotions to his God and savior, shall find his devout soul more rapt with divine awe and reverence, more enflamed with pure and holy zeal, in the delay and late approach unto it, than if, at first, he had entered upon it.’ The author approved of pillars in churches as ‘graceful, stately and necessary, as well for supporting the roof, distinction of the aisles from the body of the church, and different from profane buildings’. That ‘the chancel or quire must be higher than the body of the church’, and ‘divided from the church by grates of wood, curiously carved, or of iron or brass, cast into the comely works, is not only very graceful, but according to the laws and orders of building observed by the primitive Christians’. This should be the most highly decorated part of the church: ‘Hither bring your stateliest hangings and adorn the walls, hither your richest carpets and bespread the ground; hither your most glorious silks and finest linen, to cover the holy table. The alacrity and ingenious piety of former times in adorning this sacred place makes us seem dull, stupid and irreligious.’ However, other parts of the church should not be devoid of ornament. The walls should be beautified, ‘with some excellent paintings of sacred stories read which may strike into the beholder religious and devout meditations’. The capitals should be decorated with carved leaves and flowers. The windows, which should be set high in the walls to avoid distracting the worshippers, should be filled with stained glass, thus adorning ‘the church with a glorious light’ and moderating ‘that bright light which is a hinderance to devotion’. The roof should be adorned ‘with azure colour and gilded stars and then, as in figure, so in colour, it resembles the hemispheres of the heavens; which perhaps gave occasion to St Chrysostom to call the church … an earthly heaven’. The churches which came closest to this ideal were, of course, the cathedrals, and our author was adamant that ‘parish churches and private chapels … should be built after the manner of cathedrals, as near as, with convenience, they may’.6 While not every church could be a cathedral, the notion that the liturgical and physical arrangements of parish churches should be modelled on that of their ‘mother church’ provided a central source of legitimation for reformation Laudian style. Both Dow and Heylyn informed Henry Burton in 1637 that all the current practices that Burton accused of novelty 6

De templis (1638), pp. 190–202. For the notion that Westminster Abbey in particular might have played a central role in preserving and propagating a ‘Laudian’ style of worship see the seminal article by Julia Merritt, ‘The cradle of Laudianism? Westminster Abbey, 1558–1630’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 52 (2001), pp. 623–46.

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had been both ‘used in the primitive and purest ages of the church’, and ‘were never wholly out of use in this church of ours, but observed as religious customs, derived from the ancient church of Christ, … in cathedrals and the royal chapel’.7 Indeed, Charles I himself had determined ‘positively that all parochial churches ought to be guided by the pattern of the mother church upon which they do depend’.8 As Alexander Read observed, at the end of his visitation sermon of 1631, ‘if we acquit ourselves from the costliness and gloriousness, yet may we not free ourselves from the decency and comeliness. Though God shun not a cottage, yet men must think him worthy of a palace.’9 Read’s sermon was, in part, a list of the sorts of material and practical deficiencies which he thought prevented many parish churches attaining a ‘blameless beautifulness’.10 In part, these comprised obvious practical defects like leaky roofs or broken-down pews. More interesting for our present purposes were objections which pointed directly to Read’s exalted vision of the whole church and its fittings as sacred. Thus, having lamented the cheapness of many a communion table or font, he pronounced it ‘defective’, if not undecent, that the whole care of our acqua baptismatis should be left to the clerk, without any other inspector over him, who (having perhaps but one pail in his house, and wanting … a vessel to honour, as St Paul calls it) serves the sacred font with the same pail with which he serves his hog. Or 7

Dow, Innovations (1637), p. 114. Heylyn, Brief (1637), pp. 171, 174. For the reformation of the cathedrals based on the example of the Chapel Royal, and the subsequent use of the cathedrals, thus newly reformed, as ‘mother churches’, i.e. models which all other churches should emulate, see Fincham and Tyacke, Altars restored, pp. 232–7, esp. 237 and Parry, Glory, laud and honour, chapter 3, ‘The renovation of the cathedrals’. Also see Diarmaid MacCulloch, ‘The myth of the English reformation’, Journal of British Studies, 30 (1991), pp. 1–19, see esp. pp. 8–9, on the cathedrals as a ‘liturgical fifth column within the Elizabethan church’ ‘promoting the beauty of holiness in the face of protestant denials that such beauty was a goal of Christian worship’ and, in the end, providing ‘the Laudians’ with ‘the ideal’ of religious worship ‘central to their religious program’. This latter theory, that it was the cathedrals that were the source for the Laudian style of piety, has been refuted, definitively in my view, by Ian Atherton. Or rather Atherton has shown that the claim that something like the Laudian style had been preserved in the cathedrals since the reformation was entirely untrue, and insofar as the Laudians were seeking to base, say, the altar policy, on the procedures observed in the cathedrals, they were drawing on the example of cathedrals whose practice in the crucial areas had recently been remade by the Laudians themselves. As Atherton puts it, under the Laudians, ‘what had begun as a fiction of cathedral use became a prescription enforced on cathedrals themselves and subsequently on parish churches and chapels’. Thus Atherton concludes ‘it was not so much that cathedrals were hothouses of Laudianism, where ceremonial, liturgical and theological innovation were forced in conservative hotbeds left behind by the reformation. It was more that the continuation of the idea of the cathedral could function as an inspiration for conservative experiment.’ Ian Atherton, ‘Cathedrals, Laudianism, and the British churches’, Historical Journal, 54 (2010), pp. 895–918, quotations at pp. 906, 918. 9 Read, A sermon (1636), p. 22. 10 Ibid., p. 5. 8

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perhaps snatches up water in his house, homely used and half fouled before, and pours it into a font more foul than it. Or perhaps commits the whole to his young boy or girl, or takes water standing in the font before, a month or two months older than the child.11

According to Read, it was similarly ‘an undecent thing that our communion bread which is, by and by, to be the body of Christ … should be brought into the church and sanctum sanctorum in a stained, course, tattered linen poke, like a … pudding bag or a … foul muckinger, there lye all prayer’s time, till sermon begin, in the view of the congregation to vilescere in oculis populi … Also that a church should not have so much as a homely napkin to cover it, or to take away, in decent manner, the fragments.’12 At one level this seems conventional enough. Who, after all, could be in favour of filthy fonts and rotting pews? But there was far more to the Laudian impulse towards the beauty of holiness than a mere concern with tidiness, decency and decorum. We can see as much from Edward Kellet’s rebuke to those extreme sabbatarians who ‘will not have bells rung on the sabbath days, nor water carried in pitchers, or pails to fill the font, nor the raw air of the church perfumed with frankincense, perfumes, or wholesome odors, nor the decent ornaments of the priests to be put on’. For any properly pious Christian could see ‘that the temple privilegeth, if not sanctifieth, such’ – seemingly humble and mundane – ‘works’.13 The church itself, then, was a sacred space; God’s presence within it was palpable, and at its most intense in the sacraments; hence Read’s obsession with the impedimenta and logistics of both the eucharist and baptism. And hence too, Margaret Aston’s assessment that ‘by the end of the 1630s, there was a consensus of opinion in some quarters that holiness properly belonged to places and objects given over to God’s service’.14 Here Read’s objection to the use of humble bags for transporting the communion bread was particularly telling. The bag should be special, he claimed, ‘since the very bringing of it into the church to that use is a taking of it out of the world, a promotion of it to more reverence, and a next step to consecration itself’.15 As ever, Kellett went even further, 11

12 13 14 15

On instructions to churchwardens to repair ‘cracked or broken fonts, avoid the use of basins, and replace or supply a wooden cover, sometimes with a “pyramidical” or conical design’, see Fincham and Tyacke, Altars restored, p. 245. On font covers see Parry, Glory, laud and honour, pp. 88–90. Read, A sermon (1636), pp. 6–14. Kellett, Tricoenium Christi (1641), p. 18. Aston, Broken idols, p. 278. Read, A sermon (1636), p. 7.

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emphasising that ‘danger there is in the fall of the consecrated bread’, for, ‘if any crumb or particle fall to the ground, it is a greater sin than the people imagine’. Great care was therefore to be taken ‘for you do believe, and rightly do believe, that you are guilty of the body of Christ, if any part or parcel thereof should, through your negligence, fall to the ground’. He backed that claim up with a range of patristic and later ‘Catholic’ authorities, running through Tertullian, Origen, Pope Pius I, ‘who lived in the days of Justin Martyr’, and culminating with Baronius, who was quoted endorsing ‘the practice in former times’, when ‘certain little tables were set before the communicants as now (saith he) we hold linen cloths before the receivers’.16 To avoid such sacrilegious abuse in the church of England, Kellett recommended that the communicant receive the consecrated host ‘with the left hand bearing up the right’, with the two hands crossed at the wrist, and the palm of the right hand open to receive the sacrament. Thus, ‘framing our hands like to a cross, let us receive the body of Christ crucified and, laying our foreheads, eyes and lips nigh to it, conceive it as a divine coal to burn our sins’.17 Read’s diatribe, and Kellett’s somewhat eccentric advice, were conceived negatively as a reaction against what they took to be the slovenliness and laxity of the contemporary church – with many receiving ‘the blessed sacrament, sitting, or leaning on his elbow, or half sitting, half kneeling, or looking on the one side, or smiling, or using unseemly motion’18 – and positively, as an appropriate response to the spiritual power, the divinity, immanent in the church and especially in the sacrament. These passages show clearly the way in which the Laudians’ vision of the church as the house of God, combined with their constant comparisons of Christian churches with the tabernacle and the temple, served to invest apparently trivial physical details with an aura of sanctity, and thus with considerable ideological significance. That is a point to which we will return again and again, as we turn from the material to the ceremonial aspects of the beauty of holiness. 16 17 18

Kellett, Tricoenium Christi (1641), p. 654. Ibid., p. 655. Ibid.

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chapter 10

The Beauty of Holiness and Ceremonial Conformity

10.1  ‘Locus Terribilis’, the Church as a Site of ‘Holy Fear’ and Necessary Reverence If, for the Laudians, the status of the church as the house of God involved an intense concern with the material fabric of the church, it also prompted an even greater stress on the ceremonial and liturgical aspects of divine worship. God’s presence in his house demanded the utmost reverence from all who approached it. As Walter Balcanquall observed, ‘if the church be my house, that is God’s, we must observe a reverend distance in all our approaches which we make to God in it, else we run upon a certain danger’. That danger stemmed from God’s negative propensity not ‘to be familiar with any, to entertain them, or be entertained by them, unless they have observed this distance’ of outward respect and ceremonial decorum, and from his positive propensity to punish consistently all those guilty of irreverence. Thus, ‘Uzza did but irreverently touch the ark of the Lord, and the Lord presently killed him; the men of Bethshemish did but irreverently look into the ark of the Lord, and the Lord presently slew 50,000 of them.’1 As Thomas Laurence summed it up, God ‘commands our faith, but loaths our incivility’.2 There was, therefore, no pleasing God ‘without reverence and godly fear’. We must ‘press not into his awful and powerful presence without unfeigned expression of humble reverence and devout humility’. And here fear was of the essence. For ‘fear to reverence is as the soul to the body, it keeps life in it’. ‘Fear preserves reverence in man to man, and in man to his maker. Fear, then, is added because no true service, nor no right reverence without it.’ In particular, ‘Holy fear’ was ‘an excellent antidote against the poison of presumption and profaneness’. Accordingly, 1 2

Balcanquall, The honour (1633), pp. 12–14. Laurence, A sermon (1637), pp. 1–2.

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the church should be ‘locus terribilis’. Thus had Abraham and Elias both responded to direct encounters with the divine ‘with unfeigned expressions of humble, reverent and devout piety’. ‘Abraham fell flat upon his face’, while Elias wrapped ‘his face in his mantle, as unworthy to behold the king of glory’.3 As that implied, all that awe, fear and reverence had to take a directly physical form. For, as Skinner told the court in 1634, ‘without genuflection, or prostration, or some other inclination or submission of the body’, ‘it is not complete worship’.4 As Edward Kellett insisted, ‘God will not have body alone or soul alone, he will not have half thy prayers … Thy devotions must be entire.’5 ‘God loveth not half worship, and God will be glorified as well in our body as in our spirit.’6 Thus we must not only ‘bend the knees of our soul’, but also ‘profess the humility of our souls’, ‘by the humiliation of our bodies’.7 For John Browning, ‘as the body cannot move without the soul, so God, enjoining us the reverence and affectionate care and keep of the soul in his service, requireth every motion of each part of the body, agreeable thereunto’.8 Though it was true that ‘the true geniculation be of the mind, so that one were better to have a humbled mind, and stand upright, than to kneel often and be proud withal, yet, if we worship God in our hearts, our hearts will command the humble bowing of the knees’.9 ‘Think not’, wrote Foulke Robartes, that I would reduce all God’s worship to bodily gestures; neither imagine that it belongeth to the soul alone. The soul is the most excellent part, whose intentions recommend the expressions of the body unto God. But the body is a part, and an essential part, of the man, and must bear his part with the soul in God’s worship. If the body act alone, then doth God say, man, where is thy soul? If the soul alone take it all upon it, then, saith God, where is, or what doth, the body? Where are thine eyes, thy hands, thy knees, thy legs, to declare and accompany the lifting up the humility and the confidence of thy soul? The whole man is to be employed in thy worship. It is for God, and for his glory, that I do plead thus earnestly with my brethren.10 3

BL Additional Mss 20065, fols. 43v, 42v. Skinner, A sermon (1634), pp. 10, 6. 5 Kellett, Tricoenium Christi (1641), p. 124. 6 Ibid., p. 637. 7 BL Additional Mss 20065, fol. 42v, from a sermon ‘preached at Whitehall, December 18, 1632’ and also at Bristol, 1637. 8 Browning, Public prayer (1636), p. 22. 9 Kellett, Tricoenium Christi (1641), p. 637. 10 Robartes, God’s holy house (1639), p. 3. 4

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According to Eleazar Duncon only those ‘rapt with the manichaean fury’ would thus ‘deny our bodies to God’.11 Thus Laud himself rejoiced that ‘even according to the service book of the church of England, the priest and the people both are called upon for external and bodily reverence and worship of God in his church’.12 As we have seen, many of our authors used the comparison between the honour due, not merely to the person of the monarch, but to the symbols of their regality and presence in their presence chamber to make the point. Thus in 1637 Edward Boughen asked, ‘if we were to wait upon some great person, we would have a great care of decency, and shall we not be as careful, when we are to wait on God, and to do him service? Especially in this house, wherein we are commanded “to worship the Lord decore sancto”, in an holy kind of decency or (as we) “in the beauty of holiness”.’13 But there was a limit to how far such arguments from analogy could be stretched. Therefore, Thomas Laurence insisted that ‘some have a civil respect, others a religious, but the Lord only a divine, for, as the infinitude of his nature cannot be comprehended under the same kind of being, so neither can it be comprehended under the same kind of worship with a creature, but only to show by what natural and rational proportions the church rose, by way of supereminency, as the schools speak, from a relative respect of divine things, to an absolute respect of the divine essence; and from a just valuation of man, to a right estimate of God’.14 Robert Skinner summed up the point when he observed that ‘a good rule it is of Lactantius, if the same worship be given to any other, God is not worshipped at all … It were sacrilege then to offer him a sharer.’15 If God’s presence demanded an outward reverence from all who came into the church, the collective ritual effects of that reverence became perhaps the most crucial and defining characteristics of the beauty of holiness. In a visitation sermon of 1636, Richard Tedder conjured up the image of the elaborate outward reverence and piety of the primitive Christians who, he maintained, were more like a choir of angels, than of men all upon their knees at the prayers, all upon their feet at the sermon, none presumed so much as to sit, as being too bold and lazy a posture in God’s house, but only such as for infirmity, or some other cause were dispensed with … There were some … in imitation of Moses that would not have their 11 12 13 14 15

Duncan, Of worshipping (1660), pp. 4, 13. Laud, A speech, p. 16. Boughen, Decency and order (1638), pp. 9–10. Laurence, A sermon (1637), pp. 24–5. Skinner, A sermon (1634), pp. 12–13.

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The Beauty of Holiness and Ceremonial Conformity shoes on their feet in the temple, a shame to them that have their hats on their heads in God’s house where he and the angels look upon them … It was the main thing that the fathers laboured among the people, to maintain the honour of God’s house; that they might put a difference between a common meeting place in the market, and that which was the place of the angels and archangels, yea, the very presence chamber of the king of heaven.16

Edward Boughen transferred that vision from the primitive church to the church of England: What a wonderful decency it is, when we behave ourselves in this place, as in the presence of God; … when first we worship, and then fall down upon our knees. When the minister, like an angel of light, appears in his white vestment, behaving himself with that gravity, and reverence, and decency, which well befits his calling, and the religious duty he hath in hand. When the whole congregation shall appear in the presence of God as one man, decently kneeling, rising, standing, bowing, praising, praying altogether … like men of one mind and religion in the house of God.17

10.2  Necessary and Edifying Ceremonies, or the Integral Link between Body and Soul This vision of ceremonies as ‘moral ornaments’ designed to bring about a ‘magnificent kind of holiness’, such as to make each parish look ‘like God’s house indeed’ lay at the very centre of the Laudian view of the beauty of holiness. According to Samuel Hoard, ‘some ceremonials and circumstantials’ were ‘necessary for the right ordering and carriage of God’s service, the training up of people in piety and the preservation of religion, “for without ceremonies” (saith Zanchy) “neither could the faithful grow up together unto one body, nor give God any public worship”’.18 This was to place external ceremony and worship at the very centre of one’s vision of true religion, of what the visible church was for. In a telling passage John Browning virtually defined membership of the Christian community in ritual or ceremonial terms. So holy a place was the church, Browning claimed, that only the pure should be allowed in. He then illustrated the point by the practice of the ancient Egyptians in taking off their shoes, made of the ritually impure and polluting skins of dead animals, before they entered the temples of their Gods; a practice that ‘God, to show that he would not be behind the heathen false Gods in 16 17 18

Tedder, A sermon (1637), pp. 9–10. Boughen, Decency and order (1638), pp. 10–11. Hoard, Church’s authority (1637), pp. 5–6.

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exacting all due and possible reverence’, had transferred ‘from Moses and Joshua’ to the Israelites. Not only did this show that ‘it is lawful and warrantable to use a ceremony taken even from heathen and idolaters’, it also provided a moral lesson for Christians.19 For Browning, Balcanquall and others all used the Jews’ removal of their shoes before entering the temple as a type for the obligation of every Christian to observe decent standards of outward reverence, whenever he or she entered or attended church. Particularly striking for our purposes was Browning’s construal of purity in ritual, rather than moral or spiritual, terms. For Browning, the pure, who were to be admitted into church, and by implication the Christian community, were the outwardly reverent and not the visibly godly. The importance of outward ceremony could be illustrated and maintained in negative as well as positive terms. For John Browning, ‘not to perform or retain any the most necessary reverence in our churches’, or to ‘lightly reckon of … God’s reverence in them’, was tantamount to apostasy; ‘Oh dismal decay of Christianity! O apostating fall! O backsliding generation!’ was his comment on the ceremonial laxity of his contemporaries.20 According to John Yates, ‘to worship the lamb is without dispensation, and prostration before him admits no prohibition. We perish, if we do it not.’21 Richard Tedder made the same point, observing that, to shut out any light that may be useful in God’s house is, with the Jews, to make it a den, as they would do that would shut out the ceremonies out of the church; for take away the ceremonies out of the church, and take away the light that is in it. No religion was ever without ceremonies; all nations, not only Jews, but gentiles, used their rites and ceremonies in the time of worship, all meeting in this, as a natural principle, that divine worship cannot be rightly performed without an outward solemnity. God did not forbid the Jews, but commanded them, the use of ceremonies, though heathen idolaters abounded with them. The moral law and the ceremonial law were not given one without the other, neither can they now be parted, nor is there any ceremony so bare that is not clothed with some morality. People are instructed as well by what they see as by what they hear, and to see the picture of a saint in a glass window will preach more religion to them than to see the picture of a horse or an oxen in God’s house; the one puts them in mind that it is God’s house, the other doth but make it more like a den. What devotion can that raise in a man’s thoughts to behold, in the church, God’s priest, like a peasant, no habit to distance him from some sordid 19 20 21

Browning, Public prayer (1636), p. 7. Ibid., p. 29. Yates, A treatise (1637), sig.*3v.

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A great many of the themes and emphases central to the current discussion can be discerned running through that passage. The notion of the church as God’s house; the demands for reverent external conduct, which that notion placed on every believer and congregation; the consequent insistence on the beauty of holiness, defined both in terms of the fabric and decoration of the building – the stained glass window – and of the conduct of ceremonial worship; the insistent legitimating reference back to the law of nature, instantiated in the practice of the gentiles, and to the law of God, instantiated in the worship of the Jews under the law and in the Jewish temple; the identification of ceremonial worship as ‘the light of the church’; and finally the juxtaposition of the resulting ideal against a dystopian vision of what will emerge in Section 10.3 as a distinctively ‘puritan’ style of disorder and profanity. Here, then, in one compressed passage of prose, is a nexus of concerns, priorities and argumentative moves all central to the Laudian project. For the Laudians, church ceremonies looked in two directions. On the one hand, they looked towards God and his presence in the church, and the reverence and worship due to that presence. On the other, they were also seen as having a positive role in the edification of the church, construed as a community of believers. The beauty of holiness, of which outward ceremony was such a crucial part, had a major role to play in converting the people to true religion, and in inculcating habits of obedience and piety. According to Edward Boughen, the English church should aim to produce an image of worship so potent that ‘if a stranger or unbeliever should look in upon us (by chance) at our devotions, our reverent and devout demeanour might work upon his understanding and affections, and win him to Christ, whom we thus serve and reverence’.23 A variety of our authors were certain that the opposite was also true. John Swan quoted Lancelot Andrewes to the effect that ‘there is nothing which doth more retain many in recusancy than want of due reverence in the house of God and at his holy worship’.24 More than one of these authors told a cognate story from the start of James’ reign about the 22 23 24

Tedder, A sermon (1637), pp. 17–18. Boughen, Decency and order (1638), p. 10. Swan, Profanomastix (1639), p. 6, marginal note identified ‘Bish. Andr. In sermon on Philip. 2. 10’.

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French ambassador’s ‘viewing of our church orders, first at the cathedral at Canterbury and then at his majesty’s chapel royal at court’, which sight caused him to remark ‘that if the reformed churches in France had kept the same order as we have done, he was assured there would have been, in that country, many thousands more protestants than now there are’.25 According to John Swan, ‘bodily worship’ ‘cannot but prove an adjuvant cause to edification. For even by outward ceremonies and sensible signs, our mind is incited to tend towards the Lord.’26 This was due to what Foulke Robartes called the ‘correspondency and sympathy between the soul and the body, as maketh to accord one with another … So may I well say when the soul moveth forward in devotion towards God, the body will not be left behind, but will bear the soul company.’ This meant that the body was a perfect instrument with which to express our internal spiritual worship and reverence both to God and our fellow worshippers. But pari passu, ‘every man findeth that his soul doth sympathise with the temper of his body’.27 ‘For the body, as it receiveth life and motion from the soul, so it returneth also a further life by motion to it again; as strings touched in the same instrument move one another, or as the bodies warmth warms the clothes, which reciprocally preserve and return the bodies warmth again.’28 This meant that the soul could be affected by the repetition by the body of the outward ceremonies and physical gestures of divine worship: ‘Do we not perceive plainly that, when we betake ourselves to our knees for prayer, the soul is humbled within us by this very gesture? And when we lift up our hands and our eyes towards God, we feel an elevation of the soul also towards the throne of grace.’29 Eleazar Duncon explained how ‘adoration’, which he equated with ‘the bowing either of the head or the whole body’, contained three separate acts; the first was of the understanding, ‘which is the knowledge of the supreme and divine excellency’, and without which the action became superstitious; the second was of the will, ‘which is the free submission of ourselves, and all things in our power, performed and made, to this divine excellency’. This was the ‘formal reason of worship’, without which worship itself became a vizard or mask for ‘hypocrites’. The third was ‘an exterior act of the body’. And if that were omitted, ‘reverence, fear and 25 26 27 28 29

Hoard, Church’s authority (1637), p. 39; Sherley, The excellence, a visitation sermon preached at Blandford in 1640 and printed in 1662, quote at p. 24. Swan, Profanomastix (1639), p. 46. Robartes, God’s holy house (1639), pp. 61–2. Browning, Public prayer (1636), p. 25. Robartes, God’s holy house (1639), p. 62.

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humility are first sent packing, and religion, piety and devotion must follow after’. If, however, all three elements concurred then ‘to adore or worship God with the bending of the body is a work of piety and religion, not unbecoming the divine majesty’.30 Here all the diverse elements in Christian faith were expressed, exercised and, therefore, strengthened, the act ‘candidly expressing the inward reverence of the soul, and wonderfully increasing and perfecting that reverence’.31 At stake in these transactions was not only the individual believer’s soul, but also the souls of others: ‘Doth not the reverent entrance of one, that entreth as he should, stir up the fainting devotion of them that pray? Doth not the devout kneeling of those that are about us put us in mind of the duty and earnestness of our prayers we are about? And so, whereas the priest preacheth to the ear only, everyone, in this his devotion, and by his example, (which is most forcible) preacheth to each other’s eye.’32 Foulke Robartes agreed: ‘how decent a thing is it, in the eye of man, to behold bodies and souls accord and join together in the holy work? How doth the visible and expressive devotion of one Christian beget and increase the same in another? And how powerfully shall the reverent behaviours and gestures of an whole congregation together work upon one another?’33 Here, then, was an explicitly and peculiarly Laudian version of the notion of edification; one centred not, as with the puritans, on the ear, but on the eye, and not, again as with the puritans, on the word preached, but on the conduct of an orderly and properly ceremonious style of worship.

10.3  Significant Ceremonies And so a visitation sermon preached in 1640 claimed that there was ‘scarce any rite or order’ of the church of England’s ‘but is a kind of visible sermon, putting us in mind of some one good lesson or other, as often as we are to use it, insomuch that they who will not be brought to harken to what we teach, by looking on what we do in such places as these, may, in a manner, read what we believe’.34 According to Giles Widdowes, ‘every church ceremony is a sign’. All ceremonies must morally signify ‘a comely correspondence to the duty signified. And this sign must be orderly, an orderly sign according to rule and method. The rule must be the scripture, 30 31 32 33 34

Duncon, Of worshipping (1660), pp. 9–11, 4. Ibid., p. 4. Browning, Public prayer (1636), p. 25. Robartes, God’s holy house (1639), p. 3. Sherley, The excellence (1662), p. 31.

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or some rational rule, not contrary to scripture. The method must be perfect, the reason of the author without exception. There must be no confusion, but a certain and perspicuous signification … Their signification must be apposite to their purpose, which is religion.’35 Of course, not everyone agreed with this, for, as Samuel Hoard admitted, ‘some reject all ceremonies as uncomely that are significant’. But, for both Hoard and Widdowes, the opposite was true; they both agreed that ‘of ceremonies … those are the most laudable that are most lively in signification’. Hoard was quoting Peter Martyr.36 Widdowes cited Kemnitius, Jewel and Zanchy, claiming that ‘if our church ceremonies were dumb, non-significant, they might well be condemned for unlawful, but they, being significant, are lawful … being significant, they are profitable for admonition and testification of our duties … The ceremonies of our church’, he concluded, ‘have special signification; they are signs, and do signify, not with sacramental signification, but with decently moral’.37 But precisely what sort of duties did the church of England’s ceremonies teach? Several of our authors gave surprisingly explicit answers to that question. Both John Browning and Edward Kellett waxed eloquent on the value and significance of kneeling. For Browning, our most appropriate feelings in church were ‘reverence with respect to Christ’ and ‘humility with respect to our own sins’. Thus, since ‘the duty we come here about’ is ‘to pray and confess our sins and miserable condition’, what gesture can be fitter than that which is the most liveliest express confession of the most wretched condition? It is St Basil’s observation ‘that by falling to the ground in prayer and rising again after prayer we do show that by sin we are fallen to the earth, and are, by the only love of our maker and creator, raised toward heaven again’. By the one we confess that our sin is the cause of the earth’s, and of our own, curse, of our own death … but, by the other, we confess our hope of a better resurrection and standing up; when, by God’s love and Christ’s merits, we shall be able to stand at the last day.38

For Kellett, just as kneeling was the appropriate posture for suppliants in need of divine forgiveness – and, after all ‘who needed not ask forgiveness?’39 – so it was also the equally appropriate expression of that awe and reverence that God’s presence in his church ought to elicit from every believer, since, as he observed, ‘the lowest humiliation is too little in that 35 36 37 38 39

Widdowes, Lawless (1631), p. 71. Hoard, Church’s authority (1637), p. 23. Widdowes, Schismatical (1630), sig. E2v. Browning, Public prayer (1636), pp. 24–5. Kellett, Tricoenium Christi (1641), p. 639.

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sacred place’.40 This reasoning applied in spades to the reception of the sacrament, ‘for to most sacred things most sacred reverence is to be exhibited, but the blessed eucharist was and is a most divine gift, and kneeling a sacred reverence’.41 ‘“The people bowed themselves, with their faces to the ground upon the pavement, and worshipped when they saw the fire come down, and the glory of the Lord was upon the house”, and shall not we do the like, when we feel the grace of God sanctifying our souls, descending upon our spirits, and Christ, the glory of his father, inhabiting in our hearts, and feeding us?’42 Foulke Robartes produced a similar rationale for standing at the reading of the creed ‘to signify and express hereby our resolution and readiness to stand and persevere to the end in this faith which we do profess, and this expression is according to scripture, which, by the metaphour of standing, setteth out Christian fortitude and perseverance as (Rom. 5. 2), we are, by faith, admitted to this grace, wherein we stand’.43 Giles Widdowes went even further. Having accepted Robartes, Kellett and Browning’s rationale for kneeling, he proceeded to gloss bowing at the name of Jesus as an acknowledgement of ‘the Lord Jesus Christ’ as ‘king of heaven and earth, of the triumphant and militant church’. The sign of the cross, for Widdowes, was ‘in token that we will not be ashamed to confess the faith of Christ crucified and manfully to fight under his banner etc.’. The surplice was ‘to signify the sincerity of the minister’s unspotted faith’.44 In the same vein, the author of De templis drew out the various meanings and lessons contained in the practice of praying towards the east. These included turning in that direction to symbolise ‘our prayers rising, as it were, from the night of sin, and forsaking the works of darkness’;45 a play on the various titles of ‘our saviour who is called … the light of the world, the sun of righteousness’;46 and references to Christ’s face, when he was on the cross, which was facing westward, and to his ascension ‘into heaven in the east, and from thence we expect his second coming, which, as himself has foretold us, shall be lightning from the east’.47 The same writer indulged in a similar display of ingenuity on the subject of the tripartite division of the church into porch, nave and chancel, which he took 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

Ibid., p. 644. Ibid., p. 637. Ibid., p. 644. Robartes, God’s holy house (1639), pp. 78–9. Widdowes, Schismatical (1630), sig. D4r–v. De templis (1638), pp. 64–5. Ibid., pp. 67–8. Ibid., pp. 80–1.

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to stand, variously, for the persons of the Trinity, the tripartite division of the angels in heaven and of Christian professors here on earth (into penitents, perfect Christians and priests).48 But perhaps his piece de resistance was a four-page symbolic reading of a service of consecration devised originally by Pope Sylvester.49 If such fecund invention was unusual, it can nevertheless be seen as but the logical extension of a concern with the symbolic and analogic potentialities of ecclesiastical ritual that was shared by many of the writers under discussion here. More common was the concern, seen in the passages from Skinner, Robartes, Kellett, Browning and Widdowes, with the everyday ceremonies of kneeling, standing and bowing, which punctuated the prayer book service, and which some Laudians saw as the essence of an active lay piety. ‘We may not’, wrote Edward Boughen, be like stocks and stones, like the pillars or pews in the church, always in one posture. Something or other we must be doing. We must be sometimes kneeling, sometimes standing, otherwhiles bowing, when and as we are commanded. We must either be confessing our faith, or our sins, or receiving absolution for our sins. We must be praying with the priest, or answering to the priest, or diligently observing what the priest delivers you from God, or praying God to incline your hearts to keep those laws which the priest, in God’s behalf, exhorts you to obey. There is no idle time spared us in the house of God; no time for sleep, or wandering thoughts.50

While Boughen might thus exhort the laity to action, their activity was completely contained within the structures provided by the liturgy of the church; a liturgy which might leave ample room for this sort of routinised activism, but which had no place whatsoever for lay (or indeed clerical) initiative: ‘Here is nothing at all left to our discretion; nothing may be left undone, when and where we please. It is not for us, then, to take the canons upon liking, to observe one and neglect another; we must make a conscience of obedience.’51 Boughen could retain a sense of this puppet-like obedience to the promptings of the priest and the liturgy as a form of lay spiritual activism or agency because of the Laudian insistence on the indissoluble link between the soul and the body outlined in this chapter. On this view, the laity’s outward, physical acts of reverence and piety, conditioned, 48 49 50 51

Ibid., pp. 54–5. Ibid., pp. 91–5. Boughen, Decency and order (1638), pp. 6–7. Ibid., p. 8.

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orchestrated and prompted by the liturgy and the priest, served both to express and inculcate various spiritual qualities or habits of mind both in him or herself and in their fellow believers. It was in this sense that the ceremonies of the church were visible sermons, ideally suited to teach the laity those feelings of reverence, humility and worship appropriate to the meeting between the individual and the divine presence which occurred each time a Christian believer entered a church.

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chapter 11

Church Ceremonies, the Authority of the Church and the Authority of Scripture

11.1 Scripture As we have seen, the Laudians placed great stress on the value of outward ceremonies in the life of the church. Ceremony was crucial in achieving the ordered beauty of holiness that was a defining characteristic of a properly regulated church. Where, however, did the particular ceremonies used by the English church come from? What gave them their peculiar efficacy in moulding the members of the church together into the mystical body of Christ? The traditional conformist position was that issues of external ceremony were not matters of faith, grounded on the Bible, but rather things indifferent, upon which scripture was silent. Ceremonies did not positively edify, nor bear any substantive religious meanings or significances, aside, that is, from demonstrating the orderly obedience of the members of the church to their rulers. It was, therefore, left to the discretion of the rulers of each church to adopt whatever ceremonies they saw fit, guided only by certain general guidelines, contained in scripture, concerning edification, order, convenience and decency. As we shall see in Section 11.4, that rationale for the ceremonies of the church of England was repeated throughout the 1630s by authors both Laudian and nonLaudian. However, as we have already seen, that standard conformist case could no longer do justice to the Laudians’ very exalted vision of the role of ceremonies in the life of the church. Accordingly, a new stress was placed on the scriptural origins or legitimations of many of the ceremonies used by the English church. This new Laudian scripturalism did not simply supplant the earlier case, but rather existed in uneasy alliance with it. The result was a position of some ambiguity and perhaps even contradiction, but also of considerable polemical flexibility, which allowed Laudians to infuse new meaning into traditional practices, and yet to retain a tenacious, and very convenient, hold on a calmingly traditional rhetoric of ceremonial conformity. 151

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Let us start with the Laudians’ deployment of scripture to legitimate the current liturgical practices of the church of England. As we have seen, several writers used scripture in addressing themselves to the subject of ‘the reverence of God’s house’. This was the title of a sermon preached by Joseph Mede before the University of Cambridge in 1637 and printed in 1638. Mede’s text was Ecclesiastes 5:1: ‘Look to thy foot (or feet) when thou comest to the house of God, and be more ready to obey than to offer the sacrifice of fools, for they know not that they do evil.’ According to Mede, ‘the first seven verses of this chapter, if we will rightly understand them’, were ‘wholly spent upon’ the ‘argument’ of ‘how we ought to demean ourselves in such sacred places’ and contained ‘precepts and instructions fitted to the several duties of holy worship we are to perform, both at our coming thither, and whilst we remain there’.1 Thomas Laurence told the king in 1636 that ‘we seldom find adoration under the law (the strictest time against superstition of any) without prostration of the body, and inclination too’. Indeed, throughout those sacred volumes [of the law] by a metonymia signi and a synedoche partis … this [term] is frequently used alone to design the whole service of God, as if all were out, if this were not in, which was done with their faces toward the mercy seat, ‘at the gate they shall worship’, saith Ezekiel …. Nor was this guise of their devotion recorded only as a practise under the law, but as a prediction concerning the gospel …. The converted gentile falling down in the church with worship, saith St Paul, and the converted Jews falling down, did worship, say the evangelists, and the departed souls, falling down, shall worship, saith the apocalypse. The first before an invisible, the rest before a visible presence of God …. The primitive Christians used prostration to God at their eucharistical devotions, so did they at their ordinary too.2

These were not pleas for the introduction of prostration into the church of England, but rather a use of scriptural precedents to argue for the centrality, for all churches, at all times, of physical gestures of humility and worship. In the passage on the Jews prostrating themselves towards the mercy seat, however, Laurence surely was hinting at a scripturalist justification for the practices of bowing towards the altar and kneeling to receive communion.3 1 2 3

Mede, The reverence (1638), pp. 1–2. Laurence, A sermon (1637), pp. 25–8. Also see Kellett, Tricoenium Christi (1641), p. 646. Laurence, A sermon (1637), p. 28, where he proclaimed ‘that sauciness and familiarity of faith was not in fashion then, which brings men to church without joints, and sends them from church without hearts, as if they come only to keep company and to sit with God’.

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Like Laurence, Foulke Robartes used prostration as a precedent for kneeling and went on to cite both ‘the words of the psalmist “O come, let us worship and fall down, and kneel before the Lord our maker”’ and the ‘fairest precedent’ of Christ himself, who ‘kneeled down and prayed’ in order to ‘free the gesture of kneeling in God’s worship from suspicion of superstition’. He also assembled a number of texts to justify the practice of standing at various points of the service, replying to the objection that many of the passages he cited seemed to imply not ‘a bodily, but a spiritual standing’ with the stock Laudian conflation of the inward with the outward, the spiritual with the physical, arguing that ‘we, by our bodily standing, do profess our spiritual standing’ and ‘do herein no whit swerve from the meaning of the scripture. But what the scripture expresseth in word, we declare by a gesture of the same signification. And so in this is no superstition.’4 Robert Skinner grounded the practice of bowing to the altar on the general, scripturally based, obligation to do physical obeisance to the presence of God in his church. To critics of such practices he responded ‘call we this creeping and cringing to stocks and stones, or is he not somewhat of kin to stocks and stones that is so gross and without understanding … Reverence here is a fruit of peace, and required by the apostle as a part of God’s service, more especially in the place of his service.’ For Skinner, then, bowing to the altar was not an indifferent ceremony required by the church, but part of God’s service ‘required by the apostle’.5 As we shall see, Skinner went even further in the case of bowing at the name of Jesus. In the same vein, Giles Widdowes baldly claimed that ‘to bow at the name of Jesus’ and the sign of the cross were both ‘express scripture’. Similarly, ‘’tis express scripture that  ’tis granted to the church to wear fine linen, white and clean, Rev. 19. 8. There is a similitude between the triumphant and militant church, and so an expression of the one’s glory by the other’s signification, and is it then contrary to decency and order to wear the surplice?’6 In his 1631 tract on bowing at the name of Jesus, Widdowes went further still. Firstly he described those ‘decent orderly signs’ that were ‘universal, ordained for the whole church. These are either express scripture, as “imposition of hands”, Heb. 6, 2., Acts 8, 17. The second is a man uncovered in the church at prayer and sermon, I Cor. 11, 4, 7. The third is loud musical instruments, hence organs and bells are used in 4 5 6

Robartes, God’s holy house (1639), pp. 78–9. BL Additional Mss 20065, fol. 43r, from a sermon ‘preached at Whitehall, December 18, 1632’, and at Bristol, 1637. Widdowes, Schismatical (1630), sigs. A3v–A4r, E2v–E3r.

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the church. Four, bowing at the name of Jesus, Phil.2 10 and many such like. These are necessary ceremonies because they signify the substantial, internal duty of the catholic church.’7 Next came ‘other ceremonies’ ‘necessarily deduced from scripture’. There followed a long list which included the ring in marriage, the surplice, the sign of the cross, kneeling to receive the communion, beating the bounds of the parish (deduced remarkably from Matt. 28:19 ‘Go, teach all nations’), standing at the reading of the creed, the four-cornered cap (deduced from ‘unmoveableness in the faith at Ephes. 4, v.11–14’ because ‘a four cornered body is hard to be moved’) and the white penitential sheet. It was, concluded Widdowes, ‘more than probable that the church, being rational’, and ‘able to give a reason of her moral significant ceremonies, took these scriptures etc. to be the rule and ground of her ceremonies’. After these ceremonies grounded directly on scripture came a third category of ‘particular, decent, ordinary ceremonies, which are not one and the same in all countries’. These last were the only genuinely indifferent ceremonies.8 All this enabled Widdowes to construe the conventional conformist injunction to ‘let all things be done decently and in order’ as an injunction to obey scripture, not merely in the sense that the scripture did indeed instruct one to obey the determinations of the church in things indifferent, but also in the sense that the things that the church was instructing people to do, the main business of external conformity, were themselves directly grounded in scriptural injunction.9 This was, in effect, to move much of the subject matter that had, for decades, been central to the debates over external conformity – debates that had (conventionally) defined the puritan issue – from the realm of things indifferent into that of things directly determined by scripture. On this basis, as Widdowes’ title suggested, puritans who refused to conform were ‘schismatical’ indeed.

11.2  From Church Triumphant to Church Militant, and Back Again Thus far we have been concerned largely with texts and precedents taken from Old Testament accounts of the temple and the tabernacle, laced with passages from the New Testament to show that such injunctions and examples were still in force and had not been abrogated by the gospel. But 7 8 9

Italics added. Widdowes, Lawless (1631), pp. 71–3. Widdowes, Schismatical (1630), sig. E3v.

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on the issue of ceremonies and bodily gestures in divine worship writers had recourse to a second body of texts, dealing not so much with the past practice of the church militant, as the present and perpetual practice of the church triumphant. John Swan explained the relation between the two: ‘God’s church is in itself but one, though the parts be two, militant and triumphant.’ ‘The church militant is a kind of heaven upon earth and therefore the congregations in it must imitate the assemblies which are triumphant.’ ‘For what better harmony can there be than that the church on earth conform herself to the church in heaven.’ And thus Swan asked, ‘in heaven, as St John saw it represented unto him, is not God worshipped by the bowings (or fallings down) of those that be there?’10 A number of authors followed Swan’s example in citing texts taken principally from the Revelation of St John and the Apocalypse in order to explain just how the church on earth could be brought into line with the church in heaven. Citing Apocalypse 4:10, John Browning claimed that ‘the very saints and angels in heaven’ ‘fall down and worship, and cast their crowns before the throne’.11 In an extended passage Edward Boughen likewise presented the saints in heaven as a perfect model of orderly and decent divine worship for our emulation,12 as did Thomas Laurence.13 Other authors drew the parallels more explicitly even than Boughen. Thus, in stressing the duty, incumbent on all members of the English church, ‘to use all the answers of the holy liturgy, and that cheerfully and aloud, not whispering, or between the teeth, not (as some do), silently, or not at all’, John Swan again cited a passage from St John’s gospel: ‘I heard a voice from heaven (saith St John) as the sound of many waters, and as the sound of a great thunder, and I heard the voice of harpers harping with their harps.’ Like unto which should be the voice of the church on earth, in all her several congregations, when she uttereth her prayers and praises to the God of heaven. For first, we are to come jointly to the place of public meeting, like the concourse of many waters; whose voice stands to signify the voice of a numerous and full multitude, being met together. Secondly, to be earnest in our devotions, like the sound a great thunder. And then thirdly, shall this loud voice of ours be musical, like unto those heavenly harpers, harping with the harps.14 10 11 12 13 14

Swan, Profanomastix (1639), pp. 27–8, 44. Browning, Public prayer (1636), p. 26. Boughen, Decency and order (1638), p. 16. Laurence, A sermon (1637), p. 27. Swan, Profanomastix (1639), p. 54.

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Humphrey Sydenham had recourse to a passage in St Augustine citing ‘the music of angels, the spiritual incense of that celestial army’ – in other words the practice of the church triumphant – as a precedent for complex musical settings and the use of organs.15

11.3 Tradition Where direct scriptural backing for the church’s practices was lacking Laudian authors often had recourse to the traditions of the church. Thus Robert Skinner told the clergy of Bristol diocese in 1637 that ‘custom doth bind us where there is no law against custom’. ‘Where there is no law for set holidays, yet for commemorating special graces and blessings the church’s customs were a law sufficient. The like may be said for set fasts.’ ‘Had we no canon’ for practices like ‘the cross in baptism’, or ‘the hood and surplice and church vestments, yet the ancient custom of the church, older that St Hierome’s, were equal to a canon’. In the primitive church, Skinner added ‘he that … should have opposed against the general custom of the church should have been recorded in the blank book of schismatics’.16 William Quelch in a tract of 1636, tellingly entitled Church customs vindicated, asserted the right of the church to take up ‘a custom that tends to the furtherance of God’s service’, and to ‘stand upon it and to bind her children to conformity’. According to Quelch, ‘the customs of the church that serve for the furtherance of devotion … are not only humane but also divine, and so may the better be stood upon’.17 This tendency to equate the authority of the church with the authority of God reached its logical conclusion in the assimilation of the customs of the church with the unwritten customs and traditions of the apostles. This was achieved through a doctrine of immemorial custom whereby church traditions, to which no known historical origins could be assigned, were taken to be apostolic. Both Samuel Hoard and Quelch cited Augustine to that effect. Samuel Hoard asserted the existence of ‘apostolic traditions, ritual and dogmatical, which are nowhere mentioned, or not enjoined, in the scriptures, but delivered by word of mouth from the apostles to their followers’. He attributed to this 15 16 17

Sydenham, Sermons (1637), p. 14, from ‘The well-tuned cymbal’, a sermon preached at the dedication of an organ at Bruton in Somerset. A few memorials of the right reverend Robert Skinner D.D. (printed not published, for presentation by members of the family, 1886), unpaginated. Quelch, Church customs (1636), pp. 44, 46; Hoard, Church’s authority (1637), pp. 13–4.

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source ‘the number of canonical books, the apostles creed, the baptism of infants, the fast of lent, the Lord’s day and the great festivals of Easter and Whitsuntide’. ‘It were to be wished’, concluded Quelch, ‘that all the customs of the church were only such, and that nothing might be used in any one, but what were allowed by all the rest; when antiquity and universality meet both together in the same custom, they give such credit and countenance to the practise of the church that no man can refuse to join us, without suspicion of distraction’.18 Through the assimilation of church custom to the authority of the apostles, a position on the customs and authority of the church which could be, and indeed was, used to assert the sovereign authority of the church over her own ceremonies was being turned into something rather different, so great was the Laudian impulse to lend an aura of scriptural or, at the very least, apostolic, purity and authority to the ritual practices of the church, and, indeed, to their own versions of those practices.

11.4  The Laudians and the Argument from Things Indifferent However, all this did not mean that the Laudians simply abandoned the existing rhetoric of conformity and obedience; far from it. That traditional rhetoric echoed through a whole series of visitation sermons preached during the 1630s. Thus, in his visitation sermon of 1636, Samuel Hoard distinguished clearly and firmly between ‘matters of faith and manners to be believed and done of necessity to salvation’ (like the sacraments), on the one hand, and ‘ceremonials and circumstantials’, on the other. The former were essential to salvation, and therefore contained in scripture. Over these the church had no power. As for the ‘circumstances of time and place, persons, gestures, habits etc.’ to be used in divine worship, these were things upon which scripture was silent: ‘Such orders could never be found in the scriptures (at least till this last, overweening age). Never any could or durst determine what the Lord’s discipline (as some call it) is, though many, with greater passion than discretion, have earnestly called for it. Certainly, had God intended such a thing for his church, or thought it necessary, he would have set it down so plainly (for so he did the Jewish regiment, which he meant they should live by) that every church (without gross ignorance) might have known what it was.’19 18 19

Quelch, Church customs (1636), pp. 48–9. Hoard, Church’s authority (1637), pp. 5, 17.

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Since this was an area where scripture was silent, the authority of the church came into play: What, therefore, shall be the times wherein God’s people must come together to worship him, and how far they are to be sanctified; what are to be the places wherein we are to meet, and how to be adorned; in what order divine service shall be celebrated; with what habit the priest, when he cometh to minister before the Lord, should be clothed; what gestures of body both priest and people shall use in their public devotions; and the time when this or that particular gesture of kneeling, standing, sitting, or bowing may be used with most comeliness and profit; what kind of places are fittest for service and sermon; what tables, what chalices, what other ornaments do best beseem that sacred mystery of the Lord’s supper. These, and such like circumstances, are the things permitted to the church’s liberty to determine.20

And by ‘the church’ Hoard meant, of course, the governors of the church, the bishops and the Christian magistrate.21 For Hoard, diversity of practice in externals was no necessary barrier to unity and amity amongst churches, which ‘held the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace’. Accordingly, he held ‘differences in external rites to be no just cause why’ any should ‘break amity … no more than difference in apparel is a good reason why the children of the same father should maintain a contention’. All of which enabled Hoard to ask ‘with what warrant, then, doth Cartwright, or any of his followers, strive to … make a schism from us, or a faction among us, for maintaining the liberty wherewith Christ hath honoured us of making and living by our own rules?’22 For, as William Quelch observed, mere externals were ‘a poor occasion to make a difference when they were agreed upon the substance’.23 For both Hoard and Quelch, then, it was a defining mark of the puritans that they demanded a scriptural warrant for matters that were inherently indifferent, and were prepared to hazard the unity of the church and commonwealth for the sake of mere externals. However, as Quelch pointed out, while ceremonies might be a small matter, obedience was not: ‘’Tis not the thing commanded that binds the conscience, but the power from whence the commandment comes; be the thing commanded never so great, it commands the obedience never the more; be the thing commanded never so small, it cannot excuse the disobedience.’24 20 21 22 23 24

Ibid., p. 6. Ibid., pp. 24–5, 8. Ibid., pp. 35–6. Quelch, Church customs (1636), p. 11. Ibid., p. 12.

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John Featley concurred; as he told the clergy assembled at Saviour’s Church Southwark in December 1635, ‘indifferent things in themselves do, in a manner, alter their nature when they are commanded by authority’.25 It was, therefore, Quelch concluded, ‘not the custom she [the church] regards, so much as your obedience to the custom’.26

11.5  Squaring the Circle, the Minimum and Maximum Cases for Conformity All this serves to remind us that a strict insistence on ceremonialism and conformity did not demand scripturalist arguments of the sort outlined. And yet, as we have seen, many Laudians did use such arguments. It seems very likely that they did so because their vision of the beauty of holiness, their notion of the role of ceremony and worship in the life of the church, were so exalted that they were continually pressing up against the limits set by the old-style adiaphoristic defence of conformity, summarised so succinctly in the passages from Hoard and Quelch cited. There was, however, a way out of these difficulties. It involved a distinction between ceremonies in general and ceremonies in particular; a distinction made with peculiar clarity by Hoard. There were, he admitted, some ceremonies necessary ‘for the right ordering and carriage of God’s service, the training up of people in piety, and the preservation of religion’. This led Hoard to conclude ‘that God is to be worshipped by his own rule, and with his own prescribed acts and duties of religion in substance’; a conclusion which might at first seem to have been in open contradiction with the adiaphoristic tenor of his wider argument. He saved the situation, however, by quickly adding that in order ‘that this may be well done’, various circumstances of time, place and person had to be determined by the church. Here was the realm of adiaphora. Such ceremonies, while not constituting the essence of divine worship, were yet necessary for its exercise. And here, despite his earlier concern for the traditions of the apostles, Hoard went out of his way to deny that all the various ceremonial needs of the church could be met through the precedents and practices devised by the apostles. The very different circumstances ‘of all churches in the world’ ensured a continuing and creative role for the exercise of ecclesiastical authority over things indifferent.27 25 26 27

Featley, Obedience (1636), p. 22. Quelch, Church customs (1636), p. 34. Hoard, Church’s authority (1637), pp. 5–6, 16.

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If the scriptural injunctions concerning the decoration and design of the church, the demeanour, dress and gestures of the clergy and laity cited by various Laudians in the passages quoted in this chapter could be construed as dealing only with Hoard’s first level of necessary generalities about the need for ceremonies and externals rather than with his second level of circumstantial specifics, then all would be well. And that is indeed how several of these authors attempted to deal with this problem. Thus, even as John Yates quoted various scriptural passages to the effect that ‘to worship the lamb is without dispensation, and prostration before him admits no prohibition’, he also construed that conclusion as a general statement on the need for outward gestures of reverence in the worship of God, leaving the choice of which gesture should be used, and when, to the authority of the individual national church. ‘The ceremony before the throne’, he claimed, ‘is left us by the example of elders and angels, the manner whereof we know not exactly, and therefore it is wholly left to the church to prescribe the form’.28 Joseph Mede made the same move in relation to Jacob’s response to God’s presence at Bethel, which he construed as evidence of the need for some outward sign of reverence before the divine presence in the church, while leaving the precise form of that gesture or sign to ‘the discretion of our superiors, and the authority of the church’.29 Similarly, Edward Kellett affirmed that churches ‘have great power committed to them’, ‘upon abuses, or other just motives’, to change whatever ‘good order’ they had previously made, without either ‘the people or any inferior ministers’ taking ‘upon them to guide or govern the churches, or pry into the reasons and consultations ecclesiastical, why the governors have appointed such observances, or have abrogated them’.30 On the basis of such passages it would no doubt be possible to gloss the various passages about bowing at the name of Jesus and other ceremonies cited so that they all fitted within a neat hierarchy of laws or authorities, stretching down from the most general prescriptions of natural and divine law, through the suggestive precedents provided by particular scriptural, apostolic, patristic and Catholic ritual practices, to the determinations in things indifferent of individual national churches. Such a reading would be neat, but it would not really accommodate all the evidence. For there was a recalcitrant Laudian tendency to lend the particular ritual and ceremonial practices of the English church the glow 28 29 30

Yates, A treatise (1637), sig. *3v. Mede, The reverence (1638), pp. 51–2. Kellett, Tricoenium Christi (1641), p. 641.

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of direct scriptural and apostolic warrant. That tendency was in at least potential tension if not conflict with the sovereign power of the national church over its own ceremonial practices, which lay at the centre of the traditional rhetoric of conformity and adiaphora. What we have here is evidence that Laudianism contained within itself, not merely certain tensions, apologetic or legitimating moves and manoeuvres, of differing, and sometimes of seemingly incompatible, implication, but also perhaps a minimum and a maximum position. The minimum position revalued the role of external ceremony and church decoration in the life of the Christian community, in part through the use of scripture and in particular of passages drawn from the Old Testament about the tabernacle and the temple. This in itself was striking enough and could generate some very exalted statements about the necessity of ceremonial conformity for the salvation of the individual and the well-being of a true church. However, proponents of this minimum position were careful to keep the authority of scripture and the particular ceremonial dispositions of the English church separate from one another. Thus, they were able to infuse an old established rhetoric of conformity and obedience with a new ceremonialist content, without seeming to break down the equally old and established division between things necessary for salvation and things indifferent. By consistently and insistently applying the authority of scripture (and to a lesser extent notions of immemorial, and therefore of apostolic, custom) directly to the external arrangements of the English church, the maximum position seemed to be breaking down those barriers. It may be no accident that the more moderate, minimum, position dominated the visitation sermons produced during the early to mid-1630s, while the rather more radical, maximum position can be found in the works of what one might call the Laudian avant garde; works often, but not always – vide the ravings of Giles Widdowes in 1631  – produced relatively late in the decade, in defence of the most controversial and allegedly novel aspects of the Laudian programme. Thus, the initial drive towards the beauty of holiness was legitimated with a traditional rhetoric of conformity, which, precisely because it was familiar, composed in large part of commonplaces, was less likely to alarm or alienate the non-Laudian members of the church, whose adherence to enhanced standards of conformity was being sought. Meanwhile, on the leading edge of Laudian opinion, arguments were being used which cast the whole project in an altogether less familiar, more transformative, overtly sacralising, light.

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Holy Ordinances

To get a surer sense of which way the ideological wind was blowing we need to turn now to the central features in the worship of the church around which Laudian ceremonialism was arranged.

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chapter 12

Prayer

Of the holy ordinances, perhaps the most obvious was prayer, the primacy of which, in the life of the Christian and of the church, was central to the whole Laudian project. Indeed, it was tied into many of the master images which lay at the heart of the Laudian approach to the beauty of holiness and the church as the house of God. For if the church was the house of God, it was also the house of prayer. As John Swan observed in 1638, ‘it is thus written, “my house shall be called the house of prayer”, and this, as to show the excellency of prayer in general, so, in particular, to express unto us the excellency of public prayer in the congregation’.1 Walter Balcanquall made precisely the same point in almost identical language.2 For Christopher Dow, ‘public prayer’ was simply ‘the most sacred and excellent part of God’s worship’.3 Richard Tedder told the Norfolk clergy, assembled for the primary visitation of Matthew Wren, that ‘prayer is the end to which God’s house is erected, domus mea, domus orationis est. Though there be many other religious duties to be exercised in God’s house, yet there is none other mentioned but prayer.’4 This was natural enough, for, as we have seen, many Laudians referred to the church as God’s ‘own house and presence chamber’, ‘the presence chamber on earth of the king of heaven and earth’. If, in attending church, Christians were indeed seeking an audience with God, then prayer was the obvious means through which that audience was to be conducted: ‘Who goeth to church, goeth to God’s house to speak to God by prayer.’5 But, for the Laudians, the church was not only a presence chamber, it was also a temple. As Balcanquall pointed out, the temple of the Jews 1 2 3 4 5

Swan, A sermon (1639), p. 14. Balcanquall, The honour (1633), pp. 20–1. Dow, Innovations (1637), p. 54. Tedder, A sermon (1637), p. 11. Robartes, God’s holy house (1639), pp. 30, 74.

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was ‘but a type of our churches’ and in place of their literal sacrifices, the Christians had their ‘daily sacrifices of praise and prayer’.6 For John Browning, prayer was ‘God’s most peculiar service, our daily and continual sacrifice, to which the apostles give, as fit is, the first place.’7 In place of the blood sacrifices of the Jews, Browning offered the spiritual sacrifices of Christians, expressed through the mouth and heart in prayer. Thus he referred to morning and evening prayer as ‘this morning and evening sacrifice’, owed by priest and people to God every day: ‘Daily and duly we should offer up this sacrifice, if not thrice each day, as did David and Daniel, yet twice at least, as did God’s people then.’8 According to Robert Shelford, ‘this duty of praying and praising God, together with God’s ministers, is, by St Peter, prescribed to all the faithful, where he tells them that they are “an holy priesthood to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ”’.9 The sacrifice to be offered to God, Browning described as ‘a broken and contrite heart … This sacrifice our mother church intends we should offer in that laborious penitential prayer, the litany.’10 He pictured Christians praying with their ‘eyes lifted up to God in heaven’ and ‘their knees with the body cast down to the earth … hands lifted up’, as ‘a sign that all we can do is too little to give him thanks for that he hath done for us, and that all which we do (our sacrifice) we desire should be accepted in the blood, passion, and merit of Jesus Christ. It is observable, (which the first Christians observed) that in the gesture of hands lifted up the figure of the cross is evidently represented.’11 Both Browning and Shelford pictured the soul of the believer, disciplined and beaten down by fasting and meditation, soaring on the wings of prayer towards contemplation of, and union with, God. Quoting Chrysostom, Shelford claimed that ‘fasting and alms are to the soul’s wings to mount it up in prayer and contemplation to heavenly things’.12 Here was the pinnacle of Christian experience, and it was to be attained largely through prayer. What was true for the individual professor was true, too, for the church as a whole. As several of these writers observed, the militant church on 6

Balcanquall, The honour (1633), pp. 10, 11. Browning, Public prayer (1636), p. 113. Ibid., pp. 134, 127. 9 Shelford, Five discourses (1635), p. 28. 10 Browning, Public prayer (1636), p. 56. 11 Ibid., pp. 70–2. 12 Shelford, Five discourses (1635), p. 32. 7

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earth was closest to the condition of the saints and ‘angels of heaven, when we are in the act of prayer’.13 As John Swan pointed out, praise was a large part of prayer: ‘The heavenly society is frequent in it, and we on earth make God’s house then to be like the heavens, when prayer and praise have chiefest place in the congregation.’14 ‘When this life is ended’, Browning explained, yet even then, … prayer abideth, I mean the everlasting prayers of the saints, which are but our most perfect prayers. And indeed, both are confessions unto God; the one of our wants here, and the other of his gifts and goodness; the one the acknowledgement of our miseries; the other, of his most abundant and all-enriching mercies. The one draweth us to him, because we want him; the other, having thus tasted the sweetness of his goodness, makes us dwell with him, because we love him. And as the saints in heaven, by the one, so we, by both these acts of our earnest prayers, … continually and daily abide by him, and, under the shadow of his wings, so making the church the house of God and gate of heaven whilst it is, thus, on earth, the house of prayer. Thus you see prayer makes us fellow citizens, with the saints, of the household of faith, God’s domestic servants, even angels (in part) whilst as they, so we, continually praise God; either confessing his power in our prayers, or his goodness in our praises. It sets us not only in heaven, and makes us heirs and co-heirs, but it … partners with Christ himself in his more lasting office.

For Christ had only discharged his role as a prophet for ‘but three years and an half; so long, at the most, he preached’. But even now in heaven he was still continuing ‘his priestly office’, ‘and being our mediator and everlasting advocate, sits at the right hand of the father, by prayer, still making intercession for us, I John 2. 1. Thus highly is this duty exalted, so highly preferred, not only his apostles on earth and saints in heaven, but also by Christ himself, that with him it is set down at the right hand of God the father.’15 Anyone could pray, and they could pray anywhere, but these writers were agreed that it was public, corporate prayer which united Christians in the militant church with the saints and angels in the church triumphant. ‘Pray at home we may’, conceded Richard Tedder, ‘but we cannot pray at home as at church, where there is a reverend assembly of fathers, a unanimous supplication unto God, where there is amongst us all but one 13 14 15

Tedder, A sermon (1637), p. 16. Swan, A sermon (1639), p. 15. Browning, Public prayer (1636), pp. 124–5. Also see Richard Corbet’s consecration sermon for Lincoln College Chapel, Oxford Historical Society, Collectanea IV, p. 145.

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mind, and one voice and the bond of charity, and the prayers of the priest, to which I add the absolution and blessing of the priest’.16 According to Walter Balcanquall, ‘the consent and agreement of Christian minds in prayer’ was ‘a thing most acceptable to God’.17 Thus the sinner ‘that is destitute of holy hands’ should rush ‘to the temple’ where, claimed Robert Skinner, he shall meet with holy hands, in the holy assembly and may speed the better, be graciously accepted for their sakes, as Job’s friends for his sake, Job 42. In my devotions, let me join with the righteous, and then his prayer (I shall hope) will make way for mine. Nay, and how shall my charity be augmented, my zeal kindled, my faith confirmed, when I hear the whole congregation … to implore, and send up an army of prayers, for the pardon of my sins. For thus it is ever in these sacred meetings; all for everyone, and everyone for all, that God may be gracious and have mercy upon all.18

If these properties of public prayer were to yield their maximum return it was essential that the laity play an active part in the public prayers of the church. And so, whatever the inherent virtues of the set prayers of the English church, we find several of these authors lamenting the passivity that had rendered public prayer a sort of spectator sport, during which the only voice to be heard was that of the priest, rattling through the prayers of the church as fast as he could go: ‘For the most part in our churches, there is but one mouth left, the mouth of the minister, and that for the most part a rash one too, even too rash, too hasty, too precipitate.’ This ‘humbling, mumbling, mangling, posting, passing over our prayers, as though they would never be ended, as it argueth contempt in them that so perform them, so it causeth also contempt in the people that are present at them’.19 Thus, John Browning claimed that a man that cometh into our churches at prayer would think that, either the people are gathered together to hear one speak or read, or that the minister were preaching only, or else, if they were prayers, either that they no ways concerned the people, or else that they not at all understood them …. Are our prayers so turned into sermons only, that we entertain them with the ear alone? Where is our mouth, our tongue, our voice? Are we ashamed to confess God before men in public? …. Can they be our prayers, to which we assent not, in which we join not?20 16 17 18 19 20

Tedder, A sermon (1637), p. 13. Balcanquall, The honour (1633), p. 26. Skinner, A sermon (1634), pp. 24–5. Browning, Public prayer (1636), p. 77. Ibid., pp. 73–4.

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John Swan turned from the depressingly desultory performance of his contemporaries to ‘the primitive church’ whose ‘Amen was like a clap of thunder, … and their hallelujah, as the roaring of the sea. I should be glad, therefore’, he concluded, ‘to see the people join with their minister, both in heart and voice, and to let so cheerful and so good a light shine forth before men, that thereby the forwardness and alacrity of one may stir up the dull drooping of another’.21 Once the performance of the laity during public prayer had been brought up to snuff, the next thing that needed attention was the regularity of their attendance. For, according to Robert Shelford, ‘the oftener we beat upon God’s word and repeat the church prayers, the more the son of God’s light reflecteth upon us, and the more heat of devotion is stirred up in us’.22 As with the bodily ceremonies and gestures that attended it, so with public prayer itself; the more often Christian professors attended and repeated the forms of public worship established in the church, the better Christians they would become. A crucial means to that end was adherence to a set and officially promulgated form of public prayer. In Shelford’s view, set prayer was God’s ‘stablished ordinance in his church’.23 Browning agreed; God had enjoined set forms of prayer in both the Old and New Testaments and provided, in the Lord’s prayer, a model for us to follow. It was both ‘set and prescribed’ and ‘short and brief’ and so should be the prayers of the church.24 John Swan cited various church councils which had decreed that not any prayers should be used in the congregations, but such as had been formerly approved. Neither is all this but agreeable to our saviour’s meaning who (because he delighted not in vain babblings) taught his disciples to make use both of a short and set form. And also how unfitting it ever was to give way to private fancies in a public assembly, St Paul declareth; ‘for when yee come together how is it (saith he) that everyone hath a psalm, hath a doctrine, hath a tongue, hath a revelation? Let all things be done to edifying. Long before which times, it was the counsel of Solomon “let thy words be few”, for God regardeth not our prayers according to their length, but according to their strength and pithiness. And indeed to have short forms and often ejaculations shows the eagerness of the spirit, and is to be truly instant in prayer; to ask, to seek, to knock.’25

21 22 23 24 25

Swan, Profanomastix (1639), pp. 54–5. Shelford, Five discourses (1635), p. 40. Ibid., p. 41. Browning, Public prayer (1636), p. 93. Swan, Profanomastix (1639), pp. 10–11.

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Thus, Christopher Dow praised the English church for appointing ‘prayers after a set and solemn form; prayers received from the ancient church of Christ, and venerable for their antiquity; prayers wherein the meanest of the congregation, by reason of their continual use, may join in, and help to set upon God with an army of prayers; prayers composed with that gravity, with such pious and soul ravishing strains of heavenly affection, that I suppose the world, setting them aside, hath not the like volume of holy orisons’.26 Set prayer helped to ensure the unity and order which Laudians saw as essential in all aspects of worship: The mouth of the church should be but one, when it was otherwise, the apostle liked it not; many mouths a means of confusion …. Again set prayer makes for the unity of the heart also; as thy mouth, thy heart; of all but one heart, so should it be. The heart of the people should, if not lead, yet at least go along with their own prayer; but how can this be, unless their prayers be known, unless familiar to them, unless they be before acquainted with them? He that prayeth with others must have respect to others with whom he prayeth; public use and order is not directed, but by commonly known sounds.

Set prayer ensured this unity and avoided the ‘tautologies, battologies … idle words, irreverent, unmannerly, ridiculous, if not blasphemous passages’, which too often attended the practice of extempore prayer.27 For Browning, prayer was perhaps the most powerful and difficult part of religious observance. ‘There is no work so hard under the sun as to pray to God aright’, he claimed. ‘None so irksome to the flesh, none which Satan more striveth to hinder. Therefore to prevent the one, and to provide for the other, fit it is meditation should go before, attention along with our prayers’; ‘attention’ paid ‘to God in heaven, to whom we pray; to ourselves and our own heart on earth, who make the prayer; to the matter and subject, for which we pray’.28 To meet such formidable requirements a set form of prayer was an essential aid; for how could prior meditation take place ‘if that they should meditate upon be unknown to them? …. But yet not all. As meditation before, so attention is necessary in our prayers. Prayer is intellectus practicus, the earnest desire of the heart. All kind of attention and intention is for the heart most needful; and for this cause, that the heart’s desire may be 26 27 28

Dow, Innovations (1637), p. 204. Browning, Public prayer (1636), pp. 84–6. Ibid., pp. 80–1.

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the more earnest, whilst being eased for the mouth, it is most busied upon itself. A set prayer is necessary for this end also.’29 The church of England, of course, enjoyed a set form of prayer, which, according to John Swan, contained everything required by the life of faith. ‘Doth thou desire to confess thy sins?’ he asked his readers, there’s a form of exquisite confession. Or dost thou desire to be absolved? There’s an order how a priest shall absolve the truly penitent and faithful soul. Or dost thou desire to praise thy God? There’s an heavenly te deum for such a purpose? Or dost thou desire to make an open confession of that faith which the orthodox Christians ever held? There be the three creeds …. Or dost thou desire to pray as thy saviour teacheth? There’s the pater noster, …. Or again dost thou desire to give public thanks (as a good Christian ought to do) for public benefits, or to be eased from general calamities, or to be secured from common evils? Why there, in that book be forms and patterns for such a purpose, yea for the asking of those things which be requisite and necessary as well for the body as the soul. And will none of these things move thee to come betimes to God’s house? I doubt thy sanctity, and suspect thy soundness. The place is holy, the service holy, and therefore let there be so much holiness in thee as may bring thee cheerfully, early and devoutly to this holy place and there make thee to be one with the rest in that holy business, which well beseems a holy Christian.

For, Swan explained, the Christian’s ‘holiness towards God’ had two aspects to it, one ‘in that we are men’, the other ‘in that we are joined as parts to that visible mystical body, which is his church. As men we are at our own choice, both for time and place and form, according to the exigence of our own occasions in private. But as we be members of a public body, the service which is to be done of us must of necessity be public, and so consequently be performed by us on holy days, and in holy places.’30 Browning summed up the Laudian position. For him, prayer was ‘the ladder of heaven; the Christian’s sacrifice; the just man’s safeguard; the devil’s scourge; the spirit’s earnest; this is the nurse of love; the friend of peace; the soul’s solace; our access to God; the means of salvation, for “whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord, shall be saved”, Joel 2. 32. For this … is all our preaching, hearing, believing Rom. 10. Our entering, hearing, offering, in the former words, hither are they referred all of them; here the greatest danger if we miss, herein the greatest comfort if we hit.’31 Likewise, Thomas Jackson lauded the ‘power there is in the songs of the 29 30 31

Ibid., pp. 86–7. Swan, Profanomastix (1639), pp. 11–14. Browning, Public prayer (1636), p. 68.

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sanctuary, when they are rightly set by the priest, and then taken up by unanimous consent of the prince and people, united in heart, with the fear of God, and with loving affection one towards another, and towards God’s church’.32 On this view, then, public prayer took its place at the very centre of the Laudian vision of the beauty of holiness; here was the activity for which Christians gathered in the presence of God and around which the other outward, bodily gestures and ceremonies discussed were arranged; here was the ultimate collective acknowledgement of human reverence and humility in the divine presence; the means through which the spiritual sacrifices of praise and thanksgiving could be offered to God, and through which God’s grace could be called down upon the repentant sinner. 32

Jackson, Diverse (1637), p. 35.

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chapter 13

Preaching

To thus enhance and magnify the significance and role of prayer in the church was inevitably to (at least relatively) downgrade that of preaching, since preaching and prayer were incessantly juxtaposed and compared, normally, in the writings of these authors, to the detriment of preaching. Many of the passages lauding the church as the house of prayer went on immediately to point out, with John Swan in 1638, that God ‘nowhere tells us that his house shall be called the house of preaching’.1 Richard Tedder agreed: God says domus precationis not domus praedicationis, not excluding preaching by commending prayer, but preferring prayer before preaching. Preaching is good, and so is prayer, and of these two, though both good, yet one is better than another. Prayer hath the only place with Christ, it hath the first place with the apostles, even in the presence of preaching; … first prayer, then the ministry of the word, and yet the ministry of the word was never of so much use as then in the times of the apostles, when they were to plant the gospel in all the world. Preaching was at highest then, and yet then prayer too had place of it. Oratio was before ministerium verbi. Now there is not so much need of preaching, as there was in the first times of the church, but it is still needful as in other regards, so for the weeding out of schism and heresy.2

‘Prayer’, Tedder continued, ‘must never be turned out, for if the end, for which God’s house was instituted, be altered, then the property is altered, and it is God’s house no longer …. Howsoever if reason will not prevail for prayer, yet God himself must; here is his scriptum est, to take off all cavil, preaching must give place to prayer in the temple. God himself hath said it, and Christ hath said it again.’3 1 2 3

Swan, A sermon (1639), p. 14. Tedder, A sermon (1637), p. 11. Ibid., p. 15.

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To explain the relationship between these two aspects of the priest’s calling Browning had recourse to the image of Jacob’s ladder, ‘which he saw in Bethel, whereon were angels ascending and descending, so by our office and ministration, angels might, in us, ascend and carry up ours, and the people’s, supplications unto God. And angels, by us, descend, to bring God’s word and message to the people. We indeed God’s angels in his heaven here on earth, the church, but these the wings, whereby we are to fly. We, the world’s light and stars, but these the orbs wherein we are to move. These two all our duties, prayer and the ministry of the word.’4 Thus, through the word God spoke to us, and through prayer we spoke to him; these were the means of communication through which the audiences granted by God in his earthly presence chamber, the church, were to be conducted. Browning compared prayer and preaching to ‘those two sisters in the gospel, Mary and Martha … serving the Lord in the mutual service of one another’.5 But if the two were integrally linked, there was no doubt in Browning’s mind that ‘public and common prayer’ was ‘far superior to that other, the word’s ministration’.6 Indeed, as John Swan told the clergy of Cambridgeshire in 1638, ‘to prefer preaching before praying, is to magnify the means before the end’.7 For Browning, ‘prayer is the principal and main; the ministration of the word but the means. This is the end, the other but the way, conducing and leading to this end. This is the proper service of God, necessary for all men and times; the other but the service of his word, peculiar to us [the clergy] and chiefly necessary for those first times.’8 For it was prayer that saved us, while preaching merely informed us about God so that we knew to whom to pray and how and in what terms to do it: ‘For (as it is in Rom. 10. 13) “whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved”. But then next, “how shall they call on him, in whom they have not believed? And how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher?”’9 As Browning put it, ‘the end of our preaching is that you may hear; the end of your hearing is, that you may believe; the end of all our believing is, that we may all pray, invocate, and call on the name of God’. Thus ‘the end of all our hearing is that we may offer… in hearing, God cometh near 4 5 6 7 8 9

Browning, Public prayer (1636), p. 111. Ibid., p. 100. Ibid., p. 112. Swan, A sermon (1639), p. 15. Browning, Public prayer (1636), p. 115. Swan, A sermon (1639), p. 15.

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to us, God speaks to us; but in prayer, we come near to him; we speak to him, this being the true sacrifice, which, after the abolishing of those bloody sacrifices, now only remaineth in the church of God, the house of prayer’.10 If preaching was a mere preparation for prayer, then its role in the life of the church was greatly diminished. As various of the passages quoted make clear, for these authors, once the church had been established, the main task for preaching was to provide each generation with the basic information necessary for them to be able to pray properly, and thereafter to perform intermittent topping-up operations, designed to protect the church from lay immorality, heresy and schism. Therefore Browning claimed that ‘the first and best Christians, after they had learned their first principles in their catechism, they gave themselves continually to prayer’. This progression from initial hearing to a more active involvement in the process of worship was actually built into the liturgy: ‘For, as in our church service, the creed, the confession of faith, followeth next after the hearing of God’s word to show us “that faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God”. Rom. 10 v.11. So, after the confession of our faith, our faith confessed presently shows itself in prayer.’ ‘This, as the order of the ancient churches in their liturgies, is observed by our holy mother, the church of England, being that very natural order which the apostle plainly layeth down.’11 In the primitive church, ‘Christian neo-phytes, seeking full admission to the church, had been called catechumeni or audientes, that is hearers.’ Thus amongst both the Greeks and Latins hearing had been ‘the first step to Christianity, or rather the preparation to it. So likewise the prayer of the catechumeni, or hearers, was’12 to be found in ‘the former part of the service, wherein there were frequent readings and lessons of the word of God’. This was ‘the lowest step, whereby they did ascend to their … supplications; the penitents’ prayer, and thence to their …. liturgy itself and their (so they called them) “prayers of the faithful”’. This had been the structure of the ‘established set forms of prayer, even in the apostles’ times’. It meant that even heathens and infidels, along with the ‘meanest and lowest of the Christians (the catechumeni)’,13 had been admitted to sermons, and then only gradually allowed to penetrate, as full members of 10 11 12 13

Browning, Public prayer (1636), p. 55. Ibid. Ibid., p. 46 Ibid., pp. 122–3.

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the church, further and further into the active, praying part of the liturgy. It was for this reason, Browning claimed, that ‘in our churches the pulpits are placed below, the altar above, or in the highest place, so we must first hear before we presume to offer … we must light the candle here, that must light us at the altar’.14 This vision of prayer as the very centre of Christian worship and of the consequent relationship between prayer and preaching could not help but affect the Laudian view of what constituted preaching in the first place. Browning, for one, ridiculed the notion that ‘there is no hearing without a sermon’: The first, and nearest degree in hearing, whereby we come close up to God, is the hearing of the sacred oracles of God …. The second degree, whereby we come near to hear (though not so near as before, nor so sure as the other) is the hearing the word of God, applied, either by general or particular churches, in their catechisms, their councils, confessions, their rituals, their homilies, which, next the word of God, are most worthily preferred before all other private works, or preachings, being the works of many, and those most learned and holy men, discussed with the clearest judgement, penned with the maturest study, delivered in the shortest manner; applied in the most familiar phrase; ordered with the plainest method; showing the most needful points. Lastly comprehending most fully the sum, substance, and body of Christian religion.

Only after these two modes of hearing did Browning list ‘the sermons or homilies’, ‘of particular, private men’, ‘which, being the works of one man alone, are therefore more subject to error; large discourses, and therefore more apt to be mistaken, more hardly understood, oft times not so applied to the meanest capacities, many times conversant … about unnecessary truths, and high disputes, confused and intricate in their order, manner, and method’. And that was to leave out the majority of sermons ‘perchance not penned at all, delivered with little, or no study, oft times, with little judgement, by men of small knowledge, learning, reading’, or else by ‘factious and seditious men’ bent on ‘rending, tearing and dividing Christ’s seamless coat, nay dismembering, and renting his most glorious body’.15 Given that the book of common prayer, in line with the liturgies of the primitive church, and of the Greek, Latin and Ethiopian churches, was largely comprised of the word of God, Browning was able to agree with Dow that anyone anxious to hear the word did not really need the 14 15

Ibid., pp. 46–7. Ibid., pp. 49–51. Also see Dow, Innovations (1637), pp. 153, 154.

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services of a preacher at all.16 Alexander Read made the same point.17 For Robert Shelford, the principal part of the minister’s office is … the true understanding, distinct reading, and decent ministry of the church service, contained in the book of common prayer. This is the pith of godliness, the heart of religion … the backbone of all the holy faculties in the Christian body …. Desire you new life? Here is baptism to give it. Are you gone from it? Here is the baptism of tears and penance to restore it. Want you weapons for the spiritual war? Here is the catechism, and confirmation. Need you food for the new life? Here is the bread and wine of Christ’s body and blood. Want you supply of virtuous young soldiers? Here is matrimony and Christian education. Need you leaders and governors? Here are Christ’s ministers.18

It must be admitted that immediately after this diatribe in praise of common prayer, and, by implication, the efficacy and acceptability of a reading ministry, Shelford went on to explain that ‘preaching is God’s mouth to his people’. There was, certainly, a place, even in his view of the church, for ‘a wise and discreet sermon’, so long as it was preached by ‘a man of reading and discretion’ and was devoid of ‘false doctrines or unsavoury speeches’.19 Walter Balcanquall admitted that the widespread comparison between the value of prayer and preaching could appear ‘odious’, albeit only before going on to indulge in just such a comparison himself by attacking ‘the generation of fools … who think that all religion consisteth in preaching and hearing of sermons’.20 Other still more moderate preachers, Laudian fellow travellers if you will, asserted the equivalence of the two functions; the erstwhile puritan Nehemiah Rogers maintained in a visitation sermon of 1631 that there was ‘a time for hearing, a time for reading, another for praying. All are God’s ordinances; one may not justle out the other, but each is to have its time and turn.’21 In another visitation sermon of 1630 Francis Rogers denounced both those who ‘would have all preaching, and no praying’ and those who ‘would have all praying, and no preaching’. What was required was a balance between them, ‘preaching and praying’ should be like ‘Hippocrites two twins’, they should ‘live arm in arm together’.22 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

Browning, Public prayer (1636), p. 48. Read, A sermon (1636), p. 17. Shelford, Five discourses (1635), p. 35. Ibid., pp. 35–6. Balcanquall, The honour (1633), p. 22. Rogers, A sermon (1632), p. 28 Rogers, A visitation sermon (1633), sigs. Cv, C2r.

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That surely was an ideal with which very few contemporaries would have quarrelled, in theory. The difficulty came in establishing precisely where the balancing point between the two priestly functions lay. Just like Lancelot Andrewes before them, the writers under discussion here were, as we shall see, in conscious and full-throated reaction against elements in the church who, they claimed, equated religion and divine worship exclusively with preaching, defined narrowly as the exposition of scripture by the minister in the pulpit. These people, it was claimed, systematically subjugated the interests of prayer, concerted and orderly worship, and all the other constituent parts of the beauty of holiness, to the demands of preaching. It is, therefore, within that polarised and polemical context, that many of the remarks cited in this chapter need to be read. And yet, even taking that highly polemicised context into account, there can be no doubt that, for the authors under consideration here, preaching came a poor second to prayer. Moreover, given their overarching vision of the church as the house of God, their definition of the Christian community in largely ceremonial or ritual terms, and their consequent insistence on uniform, ordered, collective acts of worship as the very essence of Christian religion, that conclusion was as inevitable, as it was, in their eyes at least, salutary.

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chapter 14

The Sacrament and the Altar

If, for the Laudians, preaching was but a means to bring people to prayer, there was a real sense in which both prayer and preaching were, in their turn, but the means to bring people to the sacrament. According to one author, the soul of a Christian ‘was a temple of his God’, created in and through the sacraments; ‘it is dedicated and consecrated in baptism, it is re-edified by confirmation, and the holy eucharist’.1 God’s presence in the church was therefore most intense in the areas given over to the administration of the sacraments, the font and the altar, and the life of the Christian could be construed as a journey from the one to the other. As Robert Shelford asked, ‘seest thou not the son of God’s seat here, the holy altar at the upper end of this house? And seest thou not the holy font, at the nether end, where the Holy Ghost is always ready to receive all into his kingdom? If the Son and Holy Ghost’s seats be at both ends of this house, must not the Father needs be all the house over?’2 According to John Swan, ‘perfect communion with God’ ‘begins indeed in baptism, but ends in the Lord’s supper, for higher we cannot go, till we come in heaven, and they are the best saints that are admitted to it’.3 Eleazar Duncon maintained that ‘all children or men, being washed in the holy font, do from thence obtain remission of sins, become sons of God, and are made heirs of heaven’. But these benefits paled into insignificance when compared to ‘far greater and diviner privileges’ emanating from the sacrament of the altar.4 The reception of the sacrament was thus the acme of the Christian’s profession; believers should prepare for it with prayer, fasting, meditation and alms deeds, for, John Browning claimed, ‘by an obedient tendering of ourselves unto God in the blessed eucharist, receiving his body and blood, 1 2 3 4

De templis (1638), p. 132. Shelford, Five discourses (1635), p. 15. Swan, Profanomastix (1639), p. 39. Duncon, Of worshipping (1660), pp. 21–2.

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“he living in us, and we in him”, we are made partakers of the divine nature’.5 This was to place the sacrament at the very centre of the life of faith and the church. The sacrament, said Yates, displayed ‘God’s more especial presence’ in his church and represented ‘our greatest communion with Christ’. ‘It is the highest advancement a Christian hath to be fed at God’s board, and with Christ’s very body.’6 For Eleazar Duncon the sacrament was ‘the most awful and venerable sacrifice, which our Lord himself did institute from old, for the commemoration, representation, application and exhibition of that most perfect sacrifice, once made and offered on the altar of the cross’. It was a ‘heavenly banquet, in respect of which all the dainties of the world are but filth and trash. Where we eat the bread of life itself, and drink the cup of eternal salvation and blessing, yea, indeed the body of our Lord and his precious blood …. “The help to immortality, and pledge of our remembrance”, as say the Greek fathers, by whom this mystery is wont to be called … final, that is the greatest perfection and consummation of the Christian religion.’7 For Edward Kellett it was ‘by the strength of the sacraments’ that we might ‘walk strongly and Christianly all the days of our lives’ and ‘feed on the holy consecrated signs’, so ‘that we may never be separated from the thing signified, even holiness itself, Jesus Christ, our Lord’.8 Through the sacrament of the altar we were able to ‘to feed on the divine food at thy heavenly table, with all the most blessed society of our beatified predecessors, the participants and communicants with Jesus Christ, our Lord, in his kingdom’.9 On the one hand, ‘baptism makes a white soul, beloved of God, the heir of God, and openeth the kingdom of heaven; as the fathers phrase it, Christ sanctifieth and cleanseth the church with the washing of water by the word’. On the other, through ‘the blessed sacrament of the eucharist’, ‘our souls may be filled and fatted with God’.10 ‘The sacraments of grace’, Kellett proclaimed, ‘remit, quell and mortify sin’. The reception of the sacrament ‘enfeebleth and diminisheth sin in the smallest matters, but in more grievous sins it wholly taketh away our consent’. Kellett challenged his reader to see whether ‘you find not so sharp motions to anger, envy, luxury or the like’ after the reception of the sacrament. If so, let 5

Browning, Public prayer (1636), p. 58; also see Shelford, Five discourses (1635), pp. 24–5. Yates, A treatise (1637), pp. 62–3. 7 Duncon, Of worshipping (1660), p. 22. 8 Kellett, Tricoenium Christi (1641), p. 26. 9 Ibid., p. 61. 10 Ibid., p. 543. 6

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the believer ‘thank the body and blood of our Lord, because the virtue of that sacrament worketh effectually on him, and let him rejoice that the foulest ulcer beginneth to heal’.11 ‘The eucharist, in the right use, maketh an attrite man, a contrite one; a contrite man to be justified; a justified man to be holy; a holy man to be more holy; and the holiest to be more lively, spiritful and prompt in religious service.’12 In short, Kellett concluded ‘thy powerful sacraments provided both preservatives that we fall not, and redemptives if we fall’. They ‘work effectively in us’ as ‘conduit pipes of grace and conveyers of goodness into our souls’.13 ‘It is a medicine of immortality, an anti-dote against death; procuring life; purging sin; driving away all evils.’14 In short, the sacrament operated ‘not only [by] sealing and signifying grace, but conferring and exhibiting it by itself, in the true use’.15 On his view, if the church was the house of God, its status as such was conferred by the divine presence within it, and the Laudians were agreed that that presence was at its most intense at the altar. Thus Kellett argued that it was entirely right that at our ‘entrance into the church’ ‘we bend, stoop and do reverence to God alone, toward the east, where the memorial is, of the holiest of holies, and where Christ is really, spiritually, most ineffably present at, and in, our sacrament’.16 As Thomas Laurence put it, preaching at court in 1637, just ‘as there was a greater communication of the divine presence in these [holy] places’ than elsewhere ‘so there was a greater communication of the same presence in some parts of those places than others’: ‘Though the glory of the Lord filled both the tabernacle and the temple, yet it filled not all alike … and as that distinction in holy places continued after Christ, so did the reason of that distinction too.’ For Laurence compared the difference between the area around the altar and the rest of the church to that pertaining between the area ‘within the veil’ and the rest of the temple.17 On this view, ‘his table’ was ‘the most sacred place in God’s house, in which he offers himself to his people, and they take him, as truly present, for real presence is not denied when transubstantiation is rejected, but Christ really present in the holy sacrament is an object of our faith, 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Ibid. Ibid., p. 544. Ibid., p. 632. Ibid., p. 656. Ibid., p. 544. Ibid., p. 80. Laurence, A sermon (1637), pp. 15–17.

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not of our sight or seen’.18 For Pocklington, too, ‘Christ is most truly and really present in the blessed sacrament’, and it was this presence which demanded our ‘humble and lowly reverence towards the holy and most sacred altar’.19 Thomas Laurence agreed that God’s presence in the sacrament was real and that it was this which rendered the altar and its environs holy. In discussing that presence Laurence emphasised the human duty to cloth our phrases in general and indefinite expressions. As I like not those that say he is bodily there, so I like not those that say his body is not there, because Christ saith  ’tis there, and St Paul says  ’tis there, and the church of England says ’tis there, and that truly, and substantially, and that not only by way of representation, or commemoration, and yet without either con-, sub-, or trans-, which the ancient church said not; by a real, and nevertheless, which the ancient church said, a spiritual, and mystical, and supernatural, presentation and exhibition. For why should our saviour bid us take, what he would not have us receive? We must believe ’tis there. We must not know how ‘tis there. Our faith may see it, our sense cannot. ’Tis a mystery they all say; and ’twere no mystery, if ’twere known.20

Edward Kellett agreed that the precise meaning of the phrase ‘this is my body’ provided ‘an ample field to expatiate in’. And having observed, more in sorrow than in anger, that the Roman church might have ‘deferred their definitive sentence and over hard censure’ concerning the precise nature of the real presence, he proclaimed that ‘I am resolved to forebear further disquisition, and to lose myself in holy devotion and admiration, that I may find my Christ. The sail is too large for my boat, this sea is too tempestuous for my shallop.’21 Thus it was that Kellett’s Tricoenium Christi was studded with rapturous prayers to be prayed at or about the reception of the sacrament.22 In the same spirit, Pocklington quoted Chrysostom on the awesome spectacle of the sacrament: ‘“When the curtains are drawn back by our hearts, which 18 19 20 21

22

Yates, A treatise (1637), pp. 16–17. Pocklington, Altare (1637), pp. 86–7. Laurence, A sermon (1637), pp. 17–18. Kellett, Tricoenium Christi (1641), p. 629. Kellet, and perhaps also Laurence, were here subscribing to the view that ‘Rome’s error consisted more in over-definition, in unnecessary superstructures’ erected on the top of doctrines necessary to salvation, ‘rather than in heresies which threatened to overthrow the foundation’ upon which both the church of Rome and the church of England stood. Of course, as Milton observes, ‘if the fundamentals of faith were unreservedly shared by both churches it was difficult to see why there should be intense conflict with Rome’. This was a point made by many on the leading edge of the Laudian avant garde. See Milton, Catholic and reformed, pp. 184, 186. On attitudes to transubstantiation see ibid., pp. 196–205. Kellett, Tricoenium Christi (1641), pp. 104, 656.

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even then we are bidden to lift up unto the Lord, conceive heaven itself to be open unto us. When Jesus Christ is given to the faithful communicant, who, we may be sure, cometh not alone, but with the blessed spirit, attended with his blessed angels, whom he hath made ministering spirits for their good, who shall be heirs of salvation.”’23 Joseph Mede, Robert Shelford and the author of De templis all cited Chrysostom to the same effect, with Pocklington reminding John Williams that for all his ‘blasphemous’ comparisons of the altar to ‘a dresser’, as a priest, administering the sacrament, ‘he standeth and ministreth in the most holy place under the cope of heaven, and mixeth himself in his service with those ministering spirits, the blessed angels, that, with bended necks, give humble attendance to their Lord’. If any responded to such claims by maintaining that that may well have been true enough in Chrysostom’s day, but it was certainly not true now, Mede had a ready answer; it was ‘because of our irreverent and unseemly behavior in them, which makes these blessed spirits loath our company’.24 The intensity of the divine presence in and at the sacrament could not but lend a glow of holiness to the altar upon which the sacrament was administered. Thomas Laurence compared that glow to the aura of spiritual potency and holiness that attended the material objects used by Christ, the prophets and apostles in the working of miracles. ‘Nor can any say’, Laurence claimed, that ‘this grace of his extraordinary residence, and assistance or operation, which we presume here, is greater than ecclesiastical writers ordinarily ascribe to those parts our savior, in his humanity, conversed principally in, to those he used, or were used against him; no more than his garment had, in St Mark, or his spittle, in St John; no more than the rod of Moses, in Exodus; the mantle of Elijah, or the bones of Elisha, in the Kings; no more than the handkerchief of St Paul, in the 19th of the Acts, or, in the 5th, the shadow of St Peter’.25 Of course, if the holiness of the altar, and its attendant impedimenta, was no greater than this, then it was very great indeed. No wonder Alexander Read was so pernickety about the furniture and utensils used to prepare for and administer the sacrament. Pursuing their habitual comparison between God’s presence in the world under the Old and New Testaments, several authors equated God’s 23 24 25

Pocklington, Altare (1637), p. 118. Mede, The reverence (1638), pp. 30, 32–3; Shelford, Five discourses (1635), pp. 8–9; De templis (1638), pp. 217–18; Pocklington, Altare (1637), pp. 118, 132. Laurence, A sermon (1637), p. 20.

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presence at the altar with his presence in the ark, or the mercy seat in the temple. Thomas Laurence drew a direct parallel between ‘an altar here’ and ‘an oracle or ark or mercy seat there’.26 Robert Shelford described ‘the Lord’s table, or high altar’ as ‘Jesus Christ’s mercy seat, because there the memory of the ever lasting sacrifice is made, and presented to the holy Trinity’.27 John Swan gave the most extended account of this equivalence, turning, at the end of a lengthy passage, from the internal dispositions in the temple to the arrangements in heaven itself: ‘St John witnesseth that he saw a throne, and one that sat upon it. So in the temple (as formerly in the tabernacle) was a mercy seat, the sacred monument of God’s presence there, and in the first Christian churches a … sacrarium, enclosed with a rail, for the holy table.’28 All this meant, as Pocklington observed, that, within a consecrated church, the altar was ‘the chiefest place, which, with most ceremony and devotion, was hallowed’.29 Indeed, for Robert Shelford ‘the altar is the principal part of God’s house, as being the cause and original of all the rest’.30 All this had certain practical consequences for the internal arrangement of the church and for the forms of external reverence appropriate for all Christians who entered it. Here we come upon two central features of the Laudian reform of the church undertaken during the 1630s: the so-called altar policy, whereby hitherto moveable communion tables were placed permanently in an altar-wise position at the east end of the church and railed in, and the attempt to introduce, if not to enforce, since it lacked any canonical basis,31 the practice, upon entry into the church, of bowing towards the altar or towards the east. As we might expect, both were defended vigorously by the authors under discussion here. As for the altar policy, according to Peter Heylyn this was the only way ‘to keep the table free from irreverent usage, and, by exalting it to the highest place, to gain the greater reverence to the blessed sacrament from the common people’, who, ‘if infected with the fancies of these latter days’, were ‘like enough to thrust it down into the belfry, or some 26 27 28 29 30 31

Laurence, A sermon (1637), p. 9. Shelford, Five discourses (1635), p. 5. Also see Mede, The reverence (1638), p. 10. Swan, Profanomastix (1639), pp. 41–2, 28–9. Pocklington, Altare (1637), p. 116. Shelford, Five discourses (1635), p. 2. Fincham and Tyacke, Altars restored, pp. 252–3. As they note, ‘the ceremony achieved canonical status in 1640, but was not prescribed only “heartily” commended, “for the advancement of God’s majesty” and “to give him alone that honour and glory due to him and no otherwise”’.

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worse corner’.32 Pocklington agreed; it was not fit that the altar should stand ‘in the midst of the church, among the people, for everyone to go about it that list’. If it was allowed to stand ‘in the nave, or body of the church’, Pocklington continued, the altar would be exposed to the polluting presence and gaze of the catechumens and excommunicate, all of whom ‘were not only inhibited the use and participation of the holy eucharist, but also the very sight and beholding of those mysteries’.33 Wherever it was situated, Heylyn continued, ‘there were the people’s eyes most like to be fixed and settled, and their aspects turned that way in time of prayer, as being that which they most longed for, and looked after, and of the which they desired to be partakers’. In fact, Heylyn argued, the altar had traditionally been placed towards the east end of the church, ‘in the uppermost and most eminent place of the quire or chancel, so that no man whoever should have place beyond it’.34 Now the precise reasons for this eastward orientation were lost in the mists of time. As we have seen, the author of De templis had essayed a number of symbolic readings of this practice, and Edward Kellett excavated even more,35 of which Heylyn adopted just one, citing Damascene to the effect that Christ’s face on the cross had been pointing westward, ‘so that all they that looked upon him, or desired to see him, did look towards the east, which, were it so, the altar, being so lively a representation of the cross of Christ, might be disposed of so in the church or chancel, as that the people should look eastward, that desired to see it’.36 But in the end, Heylyn, Eleazar Duncon and even Kellett were forced to concede that there was neither explicit scriptural nor patristic warrant for the eastward orientation of worship. Nor could one settled meaning be assigned to the practice. Unlike Kellett, who maintained that at first, like the Jews, the earliest Christians had worshipped towards the west, Heylyn, Pocklington and Eleazar Duncon all agreed that the primitive Christians, as soon as they had been able to erect purpose-built churches, had oriented them eastwards, with fixed stone altars at the eastern end.37 Duncon at least tried to claim that this eastward orientation was ‘delivered by the apostles themselves’ to distinguish the Christians from the Jews,

32 33 34 35 36 37

Heylyn, Coal (1636), p. 52. Pocklington, Altare (1637), pp. 89, 60–1. Heylyn, Antidotum (1637), section 2, pp. 86–7 Kellett, Tricoenium Christi (1641), pp. 79–80. Heylyn, Antidotum (1637), section 2, pp. 86–7. Ibid., section 2, pp. 21, 77–9.

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who worshipped facing west.38 From all of which Heylyn posited what he called ‘the general useage of the church’, and Duncan, ‘the custom of the primitive church’.39 Kellett went one better, claiming ‘an unwritten’ ‘apostolical tradition’, which, still ‘binds as well as if it were written’.40 Either way, Duncon and Heylyn both agreed that the Jews and the pagans had been taught by the law of nature to worship towards their respective altars.41 This was the basic lesson which the Laudians wished to bring home to their contemporaries, as they insisted on bowing towards the altar as a crucial part of the outward reverence that was the mark of a true Christian. Of course, their critics replied that this was idolatry, and various of our authors went out of their way to deny that claim, since no one was being asked ‘to give divine worship to God’s table’, but only ‘to worship God toward it’.42 Certainly, to ‘worship God by an image’ was ‘absolutely forbidden’, but all that was being enforced here was the worship of God ‘towards some place and monument’; a widely used practice by God’s people. The Israelites ‘in the wilderness … worshipped God toward the cloud, as the monument of his presence going with them’.43 Later the Jews ‘looked towards the ark of the covenant, or mercy seat, both in the tabernacle and the temple’; a practice based on the ‘promise made to Moses of a presence there, which is enough to signify that the Lord hath his throne in the places which are set apart and sanctified for his service’.44 All this proved that ‘a place where God, by special signs, manifesteth his special presence, is more holy than any other place … and there men are to demean themselves with special reverence therefore. But the communion table is a place where God manifesteth himself specially present, in the sacrament of the body and blood of our Lord and saviour Jesus Christ.’45 This rendered the altar the greatest single sign, or testimony, of God’s presence in the contemporary church, ‘and towards this part therefore … a more awful reverence is required, than towards, or in, any other part besides’.46 This duty was perpetual and certainly not limited to the time during which the sacrament was being administered. As Joseph Mede pointed out, 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

Duncan, Of worshipping (1660), pp. 25–7. Ibid., p. 24. Kellett, Tricoenium Christi (1641), p. 80. Ibid., p. 27. Shelford, Five discourses (1635), p. 19. Swan, Profanomastix (1639), p. 19. Ibid., pp. 19, 20–1. Robartes, God’s holy house (1639), p. 87. Swan, Profanomastix (1639), p. 42.

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‘the chair of estate loses not its relation and due respect, though the king be not always there. And remember that the ark of the covenant was not in Jerusalem, when Daniel opened his windows and prayed thitherward; yea, that it was wanting (I mean that sacred cabinet made by Moses) all the time of the second (or Zorobabel’s)temple, and yet the place esteemed notwithstanding as if it had been there.’47 As we have seen, a number of our authors insisted that in paying such respects to the mere signs and witnesses of God’s presence, men were rendering to God no more reverence than they regularly yielded to kings and great men.48 Kings expected honour and reverence to be paid, ‘not to their persons alone, but to their portraitures, their robes, their arms royal, their chairs of state, their chambers of presence’. If to render such honour to them was not idolatrous, no more was it idolatrous to render such reverence to the arms and insignia of God in his church.49 Thus in 1636 Thomas Laurence professed that he could see ‘no reason any should stick at this. Seeing ’tis just that place should have a pre-eminence above the rest, from which virtue and efficacy is derived to the rest. For the word which we preach is not operative, but through the merit of that sacrifice; nor those streams of regeneration, pure and clean, anything regenerative at all, unless first bathed and washed in his blood.’50 In other words, the efficacy of both the word and of baptism was in some way subordinate to, indeed, dependent upon, the sacrifice of the altar. As Foulke Robartes explained, it was fitting, therefore, that the altar should be railed off at the far end of the church, so that the Christian’s spiritual journey from the font at one end, via instruction and purification in preaching and prayer, to union with Christ in the sacrament, at the other, could be expressed in physical, architectural terms for all to see.51 As the author of De Templis explained, ‘the man who enters the west door from far, beholding the altar where he seriously intends to offer his devotions to his God and saviour, shall find his devout soul more rapt with divine awe and reverence, more enflamed with pure and holy zeal, in the delay and late approach unto it, than if at first he had entered upon it’.52 For ‘the nearer a man approacheth to that table, whereupon he seeth, with his own eyes, the sacred body and blood of his Lord and saviour 47 48 49 50 51 52

Mede, The reverence (1638), p. 11. Yates, A treatise (1637), sig. *3r. Laurence, A sermon (1637), pp. 24–5. Ibid., p. 20. Robartes, God’s holy house (1639), p. 45. De templis (1638), pp. 190–1.

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Jesus Christ, laid forth for him, to feed upon to everlasting life, the more he should find himself ravished with devotion and not scared with an imagination of superstition’.53 Thus was the primacy of the sacrament over preaching as a means of grace given tangible architectural, and, in bowing towards the altar, ceremonial form. For according to John Browning, the placing of the altar above the pulpit demonstrated the superiority of the former over the latter and that ‘we should first hear before we presume to offer’.54 John Yates asserted that ‘the pulpit, font, desk’ were none of them as holy as the altar, which alone was ‘God’s throne’ to signify ‘his majesty’ and ‘his presence with his people’ in the church.55 Eleazar Duncon gleefully observed that the ancients had never attributed ‘so great encomiums of holiness’ to the ‘pulpit or font’ as to the altar. Even in this sermon-obsessed age, Duncon asserted, ‘no man can be so mad as to compare the pulpit with the altar in point of holiness. For neither is the sermon there preached the word of God, nor, this being supposed (though not granted), can the Holy Ghost be thought to be so strictly conjoined to the word of God, as the son of God to the blessed sacraments.’56 For Peter Heylyn the altar was ‘more sacred than any material thing besides to the church belonging’, and its position railed-in in the chancel was necessary to ensure that it ‘had a far greater measure of reverence and devotion conferred upon it’.57 Laud himself agreed wholeheartedly with these sentiments, famously asserting that the altar was ‘the greatest place of God’s residence on earth. I say the greatest, yea greater than the pulpit, for there ’tis Hoc est corpus meum, “This is my body”, but in the pulpit ’tis at most Hoc est verbum meum, “This is my word.” And a greater reverence, no doubt, is due to the body than to the word of the Lord. And so in relation answerably to the throne where his body is usually present, than to the seat whence his word useth to be proclaimed.’58 53 54 55 56 57 58

Robartes, God’s holy house (1638), p. 44. Browning, Public prayer (1636), p. 46. Yates, A treatise (1637), pp. 62–3. Duncon, Of worshipping (1660), p. 21. Heylyn, Antidotum (1637), section 2, p. 86. Laud, A speech, p. 57.

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chapter 15

The Sacrament and the Social Body of the Church

15.1  Clerical and Lay Thus the layout of the church gave physical expression to the Laudians’ vision of the proper hierarchical arrangement of the divine ordinances in the church. It similarly embodied the spiritual pilgrimage of the individual Christian, conceived as a journey from the font, via the pulpit and prayer book, to the altar. However, the Laudian church interior, as these authors described it, could also be read as containing an idealised vision of the Christian community. For the extent to which different groups were granted access to the places of the greatest spiritual heat or divine presence could be taken to define their place within the Christian community. Here the most obvious division was a horizontal line drawn across the visible church, dividing the clergy from the laity. For the Laudians this was a distinction of the highest significance. Thomas Jackson maintained that Saul had been deposed as king of Israel because he ‘did usurp the priest’s office in offering sacrifices’ which ‘was prodigious. If he took upon him only to appoint the time for the sacrifice or supplication, designing some priests for exercising the sacred function, this was a great deal too much, more than mere folly.’1 Other Laudians had recourse to the tabernacle and the temple of the Old Testament to make the same point: The whole camp is holy, and therefore no unclean person must be in this; the tabernacle holier than the camp, and therefore the Levites alone must pitch round about that; the sanctuary holier than the tabernacle, and therefore the priests only must enter there … the oracle holier than all, and therefore none must approach here but Aaron himself, which is holiest of all, and that but once a year neither, and that not without lotions and propitiatory vestments and mystical sprinklings, blood, in one hand, to appease 1

Jackson, Diverse (1637), from ‘three sermons preched before the king’, p. 64.

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The Sacrament and the Social Body of the Church God, and a censer presenting a cloud of incense, as it were, to hide him from God, in the other.2

The same pattern had been retained in the temple, Laurence claimed. In explaining to his court auditory the need to observe ‘the difference betwixt holy and profane, the neglect whereof made God so angry in Ezekiel’, Laurence applied the same principles and distinctions to the contemporary church: ‘Tis holy where thou hearest me speak’, he told the court, ‘but tis holier from whence I speak; that is too clean for thy shoes, and this for thy feet’.3 But if the pulpit was holier than the pew, the chancel, and still more the altar railed off within it, was holiest of all: ‘None out of orders, no not at the communion, came within these … in the chancel the rest, the priests only at the altar.’4 Having downplayed the role of preaching in the life of the church, played up that of prayer and the sacraments, and played up most of all the intense divine presence in the sacrament, and at the altar upon which it was administered, it was inevitable that the Laudians should thus choose to define and exalt the role of the clergy in terms of their monopoly over the ministration of the sacrament, and of their control over access to the altar. As John Yates explained, ‘as Christ was known to his disciples in breaking of bread, so were the primitive priests known to their people by breaking the sacramental bread’.5 Both Pocklington and Heylyn emphasised that all Christians could offer not only the spiritual sacrifices involved in praise, prayer and alms deeds, but also what Heylyn termed ‘the oblation of our whole selves, our souls and bodies’. These were of an ‘entirely spiritual nature’, and every Christian was bound to ‘offer those sacrifices to the Lord his God continually at all times, in all places, and on all occasions. No wood so wide, no den so dark, no sea so spacious, which may not be a temple for these devotions and in the which we may not find an altar for these sacrifices.’ But that was not true of ‘the sacrifice of the altar, wherein the death and passion of Jesus Christ is commemorated in the consecrations of the bread and wine, and breaking, and delivering them to the faithful’. For that was ‘the particular function of the priest to perform’.6 All of which produced the priest’s sole right of access to the altar.7 Only the clergy could pass within the rails to ‘the highest place of all, whereunto 2 3 4 5 6 7

Laurence, A sermon (1637), p. 7. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. 10. Yates, A treatise (1637), p. 12. Pocklington, Altare (1637), p. 104. Heylyn, Antidotum (1637), section 2, p. 19. Heylyn, Antidotum (1637), section 2, p. 32.

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the priest ascended by certain steps and degrees, and when they did so ascend, were not psalms of degrees sung, called, for that cause, graduals? …. Was it not the only place whither none but priests might be allowed to come to officiate? Was not the holy eucharist there, and nowhere else, consecrated? Durst the priests themselves ascend thither without doing lowly reverence three several times? Was not this holy altar, and the mysteries thereof, at some time kept railed from the eyes of most men?’8 Thus while Joseph Mede located the ‘place of the clergy next to the altar and distinguished from that of the laity’,9 Pocklington went into greater detail, explaining that ‘the altar must needs stand in that place which was appointed for the priests to officiate in’, that is, not ‘in the midst of the chancel, much less in the midst or body of the church, but in that place of the presbytery, which was called sacrarium or sanctum sanctorum’. Within the space thus marked off, the clergy were further divided into groups: First, in the entering [of the presbytery] on both sides thereof were exedrae, seats or stalls, placed for the priests. Here the deacons might not sit. Secondly, above these, near the upper end of the quire, was placed cathedra, the chair or bishop’s throne …. Thirdly, in the midst of the quire, kneeled the laics that were admitted to the holy mysteries, and together with them such priests as, after penance, were received into the communion of laics, and not of priests. Fourthly, at the upper end of the chancel, was placed, enclosed and railed in from the rest of the chancel, the sacrarium; here stood the altar or Lord’s table, and hitherto none might approach but the priests themselves.10

Both Pocklington and Heylyn cited Ambrose’s expulsion of the Emperor Theodosius from within the rails to emphasise that here even the most exalted laypeople had no place here. According to Heylyn, having removed Theodosius from the holy of holies, ‘Ambrose allotted him a place … immediately before the bars that severed the church and the chancel; … so the emperor might have place before the people, as had the priests before the emperor.’11 As the guardians of, and activating agents behind, those structures, the crucial human element in the economy of sacramental grace which 8 9 10

11

Pocklington, Altare (1637), p. 117. Mede, The name altar (1637), p. 36. Again, after all this, it should come as small surprise to find Fincham and Tyacke observing that ‘some bishops and clergy insisted that the area within the rails was a priestly sanctuary from which the laity was excluded’. See their Altars restored, p. 242. Heylyn, Antidotum (1637), section 2, pp. 81–2, quotation at p. 82; Pocklington, Altare (1637), pp. 61–3.

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embodied and distributed the divine presence in the church, the clergy possessed great power. As John Yates put it in 1637, it had always been held the symbol of Christian communion to be partakers of the altar, and to receive from it the holy sacraments …. He who is within the altar is pure, therefore also he that obeyeth the bishop and priests. He is within the altar that may receive the sacrament, and he only may receive the sacrament that is in obedience, or due order, subject to the bishop and priest …. Without these there is no elect church, no observation of holy things, no congregation of saints …. He that is not within the altar is deprived of the bread of God, that is, he that hath no communion with his pastor at the altar is to be denied the sacrament, still the altar hangs upon the priest and fellowship with him proves fellowship with the other.12

Pocklington used the existence and exercise of the disciplinary powers of the clergy, ‘all which were of famous and frequent use within 200 years after Christ’, as evidence for the existence, even when the early church was under persecution, of consecrated churches, separated off from the world and given over entirely to the worship of God: ‘For how delinquents should be excommunicated out of dens, forests or private houses, or solemnly admitted into them again, is beyond any common understanding.’13 There could scarcely be a clearer example of the Laudian tendency to see ‘the church’ not primarily as a community of true believers or congregation, but as a building, a finite holy place, both containing and showing forth the divine presence, the liturgical and physical structures and limits of which defined and created membership of the Christian community, and without which no such community could exist. The power which this state of affairs conferred on the clergy reached its apogee in their right to admit, and to exclude, Christian professors from the sacrament. This was a power which the Laudians felt belonged to every priest and which every priest should exercise. Peter Heylyn accused Bishop Williams of trying ‘absolutely’ to deny ordinary priests ‘all authority from hindering scandalous and unworthy persons to approach’ the sacrament. Citing the prayer book rubric and various canons, Heylyn countered with the claim that ‘this was an authority left unto the priest without further trouble and, more than so, a charge imposed upon him not to do the contrary’.14 12

Yates, A treatise (1637), p. 12. Pocklington, Altare (1637), pp. 37–8; Heylyn, Antidotum (1637), section 2, pp. 81–2. 14 Heylyn, Antidotum (1637), section 3, pp. 63, 65. Also see Heylyn, Coal (1636), p. 25. Pocklington, Altare (1637), p. 13. 13

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15.2  Godly and Profane If the issue of proximity to the altar served, firstly and most importantly, to establish the master divisions between the laity and the clergy, and the communicant and the excommunicate, in the hands of some of these authors the same motif also established an elaborately variegated vision of the social body of the church. With the church conceived as composed of a number of distinct component parts, each defined in terms of their relation to the altar, the resulting spatial distinctions were then used both to express and enforce certain differences in status amongst the lay members of the church. Foulke Robartes argued that, as there be several ranks of people, professing church unity, so they have their places, in their several distances. Some are unworthy to come within the doors of the church and therefore are to stand without. Some are fit to be received in, to be baptised. Some to be instructed in the grounds of religion, and to repair with the rest of the clergy. All which is done in the nave and body of the church. And as men profit in knowledge, and a working faith, to discern the Lord’s body, they are admitted into a higher room; where the sacrament of the body and blood of Jesus Christ is to be administered, at the holy table in the chancel, which divideth it from the rest of the church.15

While there was general agreement on this point, our authors differed on how precise the different distinctions and gradations, both within the church and amongst the laity, should be. Heylyn concentrated on the basic division between ‘the body of the church’, on the one side, and the ‘choir or chancel’, on the other. In the former the Christians had ‘their auditorium, their place for reading of the scripture, and so much of the public offices as might be heard by those whom they called catechumeni, that were instructed in the faith, and not as yet admitted unto the sacrament of baptism’. The latter were ‘set apart for the performance of those rites, in which they placed the greatest mystery of their profession, which was the sacrament of the body and blood of our Lord and saviour’. This distinction Heylyn grounded both in ‘God’s command’ and ‘natural reason’, since ‘in the tabernacle, built by God’s own appointment, and fashioned by his own direction, there was a sanctum sanctorum, a place more holy than the rest’, and ‘the gentiles had, in their several temples, their adyta or penetralia’, entrance to which was ‘was lawful unto none besides priests’.16 15 16

Robartes, God’s holy house (1639), p. 41; also see Pocklington, Altare (1637), p. 13. Heylyn, Antidotum (1637), section 2, pp. 79–80, 71.

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Other authors favoured a tripartite division between the ‘church porch, temple itself and the chancel’.17 Within that tripartite division both the author of De templis and John Pocklington mentioned five separate places. According to De templis, ‘in the Greek churches’, working from the outside in, the first place ‘was without the church doors’, where the penitents stood ‘weeping and imploring the prayers of those that went in, or out’; ‘the second called auditio, was within the church doors, where they heard divine service, and the scriptures expounded’; ‘the third subjectio or substratio, which was within the body of the church, behind the seats, from whence they went forth of the church, with the catechumeni’, when the deacon gave the word. ‘The fourth place was called consistentia, where, having performed canonical penance, they stood with the rest of the congregation and prayed’; ‘the fifth was participatio, where, with the rest of the faithful (having brought forth fruits worthy of repentance), they received the holy communion’.18 Pocklington’s account was virtually identical to this, only he presented the arrangement not as limited to the Greek church, but as part of the normal structure of the church buildings and ‘strict discipline’ of the entire primitive church.19 These examples were not presented as binding precedents for the English church, where, as Williams pointed out, there were no pagans to be converted and slowly admitted into full communion with the Christian church. Rather they were presented as examples of the admirable severity of the spiritual discipline of the early church. As such they were normative in a moral rather than a legal sense. Here was a model, a moral ideal, to which the contemporary church could aspire, rather than a legal or institutional blueprint for immediate action. The most that Foulke Robartes would say for this sort of division of the church into places of relative holiness for different sorts of Christian professor was that it was ‘agreeable with good reason, order and comeliness, free from any colour of superstition’.20 However, while it would be mistaken to equate this vision of the Christian community with ‘official’ Laudian policy, it is not difficult to see it as a natural development or outgrowth of that policy. As with so much else of the Laudian programme, it was justified in terms both of the temple and tabernacle of the Jews and of the practice of the primitive church. Moreover, the notion that the differences in status or spiritual 17 18 19 20

De templis (1638), p. 54. Ibid., pp. 55–8. Pocklington, Altare (1637), pp. 25–9, 44–53. Robartes, God’s holy house (1639), p. 41.

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standing between the various groups that made up the Christian community were best expressed in terms of the actual distance of each group from the altar during public worship was entirely in line with the Laudian altar policy. As we have seen, the typical Laudian church interior, with the altar railed at the east end of the chancel, perhaps a screen erected between the nave and the chancel, and the obtrusive and irregular private pews of the laity levelled,21 as all signs of human status hierarchies were effaced before the divine presence, did indeed present a picture, delineated in architectural or spatial terms, of the Laudian view of the Christian community and the church. The relative value of baptism, preaching, prayer and the sacrament, the predominantly sacramental role of the clergy, and the largely submissive role of the laity as the subjects of public prayer and the objects of clerical supervision and spiritual discipline, could all be read from the appearance of the church and from the structures of the public worship conducted within it. The idealised vision of a variegated or subdivided Christian community, stretching back from the rails of the altar to the church porch and beyond,22 was merely a refinement of that vision, one entirely in keeping with Laudian notions of the disciplinary powers of the clergy and of the holiness of the church, in general, and of the altar, in particular. 21

22

For all these changes see Fincham and Tyacke, Altars restored, pp. 240–4. On pews see Marsh, ‘“Common prayer” … the view from the pew’; ‘Sacred space … the view from the pew’; ‘Order and place … the view from the pew’. Although reception at the rails was very much the Laudian ideal and an emergent norm, it did not receive canonical authority until 1640, and, as Fincham and Tyacke show, was introduced cautiously and unevenly, and not without some controversy even amongst the Laudians themselves. See their Altars restored, pp. 212–18.

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chapter 16

The Altar and Visible Succession

16.1  Tabernacle, Temple and Church If the altar, and the arrangement around it of the rest of the church, defined both as a building and a community of Christians, served to shape and define the church in spatial and architectural terms, it also served to locate it in sacred time as well. As we have seen, the whole Laudian view of the church revolved around the alleged continuities linking the contemporary and primitive churches with the tabernacle and temple of the Jews. In many ways the dominant way of presenting those continuities was through images of a succession of altars, priests and sacrifices.1 For Edward Kellett, as for many of our authors, all the central features of Christian worship and religion were based on Jewish prototypes: ‘The Jewish circumcision was turned into the blessed sacrament, the sabbath into the Lord’s day, so praying towards the west, by the Jews was aptly changed to the praying eastward, by Christians.’2 For Kellett, all sacraments of the old law were figures of the eucharist, and they did also finally design and typify Christ’s death. Therefore the blessed eucharist must needs adumbrate Christ’s death also. Indeed the Egyptian Passover, by the sprinkling of whose blood the Israelites were freed from the exterminating angel, did most lively typify Christ slain, and his blood delivering us. But the paschal lamb, which afterward was yearly slain, did more resemble the sacrament of Christ’s body and blood, and yet both the first, and the succeeding yearly Passover, may all of them, and each of them, in a true and fitting sense, be said to prefigure, not only the sacrament of the body and blood of Christ, but the very crucifixion of our blessed saviour Christ.3

1 2 3

Balcanquall, The honour (1633), pp. 10–11; also see Yates, A treatise (1637), sigs. g3v–g4r, and Pocklington, Altare (1637), p. 127. Kellett, Tricoenium Christi (1641), p. 79. Ibid., pp. 543–4.

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The result, Kellett explained, was that ‘the presence of God’ in ‘the first temple’ was now greatly surpassed by the intensity and glory of his presence in the church: ‘God indeed spake to our fathers, at sundry times and in divers manners, but he hath spoken to us by his son, the heir of all things, by whom he made the world.’ True, ‘the temple had the ark and propitiatory’, ‘but what did that ark figure out, but our saviour?’ ‘As for the propitiatory of the Levitical law, we have a better in the law evangelical, Christ forgiving us all our trespasses.’ ‘Had the Jews their altars, one of incense, other of burnt offering? Had their altar of burnt offerings divers privileges, strange and wonderful? Fire from heaven, fire which never went out, and yet consumed not the wood of which the altar was made.’ ‘Yet for all this, our privileges go beyond theirs, and weigh more than theirs, though they were tried in the balance of their own sanctuaries.’ ‘For we likewise have a golden altar … and this altar signifieth Christ …. Nor was Christ only an altar, but on this altar, he did offer the most blessed incense, and most blessed sacrifice that ever was offered; himself was both … an offering on the altar of incense… and … a bloody sacrifice, on the altar of the cross; in both, a sweet-smelling savour unto God, an expiatory sufficient offering for the sins of the whole world. Nor was he only the holy altar, and the holy offering, but he was also the most holy priest, and hath an unchangeable priesthood.’4 In an account that started with Cain and Abel, Peter Heylyn took his vision of the succession of altars, priests and sacrifices beyond even the temple and the tabernacle. ‘Natural reason’, he claimed, ‘told them it was fit that God, the donor, should be honoured with some part of that which he himself had given unto them. Thus in those early days have we found a sacrifice, and sacrifices … are not to be found without priests and altars’. In his Parable of the tares, he pushed the origins of the altar back even further, arguing that, although the first sacrifice we heard of in scripture was indeed made by Abel, it was certain that ‘he was taught it by his father and …. Adam learnt it of the Lord’.5 But if Cain and Abel had sacrifices and an altar, they themselves were not priests. The priesthood rested in Adam ‘entirely till Seth came of age, to take part of the burden from him, that dignity continuing always after in the pater familias, the eldest of the line or family, until the Levitical priesthood was set up by Moses’. Heylyn cited Noah as another example of the same syndrome, as the head of his family, ‘building an altar to the Lord, and offering burnt offerings on the 4 5

Ibid., pp. 114–16. Heylyn, Tares (1659), p. 9.

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altar, which sacrifice of his was eucharistical, not typical; a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving for his preservation from the flood, not anyway significative of Christ’s to come’. This arrangement continued until the house of Jacob had become so numerous that it was ‘settled by the Lord himself into the body of a church’, whereupon ‘it pleased the Lord to signify, by Moses, how he would be worshipped, to prescribe certain rites and forms of sacrifices, and, for those sacrifices to appoint both priests and altars. These sacrifices were divided into … gratulatory, such as that of Noah before remembered, and expiatory, … as types of that most perfect expiatory sacrifice which, in the fullness of time, he was to offer on the cross, for the sin of man.’ When Christ came he abrogated all the sacrifices of the law, but he did not ‘deprive his church forever of all manner of sacrifices’: A sacrifice there was among the Jews, showing forth Christ’s death unto them, before his coming in the flesh; a sacrifice there must be amongst the Christians, to show forth the Lord’s death, till he come in a judgement. And if a sacrifice must be, there must be also priests to do, and altars whereupon to do it, because without a priest and altar, there can be no sacrifice. Yet so that the precedent sacrifice was of a different nature from the subsequent, and so are also both the priest and altar from those before; a bloody sacrifice then, an unbloody now; a priest derived from Aaron then, from Melchisedeck now; an altar for Mosaical sacrifices then, for evangelical now.6

The point here was to deny Bishop Williams’ claim that the term sacrifice ought no longer to apply to the sacrament and that we were now therefore dealing with communion tables rather than altars. And so John Pocklington triumphantly proclaimed that the word ‘altar’ far preceded the word ‘table’ in sacred history. Christ himself used the term, but there was no mention to be found of a communion table within 180 years of Christ. This enabled Pocklington to conclude that ‘the name of altars, and their religious use is, in the Christian church, guided by Christ’s spirit above 1200 years more ancient than the name of tables in the church of the Jews, and above 2,300 more ancient than the name of tables in the Christian church erected by the apostles among the gentiles’.7 6

7

Heylyn, Antidotum (1637), section 2, pp. 2–7. As we might expect, John Williams interpreted this material very differently, arguing that, since the altar erected by Noah after the flood was the first that we heard of in the scriptures, it was, therefore, ‘the first that ever was built’, and that, therefore, while ‘God would not suffer the first age of the world, for 1,650 years, to pass away without prayers, praises and thanksgivings’, he had ‘suffered it to pass without any altars’. Williams, Holy table (1637), p. 110. Pocklington, Altare (1637), pp. 3–7, quotation at p. 5.

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Thus was the sacrament of the altar the fulfilment of the types provided by the multifarious sacrifices of the Jews, now compressed into this one uniquely powerful representation, commemoration and re-enactment of the central event in salvation history, the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross. Through the sacrament, the saving effects of that sacrifice, the body and blood of Christ, were distributed to all the members in good standing of the visible church, an entity whose status as Christ’s mystical body reached its apogee, in this life, at and during the sacrament. No wonder many of Kellett’s fellow Laudians were convinced that angels attended the reception of the sacrament where and whenever it took place. Indeed, when we place this material alongside the passage (quoted above) in which Kellett pictured the Christian recipients of the eucharist feeding ‘on thy divine food, at thy heavenly table, with the most blessed society of the beatified predecessors, the participants, and communicants with Jesus Christ, our Lord in his kingdom’,8 we can appreciate the ways in which Kellett (and indeed our other authors) located the present practices of the Laudian church both longitudinally, within the deep structures of sacred time and salvation history and horizontally within the eternal now of relations between the churches militant and triumphant.

16.2  ‘The House of Prayer’ and ‘The Gate of Heaven’: Church Triumphant and Church Militant Meet at East Knoyle The decoration of the church at East Knoyle in Wiltshire gives extraordinarily vivid representational and material form to the vision of the holy, of sacred space, and of the proper relationship between the sacrifice of prayer and thanksgiving in the sacrament and Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, outlined thus far.9 As Fincham and Tyacke have shown, the chancel there, which functioned in the seventeenth century as a communion room,10 was decorated in the late 1630s with plasterwork images designed by Christopher Wren, father of the architect and 8 9

10

Kellett, Tricoenium Christi (1641), p. 61. I owe my knowledge of this church to the kindness of Ken Fincham, under whose guidance, and in whose company, I first saw these images. What follows is not merely deeply indebted to, but in large part derived from, the account thereof given in Fincham and Tyacke, Altars restored, pp. 262–4, now usefully augmented by Louise Durning and Clare Tilbury, ‘“Looking unto Jesus”: image and belief in a seventeenth century English chancel’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 60 (2009), pp. 490–13. Also see Aston, Broken idols, pp. 335–8. Cf. George Yule, ‘James VI and I: furnishing the churches in his two kingdoms’, in A. J. Fletcher and P. Roberts, eds., Religion, culture and society in early modern Britain (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 182–208.

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younger brother of the Laudian zealot, and Bishop of Norwich and Ely, Matthew Wren. The chancel arch was decorated with a scene of the ascension, while above the altar was placed a representation of the Trinity and against the table a picture of Christ upon the cross and a crucifix. On either side of the great east window were representations of Jacob’s ladder, with angels ascending and descending from earth to heaven. Here the presence of angels at the celebration of the sacrament, asserted by so many of our authors, is, if not rendered visible, then at least given material representation. So, too, is the central role of prayer, and, given the context of a chancel or communion room, of the sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, offered up to God each and every time the sacrament was celebrated. The combination of texts, from the Old Testament and from Revelation, reflects those used by our authors to connect the practice of sacred worship under the old and new covenants, and the doings of the church militant with those of the church triumphant. On the south wall, Jacob is shown anointing a structure of stones, which looks a lot like an altar. The text above is drawn from Genesis and reads: ‘Jacob vowed a vow and said the Lord shall be my God and these stones shall be God’s house and of all that thou shalt give me I will surely give the tenth unto thee.’ This, of course, recalls the use made of this incident and this text by many of our authors in establishing the long-standing roots, before both the tabernacle and the temple, of the dedication of particular holy places to the worship of God, and the association of said places with altars, priests and sacrifices. Jacob’s vow to give back to God a tenth of all that he received, served, of course, to extend the aura of holiness attendant upon the church and the sacrament to the tithes that sustained the priest in his service at the altar. Other texts quoted at East Knoyle reflect the main thrust of the Laudian case as analysed earlier in this book. Jacob’s speech on awaking from his dream is reproduced, marking this place where heaven and earth had met, as ‘the house of God and the gate of heaven’, which text, on the south wall, is echoed by those quoted on the north, the first from 1 Kings 9:3, ‘the Lord said I have hallowed this house to put my name here’, and the second, from Isaiah 56:7, ‘my house shall be called the house of prayer, to all nations’. To drive that point home, next to the ladder with the ascending angels is the text ‘smoke of the incense went up with the prayers of saints before God, out of the eagles hand’, Revelation 8:4, and next to that with the descending angels, ‘the Lord will give grace and worship and no good thing will he withhold from ye that lead a godly life’. Beneath the ladders

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are two phrases that, as Durning and Tilbury observe, are ‘the key to the east end scheme: “let prayers ascend”, “that grace descend”’.11 Outside the chancel, at the centre of the north wall, is a figure kneeling with his arms raised in prayer, looking upwards towards the chancel arch which contains a representation of the ascension of Christ, now much defaced. Beneath the kneeling figure is the exhortation ‘let us lay aside every weight of sin that hangs so fast about us and let us run with patience the race set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith’. Above an eagle flies heavenward, picking up the text on the chancel wall from Revelation, not to mention that inscribed in a ribbon wreathed around the praying figure’s head: ‘Oh that I had the wings of a dove’, Psalm 60:6. As Durning and Tilbury point out, from the range of readings of Jacob’s dream available, the iconography in operation at East Knoyle picks out an explicitly ‘Christological image alluding to Christ as the ladder joining heaven and earth, whose sacrifice is the ground of the new covenant’; adding that ‘in making the angels fly beside the ladders rather than move upon them’, as other versions of the scene do, ‘Wren distinguishes between the subsidiary role of the angels and the central meaning of Christ as the ladder’.12 In this way, while, in the angels’ movement between heaven and earth, and in the texts beneath the ladders, Wren’s scheme might be thought to evoke or contain a reading of this image or event (used by Hooker and John Browning), in which the ascending and descending angels embody the role of the priest, sending the collective prayers of the people up to God, and bringing down the blessing of God, in the form of the word preached, that is not the purport of the scene as constructed by Wren, which contains no gesture towards the word preached, descending from heaven via the ministry, as the natural correlative of the prayers ascending thither. If those other meanings are summoned at all here, they are immediately subordinated to a far more Christ- and sacrament-centred vision. To quote Durning and Tilbury, ‘the whole ensemble, especially as completed by the crucifix at its centre, speaks of the divine presence in the communion’.13 As Durning and Tilbury also note, the phrases on the chancel walls change the scriptural phrase from ‘this stone’ to ‘these stones, which I have set for a pillar shall be God’s house’. This is a usage they see echoed in 11 12 13

Durning and Tilbury, ‘“Looking unto Jesus”’, p. 504. Ibid., p. 505. Ibid., p. 512.

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the text cited on the other side of the chancel: ‘ye also as living stones are built up a spiritual house’. Such phrases are, as they quite rightly observe, redolent of puritan or evangelical Calvinist notions of the Christian community or visible church as a temple built only of lively stones, rather than of a Laudian vision of the church as a fixed holy place and physical structure, ‘God’s earthly dwelling place’, as they put it.14 The former (puritan) view, held edification to be the process whereby the spiritual temple built only of lively stones or true believers was built. This was to be done through the mutual instruction, counsel and admonition of the godly, and the operation of the word, preached and applied by the clergy, and heard and internalised by the laity, under the adjuvant influence of the Holy Spirit. It is just that here the word (and notion of) edification is being appropriated for a very different vision of true religion, one centred on prayer, the sacrament and Christ’s sacrifice, from which any mention of, or concern with, the word preached has been completely expunged. (The word, of course, was present, but only as inscribed on the walls of the church, to be read by the laity, not preached and interpreted by the minister in the pulpit, which, of course, was located, not in the chancel, but in an appropriately subordinate position, outside, in the body of the church.) The images and texts assembled at East Knoyle in effect present the viewer not even with the church, but rather with the chancel, and the altar positioned, and the sacrament performed therein, as both ‘the house of God’ and ‘the gate of heaven’. Prayer, and more particularly the sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving offered up in the sacrament, a sacrament that really does contain, display and distribute Christ’s body, is presented as a sort of escalator up which the believing communicant can ascend, with the risen Christ, to heaven. Here is the, as it were, material or representational assertion of the central Laudian claims that the celebration of the eucharist really was attended by angels, and that its reception was as close as we could come, in this life, to the union with God in Christ enjoyed by the church triumphant in the next. Thus was the church militant connected to the church triumphant, and the believing communicant integrated into the mystical body of Christ. There is, then, a notion of edification being canvassed here, but it is a strikingly Laudian one. The effect is thus not, as Durning and Tilbury suggest, to offer a series of ‘open-ended’ texts and images, glossable by a variety of different schools of thought, but rather to appropriate a key term drawn from one style of piety for the purposes of another. The result 14

Ibid., p. 502, fn. 30.

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was an entirely, indeed an aggressively, Laudian space, in which nearly all of the central features of Laudianism as they have featured in this book were given material form, that is to say, both pictorial and textual representation, if not inscribed, then at least plastered, upon the walls of the church itself. Instead of ‘the scriptural texts accompanying the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s prayer’ ‘more usually found’15 in postreformation English churches, we have here a mixture of image, text and ecclesial space, that (along with other aspects of the iconography in play at East Knoyle) Durning and Tilbury quite plausibly relate to the exegetical method and sermons of Lancelot Andrewes, here being used to send an identifiably Laudian message.16 Something which, of course, speaks to the foundational status of Andrewes and his sermons for the Laudian ideology being explicated in this book.

16.3  Altar, Priest and Sacrifice in the Early Church Given the centrality of the triad of altar, priest and sacrifice to the Laudian argument, and given the popish connotations of all three of those words in the ears, not merely of the precise or the paranoid, but of a good many Calvinist conformists, it is small wonder that Heylyn, Pocklington and the others spent considerable time explaining what precisely they meant by the three terms. Thus, in the face of Bishop Williams’ claims to the contrary, Peter Heylyn emphasised that the words altar and table were clearly interchangeable: ‘St Paul calls it once a table and once an altar … an altar in relation to the sacrifice, which is there commemorated; a table in relation to the sacrament which is thence participated.’17 ‘The altar in the Old Testament is by Malachi called mensa domini, and of the table the New Testament, by the apostle, it is said habemus altare.’18 Both were but different terms for the same thing, Joseph Mede explained, ‘the sacred bier … of the body and blood of Christ’.19 But having conceded that much, Heylyn immediately went on to point out that all three of his keywords, priest, 15 16

17 18 19

Clare Tilbury, ‘The heraldry of the Twelve Tribes of Israel: an English reformation subject for church decoration’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 63 (2012), p. 304. Durning and Tilbury, ‘“Looking unto Jesus”’ pp. 506–11, on the parallel with Andrewes sermons in the use of ‘key images, words or phrases’ culled from the scriptures in order to lead communicants ‘to act out their sacrificial part in the new covenant’, ‘to bow the knee and to rise in prayer, like the eagle towards the ascending Christ’, see pp. 506, 510. Heylyn, Antidotum (1637), section 2, p. 8. Ibid., section 2, p. 50. Mede, The name altar (1637), p. 2.

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altar and sacrifice, were used incessantly by the fathers.20 Joseph Mede, too, noted the currency of the term altar amongst the fathers, pointing out that even those fathers who did not use the word itself could be found using its correlative, sacrifice. This was of some significance, he claimed, since ‘the reason … the name altar is so much scrupled at, is because it is thought to imply sacrifice. But Justin Martyr and Irenaeus are well enough known to call the eucharist both an oblation and sacrifice; yea, the latter to dwell upon that theme. What gain is there, then, that the name altar is not to be found in those works of theirs which remain, if that of oblation and sacrifice … be?’21 All of which allowed Heylyn to conclude that ‘we may speak in proper and significant terms, as the fathers did, without approving either the popish mass, or the Jewish sacrifices’.22 On the basis of his own somewhat eccentric reading of the last supper and the early history of the church, Edward Kellett made what was essentially the same case. For Kellett, as for Heylyn, ‘altar’ and ‘table’, were, in effect, two terms for the same thing. As Kellett explained it, ‘Christ could not expect an altar in the upper chamber of a private man. Altars were no part of chamber furniture.’ And so, at the first institution of the holy supper, there had been no altar available. The conclusion, then, was clear: ‘He consecrated the saving eucharist on a table, and therefore it is called the Lord’s table and, because Christ did so, all other Christians were the apter to do so and, for a while, called the church-altars, tables, in reference to Christ’s first institution upon a table.’ Thus, while ‘Christ may be said, in a sort, to be the altar, the offering and the priest, when he was sacrificed on the cross, other than a metaphorical altar he used not, he was not’.23 Thus, it was no surprise that ‘even the holy Christians, in their best perfection, had diverse tables on which they did administer the Lord’s holy supper, and partaked of the holy communion, and they were called the tables of the Lord’.24 In marked contrast to both Heylyn and Pocklington, Kellett conceded that ‘in times of persecution’, the early Christians ‘could well use none but tables … and seldom altars …. Nor did they carry an altar or altars from house to house, from city to city, from country to country … but used the tables as they were made by art, wheresoever they came. Nor perhaps did they stand on the particular consecration either of tables, or of cups and vessels to hold the body and blood of Christ, but, in the fiery furnace of 20 21 22 23 24

Heylyn, Antidotum (1637), section 2, pp. 9–10. Mede, The name altar (1637), pp. 4–24, quotation at p. 13. Heylyn, Antidotum (1637), section 2, p. 26. Kellett, Tricoenium Christi (1641), p. 578. Ibid., p. 579.

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persecution, were content sometimes to make use of such things as could be had, and rather made them holy, than found them holy.’25 This was in effect to concede considerable ground to the patristic case made by Bishop Williams, but, Kellett contended, all this did not mean what Williams claimed it meant, that ‘the name of altar is unlawful, or of a late invention, or that they were excluded from Christian churches, or that tables were allowed and everywhere set up in the churches, or that altars were destroyed generally, or for the most part. Or that even altars themselves were sometimes called tables, with an eye to Christ’s first institution.’ He ‘that will cry up tables to cry down altars, he knoweth not the different usances of the church, in times of persecution, and out of it, but taketh advantage of words to set asunder things which may well stand together and runneth with a strong bias to his own works’.26 Therefore, for all that his own position was based on a far more, as he thought, rigorously historical account of the last supper and the early church than was Pocklington’s or even Heylyn’s, Kellett’s use of the key terms altar, priest and sacrifice, and his insistence on the continuities and differences between the old and new covenants, between the ark, tabernacle and temple of the Jews and the churches of Christians, was no less intense or insistent than those of our other authors.27 We have a vision being adumbrated here of a sacrifice, a priest and an altar stretching from Adam to Cain and Abel, and thence, through the patriarchs, Moses, the tabernacle, the temple, to Christ and his apostles, and from there down to the present. Amongst our authors it was John Pocklington who pushed this vision the furthest by envisaging the visible apostolic succession that all Laudians held defined the true church, not in terms of episcopal succession, but rather in terms of chains of fixed and visible altars, stretching from the apostles to the present, and only then to associate that succession with the succession of bishops. As we have seen, in marked contrast to Heylyn, Mede and Kellett, Pocklington insisted that Christians, from Paul to Constantine, had both consecrated churches and ‘altars for their Christian sacrifices’. While he admitted that those churches ‘shined not with gold or precious stones’, Pocklington insisted that they were rendered ‘illustrious 25 26 27

Ibid., p. 578. Ibid., pp. 578–9. Coming late to the fray, Kellett’s text of 1641 was almost certainly designed, definitively, as he hoped, to decide the argument over the altar between Williams, Heylyn and Pocklington in the Laudians’ favour, in part by conceding that while Williams had got some of the apostolic and patristic history right, his historical findings did not mean what he took them to mean. His intervention was thus designed to save Heylyn and Pocklington from their own (historical) errors, while confirming that in, general terms, they were in the right.

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and glorious by the holiness of priests, holiness of altars, where they alone waited, and the holiness of the blessed eucharist that was thereon, and could not elsewhere be consecrated’.28 In order to demonstrate this visible succession of material churches Pocklington associated it with the known succession of bishops which stretched from the apostles to the council of Nicaea; ‘since there was such an evident succession of bishops in their several sees, we may be well assured they had churches, and did not for fear run into the woods, and dens, and caves of the earth to administer the holy sacraments, where were neither baptiseria nor altaria’. On the contrary, Pocklington argued, to do that was a mark of heretics, who ‘would consecrate and administer the sacrament in any place, in woods or dens, but Christians only in the churches and upon altars, even in the heat of persecution under Valens’.29 Indeed, the association between bishops and altars was even closer than that. For, as Pocklington argued, it was precisely in the presbyterium, ‘the place appointed for priests to administer the sacrament in’, that ‘the enthronisations of bishops’ occurred. ‘The succession of bishops in such a chair’ was one of the defining marks that had allowed St Augustine to tell the true Catholic church from its heretical alter ego. For, according to Pocklington, while ‘Catholics could show their churches, and the very chairs in them, wherein there was not only a moral succession, in purity of faith and manners, but a local succession of bishops, continued even from the apostles times’, ‘heretics could not’ ‘and, therefore, were hereby convinced to be such and so put to shame and confounded’. ‘For if, in all this time, there were no material churches, then there could be no material chair wherein their bishops were enthronised and, if no chair, then no real enthronisation, then no personal succession from the apostles, whereby the right faith was derived from God, the father, to his son, whom he hath sent unto the world out of his own bosom, nor from the son to his apostles, nor from the apostles to succeeding bishops.’30 This was to associate the succession with apostolic doctrine, which all protestants regarded as essential to a true church, with the visible succession of material churches, altars and episcopal thrones; indeed it was to render the former dependent upon the latter.31 28 29 30 31

Pocklington, Altare (1637), p. 13. Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., pp. 30–1, 33–4. In making this case Pocklington represented an extreme version of a wider trend, described by Anthony Milton as a shift ‘away from notions of the church as definable primarily in terms of doctrine, and towards an emphasis on the sacraments as the primary concern in ecclesiology’. Milton, Catholic and reformed, p. 156.

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16.4  Episcopal Succession However shaky some of his historical assumptions – as we have seen both Kellett and even Heylyn had been careful not to contradict Jewel’s assertion (cited by Williams) that the early Christians had perforce worshipped their God in caves, barns and private houses – Pocklington’s association between the altar, the bishop and the divine presence in the ordination of the priest was not peculiar to him. It was rather entirely in keeping with the general tenor of the Laudian position. Thus, John Yates maintained ‘that breaking of bread must follow our undivided fellowship from the apostles and their successors’, and asked ‘how can we have the sacraments duly administered, if we be not truly informed of our pastors calling, and the coming of it from the apostles?’32 That claim was integrally linked to his earlier assertions, firstly, that ‘the altar hangs upon the priest, and fellowship with him proves fellowship with the other’, and, secondly, that ‘the apostles’ doctrine, fellowship, prayers, and breaking of bread are all closely comprised together’, and rely upon the succession of ‘the bishops’ to the apostles’ ‘plenary power’ and of the presbyters to the seventy, whom ‘our saviour adjoined to his apostles’.33 For Yates, only bishops had the power to ordain: ‘That seat is not sure, nor ordination justifiable, that is not by a bishop, who is able to derive his succession in that respect from the apostles …. There can be no visible church where this is no succession from the chairs of the apostles.’34 ‘Take away the apostles’ fellowship, and you take away the breaking of bread, and prayer at the Lord’s table; except there be a priest within the altar, the people are wholly without it.’35 Richard Montague, too, ‘placed a crucial emphasis on the sacramental nature of episcopal orders, and the necessity of their preservation for the very survival of the church and sacraments’. Throughout the 1630s, Montague, along with Yates, ‘directly associated the personal, episcopal succession with Christ’s promise to his Apostles to be with them until the end of the world’; a claim that, as Antony Milton points out, ‘directly overthrew Protestants’ previous emphasis upon the succession of true doctrine, and would seem to leave the foreign episcopal churches with no escape’.36

32 33 34 35 36

Yates, A treatise (1637), p. 36. Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., p. 22. Ibid., p. 33. Milton, Catholic and reformed, pp. 358, 465.

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Physical and visible succession was not, of course, enough on its own. For, the Greek churches prove as good succession this way as the Latin, and, therefore, both being suspected for doctrine, we must have recourse to that memorable saying in Act 2 42, “They continued steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread and in prayer.” These notes will torment all our adversaries; papists with doctrine, schismatics with the apostles’ fellowship, and both in breaking of bread; the one because they break no bread in substance, the other because they distribute mere bread. As they dislike an altar, so they dislike to be within it, by denying communion with bishops, and doing many things without them.37

Of course, many earlier English protestants had committed themselves to the notions that episcopacy was an institution of apostolic foundation, and that the bishops were the apostles’ successors whose presence was necessary, if not to the being, then at least to the well-being of a true church. Still others had come to stress the value of a continuous, visible episcopal succession in validating the orders of English protestant priests or ministers. Laudians, like Montague, Yates and Pocklington – who, in this as in so much else, were merely following in the footsteps of Lancelot Andrewes – were, however, doing more than merely reiterating those positions. In a remarkable exchange with John Williams, Peter Heylyn fell upon Williams’ claim that the bishops’ calling was ‘founded upon apostolical and, for all the essential parts thereof, on divine right’, seeing in it the thin edge of a decidedly puritan wedge. For Heylyn took Williams’ insistence that episcopacy was based ‘on apostolical [warrant] in the first place’, not as a repetition of established conformist orthodoxy, and thus of unequivocal support for the established order, but rather as an assertion that it ‘was none of Christ, our saviour’s institution, but only founded by the apostles in their administration of the public government. The ius divinum comes after, in secundis, but in upon the second, and that in some essential parts thereof, but you know not what.’ Heylyn portrayed this position as a form of puritan subversion by stealth: ‘I hope there are not many ministers in Lincolnshire of this opinion. For let the bishops stand alone on apostolical right and no more than so, and doubt it not but that some will take it on your word, and then plead accordingly, that things of apostolical institution may be laid aside.’ Heylyn was ‘the apter’ to believe that this ‘is your meaning’, ‘because when 37

Yates, A treatise (1637), p. 22.

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Bishop Andrewes … had learnedly asserted the episcopal order to be of Christ’s institution I have heard that some, who were then in place, did secretly intercede with king James to have had it altered, for fear forsooth of offending our neighbour churches. This fear you are possessed with also, and therefore waive, not only the name of bishop, but the main ground work and foundation upon which they stand.’ The result, Heylyn maintained, was as bad as the works of ‘T[homas] C[artwright] and J[ohn] C[otton], and who else you will; New England in the midst of old’.38 This was to transform into crypto-puritanism the assertion of the apostolic, rather than dominical, origins of episcopacy. That claim had been daringly avant garde under Elizabeth, only to become something like mainstream conformist orthodoxy under James. And here was Heylyn identifying it with that ‘fine smack of puritanism’ with which, he claimed, Williams had ‘sprinkled’ his text in order, as Heylyn put it, ‘to sanctify and sweeten the whole performance, and make it ad palatum to the gentle reader’.39 Williams, in short, was playing to the puritan gallery. John Yates denounced in, if anything, even stronger language the notion that episcopacy was a human institution designed to avoid schism and disorder in the church. This had been a perfectly respectable position for Elizabethan conformists up to and including Richard Hooker, and a widely held opinion under James, but for Yates it amounted to ‘a secret atheism, and check to him that better sees what the church needeth, than to leave it, in so main a matter, to the policy and piety of men’.40 To take such a line was, of course, to raise the standing of episcopacy to that of a directly divine institution, essential for the being of a true church. This surely was what the passages cited above from Pocklington were driving at. According to Yates, bishops ‘derive all power and peace to the church, and that without them no unity can possibly in all the rest be imagined or maintained’.41 ‘The episcopal power is that which God gives unto them, whom he useth as his immediate means to convey it to the whole church.’42 Yates cited Cyprian’s comparison of the ‘universal power and jurisdiction of bishops to an head, which derives all virtue to the body; to a root, which feeds and fills all the branches; to a fountain, from which

38 39 40 41 42

Heylyn, Antidotum (1637), section 3, pp. 7–9. Andrewes’ position may well have been controversial in James’ reign, but as we have seen, he had first adumbrated it in the 1590s, under Elizabeth. Ibid., section 3, p. 1. Yates, The treatise (1637), p. 47. Ibid., p. 40. Ibid., p. 45.

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flows all streams; to the sun which sends forth all rays and beams etc.’.43 William Sherley, in a visitation sermon of 1640, pronounced government by bishops to be ‘natural and essential’ to the church.44 Nor were these the views of a few extremist outliers. In 1635, the opinion that ‘the order of bishops is by the law of God’ was included in a list of certain articles to be formally accepted by the clergy of London diocese, and in 1641 Laud insisted that Joseph Hall alter his defence of episcopacy to include the assertion that it had been instituted by Christ himself and not by the apostles. To do less, Laud explained would risk episcopacy being treated just like any other alterable apostolic tradition. As Milton points out, Charles I’s opinion in 1646 that without bishops ‘we should have neither lawful priests, nor sacraments duly administered’ and that, therefore, Presbyterianism was ‘absolutely unlawful’, indeed, ‘more erroneous than the church of Rome’, was merely an explicit statement of the logically necessary conclusions to be drawn from such sentiments, sentiments first adumbrated by Lancelot Andrewes in 1593.45 This view of the importance of episcopacy, and of a visible episcopal succession stretching from the apostles to the present, fitted the Laudian view of the church like a glove. As we have seen, for Laudians like Kellett, Pocklington, Browning, Yates, Skinner and Laurence, it was the physical and liturgical structures of the church, defined as a finite holy place, which created, figured and defined the Christian community. As the preceding pages have shown, a great deal of the Laudian programme and view of the world can be read from that vision of the church as sacred, sacramental space, a finite holy place, both containing and showing forth the divine presence through ceremonies and sacraments which could be performed only by a caste of intercessionary priests. As we have seen, that vision was in large part legitimated through comparisons with the practice of the Jews in the tabernacle and the temple. That, combined with the Laudian concern with the divine presence within the material frame of the church, a frame itself rendered holy by that very presence, served to put a major emphasis on questions of visible, material succession as a validating factor in defining a true church. Increasing the status of episcopacy from that of an apostolic to a directly divine institution, the Laudians thus strengthened the continuity running from one temple and priesthood under the Old Testament, through Christ, to the temples and priests of the New. 43 44 45

Ibid., p. 38. Sherley, The excellence (1662), p. 7. Milton, Catholic and reformed, pp. 460, 489, 493.

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The ultimate expression of this tendency was Pocklington’s vision of an unbroken succession of episcopal thrones and altars stretching from the apostles to the present. What was at stake here was a virtuous circle, in which the apostolic succession of bishops underwrote that of material altars and churches, and vice versa. Thus, if, for Pocklington, the continuity of holy places and altars helped to validate, indeed, in some sense, to create, the visible succession of bishops and episcopally ordained priests, without which the church could not exist, so too did the succession of bishops, from the apostles to the present, serve to validate (and, in some sense, create and sustain) the succession of altars and holy places. This interdependence allowed both Heylyn and Pocklington to put the highest importance on the word, concept and, indeed, material presence of the altar. For as Pocklington observed, ‘if there be no Christian altar, there is no Christian sacrifice; if no Christian sacrifice, there is no Christian priest’.46 According to Heylyn, thus to deny the altar, and the priest and sacrifice of the altar, as, he claimed, John Williams wanted to do, would bring ‘ruin and confusion’ to the church, ‘taking away all outward worship, enabling every man to the priestly function, robbing the church of all the reverence due unto it’.47 Here, then, was no pursuit of outward order and uniformity, but a struggle to protect and preserve the very essence of the church.

16.5  Priest, Altar and Sacrifice in the Church of England Having staked out their basic position, with notions of a priesthood, an altar and a commemorative sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving at its core, both Heylyn and Pocklington then struggled manfully to identify that position with the mainstream of English protestant opinion. Heylyn went through the prayer book and homilies, citing and glossing various passages in order to demonstrate that the church had publicly embraced the notions of both a commemorative sacrifice and a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving. Even this fairly rudimentary exercise caused Heylyn no small effort, even embarrassment. Having cited one passage from the homilies on the status of the sacrament as ‘a “commemoration of that blessed sacrifice which Christ once offered, a public celebration of the memory thereof, and a continual remembrance of it, by himself ordained”’, Heylyn was forced to concede that this might ‘seem not full enough for the commemorative sacrifice in 46 47

Pocklington, Altare (1637), p. 111. Heylyn, Antidotum (1637), section 2, p. 67.

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the church observed’. He attempted to remedy this by citing another passage from the homilies which claimed that the ‘“Lord’s supper is in such wise to be done and ministered, as our Lord and saviour commanded it to be done, as his holy apostles used it, and the good fathers in the primitive church frequented it.”’48 Elsewhere Heylyn paralleled what he presented as the situation described by Eusebius in the early church with ‘all that hath been delivered from the book of articles, the homilies and public liturgy’, in order to ask the reader ‘if you ever found a more excellent concord than this between Eusebius and the church of England in the present business?’49 If anything Pocklington was even more brusque in making the same manoeuvre, affirming that it was crucial to ascertain ‘where the altar did stand in the primitive’ for ‘there, I suppose, it ought to stand, if the canons of our church have not otherwise ordered it’,50 which of course the Laudians held that they had not.51 This was in effect to shift a case ostensibly based on the foundation documents of the English national church onto what was an essentially patristic and scriptural argument, and it was a move with which, naturally enough, Bishop Williams would have nothing to do, attacking both the validity of that manoeuvre itself and the patristic material upon which it was based. All of which prompted Heylyn to make a series of libellous and ad hominem assaults on Williams’ patristic learning.52 But if Heylyn and Pocklington had trouble with the word and notion of sacrifice, they had even more difficulty with the word altar. Altars had, after all, been removed from most English churches under Edward VI, and the word itself altogether expunged from the second Edwardian prayer book. This occasioned both Heylyn and Pocklington no small discomfort. Both men made it quite clear that they would have preferred to be dealing with the first, rather than the second, Edwardian prayer book,53 claiming that it was only the combined influence of Calvin, from abroad, and of Hooper, at home, that had disrupted things. Hooper, it was claimed, had enjoyed ‘no less interest in Dudley of Northumberland, than Calvin with 48 49 50 51 52 53

Ibid., section 2, p. 29. Ibid., section 2, p. 31. Pocklington, Altare (1637), p. 60. Ibid., pp. 93–4. Heylyn, Antidotum (1637), section 3, p. 10; section 1, p. 98; section 3, p. 28; section 2, p. 64; section 3, p. 18; section 3, p. 75; section 3, p. 36; section 3, p. 77; section 2, p. 66. Heylyn, Coal (1636), p. 39f. Pocklington, Altare (1637), p. 117. Like Heylyn, Pocklington stressed that in ‘King Edward’s liturgy … of 1549’ the word ‘altar’ ‘is everywhere, but in that of 1552 it is nowhere called an altar, but the Lord’s board. From whence we may guess when communion tables came in.’ Pocklington, Altare (1637), p. 72.

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the duke of Somerset’. All of which enabled Heylyn to argue that it had only been the combination of the foreign influence of Calvin and Beza and the domestic intrigues of the two lay councillors that had induced the young king to reform the prayer book again.54 All of which put Bishop Williams in the happy position of being able to cast himself as the protector of the prayer book as a quintessentially English document against Heylyn’s claims about sinister foreign influence,55 by stressing that ‘it was the king, the Lords and the state’ who had ‘made this alteration in our liturgy in the point of altars’.56 Moreover, altars had been removed from most churches; the word was absent from the 1552 prayer book; and the relevant Elizabethan injunction, canons and prayer book rubric did all seem to endorse a moveable communion table, rather than a fixed altar. As Williams insisted, ‘the book of 1549 … is vanished, and we have nothing to do with it’. ‘Your tongue, for the present, ought to speak as the present book and law speaks it unto you, and that is, as yourself confess, “the Lord’s board only”.’57 Confronted with these recalcitrant facts, Heylyn and Pocklington adopted a number of expedients. On the absence of the word altar from the liturgy, here echoing Joseph Mede on the fathers, they claimed that this really did not matter, since the words sacrifice and priest were used throughout the prayer book and ordinal. In the case of the word ‘priest’, this was so ‘especially in that part thereof [of the prayer book] which concerns the sacrament’. Thus, since ‘altar, priest and sacrifice are relatives, the church of England keeping still, as well the office of priesthood, as the name of priest, must needs admit of altars, and sacrifices, as things peculiar to the priesthood’.58 As for the canons and rubric, Heylyn glossed them as permissive. They left the position of the table/altar open, and the king himself had now construed the question ‘as a thing of liberty’, to be left to the ordinary to decide. And now there was the St Gregory’s case to guide the bishops’ policy in their own dioceses.59 Heylyn took a similar line with the Elizabethan injunction, using canon 82 to gloss it as ‘plainly’ ‘a matter of 54 55 56 57 58 59

Heylyn, Coal (1636), pp. 38–9; Heylyn, Antidotum (1637), section 1, pp. 100–32, quotations at p. 116. Also see Heylyn, Antidotum (1637), section 1, pp. 121, 110. Williams, Holy table (1637), pp. 148–9. Ibid., p. 145. Ibid., pp. 141–2. Heylyn, Antidotum (1637), section 2, pp. 27–8. Ibid., section 2, pp. 93–4; for Williams as refractory to royal authority, as instantiated in the St Gregory’s case, see section 2, pp. 29–30

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permission rather than command’; a permission, moreover ‘only in such times and places where otherwise the minister cannot conveniently be heard of the communicants. So that all the lesser churches, such as our country churches, for the most part, are, and in all others, where the minister, standing at the altar, may be heard conveniently, the table may stand altarwise in the time of ministration, without breach of canon.’60 But rather than rest his case on a merely permissive authority ceded to the bishops, Heylyn resorted to the practice of the cathedrals and the Chapel Royal. These, and not the ordinary parish churches, ‘which in this kind had too much deviated from the ancient practise’, were the true repository of the ‘ancient orders of the church of England’ which ‘have been best preserved in the chapels of the king’s majesty and the cathedrals of this kingdom, without the which perhaps we had, before this, been at a loss, amongst ourselves, for the whole form and fashion of divine service. And, therefore, if it be so in the chapels and the cathedral churches … it is a pregnant argument that so it ought to be in the parochial which, herein, ought to be precedent and conform themselves to the pattern of the mother churches.’61 And ‘if we look into the former practice, either of the chapels of the king, the best interpreter of the law which himself enacted, … or of collegiate and cathedral churches, the best observers of the form and order of God’s public service’, we should find altars or a communion table standing altar-wise at the east end. The table had stood thus in the Chapel Royal since the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, the precise moment when ‘that rubric in the common prayer book was confirmed and ratified’.62 And so, Heylyn asked Williams, if the cathedrals could have altars, why not parish churches?63 In making this move, Heylyn was merely elaborating upon arguments made by Laud in Star Chamber, in his speech at the condemnation of Bastwick, Burton and Prynne. There the archbishop had cited the fact that, ‘in the king’s royal chapels and divers cathedrals, the holy table hath, ever since the reformation, stood at the upper end of the quire, with a large or full side towards the people’. Thus did Laud hope to render absurd Burton’s allegations about an episcopal conspiracy to return the country to popery: ‘For did queen Elizabeth banish popery, and yet did she all along her reign, from first to last, leave the communion table so standing 60 61 62 63

Heylyn, Coal (1636), p. 50. Ibid., pp. 26–7. Ibid., pp. 51–2. Heylyn, Antidotum (1637), section 1, p. 128. On these claims see Atherton, ‘Cathedrals, Laudianism and the British churches’.

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on her chapel royal, in St Paul’s and Westminster, and other places, and this of a purpose to advance or usher in that popery which she had driven out?’ On that basis, Laud asked, ‘whether there be not more reason the parish churches should be made conformable to the cathedral and mother churches, than the cathedrals to them’?64 Moreover, Elizabeth had reserved to herself a power, ‘by the advice of her commissioners for causes ecclesiastical, or of the metropolitan’, ‘to ordain or publish such further ceremonies or rites as may be most for the advancement of God’s glory’. Nor, as Henry Burton had alleged,65 had that authority been peculiar to the queen, but rather passed down to her successors, and so, just as the altars had first been removed in Bishop Ridley’s time ‘to avoid superstition’, so might they now be restored, by King Charles, ‘on information of the irreverent use of the holy table by all sorts of people’, the better ‘to avoid profaneness’.66 Which was what Heylyn took the St Gregory’s case to have done. And not a moment too soon, since, Heylyn observed, it was now ‘high time, assuredly, that such profaneness should be met with’.67 Thus Heylyn tried to present the king’s decision in the St Gregory’s case not as a discrete event, the resolution of one particular jurisdictional dispute, but rather as ‘a declaration of his majesty’s pleasure’. For in ruling, in that instance, in favour of the Dean and Chapter, Charles had asserted that the bishop’s action in moving the altar ‘not to be any variance from the ancient constitutions of this church’.68 When this was added to the practice of the Chapel Royal and the cathedrals, Heylyn could see no reason why the decision should not be regarded as a binding precedent. To buttress the point he cited several brutally absolutist maxims from the civil law. ‘Regal decisions in this kind’, Heylyn concluded, ‘are like ruled cases … in the common law, or the … judgements and determinations of the reverend sages in that profession, extant in their reports, term books and commentaries, first made in reference to the cause which was then before them, but of authority (at the least directive) in all other business of the like condition’.69 With that, Heylyn returned to his preferred ground of patristic precedent, claiming that the St Gregory’s case reaffirmed ‘the conformity of 64 65 66 67 68 69

Laud, A speech, p. 59. Burton, For God (1636), p. 66. Heylyn, Coal (1636), pp. 58–63, quotations at pp. 58, 59, 63. Ibid., p. 53. Heylyn, Antidotum (1637), section 1, pp. 65–6 Ibid., section 1, pp. 66–7.

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our church in this particular according to the practise of approved antiquity’.70 Elsewhere in the same tract, Heylyn maintained that we should let the fathers ‘speak their minds, according to the liberty of those most pure and pious times’ and, if we did, we would find altars, priests and sacrifices aplenty.71 And so it was only by asserting the complete congruence of the Church of England with ‘the ancient practise’ of the patristic past and then by refracting the position of the church of England through a certain version of that past, not to mention the first Edwardian prayer book – itself held to be entirely ‘agreeable to God’s word and the primitive church’ – that the foundational documents of the national church could be rendered fit for (Heylyn’s) purpose. But even then, after all these contortions, Heylyn remained aware of the very shaky legal basis of the altar policy. After all that bluster and bravado about the royal will and the St Gregory’s case, he had been forced elsewhere to concede that, while ‘the intimations of a prince in matters of indifferent nature’ were ‘sufficient inducements for a subject to conform thereto’, in fact, the St Gregory’s case did not constitute a royal order to convert all communion tables into altars, but merely an encouragement to the other bishops to follow suit in their own dioceses, which admission was all that Bishop Williams needed to justify his treatment of ‘that squirrel-headed young man’, the Vicar of Grantham.72 Williams also gleefully pointed out that the Privy Council order, printed by Heylyn in A coal from the altar,73 contained ‘no altar, no altar-wise, no fixing in the east, no stepping, no mounting, but all left to the law, to the communion book, to the canon and to the diocesan’.74 On those grounds, Williams insisted – and not without good reason – he had by far the stronger case. Even Heylyn conceded that, ‘if present law be contrary to the ancient practice, the ancient practice must give way, and the law carry it’.75 It was just that, on Heylyn’s reading, the law was essentially permissive, and thus what he took to be the ‘ancient practise’ must not only inform, but determine, current policy. And thus Heylyn moved to his inevitable conclusion that altars were not only legal, or even salutary, they were positively

70 71 72 73 74 75

Ibid., section 1, p. 19. Ibid., section 2, pp. 66–7. Ibid., section 1, p. 59. Heylyn, Coal (1636), pp. 64–6. Williams, Holy table (1637), pp. 59–60. Heylyn, Antidotum (1637), section 2, p. 91; also see Pocklington, Altare (1637), p. 60.

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essential for a properly reformed and monarchically governed church like that of England.76 To round matters off, both Heylyn and Pocklington glossed the position of the church through the opinions of divines whom they described as ‘the worthies of the church, which are best able to expound and unfold her meaning’. Of these, as one might expect, the most frequently quoted was Lancelot Andrewes. Heylyn also cited Casaubon, defending King James’ views to Cardinal Duperron and Richard Montague, in both his New gagg and his Appeal, defending the use of the phrase ‘“blessed sacrament of the altar”’, and of ‘“the words sacrifice and priesthood also”’, as merely following the ‘“steps and practise of antiquity”’. Thomas Morton was Heylyn’s one foothold in the English Calvinist tradition, conceding ‘a representative and commemorative’, although denying ‘a proper, sacrifice’.77 Pocklington cited Andrewes, Casaubon, Montague and Francis White.78 Here was the Laudian tradition feeding upon itself. Pocklington enlisted these divines to prove conclusively that when, in article 31, in a passage explicitly cited by Williams in his original letter to the Vicar of Grantham, the church condemned popish claims about ‘the sacrifice of the mass’ as ‘so many blasphemous fables and dangerous deceits’, it was not condemning as ‘blasphemous figments’ ‘the sacrifice of the altar, mentioned in the holy fathers’, but rather embracing the sacrament as a ‘representative, rememorative and spiritual sacrifice’.79 ‘A memory of a sacrifice we grant, but grant we never will that Christ, made of bread, is sacrificed.’80 Thus, Pocklington insisted that ‘priests, sacrifices, oblations, altar, the sacrament of the altar is not abolished’.81 The English church was opposed only to ‘the gross and vile abuse of these’.82 Williams responded to such arguments by pointing out that ‘the church in her homily, or any other public writing, never speaks a word of any “commemorative sacrifice”, but of “the memory” only “of a sacrifice”’. In 76 77

78 79 80 81 82

See Williams, Holy table (1637), passim, quotations at pp. 58–9. Heylyn, Antidotum (1637), section 2, pp. 32–5; also see p. 50, for Montague and Andrewes glossing Hebrews 13:10, as ‘relating to a material altar’. As Anthony Milton observes, these quotes from Andrewes were derived from a period when Andrewes was responding to Bellarmine’s claim that King James could not possibly be a ‘Catholic’ because ‘he rejected transubstantiation, the invocation of saints, and the papacy’s claim to temporal jurisdiction’, and Andrewes was thus concentrating ‘his attention on the defensive posture that these points could not be shown to be required de fide, but should remain disputable school points’. Milton, Catholic and reformed, p. 216. Pocklington, Altare (1637), p. 105. Ibid., p. 106. Ibid., p. 107. Ibid., p. 110. Ibid., pp. 112–13.

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the very ‘passage cited by the writer’ we are told that ‘“we must take heed lest, of a memory, we make a sacrifice”’. That Heylyn based his claim ‘that by these words “the church admits of a commemorative sacrifice”’ on that very passage prompted Williams to throw up his hands in mock despair.83 It is clear from this that the Laudians’ assertion that their own position was simply coterminous with that of the church of England was not without its difficulties, and that the legal basis of the altar policy was similarly dubious.84 Here the maximum position came to the minimum position’s rescue, providing, in high-flown rhetoric and scriptural and patristic precedent, a conviction that their arguments from the canons, liturgy and injunctions of the English church altogether lacked. It was, of course, to that tendency that Bishop Williams was reacting, when, in the Holy able name and thing, he derided Heylyn for deploying metaphors drawn from the fathers to decide a legal case in the church of England. For while the patristic sublime might have its place ‘in the pulpit’, where one might indeed call the communion table an altar ‘in a borrowed sense’, it had no role to play in the determination of church policy. For, in the law that should govern such matters, the ‘church utensil’ that Heylyn and the Vicar of Grantham wanted to be an altar, was never referred to ‘otherwise then by the name of table’. ‘What need you then’, asked Williams, ‘tumble in your tropes and roll in your rhetoric, when the words of the canon do far better express the duties enjoined by the canon?’85 For all their difficulties in effectively countering Williams’ arguments, it would surely be a mistake to write off the likes of Heylyn, Pocklington and Yates as unrepresentative extremists, trying to bend, to their own ideologically motivated purposes, an official policy, determined only by a moderate and traditional drive towards order, decency and comeliness. Rather, in thus taking on Williams they were acting as the pseudo-official voice of the regime and we should see the view of religion and the church, outlined in their tracts, as providing a culminating point, linking the men of the 1630s with the thought of divines like Hooker, Andrewes and Buckeridge.86 83 84

85 86

Williams, Holy table (1637), pp. 104, 103. The ambiguities and contradictions inherent in the various legal, historical, liturgical legacies, drawn from the patristic past, medieval precedent and the practices and prescriptions of the Henrician, Edwardian and Elizabethan reformations that both the Laudians and their critics were seeking to bend to their divergent purposes are brilliantly laid out in Chapter 1, ‘An unresolved reformation’, of Anthony Milton’s Second reformation. Williams, Holy table (1637), pp. 75, 77. For Buckeridge see Lake, ‘Lancelot Andrewes, John Buckeridge’.

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Holy Times

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chapter 17

The Feasts and Festivals of the Church, or Putting the Sabbath in Its Place

If, as we have seen, the church could make places and objects holy by consecrating them to the worship of God, it could also create holy time by consecrating particular times and days to the service of the Lord. In 1636 Christopher Dow cited Hooker to prove that ‘the very law of nature itself … requireth no “less the sanctification of times, then of places, persons and things”. For which cause it hath pleased God heretofore … to exact some parts by way of perpetual homage.’ For ‘to have some times for holy offices comes under the moral law, and is absolutely of the law of nature, written in the heart of every man, being involved in that principle which even depraved nature hath ever acknowledged, viz. that God is to be worshipped’.1 As Gilbert Ironside pointed out in 1637, even for duties as central as ‘vowing, fasting, preaching, catechising, receiving the sacraments, confession’, God had left the questions of ‘where, when, in what manner, how long, how often’ open, and therefore wholly subject ‘to the power and wisdom of the church and magistrate’.2 For Ironside and the other Laudians, the nomination of set days and times for public worship fell under that rubric. According to Francis White, writing in 1635, ‘the lawful ordination of the church may give the name Lord’s day to an holy day, as well as episcopal laying on of hands may make one which was a lay man be called a priest or minister of our Lord Jesus Christ’.3 For White, ‘time and place are much of a quality’ and ‘the bishops and pastors of the church, being appointed rulers by Christ’, had power to create, out of the ordinary secular materials provided by the world and its human inmates, holy persons, times and places, all dedicated to the public service of God.4 1 2 3 4

Dow, Discourse (1636), p. 20. Also see Swan, Profanomastix (1639), pp. 13–14, and Yates, A treatise (1637), p. 57. Ironside, Seven questions (1637), pp. 213, 225. White, Treatise (1635), p. 187. White, An examination (1637), p. 71. Also see Dow, Discourse (1636), pp. 38–9.

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Just as with the fabric of the church and its physical accoutrements, the holiness of the days and times thus consecrated was not inherent. ‘Now under the gospel’, explained Dow in 1636, ‘the difference of times and days is no less taken away then of meats’.5 According to Peter Heylyn, citing St Jerome, ‘all days are equal in themselves … Christ was not crucified on the Friday only, nor did he rise only upon the Lord’s day, but that we may make every day the holy day of his resurrection, and every day eat his blessed body, in the sacrament. When therefore certain days were publicly assigned by godly men for the assemblies of the church, this was done only for their sakes … who had more mind unto the world than to him that made it, and therefore, either could not, or rather would not, every day assemble in the church of God.’6 To argue the contrary – that the Lord’s day was ‘more holy than other days’ – was, according to Gilbert Ironside, a popish opinion, generally condemned ‘by reformists’.7 As Ironside explained it, ‘God’s ordinance may bless the day, and make it happy unto his people, but the day doth not bless the ordinance unto us.’ ‘Days are well styled holy by accident and in regard of their end and appointment, because set apart for holy things and no otherwise.’8 ‘Though in themselves, and setting aside the ordinance of the church, they are all alike, yet, in relation to the duties to be performed in them, [days consecrated by the church] more holy then others.’9 Ironside developed the point with a series of comparisons between the times dedicated by the church to the service of God and the objects and places similarly dedicated: ‘Thus, indeed, this day [Sunday], as all other consecrated things, doth receive, from its consecration, an especial quality to beget in the hearts of men the sparks of devotion, unless they be hindered in them by want of reverence.’ In the same way, the altar was but a ‘memorative instrument unto which the assistance of grace is never wanting, either to beget in our minds such thoughts of the death of Christ, or to extract from our persons such a worship of him, if we be not otherwise wanting in ourselves’.10 For Ironside, the Lord’s day was just such a memorative instrument. Just as ‘Gerson affirms of churches and consecrated places’ that prayers made there are ‘more pleasing unto God [and] more profitable unto us’ than prayers made elsewhere, and that ‘all blasphemy, 5

Dow, Discourse (1636), p. 65. Heylyn, History (1636), part II, p. 31. 7 Ironside, Seven questions (1637), p. 189. 8 Ibid., pp. 187, 191. 9 Dow, Discourse (1636), p. 66. 10 Ironside, Seven questions (1637), p. 280. 6

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either in words, or deeds, or signs, is so much the more execrable, by how much the place is more holy’, ‘so say we that … the holy duties are, on this day, ordinarily performed with greater fervency of spirit, benefit to ourselves and, therefore, acceptance with God, because the glory of the day is apt to put life into our performances; that all irreligious conversation is therefore the more execrable on that day; … that all thoughts, and words, and ways which separate from God are always damnable, but much more upon the Lord’s day, from this ground and no other’.11 We have here, therefore, a series of claims advanced for the times set apart by the church for divine worship which closely paralleled the claims advanced for the buildings and physical objects similarly consecrated to the service of God by the church. During the 1630s the Laudians tended to canvass these claims about the power of the church to institute holy days and times in self-conscious opposition to the sabbatarianism of many of their contemporaries. Obsessed, as they were, with the value of public worship, the Laudians might have been expected to approve of sabbatarianism. Here, after all, was an ideological force designed to administer a dose of much-needed public piety to the English people; a force, moreover, which, as the researches of Dr Parker have shown, enjoyed a wide body of support amongst conformists as well as puritans.12 In part, the explanation for this hostility lay in the Laudians’ determination to vindicate the authority and autonomy of the church from the restrictions placed upon it by puritan scripturalism. For in sabbatarianism they felt themselves confronted with a typically simple-minded, puritan invocation of the authority of scripture. The puritans held that the Lord’s day or Sunday was a continuation of the Jewish Sabbath, directly grounded on the fourth commandment, which, as part of the decalogue, had to be accepted as a universal moral law, binding at all times, and in all places, on all Christians. Such claims placed the Sabbath on a uniquely scriptural footing, and thus elevated it to the status of a divine institution, in effect relegating the other holy days, ordained and observed by ecclesiastical authority, to second-class status. By implication, this called into question the sovereign power enjoyed by the church over the details of her own external worship, and could, and in puritan hands often did, lead to the repudiation of all holy days other than the Sabbath as superstitious and popish. Francis White saw the crude scripturalism which underlay the sabbatarian position, as well as presbyterianism, as antipathetic to all true 11 12

Ibid., pp. 277–8. Parker, The English Sabbath.

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learning and reverence for tradition, and, as such, a harbinger of heresy and confusion: ‘This conceit hath quenched the devotion of many good people towards God’s public worship. It hath caused a fraction and division in the church and state and brought forth a novel spawn and fry of Donatists, Novatians, separatists, Anabaptists, etc. Also many are become contentious and factious in civil affairs.’ The result was that ‘many people, piously affected in their general intentions, men and women fearing God, loving his word, sober, charitable, virtuous in their moral conversation, are made a prey to schismatical leaders’.13 In the dedicatory epistle of his tract to Archbishop Laud, Gilbert Ironside organised sabbatarian scruples and debates under the heading of ‘perplext and perplexing’ ‘disputations’ of the sort that were entirely incompatible with the church’s peace or spiritual health. In this, they were directly comparable to contemporary controversies about predestination. Such disputes were, he claimed, the product of ‘Satan’s malice, casting scruples into men’s conscience’ and ‘of the vanity of some spirits who applaud themselves, saying, with the fly upon the chariot wheel, what a dust do we raise?’ Despite their relative novelty in the English church, ‘unknown even unto our martyrs in queen Mary’s days’, ‘how deeply’ ‘the Sabbatarian tenets’ ‘are now rooted, who seeth not, and how the hearts of men are thereby alien’d one from another? How such as dare contradict them are made anathema, all religion being reduced to this one head, the observation of the sabbath.’ Things had got this bad – ‘a manifest schism’, Ironside called it – because of ‘the long connivance of the church and silence of her sons’, but now was the time to put a stop to this nonsense once and for all.14 For Francis White, the same crude literalism, which saw the whole of the fourth commandment as ‘properly, entirely and perpetually moral’, also underlay the presbyterian movement, and thus ensured that sabbatarianism was a tenet held ‘by all such as either openly profess, or do lean towards, the disciplinarian faction’.15 Those White termed ‘novel sabbatisers’ were ‘either in heart, or in open profession, adheres to the presbyterian policy’, who ‘sucked not their doctrine of the sabbath from the breasts of both testaments, but partly from the corrupt fountains of ancient heretics, and partly out of the broken cisterns of their own private fancies’.16 13 14 15 16

White, Treatise (1635), dedicatory epistle to Laud, sig. Ar. Ironside, Seven questions (1637), dedicatory epistle to Archbishop Laud. White, Treatise (1635), p. 23. White, An examination (1637), p. 33.

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Heylyn too held sabbatarianism to be a recent error of puritan origin, spawned just ‘forty years agon’ in ‘1596, and being made known, was then neither universally nor unanimously received’.17 Its first propagator was the puritan Nicholas Bownde, and sabbatarianism was subsequently spread abroad by other radical non-conformists like William Ames. Here Heylyn quoted with approval Thomas Rogers’ claim that sabbatarianism was merely the continuation of the classis movement by other means.18 For the Laudians, sabbatarianism carried within it a damning critique of a central feature of the piety of the English church. On the basis of a passage from William Ames, Christopher Dow claimed that all sabbatarians accounted the observation of the other holy days of the church ‘a breach of the fourth commandment, and think it a sin to make more holy days than one in seven’.19 Peter Heylyn pictured a concerted puritan/sabbatarian campaign to undermine the standing of the other holy days in the eyes of the people: ‘By inculcating to the people these new sabbatarian speculations, teaching that that day only was of God’s appointment, and all the rest observed in the church of England a remnant of the will worship in the church of Rome, the other holy days in this church established were so shrewdly shaken, that, till this day, they are not well recovered of the blow then given. Nor came this on the by, or besides their purpose; but as a thing that specially was intended from the first beginning, from the first time that ever these sabbath doctrines peeped into the light.’20 For John Pocklington all this had very sinister implications indeed. ‘Allow them but their sabbath’, he warned in a visitation sermon of 1636, ‘and you must allow them the service that belongs to their sabbath. Then must you have no litany, for that is no service for their sabbath … but for Sundays; nay, for Wednesdays and Fridays, which must not be used, for six days thou must labour; nay, you must have no part of the service in the communion book used, for that is service also for holy days, which are abominated as idolatrical, being dedicated to saints. Well then, the sabbath must be yielded them, otherwise there will be no day left for God to be served on.’21 In attacking puritan sabbatarianism the Laudians returned the argument to first principles concerning divine law, moral law, the relationship 17 18 19 20 21

Heylyn, Brief (1637), pp. 130, 50–1. Heylyn, History (1636), part II, p. 8; part II, pp. 186, 250. Cf. Collinson, ‘The beginnings of English sabbatarianism’, in his Godly people (London, 1983), pp. 429–43. Dow, Discourse (1636), p. 57. Heylyn, History (1636), part II, pp. 254–5. Pocklington, Sunday no Sabbath (1636), p. 7.

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between the authority of the church and the authority of scripture; issues which go to the centre of the Laudian position, and we need to examine the nature of their case against sabbatarianism if that position is to be properly understood. Thus at one point, Gilbert Ironside defined the criteria which the Lord’s day would have to meet in order to be regarded as of ‘divine ordination’: ‘Whatsoever is of divine ordination must be so, either from God, the father, in the law of nature, or some positive precept of the Old Testament, or from God, the son, in some precept of the gospel, or from God, the Holy Ghost, inspiring the apostles, leading them, according to the promise of Christ, into all truth.’22 But the Lord’s day met none of those criteria, and so could not claim a divine origin. Thus, Francis White defined the central characteristics of natural law, none of which could be found in the Sabbath. ‘In all such laws and precepts’, he wrote in 1635, ‘the actions commanded or prohibited are, in their inward nature and quality, good or evil, before any external constitution passeth upon them’. Moreover, that inherent goodness or evil had to be predicated upon ‘some dictates and principles of the law of nature, imprinted in man’s heart at the creation’ and ‘universal’ in their application to human affairs.23 It was, however, impossible to argue that many of the central features of the Jewish Sabbath, as set down in the fourth commandment, and practised by the Jews after Moses, met those criteria. Neither the devotion of the seventh day after creation, nor the proportion of one day in seven, nor the obligation to rest from all labour on the Sabbath could be derived from the universal principles of natural law.24 Rather, these observances were the product of divine positive law, given to the Jews via Moses, for particular purposes and for a limited time. For, as Christopher Dow remarked in 1636, positive law ‘cannot contain in itself any perpetual obligation. For all laws of that nature (though made by God himself) admit mutation (at least) when the matter concerning which, or the condition of the persons to whom, they were given, is changed.’25 This was a point the Laudians drove home with an analysis of church history. They denied the claim, often advanced by sabbatarians, that God had enjoined Adam a day of rest on the seventh day to commemorate 22 23 24

25

Ironside, Seven questions (1637), p. 171. White, Treatise (1635), pp. 28–9. Prideaux, The doctrine (1634), pp. 10–15; White, Treatise (1635), pp. 34–7, 190; Dow, Discourse (1636), pp. 8–10; Heylyn, History (1636), part I, pp. 12–13, 68, 132; Ironside, Seven questions (1637), pp. 10, 45–6. Dow, Discourse (1636), p. 24.

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the act of creation. The furthest they would go on that point was Gilbert Ironside’s ingenious concession that while God had ‘destinated and foreappointed’ the seventh day as a day of rest and worship at the creation, that appointment had not been put into operation until the Mosaic law came into effect centuries later. In the interim the Sabbath had enjoyed what Ironside termed ‘only a metaphysical being’.26 Thus neither the patriarchs before Moses, nor the gentiles, had felt any obligation to observe the Sabbath, as they would have done had it been part of the law of nature, inscribed in the hearts of all humankind at the creation, or indeed part of a divine positive law given to Adam in Eden. According to Peter Heylyn, none of the patriarchs before Moses, neither Abel, Abraham, Jacob, nor even Melchizedek, ‘a type and figure of our saviour’, had observed the Sabbath.27 Therefore, Heylyn claimed, ‘there is no ground in scripture to prove that those before the law had, in their sacrifices, any regard at all to set times and days; either unto the sixth day, or the seventh, or eighth, or any other; but did their service to the Lord, I mean the public part thereof, and that which did consist in external action, according as occasion was administered unto them. The offerings of Cain and Abel, for ought we can inform ourselves, were not very frequent.’ There was, Heylyn concluded, ‘no mention in the scripture of any sacrifice or public worship, but the occasion is set down …. Natural reason, saith Rupertus, could instruct them that God was to be honoured with some part of that which he himself had given unto them, but natural reason did not teach them that one day differed from another.’28 What did teach the Jews was the positive law of God, delivered to Moses on Mount Sinai. The purpose of that positive law, establishing the seventh day as a holy day of rest and worship, was either specific to the Jews, or of a general typological, mystical significance to Christians. For the Sabbath had a dual reference; historically, it referred back to the freeing of the Jews from their bondage in Egypt, while mystically it looked forward to the spiritual rest from sin and death which Christ would purchase on the cross for fallen humanity. In this it had much in common with the other feasts and ceremonies of the law. Thus, ‘the passover did remember them of their deliverance out of Egypt; the Pentecost, of the law given in mount Sinai; the feast of the tabernacles, of God’s protection of them in the wilderness; the sabbath of the creation of the world in six days’. And 26 27 28

Ironside, Seven questions (1637), pp. 21–2. Heylyn, History (1636), part I, pp. 43–59; for Melchizedek see p. 49. Ibid., part I, pp. 41–2.

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yet mystically ‘their passover was a type of our redemption by the blood of Christ; their Pentecost, of the pouring out of the spirit, writing God’s laws in the tables of our hearts; their feasts of tabernacles, of our present pilgrimage to Jerusalem, which is above; their Sabbath, of the peace of conscience and joy of heart, which we receive by a lively faith’.29 In common with all the other feasts and observances of the Old Law, the Sabbath had been abrogated by Christ. It was, after all, natural that ceremonies ‘which God commanded Moses in his levitical law’ ‘as notes and badges of distinction between Jew and gentile’, and as signs ‘to shadow out Christ, or his offices, or his benefits, and doctrine of the gospel’, should be removed or dispelled by the arrival of Christ himself.30 As Francis White observed, Christ ‘freed and delivered the Christian church from the external observance and obedience of all such legal precepts as were not simply and formally moral’.31 ‘Now Christian liberty hath freed God’s people, under the gospel, from the observation of days, and months, and times and years, upon legal and ceremonial principles, Gal.4. 10, Col.2.16.’32 As Edward Kellett put it with memorable succinctness, ‘when Christ arose, the Sabbaths lay down, and began to taste of their eternal periods. As it was sin not to have observed the legal Sabbaths before, so after Christ’s resurrection it had been a greater sin to observe it. The ceremonial law was languishing all Christ’s life, was dead at Christ’s death, in most things, but after the Resurrection, and the promulgation of the gospel, was deadly.’ Thus, ‘in all the apostolical writings is no incitement to observe the sabbaths any longer, but the Lord’s day, which Christ himself chalked out unto us by his oftener appearing on that day than on the Jewish Sabbaths’.33 To argue thus was not to consign the whole of the fourth commandment to the dustbin of the Mosaic law. On the contrary, all these authors were in agreement that the fourth commandment was ‘partly moral and partly ceremonial’,34 ‘of a mixed or middle nature, …. Moral it is as to the duty, that there must be a time appointed for the service of God, and ceremonial, as unto the day, to be one of seven, and to continue that whole day, and to surcease that day from all kind of work. As moral, placed amongst the ten commandments, extending unto all mankind, 29 30 31 32 33 34

Ironside, Seven questions (1637), p. 72. Ibid., p. 71. White, Treatise (1635), p. 63. Ibid., p. 160; also see Dow, Discourse (1636), pp. 7–8. Kellett, Tricoenium Christi (1641), pp. 75–6. Ironside, Seven questions (1637), p. 69.

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and written naturally in our hearts by the hand of nature; as ceremonial, appertaining to the law Levitical, peculiar only to the Jews, and to be reckoned with the rest of Moses’ institutes.’35 The whole emphasis of the Laudian position went towards keeping the moral thrust of the commandment as general, indeed as vague, as possible. As Francis White summed it up, the ‘equity and analogy of the fourth commandment obligeth Christians to observe a convenient and sufficient time for God’s worship and service, and for the exercise of spiritual and religious duties’.36 Having thus freed the church from the ceremonial parts of the fourth commandment and the Mosaic law, the Laudians sought strenuously to maintain that freedom in the face of sabbatarian attempts to confer a divine, or at least apostolic, warrant on the institution of the Lord’s day, which, in the sabbatarian dispensation, had been introduced into the church by Christ and his apostles as a direct successor to the Jewish Sabbath. For this, the Laudians claimed, there was no evidence in either scripture or church history. Thus Peter Heylyn asserted in bold type at the head of the first chapter of the second part of his History of the Sabbath, ‘that there is nothing found in scripture touching the keeping of the Lord’s day’.37 Francis White agreed; if they were applied directly to the present, the literalist arguments based on the Old Testament made for a Saturday Sabbath.38 Gilbert Ironside applied the same argument to the authority of the apostles, pointing out that ‘apostolical practise binds not the conscience, but where there is a precept annexed’.39 ‘It is too much looseness to say we are bound to follow the examples of God’s saints when no precept can be produced.’ Indeed to do so was, for Ironside, a mark of popery.40 Christopher Dow lambasted the argument, beloved of the sabbatarians, that God must have made provision for the observance of a Christian variant of the Sabbath: ‘It is a bold and strange course for men to adventure to argue that God must needs have done the thing, which they imagine was to be done, whereas, in matters that concern the actions of God, the most dutiful, and safe way, on our part, is to search what God hath done, and, with meekness, to admire that, rather than to dispute what he, in 35 36 37 38 39 40

Heylyn, History (1636), part I, p. 68; also see part II, pp. 162–3; Ironside, Seven questions (1637), p. 85. White, An examination (1637), p. 45. Heylyn, History (1636), part II, p. 1. White, Treatise (1635), p. 180. Ironside, Seven questions (1637), p. 144. Ibid., p. 160.

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congruity of reason, ought to do.’ To do otherwise was ‘to lay an aspersion of imperfection upon the scriptures, and of neglect in Christ himself of that office, which, as the great prophet of his church, belonged to him …. But far be such blasphemous thoughts from us, far be it from us to measure the faithfulness of our blessed saviour by our fancies, or to judge him unfaithful, because he did omit that which our shallow conceits judge necessary and fit for him to do.’41 Gilbert Ironside proceeded not merely to controvert, but to invert that same ‘puritan’ argument. It was, he claimed, small wonder that there was no hint of an honourable mention of Sabbath observance in the New Testament for ‘that which is expressly against Christian liberty was never commanded by Christ, or his apostles. But to have the conscience burdened with any outward observations, putting religion in them, as being parts and branches of God’s worship, is directly against Christian liberty. For how is he free, that is thus bound to times, and days? We have, then, only exchanged, not shaken off, the Jewish bondage.’ It was, therefore, quite natural that there were no set times laid down in the New Testament for even the central duties of Christian religion: ‘We nowhere read how often in a year we must receive the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, how often we should hear a sermon, or when to give, or how much, either publicly or privately.’ It was no surprise, then, that ‘under the gospel there is no set time appointed to be kept sabbath’.42 Peter Heylyn made the same argument about the apostles, and in particular St Paul. ‘It is not probable’, Heylyn concluded, ‘that he, who so opposed himself against the old sabbath, would erect a new. This had not been to abrogate the ceremony, but to change the day; whereas he laboured what he could to beat down all the difference of days and times, which had been formerly observed.’43 Since the ceremonial parts of the fourth commandment had been abrogated by Christ, and not been replaced or augmented by the divine authority of either Christ or his apostles, the decision as to what constituted convenient and sufficient time for divine worship, and the nomination of particular days and times, was left to the discretion of the church, backed up, where appropriate, by the Christian magistrate. To make the point Heylyn emphasised the variable practice of the primitive church with reference to the Lord’s day: ‘For three hundred years there was neither 41 42 43

Dow, Discourse (1636), pp. 36–7. Ironside, Seven questions (1637), pp. 165–7. Heylyn, History (1636), part II, p. 27.

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law to bind them to it, nor any rest from labour, or from worldly businesses required upon it.’ Even when Christian princes started to intervene the resulting restrictions varied from place to place, and all allowed various exceptions and loopholes for the conduct of business ‘necessary to the commonwealth’. Moreover, ‘it was not brought about without much struggling, and on opposition of the people, more than a thousand years being past, after Christ’s ascension, before the Lord’s day had attained that state in which now it standeth’.44 Their opposition to what they took to be puritan sabbatarianism allowed the Laudians to defend and assert a number of other positive religious goods taken from the centre of their view of true piety. Since, on the Laudian view, Sunday observance rested entirely on the ‘wisdom and discretion’ of the church,45 it now became possible, not merely to defend the other holy days from puritan allegations of popish superstition, but also to equate them with the Lord’s day itself. Francis White maintained that the church ‘hath honoured the son, in keeping holy the Sunday ever since the apostles; not by virtue of the law of the fourth commandment, for that commandment enjoineth Saturday, but for the same reasons it observes Easter, Whitsuntide and the feast of Christ’s nativity; that is, according to the rule of Christian liberty, and because it is an act of piety and gratitude to honour Christ upon those set and solemn festival days, which, by lawful authority, are appointed’.46 Not only was the authority upon which both the Lord’s day and the other Christian festivals were based precisely the same, the ends for which that authority had consecrated them were identical. ‘For what else’, asked Dow, ‘is required on those days but the solemn prayers and praises of God in the church, joined with the hearing of his word, and a special commemoration of his benefits, which, as on those days, were received?’ The Lord’s day had, of course, been consecrated to commemorate the resurrection. But then the other holy days of the church were similarly intended to commemorate other ‘real great and general benefits vouchsafed by God to his church’. These, Dow continued, ‘may almost be ranked under two heads. First, such memorable steps in the story of our blessed saviour, as by which the great work of our redemption advanced unto its happy accomplishment. Secondly, the memorials of that goodness and glory which he afterwards manifested to the world by his holy apostles, evangelists and martyrs.’47 44 45 46 47

Heylyn, History (1636), part II, p. 94. Ironside, Seven questions (1637), p. 163. White, Treatise (1635), p. 305. Also see Dow, Discourse (1636), p. 58. Dow, Discourse (1636), pp. 60–1.

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In terms, therefore, of the authority which created them, the ends for which they were consecrated and the benefits which they were designed to commemorate, and confer, the Lord’s day and the other holy days were on essentially the same footing. It was a point Heylyn made historically by recounting the gradual rise in the church of the three great Christian festivals of Christmas, Easter and Whitsun, all of which were observed with no less solemnity or seriousness than Sundays were, and which gradually came to be accepted as the three occasions upon which all the laity should communicate in the course of the year.48 Ranking the holy days of the church thus became a question of some difficulty. On the one hand, citing the precedent of the Eastern churches, and the current practice of the church of England, Heylyn could imply that Sunday was not a great deal different from Wednesdays and Fridays.49 On the other hand, Gilbert Ironside could describe the Lord’s day ‘devoted by the church to the Lord’s service’ as ‘the queen of days’.50 Not only was it ‘kept in memory of the resurrection, which is far to be preferred before any’ saint’s day, the church also devoted the whole day to ‘the solemnity of the public worship’, unlike other holy days ‘when she intends only half, or some part, of the day to be kept holy, forbidding all manner of works upon some days, but allowing them upon others, as markets and fairs. In this latter respect also no holy day is equal with the Lord’s day, … notwithstanding, if we look to the outward solemnity of God’s worship, some holy days may be greater than it.’51 The resulting position allowed the Laudians to attribute a certain positive religious significance, or spiritual charge, to be attributed to the holy days of the church.52 Most particularly, the great festivals of the Christian year both figured, and extended to all believers, the benefits conferred on fallen humanity by Christ’s incarnation, life, passion and resurrection. ‘They which come to God’s house upon the day of Christ’s nativity (coming in faith and love as they ought) are’, argued Richard Shelford, 48

49 50 51 52

Heylyn, History (1636), part II, pp. 58–61. Lancelot Andrewes had, at the very least, a sabbatarian phase in the 1590s, something of which the reading public was reminded by the posthumous publication in 1630 of his A pattern of catechetical doctrine, and later, in 1642, of the far fuller The moral law expounded. It is unclear whether or not sabbatarianism was an opinion that Andrewes repudiated in later life, as Heylyn, amongst others, claimed. What is certain from the XCVI sermons is that, just like the later Laudians, Andrewes also had a very exalted (and decidedly unpuritan) view of the great feasts of the Christian year, as well as of the Sabbath, a view of the matter that the later Laudian anti-sabbatarian position maintained. Heylyn, History (1636), part II, p. 73. Ironside, Seven questions (1637), p. 276. Ibid., pp. 190–1. Yates, A treatise (1637), p. 59.

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partakers of Christ’s birth; they which come upon the day of circumcision are with him circumcised from the dominion of the flesh; they which come upon the day of purification are presented with him to his father; they which come upon Good Friday are partakers of his precious death; they which come upon Easter day are partakers of his glorious resurrection; they which come upon ascension day ascend with him in holy desires and hereafter shall ascend in person; they which come upon Whitsunday shall partake of those white gifts that God bestowed upon his church upon that day; they which come upon Trinity Sunday shall enjoy the blessed Trinity of father, son and holy ghost. So again they which come upon St Stephens day are, in affection, partakers of his martyrdom and prepared for holy suffering.

By ‘observing saints days, and in dedicating temples to God in their names’, Shelford claimed, ‘we have the blessed saints still living and dwelling among us’. It was this which allowed Shelford to conclude that the keeping ‘of the holy feasts of the church’ was one of the main offices of holiness. Those who omitted it, he claimed, ‘do, as much as in them lies, cut themselves off from this holy communion [with the saints in heaven], and have a great loss, which none can see but they that have spiritual eyes’.53 There was more at stake here than just the need to organise and concert the collective worship of God at certain set times. Just as the structure of  the church building, once it had been carved out of the secular and the  everyday by the consecrating power of the church, and especially of the bishops, retained an aura of permanent holiness, so the structure of the Christian year, similarly separated out of the raw material of secular time by the sacralising power of the church, likewise acquired an indelibly holy character. Holy days were like the ceremonies and outward forms adopted by the church; in themselves indifferent, their ordination and use by the church for religious purposes turned them into peculiarly effective means of imparting religious and moral messages. Though not of directly divine origin, they took on a glow of holiness from the genuinely divine ordinances for which they provided an ecclesiastically designed and sanctioned frame. Moreover, just as the life of the Christian could be figured as a journey through the physical structure of the church, from the font to the altar, so too it could be pictured as a journey through the temporal structure of the Christian year from Christmas to Easter and thence to Whitsun. Thus, the Laudian assault on ‘puritan’ sabbatarianism formed part of the overall Laudian revaluation and defence of the architectural, ceremonial and temporal structures erected by the visible church to contain, show 53

Shelford, Five discourses (1635), p. 27.

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forth and distribute the divine presence. Here the Christocentric emphasis of the Laudian style of piety was crucial. Just as the central act of Laudian piety was the incorporation of the faithful communicant into Christ’s mystical body, via the sacrament, so the most important holy days reflected the crucial events of Christ’s life, and Sunday itself commemorated the high point of Christ’s triumph over sin and death, in the resurrection.

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