Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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compel his subjects to furnish ships for the defence of the kingdom when it

was in danger, and that he was the sole judge of that danger and the necessary

means to avert it.

Each year, however, the collection of Ship Money became a little slower

and less complete, though even in 1637 nine tenths of the £196,413 demanded

was eventually paid. But at the time that that sum was being brought in, two

new factors were making the public drag its feet. One was Scotland’s progress

towards rebellion and Charles’s preparations for meeting it with force;

the other was John Hampden’s trial. Flat refusals to pay were still uncom-

mon, but the government could no longer ignore them, and Hampden, a close

associate of Eliot who had sat in all the parliaments of the 1620s and had

already been imprisoned for refusing the Forced Loan, was chosen for a test

case. It began in November 1637 amid intense public interest, and it was over

three months before all the judges had delivered their judgments. Only seven

of the twelve found for the crown, and though the grounds on which

the other ﬁve upheld Hampden were narrow and technical, the minimal

majority for the government spelt a moral defeat. Oliver St John’s brilliant

speech as Hampden’s counsel was in effect an eloquent assertion of the neces-

sity of parliaments, whereas Justice Berkeley’s extravagant claims for the

crown did Charles no favours. For pronouncements such as ‘rex is lex, lex

loquens, a living, a speaking, an acting law’ Berkeley was to be impeached by

the Long Parliament.

It can be said for Ship Money that it was paid into the Treasury of the Navy

and used for nothing else but the king’s ships and their crews. From 1635 the

Ship Money ﬂeet was the best that England had put to sea for many years; it

raised her standing in Europe, and its protection of the growing volume of

English shipping was undoubtedly in the national interest. But the navy had

never before depended on regular extra-parliamentary taxation, and it was

never to do so again. An even ﬁner ﬂeet was to be maintained under the

Commonwealth out of parliamentary revenue, including of course the cus-

toms. Contemporaries were justiﬁed in seeing Ship Money, once it was levied

annually, as a means of averting the calling of a parliament indeﬁnitely and as

a breach of the spirit of the Petition of Right; for the ofﬁcial arguments that it

was a rate and not a tax, and that the king was not demanding money but

commanding the provision of ships, cut little ice with men whose possessions

were distrained if they did not pay a very speciﬁc sum in cash.

The shortfall in payment only became really worrying in 1638, when the

Scots openly rebelled in a cause that commanded much English sympathy,

and collection only collapsed in 1639, when the counties were facing the

68 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

Gardiner, Constitutional Documents gives long extracts from Berkeley’s speech on

pp. 115–24, and from St John’s on pp. 109–15.

ch3.y8 25/9/02 4:42 PM Page 68

simultaneous costs of ﬁelding an army in the First Bishops’ War. The striking

success of Ship Money until then has been taken as evidence that it was not

seriously unpopular until the government’s policies aroused widespread

opposition for other reasons. We should not suppose, however, that the fact

that it was paid more or less obediently for ﬁve years is any indication that it

was paid willingly. The habit of obedience was strong among gentry magis-

trates and subordinate ofﬁcers in counties and towns and villages, because

any breach in co-operation between them and the privy council, or among

themselves, could pose a serious threat to peace and order in their localities.

Outright refusal was a risk that few were willing to take until men of Hamp-

den’s standing set an example, because with no prospect of a parliament to

liberate them they might languish in prison as long as Strode and Valentine.

Moreover the amounts demanded of individuals were not large, because Ship

Money was paid by several times as many people as were assessed for parlia-

mentary subsidies. The poorest contributed as little as a penny, while the gen-

try were as usual grossly under-assessed; the sum which Hampden, one of the

richest squires in Buckinghamshire, refused to pay was £1. The sheriff, to

whom the Ship Money writs were addressed, had a strong motive for putting

the pressure on the constables and other subordinate ofﬁcers, since if he failed

to deliver his county’s quota he had either to pay the deﬁcit himself or face the

council’s wrath and stay in harness until he had collected the arrears. Ship

Money made the sheriff ’s ofﬁce so nearly intolerable that fewer and fewer

members of county families were willing to undertake it; thus forcing the

government to ﬁll it in some cases from lower in the social scale or from men

who lived outside the county, and so straining the delicate system of co-

operation upon which local administration depended.

Despite the rarity of open refusals before 1638, there were so many protests

over the sums demanded of particular localities that they only half-conceal a

resentment of the levy itself. As soon as Ship Money was extended to the

inland counties, the privy council was so overwhelmed with complaints,

appeals, and requests for direction that it was unable to continue the pro-

gramme of reform that it had been genuinely trying to pursue in the earlier

1630s, and the efﬁciency of central government was impaired. And when the

country ﬁnally went on a tax strike in 1639, under the double burden of Ship

Money and ‘coat and conduct’ money (for the troops on the march towards

Scotland), it was largely because unpaid constables would no longer go on

wringing pennies out of neighbours poorer than themselves.

The traditional system of local government by unpaid magistrates survived

the years of personal rule in fair working order, but this should not be taken

as evidence (as it sometimes has been) that non-parliamentary rule was

broadly acceptable to the gentry elite of the shires. They shared a common

interest with central government in maintaining order and keeping the

The New Reign 69

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poorer sort tolerably content, and they were reluctant to forfeit the prestige

which the commission of the peace conferred. The king had sharply warned

them against agitating for a parliament, and if he chose not to call one there

was nothing they could do about it. Non-cooperation was not an option. The

lines were kept open between central and local government when the assize

judges went on their circuits twice a year, and commenced their proceedings

in each county by delivering a charge to the assembled JPs. It was a reminder

that they were engaged in the common enterprise of enforcing the law of the

land, and before they set out the judges were collectively briefed by the Lord

Keeper of the Great Seal in Star Chamber. The lord lieutenant could be an-

other channel of communication, especially if he resided in his county for at

least part of the year.

Early in 1631, in a time of dearth and high unemployment, the privy coun-

cil sent out to all counties a comprehensive set of directions known as the

Book of Orders. It used to be seen as inaugurating a new and paternalistic

social policy and as a major extension of royal control over local government.

In fact it was essentially traditional in spirit, in line with occasional earlier

drives to improve the quality of local administration, and it was almost entirely

the work of the Earl of Manchester, the father of the parliamentarian gen-

eral. The remedies that it prescribed—poor relief, provision of work, securing

adequate local supplies of grain and so on—were mostly of Tudor origin and

already widely applied in many counties. What was new in the Book of

Orders was that it required the quarter sessions everywhere to return quar-

terly certiﬁcates to the council, reporting their execution of its directions.

This, rather than the directions themselves, caused some resentment, because

local magistrates felt that they could judge their communities’ needs better

than the men in Whitehall, and that they were already doing their best to meet

them. For a year or two the Book had a noticeable effect, but the quarterly

reports came in very irregularly. In 1633 more than half the counties failed to

return any at all, and those that sent fewest included some of the best gov-

erned. The results might have been more positive if the council had had the

time and the personnel to read and act on the reports that were sent in, but

from the mid-1630s it all but sank under the labour of administering Ship

Money. The Book of Orders merely created a short-term stir in a long-term

momentum towards improvement which owed more to the initiative and

concern of county magistrates than to central direction; the provision of poor

relief, for instance, improved more under the Commonwealth than in

Charles’s reign down to 1640.

The Book was almost certainly less of a strain

70 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

B. W. Quintrell, ‘The making of Charles I’s Book of Orders’, English Historical Review

XCV (1980); P. Slack, ‘Books of Orders: the making of English social policy, 1577–1631’,

Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, XXX (1981); Anthony Fletcher, Reform

ch3.y8 25/9/02 4:42 PM Page 70

on the gentry’s tolerance of non-parliamentary rule than Ship Money and the

other ﬁnancial exactions that bore on them. But strain there certainly was.

Turning from the country to the court, the greater formality that Charles had

introduced at his accession became even more marked during the personal

rule. What he had seen of the King of Spain’s court—its august ceremony, its

hierarchy, its reverence for the throne, and its highly ritualistic religious wor-

ship—had left an enduring mark on him. In or about 1630 he personally

signed a comprehensive set of regulations for the conduct of his household

and entourage which demonstrate his preoccupation with the physical pre-

sentation of majesty. Entry into the precincts of the court was to be strictly

checked, and access to the Presence Chamber, Privy Chamber, and above all

the royal bedchamber was exactly regulated. Misconduct by ofﬁcers of the

household was to be severely punished, and immorality on the part of

courtiers, even the highest, was not to be tolerated. It was an austere ethos

that he aimed to inculcate, far from the pleasure-loving cavalierism of the

popular image. The ceremony laid down for the Chapel Royal might have

made a modern intruder wonder quite who was being worshipped, God or his

lieutenant on earth, though Charles would have been shocked by the sugges-

tion. The enormous importance that he attached to the Order of the Garter

and its ceremonies again reﬂects his constant attention to the image of

royalty. He longed for the brave new Whitehall Palace that Inigo Jones had

designed, and of which only the Banqueting House was built; it would have

given the royal presence a setting of appropriate splendour, and set him at a

proper distance from all but his closest servants and greatest subjects.

In recent years there has been great interest in the masques, plays, and

poems that entertained the court, and in the paintings and music that the king

or his chief courtiers commissioned. It need hardly be said that the work of such

men as Anthony Van Dyck, Inigo Jones, Ben Jonson, Thomas Carew, Richard

Lovelace, Sir John Suckling, and the brother composers Henry and William

Lawes is highly worthy of attention in itself. It has been argued, however, that

the Caroline court masques should be studied as not merely the diversions of

an elite but as the very deliberate expressions of a political ideology. They

belong to an age in which images did not merely represent authority, but were

held to have a power in themselves to inculcate virtue and disseminate it.

Their purpose therefore (so the case runs) was not just to entertain but to

communicate political values to men holding positions of responsibility from

the king’s ministers downward; they have been described as ‘the high mass of

Neoplatonic monarchy performed by the whole clerisy of court’.

They

The New Reign 71

in the Provinces: The Government of Stuart England (New Haven and London, 1986), pp. 56–9,

123–5, etc.

By P. Thomas, quoted by Sharpe in Personal Rule of Charles I, p. 230, in the course of a

ch3.y8 25/9/02 4:42 PM Page 71

certainly embody the ideals whereby Charles and his ministers strove to steer

the ship of state—ideals of peace, order, service, and the subjugation of rebel-

lious passions—but the question is whether they had much impact outside the

narrow circle of those who witnessed or participated in them. They are most

unlikely to have done so. They did reach a wider audience through printed

editions, but one suspects that they were read more for their aesthetic and

entertainment value than for their rather insipid political messages. It would

have been different if the Caroline court had been as open and popular as the

Elizabethan, but since medieval times there can rarely have been a monarch

who was known by sight to so few of his subjects as Charles. He not only

restricted access to his presence, but he really tried to enforce the order (which

was not novel) that noblemen and gentlemen should reside on their country

estates, and should not come to London even on business, unless it was the

king’s, without permission.

In actual government, the great change that coincided with the personal

rule was the privy council’s return to full activity, after Buckingham’s dom-

inance had threatened to reduce its functions to routine, or to the execution of

policies decided elsewhere. With around forty-two members it might appear

too large to act with the corporate authority of a modern cabinet, but in con-

trast with Tudor practice many council appointments were honoriﬁc, and the

typical attendance was around a dozen or less. Charles involved himself more

in the daily business of government than James had done and attended far

more council meetings. We do not know quite how many, because by a royal

order of 1630—one of many that aimed to regulate conciliar procedures—no

clerks were to be present when the king was, so an unknown number of his

attendances probably went unrecorded. The council still bore traces of its

past as part of the royal household; the Council Chamber faced the king’s

bedchamber in Whitehall Palace, though it also met at times in the Star

Chamber in the Palace of Westminster, or in whichever royal residence the

king was occupying when on progress. The full Council Board always met on

Wednesdays and Fridays, to which Sundays were added from 1635, to cope

with the burden of administering Ship Money. But business was constantly

increasing under the government’s efforts at administrative reform, and

thirteen or fourteen meetings a month were quite common in the second half

of the decade.

There were few matters on which Charles did not seek the council’s advice,

and the active members were never conﬁned to a single political viewpoint.

Contemporaries spoke of the Spanish, Dutch, and French factions, but they

over-simpliﬁed. Nevertheless there was a rough correlation between those

on the one hand who favoured friendship with Spain and were opposed to

72 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

discussion of the whole nature of court culture (pp. 222–35). See also the same author’s Politics

and Ideas in Early Stuart England (1989).

ch3.y8 25/9/02 4:42 PM Page 72

calling another parliament, and those on the other who supported a protest-

ant foreign policy, sought to keep the way open for England to intervene

again in the continental wars, and desired an early return to traditional con-

stitutional ways, including parliaments. The most prominent of the former

group were doubtful protestants, at best. Chief among them until his death in

1635 was Richard Weston, the Lord Treasurer who laid the ﬁnancial foun-

dations of the personal rule and was made Earl of Portland in 1633. He kept

up a personal correspondence with the Count-Duke of Olivares, the great

minister who virtually ruled Spain, and though he attended Anglican services

for much of his life he was married to a declared catholic and converted for-

mally to Rome before he died. Weston was an old friend of the great magnate

Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel and Earl Marshal of England, who had

been a privy councillor since 1616 and after 1629 rose high in Charles’s esti-

mation, not least because he too was a great collector and connoisseur.

Brought up a catholic, he had converted to the Church of England in 1615.

Weston’s protégé Francis Cottington, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer

throughout the personal rule, a baron from 1631, and Master of the Court of

Wards four years later, had been a diplomat at the Spanish court at intervals

since 1605 and had become ‘almost a naturalized Spaniard’.

Amusing, ﬂam-

boyant, and cosmopolitan, he was nevertheless a serious politician and a use-

ful minister. At heart a catholic, he alternated between Anglican conformity

and professed Romanism, generally according to the state of his health; he

died in the old faith.

The committed protestants, whose sympathies lay with the Dutch and with

Sweden and Denmark in the continental wars and who would have gladly

returned to parliamentary government, were a dwindling force in the council.

The third Earl of Pembroke died in 1630, Dorchester in 1632, Archbishop

Abbot in 1633, and Sir Thomas Roe was passed over for the secretaryship on

Dorchester’s death in favour of another suspected crypto-catholic, Sir Fran-

cis Windebank, a great protector of catholic priests, though he was probably

an Arminian in the 1630s, and only ﬁnally converted to Rome in 1646. The

other Secretary of State, Sir John Coke, was a ﬁrm enough protestant, but he

was more a man of business than a policy-maker, and age was creeping up on

him; he was 77 when he was ﬁnally persuaded to pass on the seals in 1640.

There was a phase in 1631–2 when the protestant constitutionalists seemed

to be in the saddle. Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden was striking triumphantly

southward after his sensational victory at Breitenfeld, and the reconquest of

the Rhine Palatinate lay in his grasp. He asked England for ﬁnancial and

diplomatic support, and Elizabeth begged her brother to give it. This would

have meant calling a parliament, but Gustavus was such a hero in England

The New Reign 73

Reeve, Charles I and the Road to Personal Rule, p. 185.

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that it would almost certainly have been generous, and Charles would have

got a more sympathetic consideration of his own ﬁnancial needs than at a

later time, for Ship Money still lay in the future. But there were reasons for

doubting whether Gustavus would restore Frederick to his territory, since

other allies of his had claims to it, and in the end Charles drew back from

breaking with Spain and committing himself to another parliament. He also

detested the Dutch, whose ally he would have become, and he sympathized

with Spain’s phobia about an international protestant conspiracy, of which

he saw his own puritan subjects as a part. England soon resumed the orienta-

tion towards Spain which characterized most of the 1630s.

There was one more signiﬁcant break in it, between 1635 and 1637, fol-

lowing upon France’s declaration of war against Spain. Again the Palatinate

lay at the root of it. Frederick having died, his elder son Charles Louis was

now the titular Elector, and French forces were now in occupation of much of

his territory. For various reasons, English hopes of getting it restored to him

though Spanish inﬂuence were dashed by the Peace of Prague, which the

Emperor Ferdinand signed with the Elector of Saxony in 1635. Charles had

hitherto disliked the France of Richelieu almost as much as he did her Dutch

allies, but he was much drawn to the alliance that the cardinal now offered

him, on terms that included an undertaking not to make peace without secur-

ing the restoration to the Palatinate of Charles Louis, who arrived in England

in November 1635 to add his own pleas for joint Anglo-French action. It all

came to nothing in the end, but the episode is signiﬁcant because it aroused

the queen to a more active role as an ardent supporter of the proposed

alliance, and it brought to prominence a ‘French faction’ which was to be a

force in the coming years. Its leading numbers were Henry Rich, Earl of

Holland, and James, Marquis of Hamilton. Holland was High Steward to the

queen, Chancellor of Cambridge University, Groom of the Stool from 1636,

brother of the puritan Earl of Warwick, and a favourite of both the king and

the queen. Hamilton was Master of the Horse, Charles’s principal Scottish

adviser, and from 1633 a member of the English privy council as well as

the Scottish. He was given the English title of Earl of Cambridge, which

was to lay him open to trial as an English traitor in 1649. Cottington and

Windebank also gravitated towards the queen and France, despite their His-

panophile reputations, and Arundel returned from a mission to the Emperor

in 1636 so thoroughly ill-satisﬁed with the response he received that he too

advised allying with France and breaking with Spain. Any such prospect

ended, however, when revolt began to stir in Scotland in 1637, for Richelieu

listened sympathetically to Scottish appeals for support, and England’s need

to keep clear of foreign entanglements soon became very plain.

It may seem surprising that so little has yet been said of Wentworth and

Laud, the two most famous of the king’s servants during the personal rule,

74 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

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and the two who incurred the most odium and paid most dearly for their par-

ticipation in it. But Wentworth had few friends at court (other than Laud),

and little direct inﬂuence on the government of England until 1639, for he

was physically distanced from it, ﬁrst in York as President of the North and

then from 1633 in Ireland as Lord Deputy. Laud was always a power in reli-

gious matters, but Charles at ﬁrst discouraged him from engaging too closely

in temporal affairs. Laud scored a success when his protégé Windebank got

the secretaryship in 1632, but it was only during Portland’s last illness that he

rose to really high political inﬂuence. With his strict principles and genuine

zeal for reform he got on badly with Portland, who ﬁgures in his letters to

Wentworth as ‘the Lady Mora’, signifying the spirit of dilatoriness, procras-

tination and venality that frustrated the policies that he and the Lord Deputy

tried to pursue under the name of ‘Thorough’. He called Cottington, less than

fairly, ‘Lady Mora’s waiting maid’. It was a mark of his new standing that he

got William Juxon, Bishop of London, appointed Treasurer after Portland’s

death, despite Cottington’s more obvious claim to the succession. Juxon exe-

cuted the ofﬁce with probity, though hardly with distinction or originality,

but to have the three highest prelates in England—Arminians all—in the inner

ring of the privy council did not endear the government to public opinion.

Elizabeth, whose reign was increasingly looked back on as a golden age,

had had only one clerical privy councillor, Whitgift, in all her ﬁfty-four years

as queen.

Of all aspects of the personal rule, its religious policy is the hardest to assess,

yet probably the most important to understand. With Scotland there is no

great problem, and in the next chapter it will be shown how Charles’s treat-

ment of the Kirk generated the national rebellion which launched the Wars of

Three Kingdoms. The case of Ireland is not so straightforward, but it will not

be too difﬁcult at a later stage to describe how fears for the religion of the

catholic majority of the Irish people helped to drive them too into rebellion.

As for England, most historians can now agree that though the immediate

issues over which king and parliament came to blows were primarily political

and constitutional, men and women were profoundly inﬂuenced by their reli-

gious standpoints when they formed a judgement about the claims of the two

sides for their support. But just what the religious policies were that they were

approving or condemning, and how far they departed from Elizabethan and

Jacobean norms, and who was mainly responsible for formulating them, and

what in them was most objectionable and to whom, and consequently where

the main lines of religious division ran—these are all questions over which

historians disagree widely. The differences are not just between revisionists

and the older schools. One distinguished revisionist sees religious issues as

so fundamental that ‘The English civil war was not the ﬁrst European

The New Reign 75

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revolution; it was the last of the Wars of Religion’.

Another, while acknow-

ledging that Caroline ecclesiastical policies offended particular sectors of the

community, suggests that at parish level they engendered ‘a growing commit-

ment to and affection for the church’, and that most of the religious strife of

1640–2 was of very recent origin, stirred up by a puritan minority in the wake

of the Bishops’ Wars.

The version offered here, therefore, can only be one

historian’s reading of a complex web of evidence and argument, at one stage

of a controversy that is obviously far from ﬁnished.

To this writer the least plausible of recent interpretations is one which con-

tends that Charles and Laud were simply resuming the efforts of Whitgift and

his successor Bancroft to secure conformity to an Anglican church order and

ethos that went back to the Elizabethan settlement; in other words they intro-

duced no essential change, other than to end the laxity of Abbot’s archiepis-

copate.

This ﬂies in the face of abundant evidence that most educated

contemporaries were aware of very considerable change, beginning before

the personal rule and intensiﬁed in the course of it, with the result that when

the Long Parliament at last had a chance to address the grievances of the

realm, most members gave priority to religious ones. But this should not be

attributed, as it often used to be, to a ‘rise of puritanism’, or interpreted as a

straightforward conﬂict between puritans and Anglicans. ‘Anglican’ was a

term virtually unknown to contemporaries, and mainstream puritanism was

(as has been argued) a strain of piety within the established church, which

accommodated it reasonably comfortably during most of James’s reign. A

much favoured recent interpretation has identiﬁed the Laudians rather than

those they called puritans as the innovating party, thanks to a partnership

between the king and the leading members of the hierarchy, and has substi-

tuted for the rise of puritanism ‘the rise of Arminianism’.

This is much

nearer the mark, but as a label it lays too much emphasis on doctrine. There

certainly was controversy over doctrine, of course, but by no means all those

stigmatized as Arminians shared the beliefs of Arminius, and doctrine was

not the main concern of most of the people involved—least of all the king,

whose initiative in the ecclesiastical policies of his reign has until recently

been underestimated.

Perhaps the mainspring of the change in direction was a reaction against

the prevailing evangelical, lay-oriented ethos of the Jacobean church. Some

leading clergy, especially the Durham House group and the disciples of

76 Background and Beginnings 1625–1640

John Morrill, ‘The religious context of the English Civil War’, reprinted as ch. 3 of The

Nature of the English Revolution (1993).

Sharpe, Personal Rule of Charles I, p. 387 and ch. 6 passim.

This is the broad argument of White in Predestination, Policy and Polemic, chs. 12–15.

Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c.1590–1640

(Oxford, 1987), and the same author’s chapter 4 in Conrad Russell (ed.), The Origins of the

English Civil War (1973).

ch3.y8 25/9/02 4:42 PM Page 76

Lancelot Andrewes, felt that the emphasis on preaching, at the expense of

prayer and the sacraments, was distorting the character of the historic

Church of England. They wanted to reafﬁrm its unique identity, and to check

the tendency to align it with the Reformed churches in other countries. They

felt a need to reassert the priestly nature of their calling, and to reinstate the

sacraments, especially holy communion, as the main channel through which

grace was conveyed to believers. Lay inﬂuences, they believed, had gone too

far; they aimed to restore the authority and independence of the clergy, and

especially of the episcopate. Their insistence that the bishop’s ofﬁce was

jure divino proved particularly obnoxious, and not only to puritans; indeed

the divine right of bishops was a much more contentious issue under Charles

I than the divine right of kings. They sought to restore a sense of the inherent

sanctity of consecrated churches, which were tending to be regarded just as

preaching-houses. Laud presided over a much-needed drive to repair delapi-

dated churches and to provide the many that lacked them with decent

furnishings.

More controversial was the aim of Laud and his bishops to re-dignify the

church’s worship, and especially the celebration of the sacraments, with a rev-

erent ritual and priest-like vestments. They insisted that services must be per-

formed according to the letter of the Book of Common Prayer, and clamped

down on those puritan clergy who abridged the liturgical part to make time

for longer sermons, or substituted extempore prayers for the prescribed

forms. Many, though not all, of the clergy who promoted these policies were

Arminians in the loose sense that was current after the Synod of Dort, in that

they deplored the harsh literalness of the Bezan doctrine of double predestin-

ation and believed that Christ had died for all. Lancelot Andrewes exempli-

ﬁes the link between their more liberal theology and the outward forms that

Charles sought to impose on all Anglican worship, for it was as Dean of the

Chapel Royal that he introduced the prince (as he then was) to the raised and

railed-off communion table, placed like an altar at the east end of the chancel,

and to those rituals like bowing at the name of Jesus which were to become

so contentious in the 1630s. Charles’s continued promotion of Arminian

divines to bishoprics, deaneries, and headships of colleges changed the whole

balance in the episcopate, even before Abbot’s long-awaited death enabled

him to advance Laud to Canterbury in 1633.

All but one of the Caroline bishops stood quite ﬁrm on the differences of

doctrine and ecclesiastical polity that separated England from Rome and on

the superiority of Ecclesia Anglicana, but whereas most of the previous gen-

eration had emphasized its afﬁnity with the Reformed churches abroad, they

sought to present it as an alternative and purer embodiment of a catholic,

apostolic church, a via media between the corruptions of Rome and the

excesses of Geneva. Calvin had less authority for them than the early Fathers

The New Reign 77

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