Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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and the practice of the early church, whose traditions they sought to recover.

Unlike the majority of Elizabethan and Jacobean protestants, who had iden-

tiﬁed the papacy with Antichrist, they regarded Rome as a true church that

had become tainted through the ages by erroneous doctrine, superstition, and

false political pretensions. They were therefore objectionable to the broadly

Calvinist sector of English protestants on three grounds: they failed to recog-

nize the utter falsity and iniquity of popery; they were suspect on those doc-

trines which had long been a touchstone of the differences between the

Reformed churches and Rome; and their ritual practices smacked of popish

superstition. In particular their placing of the communion table where the

pre-Reformation altar had stood, their raising it above the level of the chan-

cel and shutting it off with rails, and their insistence that communicants

should kneel at the rail to receive the sacrament, all offended the puritan view

of the Lord’s Supper as essentially an act of commemoration by suggesting

the catholic belief that the celebrant was re-enacting the sacriﬁce of Christ’s

body. Thus Arminianism came to be seen as a kind of creeping popery, and

even as part of a design, in partnership with catholics and crypto-catholics in

high places, to lead the national church back by degrees into the Roman fold.

This was as unjustiﬁed as the attempt by some so-called Arminians to brand

their opponents as puritans merely for upholding doctrines, especially pre-

destinarian doctrines, which had not only been permissible in the established

church but had until lately predominated in it.

With these changes came a sharp contraction of the de facto toleration that

had characterized Abbot’s long archiepiscopate. The new authoritarianism

and the drive for uniformity owed at least as much to the king as to Laud and

his fellow bishops. Charles’s support for the Arminians was based less on a

preference for their doctrine than on a growing hatred of puritans, who he

thought were bent on subverting his own royal authority. Church and state,

he believed, needed a parallel assertion of discipline and hierarchy. Con-

vinced that kingship itself was sacramental in character, he sensed a strong

afﬁnity between the reverence, ceremony, and mystery with which the Armi-

nians sought to endow religious worship, and the deference and ritual with

which he surrounded his own presence. For laymen to challenge the one was

as bad as for disrespectful subjects to profane the other. ‘Popular reforma-

tion’, in his words, was ‘little better than rebellion’, and as he said to Arch-

bishop Neile in 1634, ‘the neglect of punishing puritans breeds papists’. He

forbade public preaching and discussion concerning the vexed points of pre-

destination, not because he himself held strong views about them, but

because they were ‘too high for the people’s understanding’.

There was no

78 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

Quotation from Julian Davies, The Caroline Captivity of the Church (Oxford, 1992),

pp. 10, 11, 17. I am greatly indebted to Dr Davies’s profound study and if my brief account fails

to reﬂect its depth and originality adequately it is for lack of space rather than any reservations.

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total ban on the publication of theological and devotional works upholding

Calvinist doctrine, but all books had to be licensed by the Bishop of London

(or his ofﬁcials) or by one of the two universities, and after the transformation

wrought by Charles’s wholesale promotion of Arminians it was undoubtedly

easier to obtain licenses for writings of their school than for those of a strong-

ly predestinarian standpoint.

Charles had a deep distrust of unregulated preaching, and especially of lec-

turers supported or endowed by laymen. The Instructions that he issued in

1629, based on a document prepared by Archbishop Harsnett of York, went

much further than his father’s 1622 ban on public controversy over predes-

tination. The only lecturers that they sanctioned were clergymen holding liv-

ings in the town concerned or in the near neighbourhood, and all lecturers

were required to read divine service, wearing surplice and hood, before they

preached. Afternoon sermons, with which puritans had widely supplemented

the morning one (if it was preached at all), were to be replaced by catechizing,

according to the strict form prescribed by the Prayer Book. The Instructions

also sought to put a stop to the practice of many of the gentry who kept un-

licensed clergymen in their households as domestic chaplains or as tutors for

their children, for they restricted the keeping of chaplains to those—mainly

the peerage—who were speciﬁcally qualiﬁed by law to employ them. Not

long after, Charles and Laud put an end to a venture that had been launched

in 1625 by twelve Londoners, who had formed a trust to collect charitable

donations in order to buy up tithes that had fallen into lay hands and church

livings whose right of presentation had become lay property. In the next half-

dozen years these Feoffees for Impropriations raised considerable funds and

many bequests, and applied them to endowing lectureships, supplementing

the stipends of inadequately paid preaching ministers, and acquiring the right

of presentation to many livings. This was undoubtedly a puritan enterprise,

though a moderate one, and Laud saw it as a cunning conspiracy to over-

throw established church government. In 1632 the Attorney-General pros-

ecuted the Feoffees in the Exchequer court as an illegal corporation; next year

they were dissolved by its order, and their assets conﬁscated to the crown.

It was essentially Charles’s decision to reissue his father’s Book of Sports in

1633, and to require every beneﬁced clergyman to read it out in his church.

He disliked the strict observance of the sabbath, which he regarded as a

speciﬁcally puritan tenet—wrongly, because it had been enjoined by church-

men of all colours in James’s reign. It was also almost certainly his personal

decision in the following year, though Bishops Wren and Piers probably

advised it, to order that communion tables must be kept at the east end

during the communion service, and that communicants must kneel at the rails

to receive the sacrament. Even Laud had reservations about this, and did not

enforce the instruction rigidly; indeed only three bishops imposed it really

The New Reign 79

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strictly, including Wren and Piers. Signiﬁcantly, enforcement was to be most

rigorous in much of East Anglia, which was to be the most strongly parlia-

mentarian region of rural England, whereas royalist support was to be ﬁrmest

in dioceses where receiving at the rail was not insisted upon.

But if Laud had to carry the odium for some policies which were really

more the king’s, there were others for which he more than shared the respon-

sibility. His was a complex character, which comes over much more sympa-

thetically in his diary and his letters to his friends than in his public actions

and pronouncements. He was utterly upright, dedicated to an ideal of a puri-

ﬁed church, and punishingly hard-working in pursuit of it. He was as keen as

any puritan to recover for the church the impropriated tithes and other assets

that had fallen into lay hands and apply them to the maintenance of an edu-

cated and devoted parish clergy, but he could not abide lay initiative in the

work, and the clergy he supported had to be conformist. Though deeply

authoritarian, he was not at heart inhumane or tyrannical. But he had a

brusque, forbidding manner and a ﬁery temper, which he frequently lost, not

least at meetings of the privy council. On one famous occasion the Lord Chief

Justice, Sir Thomas Richardson, acceded to a petition from some JPs in Som-

erset and issued an order for the suppression of church ales and wakes in the

county. Unfortunately he went beyond his powers by requiring it to be pub-

lished in the local churches. Furious at this encroachment on ecclesiastical

authority, Laud had him summoned before a committee of the privy council

and so savaged him there that this most senior judge complained that he had

‘been almost choked with a pair of lawn sleeves’.

Laud was a somewhat

lonely ﬁgure at court, not only on account of his hectoring manner and total

lack of courtly graces, but because of the conspicuous gap between his social

origins (his father had been a clothier in Reading) and the pomp that he

assumed as archbishop. When he rode out from Lambeth Palace, forty or ﬁfty

mounted attendants accompanied him, and ushers roughly cleared the way

for his cortège.

During the 1630s an unprecedented number of clergymen were prosecuted

for nonconformity in the diocesan courts. Laud’s drive for stricter regulation

reached its peak between 1634 and 1637, when he revived a pre-Reformation

procedure and instituted a ‘metropolitical visitation’ of the whole province of

Canterbury. Armed with a voluminous questionnaire concerning the fabric

and furniture of churches, the behaviour and garb of the clergy, the precise

conduct of services, sermons, catechizing, and a great deal else, his Vicar-

General Sir Nathaniel Brent traversed the whole of England south of Trent,

interrogating parsons and churchwardens on every point. Needless to say he

uncovered many disorders, many evasions of the strict letter of the Prayer

80 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

Trevor-Roper, Archbishop Laud, pp. 156–8.

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Book, and much equivocation over the controversial ‘ceremonies’. Laud’s

own preference was to secure conformity by persuasion rather than coercion,

and fewer clergymen were suspended or deprived than might have been if his

and the king’s instructions had been enforced with full rigour, but the pres-

sure to conform was keenly felt. Some bishops, notably Wren of Norwich

(later Ely) and Piers of Bath and Wells, applied it more high-handedly than

Laud himself. And behind the diocesan judicial machinery stood the Court of

High Commission, which acquired a quite new unpopularity in the 1630s—

an unpopularity that rubbed off on the crown, since it ultimately derived its

authority from the royal prerogative. It was used not only to discipline errant

clergy but to prosecute noblemen and gentlemen for moral offences, and to

harass them into making ever more of their impropriated tithes to the main-

tenance of the clergy.

Laud also bears much responsibility for making the other great prerogative

court, Star Chamber, unpopular as it had never been before. The most notori-

ous case tried there, in 1637, was that of William Prynne, John Bastwick,

and Henry Burton, who had committed the unpardonable crime of attacking

in print the whole order of bishops. They were sentenced to be branded, to

have their ears cut off, to stand in the pillory, to pay ﬁnes of £5,000 each, and

to suffer life imprisonment. Their prosecution proved to be one of Laud’s and

Charles’s worst mistakes, for the oppressive proceedings and the savagery of

the sentences recoiled against their accusers; branding, mutilation, and the pil-

lory were not penalties to be imposed on gentlemen. The demonstrations of

sympathy that greeted the victims’ addresses from the pillory and accompan-

ied them to their places of imprisonment gave them a moral victory. It was

quite an achievement to make martyrs of men as unlovable as Prynne and

Burton but Laud believed that people who attacked the principle of hierarchy

in the church could be no loyal subjects of the king, and Charles agreed with

him. Preaching at the opening of parliament in 1626, Laud said:

They, whoever they be, that would overthrow sedes ecclesiae, the seats of ecclesias-

tical government, will not spare (if ever they get power) to have a pluck at the throne

of David. And there is not a man that is for parity, all fellows in the church, but he is

not for monarchy in the state.

This was of the same order of extravagance as the belief of Laud’s opponents

that he and his fellow-Arminians were hand in glove with papists in a design

to bring the Church of England back to Rome.

Not everything that Laud attempted was unpopular, and endeavours that

were disliked by some were probably well taken by others. The ﬁrm pressure

that he put on patrons of livings to bear their share in repairing delapidated

churches may have been resented by the gentry who felt it, but welcome

The New Reign 81

Prothero, Select Statutes and Constitutional Documents, p. 435.

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enough to their humbler fellow-parishioners. Squires doubtless complained

at the enforced removal of their high-sided box pews, whose privileged pos-

ition often cluttered the chancel, but ordinary worshippers must have been

glad to get a proper view of the services for the ﬁrst time. The reverent rituals,

the fuller observance of the church’s festivals, and the enhancement of wor-

ship with what Laud called ‘the beauty of holiness’ all offended puritans, but

may well have been better liked by simple countryfolk, and not only by them.

When the Long Parliament tried to outlaw the Prayer Book rites and services

after the Civil War, it encountered a deep and widespread popular affection

for them. Even the bitterly opposed altar rails cannot have been universally

unpopular, for many parishes restored them spontaneously on the eve of the

Restoration, before the Anglican order was formally reinstated. Laud’s

efforts to make well-to-do Londoners pay tithes may have done more to

heighten anticlericalism than to raise the clergy’s living standards, but it was

an honest attempt to redress the unfair share of the tithes burden that small

countrymen bore. Laud laboured hard to recover all sorts of ecclesiastical

assets that had been quietly appropriated by the laity, and to apply them to

improving the incomes of the clergy, but his achievement was very limited,

because of all his major aims this was the one in which he had least support

from the king.

Looking at the Caroline church from the perspective of 1640, few if any of

the directives that Charles and his favoured prelates had imposed on it were

totally without precedent, yet collectively they effected a qualitative change in

its character. Where there had been a fairly wide and often longstanding var-

iety of liturgical and ritual practice there was now a high degree of conform-

ity, much of it unwillingly yielded. Whereas the main thrust of the Jacobean

church had been evangelical and the involvement of the laity in the work had

been generally welcome, the emphasis was now on sacerdotalism and sacra-

mentalism; preaching was constrained and lay initiatives discouraged. There

was a much stronger assertion of clerical authority, especially episcopal

authority. The church courts, busier now but scarcely more efﬁcient,

acquired an unprecedented unpopularity. The swing from a predominantly

Calvinist to a predominantly anti-Calvinist theology had begun before

Charles’s accession, but his weighting of the scales in the Arminians’ favour

and the relative difﬁculty with which strict predestinarians could preach,

publish, or ﬁnd preferment raised fears that the church’s protestant faith was

under threat. Absurd though the charges were that Charles and Laud were

heading the country back to Rome, these changes did amount to what can

fairly be called a catholicization of the Church of England, a kind of counter-

reformation in a minor key. They shifted it away from sisterhood with the

Reformed churches of Europe, and claimed it as a true daughter of the

catholic apostolic church of the early Christian centuries.

82 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

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To many modern Anglicans the ecclesiastical policies of the 1630s may

look almost entirely admirable, but we have to consider how they struck con-

temporaries. Charles’s subjects saw them against the background of the

strongly protestant church in which they had grown up; against the back-

ground too of the long and bloody wars on the continent, which to many rep-

resented a struggle between the gospel and Antichrist. They linked them with

the cruciﬁx on the altar in the Chapel Royal, with the ritual observed there,

with the king’s practice and advocacy of frequent confession, with his uxori-

ousness towards his catholic wife, with his frank pleasure in the company of

successive papal agents to her court, and with the increasingly fashionable

conversions that they effected among her courtiers. It was not enough that he

publicly deplored those conversions, and disapproved of the freedom with

which English catholics worshipped in her chapel and in those of

foreign ambassadors, or that he trebled the crown’s income from recusancy

ﬁnes. Since some of his own senior ministers were generally believed to be

crypto-catholics, the association in the public mind of Arminianism with

popery and of the court with both is not surprising, especially after the return

to a strongly pro-Spanish orientation in foreign policy from 1637 onward.

Fears of a pervasive popish plot were of course less rational, but Gunpowder

Treason and the conspiracies against Queen Elizabeth’s life were vivid in the

folk memory.

The Great Migration to New England coincided almost exactly with the

personal rule. Between 1629 and 1640 about 60,000 men, women, and chil-

dren made the journey, and far more than in the case of Virginia and the other

older colonies whole families wound up their affairs in England and sailed to

Massachusetts together. By no means all of them emigrated for religious rea-

sons, but the high proportion who did brave such a vast and perilous change

of life for the sake of their faith, and the number of ordained ministers who

sailed with them, are eloquent testimony that for a signiﬁcant sector of the

English people the only religion permitted to them by law had become offen-

sive to their consciences to a degree unprecedented before Charles’s reign. In

contrast with the Mayﬂower pilgrims, who were avowed separatists, the

great majority who sailed in the 1630s had always regarded themselves as

members of the national church, and severed communion with it reluctantly.

Many more were contemplating emigration as the only way of ﬁnding reli-

gious freedom, including one Oliver Cromwell, when the change in Charles’s

fortunes gave them fresh hope at home. The Massachusetts Bay Company was

not the only colonizing venture with a religious complexion, for Viscount

Saye and Sele and Lord Brooke, both strong puritans, founded the Saybrook

Company for the settlement of Connecticut; while the Providence Island Com-

pany, which aimed to establish a puritan colony in the Caribbean, became

politically important at home because it kept so many future leaders of the

The New Reign 83

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Long Parliament in close touch during the years when the two houses at West-

minster stood empty.

The effect of Caroline policies on Ireland and its religious communities

will be traced in a later chapter. It was in Scotland, however, that they ﬁrst

provoked open rebellion, so to Scotland we must turn next.

84 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

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four

Storm over Scotland

When James VI (as he was styled in his native land) died he left his Scottish

subjects nursing a number of discontents, but none so serious as to threaten

to make them ungovernable. Rule by an absentee king imposed an inevitable

strain, but James knew his people and understood the problems. When he

ﬁrst departed for England he promised to revisit Scotland every three years,

but he did so only once, in 1617. During his ﬁrst decade or so as James I of

England he surrounded himself with Scots to an extent that aroused serious

resentment among English courtiers, and for much longer he kept in touch by

summoning his chief advisers in Scotland, one after another, to come and

report on the state of affairs there and counsel him on his Scottish policy. He

also added a powerful group of Scottish peers to the English privy council,

thus giving it, quite informally, a British dimension.

He was sensitive to Scottish fears of being reduced to a province, but he

could not wholly allay them because they had some foundation. The absence

of a royal court denied the old nobility the natural arena in which they had

hitherto wielded political inﬂuence, and deprived the merchants and manu-

facturers around Edinburgh of a vital economic stimulus. Scottish adminis-

tration became increasingly the preserve of a smallish group of leading civil

servants and courtiers, among whom faction was rife and corruption not

uncommon. James’s practice of freely ennobling the more successful of them

created a potential rift between the old aristocracy and the new noblesse de

robe. In his later years his government became less sensitive to Scottish aspir-

ations and susceptibilities. New taxes, and (as in England) the sale of monop-

olies to courtiers and speculators, raised doubts about the government’s

probity, and its failure to protect the Scottish currency against the circulation

of dubious foreign dollars gave the mercantile community a serious problem

and a well-founded grievance. On the political and religious front, the forcing

through of the Five Articles of Perth made many think that even the emascu-

lated Scottish parliament had been pushed too far, and revived what had been

a waning Presbyterian faction among a new generation of ministers.

Charles showed no awareness that ruling Scotland as an absentee monarch

presented any serious problem at all. Until he had reigned for nearly eight

ch4.y8 27/9/02 10:26 AM Page 85

years the only Scotsmen whom he knew personally were those at his English

court. He had been less than four years old when, as a sickly child who had

only recently learnt to walk and talk, he had followed his parents south in

1604. He did not revisit Scotland until his coronation as King of Scots

twenty-nine years later, and his next and last appearance there was in 1641.

He had none of his father’s old hankering for a union of the crowns and an

integrated kingdom of Great Britain, and he was far less sensitive to Scottish

fears of becoming a mere province. His aim was not, however, to subor-

dinate Scotland to England but to subject it to his personal authority. It suited

him that it was a separate kingdom, because with its weaker institutions he

thought he could control it better.

Like James, he governed through a privy council in Edinburgh, but in vari-

ous ways he changed its character as well as its personnel. He initially

appointed forty-seven councillors, including twenty-seven noblemen who

held no ofﬁce of state. But since attendance gave the latter no direct contact

with the king, few of them ever appeared, and the real decision-making

devolved upon a small core of ofﬁcials. These indeed protested when he raised

the quorum to eight, for they did not always muster so many. The real innov-

ations, however, lay in his rigid separation of the privy council from the Court

of Session, Scotland’s highest law court, and the exclusion from the latter not

only of councillors but of noblemen. In principle it seemed a progressive move

to separate the executive from the judicial function and to clear the Court of

Session of nobles with no professional qualiﬁcation in law. In practice it

involved the removal from the court of some who had been appointed judges

for life, which was doubtfully legal, and the disqualiﬁcation from the council

of some of its most expert and experienced members, the legally trained ones

who were also judges. There had been a time in James’s reign when all

members of the Court of Session had been privy councillors. The real purpose

of these ‘reforms’ was not to achieve constitutional propriety, however, but

to forestall any questioning by either the council or the judiciary of a measure

that Charles had prepared with an absolute minimum of consultation, and

now expected his Scottish servants to implement without discussion. This

was his act of revocation.

There had been so many royal minorities in Scotland—Charles was in fact

the ﬁrst monarch in over two centuries to inherit the crown at an age above

ﬁfteen—that it had become the accepted right of a new king, on arriving at an

age between twenty-one and twenty-ﬁve, to revoke any grants of royal prop-

erty that had been made in his name before he assumed the personal exercise

of the royal authority. Since there had been no minority, he being twenty-four

at his accession, Charles’s right to an act of revocation was questionable, yet

he intended not only to exercise it but to extend it beyond the practice of his

predecessors. On the basis of earlier statutes which had made it illegal ever to

86 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

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alienate land annexed to the crown without parliament’s consent, his act

revoked grants not only of crown property but of that of the Kirk, and not

only those made during minorities but all such grants since 1540—sixty years

before he was born. The signiﬁcance of the date is that it preceded the Scot-

tish Reformation and the dissolution of the religious houses, so the title of all

ecclesiastical property that had passed into lay hands during and since those

events was now in question. Not only were vast quantities of land at stake,

but a comparable slice of the country’s wealth in the shapes of tithes, or teinds

as they were called in Scotland. And unlike most earlier acts of revocation,

Charles’s had teeth.

Every substantial landowner in the country was threatened by Charles’s

act, the nobility most of all, but he never intended to exploit the powers that

he had assumed to the full. He had several objects in mind, most of them jus-

tiﬁable in principle. He wanted to show the magnates who was master, and to

curb the power that they wielded through hereditary ofﬁces and other feudal

rights. He wanted to make the terms on which some of them held their land

more favourable to the crown, and generally to improve its revenues. He

wanted to settle the confusions and ambiguities that undoubtedly beset the

payment of teinds, and by means of them to provide better for the many

parish clergy with woefully inadequate livings. What he failed to appreciate

sufﬁciently was that by threatening most of the landed classes with large-scale

dispossession, and then graciously regranting to them most of what they had

long regarded as their own, he would earn not gratitude but resentment and

distrust. It looks very much as though, in assuming such powers and imple-

menting them as secretively and selectively as he did, he was bent on asserting

his authority in a manner that would set the tone for his reign. Equally with-

out consultation, and to scarcely less consternation, he erected a council of

war and a similarly novel commission of exchequer, and he re-established a

commission for grievances (ﬁrst set up in 1623) with powers so enlarged that

it was plausibly seen as an attempt to introduce a Scottish Star Chamber.

Amazingly, he expected his chief ministers to authenticate the act of revo-

cation unquestioningly with the great seal and privy seal of Scotland, and the

privy council to enforce it without even having a sight of its text before it was

a fait accompli. He must have been very ill-informed about previous revoca-

tions, for he was genuinely surprised that his own raised such a fuss. When the

privy council protested against the whole packet of measures that it was

ordered to implement in October and November 1625, he was seriously

offended. A group of councillors took the wintry roads south to put their case

to him, which they did at a series of meetings in the withdrawing chamber at

Whitehall in January. It tells us something about his style of kingship that on

these occasions he alone was seated; Buckingham stood on his left, the Lord

Chancellor of Scotland on his right, and when the Scottish councillors spoke

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