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

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The constitutionalist revolution 249

a duty to exercise their rationality. In the later 1630s, this line of argument

was pressed as far as it would go. In his famous The religion of Protestants

a safe way to salvation (1638), Laud’s godson William Chillingworth (a for-

mer convert of the Jesuit Fisher) abandoned the basic distinction between

a merely human or ‘historical’ faith in the Bible and the infallible ‘infused’

or justifying faith that worked the salvation of Calvinist believers. In Chill-

ingworth’s view, ‘God desires only that we believe the conclusion as much

as the premises deserve, that the strength of our faith be equal or propor-

tionable to the credibility of the motives to it.’

In practice, this meant

that the Saviour’s resurrection (the well-attested miracle that vouched for

the truth of the Bible) deserved the faith elicited by well-established facts

about geography and history: the existence of the city of Rome, for exam-

ple, or of a Roman by the name of Caesar. In consequence, the ordinary

Christian’s sole duty was a sincere belief in the deliverances of scripture:

‘he that believes the scripture sincerely, and endeavours to believe it in

the true sense, cannot possibly be an heretic’.

The importance of sincer-

ity led him to bite the bullet of religious toleration, on the grounds that

‘nothing can be more evidently unjust, than to force weak men by the

profession of a religion which they believe not to lose their own eternal

happiness’.

These ultra-liberal doctrines were a much deeper challenge to existing

orthodoxy than recondite Arminian deviations, but by the 1660s they were

conventional. They did not necessarily imply abandonment of ceremonial

uniformity and their Laudian adherents had no particular grounds for

changing their political opinions. The preface to Chillingworth’s treatise

applauded the church’s commitment to ‘the beauty of holiness’, its emphasis

upon patristic study, and even its willingness to ‘use the names of priests

and altars’.

As Hugh Trevor-Roper has shown, his attitudes were not at

all unique; especially at Oxford, there were other staunch high churchmen

and future royalists with highly rationalistic attitudes, including perhaps

willingness to doubt the Trinity. Laud was himself intelligent enough to

be suspicious of these new ideas, but he did nothing decisive to suppress

them.

Unlike their nineteenth-century admirers, the Laudians were not

consciously rejecting their culture’s most distinctive innovations.

In the end, the great upheaval that swept away their church was trig-

gered by one of their successes. One mark of that church’s appeal to lively

minds was its ability to attract some foreign sympathisers. In Scotland too,

William Chillingworth, The religion of Protestants a safe way to salvation (Oxford, 1638), 36.

Ibid., ‘Preface’, s.43.

Ibid., 297.

Ibid., ‘Preface’, ss.22, 24–6.

Hugh Trevor-Roper, Catholics, Anglicans, and puritans (1987), 187–8, 230 and n, 207.

250 The Constitutionalist Revolution

an intellectual movement, proportionately much smaller but if anything

more extreme, had been encouraged by patristic study in a Reformed epis-

copalian setting. In the Scottish situation, matters were complicated by the

rational fears of owners of church lands; the apparently growing power of

the Scottish hierarchy was seen in the light of the worries provoked by the

earlier Revocation. But in Scotland as in England, the bishops might have

got away with purely intellectual innovations, had they not drawn atten-

tion to their programme by changes that they made to public worship. In

England, these included the revival of an altar at the east end of the church

in place of a Reformed communion table. The English were affronted by

the altar policy in much the same way that the Scots had been affronted

by James’s insistence on kneeling at communion: here was a symbol any-

one could grasp of a regression to Catholicism. But the offence created by

the altar policy was mild compared with the backlash that Charles caused

when he imposed a Prayer Book on Scotland that took as its model the

English book of 1549 with its conservative communion service. The effect

on mainstream Scots opinion was to discredit the idea of government by

bishops.

Inapolitical culture quite different from England’s, not least in being

inﬂuenced by sixteenth-century resistance theories, a national ‘covenant’

against such changes provided a ﬁrm basis for a comprehensive movement.

Once this movement was ﬁrmly established, there was no way, short of

military invasion, that Scots episcopacy could be protected, but Charles

proved characteristically unable to stick to a consistent course of action.

After marching an army to the Scottish border, he lost his nerve before

entering the country and ended the ﬁrst brief war about the matter with the

‘Paciﬁcation of Berwick’ of June 1639,anagreement by which he promised

to accept that ‘all matters ecclesiastical shall be determined by the assembly

of the kirk’.

What happened next casts useful light on Charles’s political failings.

His private instructions to the earl of Traquair, his representative at the

assembly, allowed the latter to sanction the abolition of episcopacy, ‘so as

the conclusion seem not to be made in prejudice of episcopacy as unlawful,

but only in satisfaction to the people, for settling the present disorders, and

such other reasons of state’. But he insisted that the church assembly was

not to ‘meddle with anything that is civil, or which formerly hath been

established by act of parliament’.

Charles thought of the Paciﬁcation

Gilbert Burnet, The memoires of the lives and actions of James and William Dukes of Hamilton and

Castleherald (1677), 141.

Ibid., 150.

The constitutionalist revolution 251

as a tactical withdrawal. With the pedantry that many of his opponents

regarded, understandably, as mere duplicity, he clung to a narrow reading

of his promise that ‘matters ecclesiastical’ should be decided by the church

assembly. He appears to have distinguished between the abolition of bishops

by the kirk (in which he was prepared to acquiesce) and the destruction of

the privileges that had been granted by the Scottish state. As a subsequent

letter insisted, he would not rescind ‘those acts of parliament, which our

father with so much expense of time and industry established, and which

may hereafter be of so great use to us’.

He was following James’s example

in working to preserve a secular structure that would in time facilitate the

bishops’ restoration. But though there was a rationale for his behaviour,

it was politically suicidal. Scottish episcopacy did have a few convinced

supporters, especially in the north-east of the country; the only actual battle

of the ﬁrst Bishops’ War took place at the Bridge of Dee, near Aberdeen.

Charles had betrayed such people without acquiring any new adherents.

Only a man of some intelligence could have devised the brilliantly deceptive

undertakings by which he had misled the covenanters; only a man of no

political wisdom could have supposed that they supplied a workable fallback

position.

About a fortnight after he had signed the Paciﬁcation, the desperate situ-

ation of the Scottish monarchy was spelled out in a cogent memorandum.

In this incisive document, his leading Scots adviser, the marquis of Hamil-

ton, predicted, quite correctly, that the assembly would abolish bishops and

that parliament would ratify its verdict. At this point, if the king employed

his veto, the result would be ‘a certain loss of civil authority’. The king must

either ‘give way to the madness of the people’ or else attempt a military

conquest, but war against Scotland would require an English parliament.

His conclusion was stark:

So all may be summed up in this; Whether to permit the abolishing of episcopacy,

the lessening of kingly power in ecclesiastic affairs, the establishing civil authority

in such manner as the iniquity of the times will suffer and to expect better; and

what will be the consequence of this if way be given thereto: or to call a parliament

in England and leave the event thereof to hazard and their discretion, and in the

interim Scotland to the government of the Covenanters.

When Hamilton’s predictions were fulﬁlled, the king preferred the sec-

ond of these options, and summoned the Short Parliament that met in

April–May of 1640. The events of that assembly corroborate the view that

Laudianism, though unpopular, had gained signiﬁcant ground upon its

Ibid., 158–9.

Ibid., 145.

252 The Constitutionalist Revolution

critics. Arminianism in the narrow sense seems not to have been a serious

concern and indignation centred on the altar policy. But even the Laudian

altar had open partisans, including the future royalists Viscount Falkland,

Edward Hyde, and Edmund Waller;

in spite of the offence to conventional

instincts that had undoubtedly been caused by high church innovations,

there was certainly none of the witchhunt atmosphere that dominated the

ﬁrst months of the Long Parliament. Above all, a fairly substantial group

of members was quite prepared, in principle, to help Charles to restore the

Scottish bishops in return for constitutional concessions. As Conrad Russell

noted, the division of opinion on this question ‘was not greatly different

from the division of opinion of August 1642’.

All this suggests that Laud

may have evoked much discontent and radicalised puritan opinion, but

that the implementation of puritan ideals was not yet a potentially pop-

ular programme. The history of the next twenty years, a period in which

military upheavals proved powerless to affect the national culture, suggests

it was never likely to become so. To grasp how the bishops nonetheless

provoked catastrophe, we must return to Laudian clericalism.

iii

It goes without saying that Laud was a believer in a strong church in a strong

monarchy, but if he had been asked to choose between these loyalties, there

could be little doubt of his decision. Unlike his mentor, Hooker, who had

denied that parliament was purely secular, Laud was convinced, in principle,

that churches should be governed by their clergy. Thus he believed that

clerical assemblies enjoyed an unrestricted power to legislate for churches,

though (as he put it in a private letter) ‘when and where these synods shall

be limited by the statute laws of any kingdom, then I conceive the law

must be submitted unto, till it may be helped’.

Even in a document that

he intended to be considered by the House of Lords, he was entirely open

about his attitude:

I will not dispute it here what power a lay assembly (and such a parliament is)

hath to determine matters of religion, primely and originally by and of themselves,

before the church hath ﬁrst agreed upon them. Then, indeed, they may conﬁrm

or refuse. And this course was held in the Reformation. But originally to take this

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

4th series 35 (1988), 88, 90.

Conrad Russell, The fall of the British monarchies, 1637–42 (Oxford, 1991), 121.

Laud, Works, vii 580.

The constitutionalist revolution 253

power over religion into lay hands is that which hath not been thus assumed since

Christ to these unhappy days.

Not surprisingly, then, he attached signiﬁcance to securing a judicial

declaration that bishops were fully entitled to hold courts in their own

names. When the judges obliged, in 1637,hedoubtless thought they had

afﬁrmed the proper theological position: bishops enjoyed inherent jurisdic-

tion enabling them, if necessary, to excommunicate, although the ‘exercise’

of such a power both could and should be scrutinised by monarchs. It says

much about the assumptions of the majority of English laymen that when-

ever this notion came to their attention they found it deeply shocking and

unacceptable. A rare exception to this rule was the parliamentarian writer

Henry Parker, who noted that almost all Protestant divines ‘hold princes

incompetent for spiritual [as opposed to ecclesiastical] regency’ and that it

was for this reason that ‘our prelates’ style is providentia divina, not gratia

Regis, and as they issue writs in their own names, so they use their own

arms in their seals, and not the king’s’.

ButParker was a writer of some

learning and great candour, and it was commoner to imply that Laud’s

opinions were somehow novel. The articles of impeachment that the arch-

bishop faced included the charge that ‘the said archbishop claims the king’s

ecclesiastical jurisdiction as incident to his episcopal and archiepiscopal

ofﬁce in this kingdom, and doth deny the same to be derived from the

crown of England’.

By 1642, some people believed that the English bish-

ops’ practice of holding diocesan courts in their own names was actually a

recent innovation.

Laud’s mischief-making enemy, John Williams, bishop

of Lincoln, knew just what he was doing when he associated his attack upon

the Laudian altar with an insistence that ‘power in matters ecclesiastical’

belonged to God alone, ‘before it came (by his and his only donation) to

be vested in the king’.

The fatal mistake that Laud made in 1640 was to encourage the anxiety

to which the subtle Williams had appealed. In the Short Parliament, the

House of Commons did not dispute that convocation had the right to

formulate laws for the clergy, but it was worried by the news that Charles had

empowered the assembly to proffer new canons, ‘the rather because of the

innovations brought in and practised before the grant of this commission’.

Ibid., vi 142.

Henry Parker, The true grounds of ecclesiasticall regiment (1641), 12.

The speech or declaration of John Pymm ...upon the delivery of the articles (1641), 9

Oliver St John, Master St John his speech in parliament (1642), sig. A3.Itisdoubtful if St John is the

true author of this text.

John Williams, The holy table name and thing (1637), 24.

Commons Journal, ii 11; Aston Diary, 50–3.

254 The Constitutionalist Revolution

This worry proved well founded. When the Short Parliament had been

dissolved, Charles ordered convocation to keep sitting. The clerical body

then voted him clerical taxes, and passed a succession of canons, including a

canon imposing an oath, inter alia, not to consent ‘to alter the government

of this church by archbishops, bishops, deans, and archdeacons &c.’

Even if it had not implied that the ofﬁce of archdeacon was too sacred to

be abolished by a human agent, this oath would have been a serious mistake.

It conﬁrmed what many moderates suspected: that Laudian ecclesiology

supplied an absolute constraint on the Supremacy. The future royalist mil-

itant George Digby regarded the oath as a ‘covenant against the king for

bishops and the hierarchy, as the Scottish covenant is against them, only

so much worse than the Scottish, as they [the Scots] admit not of the

Supremacy in ecclesiastical affairs, and we are sworn unto it’.

The future

parliamentarian Nathaniel Fiennes concurred that it was

against the law of the king’s Supremacy, in that it maketh archbishops, bishops,

deans, archdeacons etc. to be jure divino, whereas the law of this land hath annexed

to the imperial crown of this realm not only all ecclesiastical jurisdiction, but also

all superiority over the ecclesiastical state . . . it is against the oath of Supremacy

established by law point blank, for therein I am sworn not only to consent unto,

but also to assist and to the uttermost of my power to defend all jurisdictions,

pre-eminences etc. annexed to the imperial crown of this realm.

Thus Laudianism was more than just a challenge to the religious practice

of the English; it was also a threat to the nation’s political structure. In

some minds, of course, there was barely a distinction; as William Lam-

ont was able to show in his study of William Prynne, there were those

to whom the royal Supremacy was a fanatically held religious principle.

But what divided Laud and Charles from natural supporters such as Digby

was the perception that the rule of bishops had come to pose a consti-

tutional problem to which extensive church reform would be the best

solution.

Inaparliamentary setting, the canons played a crucial role in making a

puritan programme once more legitimate. They ﬁtted into an analysis that

treated the recent excesses as the foreseeable result of processes inherent in

an unreformed church order. Thus the ﬁrst of the regular ‘fast sermons’

to the House, preached by the puritan Cornelius Burges, declared that

Bray, Canons, 568.

George Digby, The speeches of the Lord Digby in the high court of parliament concerning grievances and

the triennial parliament (1641), 5–6.

A second speech of the honourable Nathaniel Fiennes (1641), 12.

William Lamont, Marginal Prynne, 1600–1669 (1963).

The constitutionalist revolution 255

‘the perfecting of the reformation of [the church]’ was the only way of

stopping the dynamic by which ‘the power of godliness will soon gener-

ate into formality, and zeal into lukewarmness, but popery, Arminianism,

Socinianism, profaneness, apostasy and atheism itself will more and more

crowd in upon us’. Burges proposed a covenant with God, while cautiously

stressing that ‘my meaning extends not to engage you in any civil covenant

and bond for defence of your municipal laws and liberties’. He did not

fail to point out, however, that ‘that late ecclesiastical oath and covenant’

was ‘little less than a combination and conspiracy against both king and

state’.

Oneofthe great advantages of those who thought like Burges was that

their viewpoint positively encouraged a thoroughly reductionist account of

‘popery’. Because the Roman Catholic faith was simply a fraud by the clergy,

its elements could be borrowed by non-papist ministers with similarly selﬁsh

purposes. There was no need, it followed, to hold that Laudians were actu-

ally secret Catholics. Nathaniel Fiennes explained that ‘one party had some

need of their [the papists’] principles to maintain their hierarchy, together

with their worldly pomp and ceremonies, which are appurtenances there-

unto’.

If a historical analogue was needed, Laud was in general compared

to Cardinal Wolsey, not to Cardinal Pole; his excesses were presumed to have

arisen from quite intelligible worldly motives. As one popular pamphlet put

it, ‘the Cardinal’s ambition was to be pope, the archbishop strove to be patri-

arch’.

Such an analysis could be accepted by moderate and sophisticated

people. Clarendon’s friend and ally Viscount Falkland was careful to avoid

support for old-fashioned puritan scruples, but thought that ‘some have evi-

dently laboured to bring in an English, though not a Roman popery. I mean

not only the outside and dress of it, but equally absolute a blind dependence

of the people upon the clergy and of the clergy upon themselves, and have

opposed the papacy beyond the sea, that they might settle one beyond the

water.’

It is striking that these were concessions that prefaced a convinced

defence of bishops. When even the church’s supporters decided to endorse

such hostile language, the puritans had clearly found a promising line of

attack.

Cornelius Burges, The ﬁrst sermon preached to the honourable House of Commons now assembled in

parliament at their public fast Novemb. 17 1640 (1641), sig. A3v–4, 56–7.

Nathaniel Fiennes, A speech of the honourable Nathanael Fiennes . . . in answere to the third speech of

the Lord George Digby (1641), 9.

Atrue description, or rather a parallel between Cardinall Wolsey, arch-bishop of York and William Laud

arch-bishop of Canterbury (1641), 7.

Viscount Falkland, A speech made to the House of Commons concerning episcopacy (1641), 7.

256 The Constitutionalist Revolution

We are now in a position to speak about the nature of the crisis that led

to a war between crown and parliament. It seems worth stressing, at the

start, that disagreements on this complex question are not, on the whole,

concerned with points of fact, but with the motives that inspired well-

documented actions. It is common ground that when the Long Parliament

met the English were astonishingly united in opposition to their govern-

ment. In November 1640, virtually no one seriously defended the secular

policies symbolised by Ship Money and personiﬁed by Thomas Wentworth,

earl of Strafford, or the religious policies symbolised by the practice of bow-

ing to the Altar and personiﬁed by archbishop William Laud. Scholars are

also generally agreed that the ﬁrst open threat to unity was the Root and

Branch petition against episcopacy delivered in December 1640, but not

discussed in parliament till 12 February.

Unfortunately, the divisions that the Petition caused are not at all straight-

forward to interpret. Not all its supporters were culturally godly; it cannot

be assumed, though, that a non-godly member who favoured Root and

Branch was broadly ‘secular’ in motivation. The body of the Petition was

cleverly drafted as an attack on lordly prelacy, and there were certainly epis-

copalians who disapproved of bishops who wielded secular power. It does

seem clear, however, that the etcetera oath had given a new legitimacy to

puritan proposals. Though the petitioners themselves were clearly puritan

(the schedule of complaints annexed was an old-fashioned godly docu-

ment), the starting point of the Petition proper was actually an erastian

statement:

That whereas the government of archbishops and lord bishops, deans and archdea-

cons, etc., with their courts and ministrations in them, have proved prejudicial and

very dangerous both to the church and commonwealth, they themselves having

formerly held, that they have their jurisdiction or authority of human authority,

till of these later times, being further pressed about the unlawfulness, that they

have claimed their calling immediately from the Lord Jesus Christ, which is against

the laws of this kingdom, and derogatory to his Majesty and his state royal.

In consequence, they requested that ‘the said government, with all its depen-

dencies, roots and branches, may be abolished, and all laws in their behalf

made void and the government according to God’s word may be rightly

placed among us’. It was clear that they had called for the destruction of

the church’s apparatus of deans, chapters, and church courts; it was not,

Kenyon, Stuart constitution, 154.

The constitutionalist revolution 257

however, obvious that ‘government according to God’s word’ was neces-

sarily incompatible with some kind of reduced episcopacy. This probably

explains the curious fact that the petition was brought in by the episco-

palian MP Sir Edward Dering, who later plausibly explained that he did so

‘to expedite the progress of another bill against the secular jurisdiction of

the bishops’.

Support for Root and Branch was not, then, necessarily a sign of a

commitment to ultra-Protestant theology. Conversely, opposition to the

measure was typically less an expression of devotion to the bishops than of

a hostile attitude to cultural godliness, especially when it could be seen as

crypto-democratic. From one possible perspective, the popular enthusiasm

for further Reformation could be a reason for resisting it; thus Edmund

Waller struck a sensitive nerve when he said that ‘I look upon episcopacy

as a counter-scarf, or outwork, which if it shall be taken by this assault of

the people, and withal this mystery once revealed, that we must deny them

nothing when they ask it thus in troops...wemayhaveashardatask to

defend our propriety.’

Anxieties of this general type proved valuable allies

for Charles; one mark of the great cultural success of England’s conservative-

minded reformation is that the godly gained and kept a radical reputation

when they had done so little to deserve it.

What makes the power of such fears particularly striking is that the

members of the House of Commons continued to agree on other issues,

including the need for Charles’s minister, the earl of Strafford, to be found

guilty of committing treason. The law involved in Strafford’s trial was

somewhat intricate, in part because so much of the feeling against him

rested upon his conduct in his time in Ireland, but two conclusions can

be drawn from a confusing story. One is that the focus of loyalty was

shifting. It was widely agreed that attacks upon laws could be treason, if

only because laws supplied ‘the very subsistence of kings’.

It could indeed

be said without much fear of contradiction that ‘treason against the person

of a prince is high treason...butitfalls short of this treason against the

state’.

The other is that proceedings against Strafford depended on a ﬂexible

conception of the law and willingness to emphasise the Houses’ court-

like status. It is well known that the Commons switched their tactics,

A collection of speeches made by Sir Edward Dering (1642), 3.

Edmund Waller, A speech made by Master Waller Esquire in the honorable House of Commons,

concerning episcopacie (1641), 4.

In answer to the earle of Straford’s conclusion (1641), 1.

Mr Maynards speech before both Houses in parliament (1641), 3.

258 The Constitutionalist Revolution

moving from a conventional impeachment towards the more direct

approach involved in an act of attainder. But though the earl had mounted

a formidable defence of his behaviour, the shift in approach was probably

not caused by an access of doubt that he was in a technical sense guilty. The

Commons explanation of what was happening (delivered, as it happens, by

Oliver St John) insisted that ‘the legislative power is not used against my

lord of Strafford in the bill; it’s only the jurisdiction of the parliament’.

This actually made life more difﬁcult for any Commons member with con-

scientious qualms; it involved their House assuming shared responsibility

for an adjudicative course of action. There was little attempt, however, to

challenge their adoption of this function. When Lord George Digby tried to

rescue Strafford, he admitted that even the Commons had ‘a double power

of life and death by bill, a judicial power and a legislative’, but complained

that the two powers were being conﬂated.

In the end, the matter hinged on a technical question. The declaratory

statute of 25 Edward III, the basis of the English law of treason, included

a clause that provided ‘that because many other like cases of treason might

fall out which are not there declared, therefore it is enacted, That if any such

case come before the judges, they shall not proceed to judgement till the case

be declared in parliament’. Interpretation of this clause provided a sensitive

index of legal attitudes. To Strafford’s opponents, it seemed obvious that

this residual parliamentary power was in itself a part of common law; a

mechanism of this sort would be a necessary part of any legal system. As

an answer to Digby explained

To deny unto that representative body the high court of the kingdom a liberty to

do anything not unjust in itself (though not as yet legally declared to be just) for

the preservation of that greater body it represents, when according the sincere and

dispassionate judgement of prudence and policy, it cannot be sufﬁciently secured

by laws already made, is neither agreeable to the law of nature, nor of the land,

nor of God.

The point seemed clear to anyone whose view of common law prioritised

the thought that law was reason above the thought that reason is expressed

in rigid rules. However, a number of qualiﬁed observers insisted that the

crucial clause was merely a proviso, an element of the statute that had

been subsequently superseded. They included Robert Holborne, and also,

Oliver St John, An argument of law concerning the bill of attainder of high-treason of Thomas earle of

Strafford (1641), 69.

SirGeorge Digby, The lord George Digby his last speech against the earle of Strafford (1641), 11.

An answer to the Lord Digbies speech in the House of Commons (1641), 17.