Cromartie Alan. The Constitutionalist Revolution: An Essay on the History of England, 1450-1642 (Ideas in Context)

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

The constitutionalist revolution 239

doth infuse and let out itself into this particular’. At this point, however, his

argument took a subversive turn. He pointed out that it is kings who judge,

‘yet I conceive that his Majesty alone, without assistance of the judges of

the court, cannot give judgement’.

The king’s Great Council, parliament,

was also a court-like vessel of an impersonal will:

If an erroneous judgement was given before the statute of 27 Eliz. in the King’s

Bench [which created a court of appeal] the king could not relievehis grieved subject

any way but by writ of error in parliament: neither can he out of parliament alter

the old laws, or make new, or make any naturalisations or legitimations, nor do

some other things: and yet is the parliament his Majesty’s court too as well as other

his courts of justice.

This vision of the English state, simultaneously impersonal and deeply

monarchist, was to be somewhere near the heart of parliamentarian think-

ing, while Holborne’s belief in a law that was composed of rigid rules was

to be characteristic of moderate royalism.

In 1638, though, such differences were easy to ignore. From a practical

political perspective, the only thing that mattered was that virtually all

England believed that the payments demanded were indefensible. It is true

the early levies were collected with relatively little difﬁculty, but there was

reason to expect the subsequent spread of principled resistance; a payment

that was justiﬁed by reference to a threat to public safety became more unac-

ceptable, not less, each time it was exacted in peacetime conditions. The

obvious analogy was not encouraging. During the previous decade, some

gentlemen appear to have paid the Forced Loan out of a sense of loyalty

to a beleaguered wartime government; in the peaceful 1630s, the govern-

ment could not appeal to patriotic solidarity. Given that the mechanism

of collection was an unpaid and overburdened sheriff whose term of ofﬁce

was a single year, the steadily mounting refusals of 1638–9 were virtually

impossible to handle. Under ideal political conditions, the problem might

perhaps have been contained, but the regime’s authority was vulnerable

to external shocks. In the event, the jolt that it received was caused by its

provocative religion.

No sensible scholar has ever denied that Charles’s religion had something

to do with his downfall. But Charles did not invent the policy of giv-

ing royal support to high conformists, nor was it obvious that such a

Ibid., iii 861.

Ibid., iii 862.

240 The Constitutionalist Revolution

stance was in itself inevitably disastrous; in the religious sphere, at any

rate, he was swimming with the intellectual current. His problem was

that the ‘constitutional’ and ‘religious’ spheres were not, in fact, entirely

separate, and that the leakage ran in both directions. It has always been

clear that his preference for uniform and ceremonious worship enabled

his opponents (whatever their motives) to mobilise resistance through

the cry of popery. But there was also a reverse effect: Charles man-

aged to encourage a perception that bishops were a threat to secular

order.

This perception was not altogether new; during his father’s reign, there

was no shortage of zealous or ambitious high church prelates who wanted

to serve both the church and themselves by shows of loyalty. But one of the

most impressive signs of James’s superior guile was his reserved approach

towards such clerical supporters. As we have seen, his personal religious

attitudes aligned him with the highest of conformists, but he actively dis-

couraged the like-minded from propagating ‘absolutist’ doctrines. One con-

sequence of his sensible restraint was that the crown’s unpopularity was not

a threat to its preferred religion. In Jacobean parliaments, the constitution-

alist opposition had mingled puritans like Nicholas Fuller with supporters

of the church like Edwin Sandys. This may, to some extent, have harmed

the monarch’s interests; as secular and religious grievances could be disso-

ciated, potentially quite serious theological disputes did not prevent MPs

co-operating. But the great beneﬁt to the church was that the bishops

and their privileges were not an obvious target of secular-minded reform.

The most serious of Charles’s many mistakes was his abandonment of this

advantage.

The symbol of his errors was archbishop William Laud, the man whose

personality and tactics created a disastrous rift among the clergy’s leaders.

But though Laud must be central to any analysis of the collapse of Stuart

monarchy, discussion of his impact has been much hampered by two pre-

conceptions. On the one hand, he has sometimes been presented as a mere

clericalist martinet, a ﬁgure whose primary commitment was to uniformity;

on the other, he has been treated as a reactionary, the leader of an obscu-

rantist counter-Reformation. In either case Laudianism was an external

shock, a movement whose brief dominance of English church affairs was

based upon the accident of Charles’s inclinations. What neither of these

approaches can explain is why this shock was such a threat to the church’s

episcopal structure. If it had been essentially an alien imposition, then its

effects should surely have been reversible without a complete institutional

upheaval.

The constitutionalist revolution 241

A better understanding of the damage that Laud did and its connection

with our wider story requires a grasp of his positive achievement. Laud was

not just a high-handed bureaucrat; he was an intellectual who represented

powerful cultural forces, most of which were to re-emerge, considerably

strengthened, after the setback of the revolution. If he was initially slow to

be promoted, his personality was found impressive; no one so cripplingly

irascible and ostentatiously immoderate could have been so politically suc-

cessful without a certain moral force and personal magnetism. Given his

openness about his rigid attitudes, it is striking that he should have been

admired by characters otherwise as different as the radical lawyer James

Whitelocke,

the future archbishop of York John Williams

(a natural

sympathiser with whom he later quarrelled), and the king’s chief minister

and favourite, the marquis (later duke) of Buckingham.

Laud’s close relationship with Buckingham was probably more impor-

tant than his inﬂuence on Charles in shaping subsequent developments.

Though it is generally assumed that Charles was a convinced Arminian,

there is not in fact much evidence that he was interested in such questions.

When he was Prince of Wales, he had been noted for his piety, but his

chaplains were drawn from the ‘Calvinist’ end of the court religious spec-

trum.

It was Buckingham, not Charles, who organised the York House

conference (at a time when he was threatened with impeachment) and took

the risk of backing Montagu instead of at least affecting to be neutral. The

likely explanation of his conduct is that the favourite belonged to the New

gagg’s target audience: conservatives with a regard for ceremonial for whom

Catholicism represented a possible form of religious seriousness. It is strik-

ing, for example, that when he chose a bride, he opted for a recusant who

did not conform till the moment of her marriage. He also clearly had a taste

for ritual; in January 1622,heled a group of courtiers in being ‘conﬁrmed

or bishopt as children use to be . . . where they had choice music and all the

ceremonies belonging to that action’.

Part of the rationale of Laudianism

was its capacity to meet the pastoral needs of such people.

The event that created the Buckingham–Laud alliance was a crisis in the

former’s family that was also a revealing episode in the development of court

religion. For much of 1622,Buckingham’s mother dithered on the brink of

James Whitelocke, Liber famelicus of Sir James Whitelocke, ed. John Bruce, Camden Society 50 (1858),

51, 77.

Cobbett, State trials, ii 1461.

Peter MacCullough, Sermons at court: politics and religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean preaching

(Cambridge, 1998), 195–208.

John Chamberlain, The letters of John Chamberlain, ed. N. E. McClure, 2 vols. (1939), ii 419–20.

242 The Constitutionalist Revolution

a conversion to Catholicism. James took an interest in this situation, and

even arranged a meeting with the missionary involved, a Jesuit who passed

by the name of ‘John Fisher’. The resultant disputation, which stretched

over three days, was mostly conducted by Laud and Francis White (the

man who was later to license Appello Caesarem). It resulted in two major

publications: White’s Areplie to the Jesuit Fisher’s answer to certain questions

propounded by his most gracious majestie, and Laud’s own An answer to Mr

Fisher’s relation of a third conference (that is, of the last day’s proceedings),

more usually known as his Conference with Fisher.

These works illuminate the situation that was to encourage the rise of

Laudianism. Both were moulded by a shift in Catholic tactics. As White

explained, ‘[the Catholics’] manner is, when they dispute with Protes-

tants viva voce,toavoid all other controversies and to set up their rest

upon the questions of visibility and authority of the church’.

Only a

perpetually visible church, they argued, could give an infallible guaran-

tee that Scripture’s message was reliable. Their clinching piece of evidence

was a statement by Augustine to the effect that only the authority of the

church induced him to credit the message of the Bible. White offered two

explanations of Augustine’s troubling dictum (he was evidently reluctant

to suggest that the great Father might have been mistaken). One was to

note that ‘some schoolmen hold that [Augustine] speaketh of acquisite

or historical faith, which is an introduction to infused [i.e.justifying]

faith . . . most men are ﬁrst induced by external motives, to give credit

to the Scriptures’.

The second referred to ‘other learned papists’ who held

‘that St Augustine, in the place objected, understood the church wherein

the Apostles themselves governed, and of which they were parts’.

Both

of these moves were mildly controversial–ageneration earlier, Hooker

had been thought daring for treating reason as the ‘key’ to scripture and

the authority of the church as an initial ‘motive’ to religion – but White

had not abandoned the important principle that scripture was intrinsically

self-authenticating.

Laud too regarded scripture as self-authenticating, but his discussion

went a little further. His starting point was quite conventional; he stressed

the need for an authority not just partially but ‘absolutely divine’ to show

that scripture was infallible. This ruled out ‘the testimony or voice of the

present church: For our worthies prove [a marginal note cited Hooker] that

Francis White, Areply to Jesuit Fisher’s answer to certain questions propounded by his most gracious

majesty (1624), sig. b3v.

Ibid., 22.

The constitutionalist revolution 243

all the church’s constitutions are of the nature of humane law’.

But though

the church was powerless to authenticate the Word, illumination was in

practice granted within the context of this institution: ‘no man may expect

inward private revelation, without the external means of the church, unless

perhaps the case of necessity be excepted, when such a man lives in a time

and place, as excludes him from all ordinary means’.

Similarly, although

he held that the workings of God’s grace exceeded anything possible to

reason, he thought of the two as intimately linked:

Grace is never placed but in a reasonable creature, and proves by the very seat which

it hath taken up, that the end it hath is to be spiritual eye-water, to make reason

see what by nature only it cannot, but never to blemish reason in that which it

can comprehend . . . Reason then can give no supernatural ground into which

a man may resolve his faith, That scripture is the word of God infallibly, yet reason

can go so high as it can prove that Christian religion, which rests upon the authority

of this book, stands upon surer grounds of nature, reason, common equity, and

justice, than anything in the world, which any inﬁdel or mere naturalist hath done,

doth, or can adhere to against it.

Thus though Laud’s argument remained essentially Reformed, he laid

unusual stress upon the role of the church and of reason. From a strictly

theological point of view, he was a relatively cautious thinker. It is often sup-

posed that his Eucharistic theory must have been scandalously Catholic,

but there is little evidence that his ideas, in this respect, departed from

the norm. As Thomas Morton quite correctly noted, the English church

was very close to Calvin (the most sacramentally minded of non-Lutheran

reformers), who held that ‘we account not our sacraments mere signs, to

represent the graces of God, but that they are also seals, to present and

exhibit the truth of God’s promises of grace, and to apply them to the

hearts of faithful receivers’.

Laud’s teachings on the Eucharist stood ﬁrmly

in this Calvinist tradition. Like the indisputably godly William Perkins,

he was happy to speak about a ‘real presence’, but this concession was

entirely verbal. Perkins had stated that the phrase was unexceptionable,

so long as the reality of the presence was understood not to be ‘local,

bodily, or substantial’.

Laud’s exposition in The Conference was quite

compatible with these principles, although his veneration for the altar

did lend some credence to the charge that he believed the presence to be

William Laud, An answere to Mr Fisher’s relation of a conference between a certaine B (as he stiles him)

and himselfe (1624), 18.

Ibid., 20.

Ibid., 21.

Thomas Morton, A defence of the innocencie of the three ceremonies of the church of England (1618), 55.

Perkins, Areformed Catholike (1597), 187.

244 The Constitutionalist Revolution

‘local’.

A generation later, the allegedly much more extreme John Cosin

offered a lucid summary of Laudian beliefs:

We do not hold this celebration to be so naked a commemoration of Christ’s body

given to death, and of his blood there shed for us, but that the same body and

blood is present there in this commemoration (made by the sacrament of bread

and wine) to all that faithfully receive it: nor do we say, it is so nude a sacriﬁce of

praise and thanksgiving, but that by our prayers also added, we offer and present

the death of Christ to God, that for his death’s sake we may ﬁnd mercy, in which

respect we deny not this commemorative sacriﬁce to be propitiatory.

It is evident that Cosin’s stress on the believer’s role was wholly incompatible

with transubstantiation, but it is also evident that the conciliatory talk of

‘sacriﬁce’ and ‘presence’ was likely to alarm an unreﬂective Protestant.

Buckingham must have been impressed by this theology, because Laud’s

diary records the growth of an intimate friendship. Shortly before the Con-

ference (in May), Laud wrote for him a ‘paper concerning the difference

between the Church of England and Rome in point of salvation’. In mid-

June, ‘my Lord Marquess Buckingham was pleased to enter upon a near

respect to me. The particulars are not for paper.’ A week later, he became ‘C.’

(presumably ‘Confessor’) to the favourite, who then received communion

at his hands.

Their chance afﬁnity of temperament, probably coloured,

on Laud’s side, by sexual attraction,

had some important practical results,

including Laud’s emergence as the leader of the existing group among the

clergy (previously led by Richard Neile of Durham) who disapproved of

Abbot’s Grindalian attitudes. In 1627,inarevealing episode, this group put

an end to the archbishop’s career as a national politician.

The occasion of their coup was his refusal to allow the printing of a con-

troversial sermon. Its author, William Sibthorpe, was not a Laudian, but

an intemperate self-publicist who railed at a long list of clerical bugbears

(including, as it happened, sabbath-breaking). The questionable aspect of

his rambling diatribe was his unqualiﬁed support for arbitrary taxation and

in particular for the Forced Loan. In an embittered account of the affair,

Abbot quite plausibly maintained that he had been sent ‘Dr Sibthorpe’s con-

temptible treatise’ because his enemies foresaw that he would feel obliged

to stop the sermon’s publication.

It is obvious whom he blamed for his

misfortunes. Laud was described as being ‘the only inward counsellor with

See the second edn, Arelation of the conference (1639), 292–6.Onlocality, see Sir Thomas Aston,

The Short Parliament (1640) diary of Sir Thomas Aston, ed. Judith D. Maltby, Camden Society, 4th

series 35 (1988), 89.

The works of the right reverend father in God John Cosin, v, 336.

Autobiography of Dr William Laud, 9.

Ibid., 43.

Cobbett, State trials, ii 1465, 1457.

The constitutionalist revolution 245

Buckingham, sitting with him sometimes privately whole hours, and feed-

ing his humour with malice and spite’. This pattern of malign behaviour

had been established in his time at Oxford, where he ‘picked quarrels in the

lectures of the public readers’ (including of course Abbot’s brother Robert)

and told ‘the then Bishop of Durham, that he [Richard Neile] might ﬁll

the ears of King James with discontents against the honest men that took

pains in their places and settled the truth (which he called puritanism) in

their auditors’.

But more was at stake in this contest than sectarian advantage; it also

involved a practical disagreement about the best way forward for royal

policy. Here Abbot was on relatively strong ground. He pointed out that

Sibthorpe’s argument had undermined the government’s whole case by its

admission that the Loan was actually a ‘tribute’ (this was corrected in the

printed version).

More generally, Sibthorpe had broken with King James’s

attitudes. Abbot was able to recall an earlier episode when his episcopal

colleague Samuel Harsnett had preached a sermon ‘upon the text, “Give

unto Caesar the things that be Caesar’s”, wherein he insisted that goods

and money were Caesar’s’. On that occasion, James ‘calmed all’ by saying

that ‘the bishop only failed in this...hedidnotadd, they were his

according to the laws and customs of the country wherein they did live’.

Abbot concluded with a pointed story about the chaplain who was asked

to license the eventual printed version. The unfortunate ofﬁcial had signed

the document, but then had second thoughts and consulted a lawyer, who

spake to this purpose: What have you done? You have allowed a strange book

yonder; which, if it be true, there is no meum and tuum,noman in England hath

any thing of his own: if ever the tide turn, and matters be called to a reckoning,

you will be hanged for publishing such a book.

According to Abbot, the chaplain then erased his signature. It would have

been better for Laud and his supporters if they had manifested the same

prudence.

Their disregard for lawyers was a natural consequence of their beliefs

about their situation. Laud was above all else a champion of the interests

of the clergy; as the epistle to the second edition (1639)ofThe Conference

explained, he thought it was his duty to preserve their ‘maintenance’ as

well as their ‘doctrine and manners’.

In this he differed from Abbot, who

had had a reputation for failing to stand up for his profession. According

to the historian Thomas Fuller (who was no Laudian), the older man was

Ibid., ii 1460.

Ibid., ii 1460, 1464.

Ibid., ii 1463.

Ibid., ii 1465.

Laud, Conference,Epistle dedicatory.

246 The Constitutionalist Revolution

‘consecrated bishop, before ever called to a pastoral charge, which made, say

some, him not to sympathise with the necessities and inﬁrmities of poor

ministers’.

Laud by contrast was continuously aware of the collective

interests of his order and of the practical difﬁculties it faced. He had no

doubt at all who was to blame; the church, in his view, was ‘so bound up in

the forms of the common law, that it is not possible for me, or for any man,

to do that good which he would, or is bound to do’.

When the puritan

common lawyer Henry Sherﬁeld took it upon himself to smash an image

(a window that portrayed the Holy Spirit as a dove), Laud worked himself

up to a disastrous outburst:

This much let me say to Mr Sherﬁeld and such of his profession as slight the

ecclesiastical laws and persons, that there was a time when churchmen were as

great in the kingdom as you are now; and let me be bold to prophesy, there will be

a time when you will be as low as the church is now, if you go on thus to contemn

the church.

Such words could hardly have been better suited to feed what Clarendon

would call ‘the virulency and animosity expressed upon all occasions from

many of good knowledge in the excellent and wise profession of the com-

mon law towards the church and churchmen’.

Resurgent clericalism was

colliding with an increased regard for legal values.

As we shall see, this clash of attitudes would be disastrous for the hierar-

chy. But Laud’s counterproductive aggression is comprehensible as a reac-

tion to some shifts affecting most of the conformist clergy. A number of

related trends were making a Grindalian church a less attractive option.

It is striking, for example, that John Prideaux, who was the best-known

‘Calvinist’ in Oxford during the period of Land’s dominance, was hostile

to the single most powerful impulse of early seventeenth-century godly

culture: its ever-increasing obsession with Sabbath observance.

Their

fellow ‘Calvinist’ Joseph Hall not only believed, as we have seen, that

Rome was a true church, but was eventually to write the standard defence

of jure divino bishops.

Above all, a more positive view of ceremonies and

of the visible church made tolerance of puritanism less defensible. The

standard Jacobean defence of ceremonies was written by the ‘Calvinist’

Thomas Morton. It attacked the nonconformists on the grounds that ‘by

your detracting from the ordinances of the church, many take occasion

Thomas Fuller, Church-history of Britain (1655), Book x, 87, 128.

Laud, Works, vi 310.

Cobbett, State trials, iii 553.

Clarendon, History, i 404.

John Prideaux, The doctrine of the sabbath, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1635).

Joseph Hall, Episcopacie by divine right asserted (1640).

The constitutionalist revolution 247

to neglect the outward worship of the church; whereupon their inward

zeal and devotion soon cooleth, and in the end vanisheth away’.

If this

argument were taken seriously, then it was right to place new stress upon

conformity.

The idea that such ﬁgures were sharply distinct from more rigorous

high churchmen is less attributable to the substance of their views than

to the Laudians’ own bigotry; it says more about Laud than it does about

Hall that the former set a spy upon the latter.

There was, to be sure, a

spectrum of opinion about the harder points of the theology of grace, but

orthodoxy’s boundaries were shifting. By 1624, the high conformist bishop

Samuel Harsnett was in a position to recall that he had been in trou-

ble in Queen Elizabeth’s reign for preaching against absolute reprobation,

but that Robert Abbot ‘hath since declared in print that which he then

preached to be no popery’.

Even in the controversy surrounding the New

Gagg, the term ‘Arminian’ was invoked without much attempt at precision;

when the concept became central to political debate (which was not until the

parliament of 1628–9), it had become a shorthand for a range of grievances,

including such events as Sibthorpe’s sermon.

It cannot be assumed, then, that the Laudian position was founded

on distinctive views about predestination. In the preface to the second,

expanded edition of the Conference with Fisher, Laud insisted that his

motives were anti-Catholic: ‘no one thing hath made conscientious men

more wavering in their own minds, or more apt, and easy to be drawn aside

from the sincerity of religion professed in the church of England, than the

want of uniform and decent order in too many churches of the kingdom’.

He added the Hookerian claim that ‘external worship of God in his church

is the great witness to the world that our heart stands right in [the inward]

service of God’, and stressed that ‘these thoughts are they, and no other,

which have made me labour so much as I have done for decency and an

orderly settlement of the external worship of God in the church’.

Laud could legitimately have pointed out that this was a position with

little or nothing in common with Catholic thinking; precisely because

Catholics believed their ceremonies to be efﬁcacious, they wasted no time

in general defences of the desirability of ritual. Peter Lake has rightly argued

that whether or not the Laudians had a theology, they certainly had a

distinctive ‘style’, one that insisted, among other things, on setting apart

times and places for worshipping God in the context of established social

Morton, Innocencie of ceremonies, 167.

Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. ‘Hall, Joseph’.

Cobbett, State trials, ii 1255–6.

Laud, Conference,Ep.Ded.

Ibid., Ep. Ded.

248 The Constitutionalist Revolution

order.

Oneofthe features of this style was that most modern of attitudes:

self-conscious traditionalism. According to George Herbert, the ‘country

parson is a lover of old customs, if they be good, and harmless; and the

rather, because the country people are much addicted to them, so that to

favour them therein is to win their hearts’.

There are signs that such a

willingness to work through popular culture (exempliﬁed most obviously

in the Book of Sports) would later help to stimulate plebeian royalism.

Defence of this nostalgic mode of feeling did have some intellectual

implications, but they were not particularly Catholic. To the extent that it

implied that love of ceremony was natural, it also had afﬁnities with the

most rationalistic strands in seventeenth-century theology. John Pockling-

ton referred to the ‘instinct of nature’ by which men in the Old Testament

built altars.

Peter Heylyn agreed that ‘sacriﬁces, priests, and altars were

from the beginning by the light of nature’.

The Laudians’ puritan-baiting

choice of language could thus be justiﬁed, in part, by reference to natural

religion. At times, they had a tendency to drift towards a creed in which

the obligations of a Christian were in effect absorbed in social duties. In

his defence of Laudian arrangements, Innovations unjustly charged upon the

present church and state (1637), Christopher Dow pronounced that

God doth not bring men to heaven by difﬁcult questions; the way to eternity

is plain and easy to be known: to believe that Jesus Christ was raised from the

dead, to acknowledge him to be Lord and Christ, and to live soberly, righteously,

and religiously in the present world is the sum of saving doctrine and Christian

religion.

The rationalist clergy of Restoration times would make exactly the same

point in roughly the same language.

A further Laudian train of thought had similar implications. We have

seen that Laud revalued both the visible church and the individual’s reason.

In the context of anti-Catholic polemic, the former emphasis required the

latter. The Hookerian admission that papists could be saved laid moder-

ate Protestants open to the dangerous argument that anybody risk-averse

should be a Catholic. The only possible response was to argue that this char-

itable concession only extended to the ignorant; sophisticated people had

Peter Lake, ‘The Laudian style’, in Kenneth Fincham (ed.), The early Stuart church, 1603–42 (1993),

161–85.

George Herbert, A priest to the temple (1652), 157.

David Underdown, Revel, riot, and rebellion (Oxford, 1985), 66–8, 276, 279.

John Pocklington, Altare Christianum (1637), 4.

Peter Heylyn, Antidotum Lincolniense: or an Answer to a book entitled Holy Table Name and Thing

(1637), section 2, 1.

Dow, Innovations, 41.