In his preface to The Religion of Protestants Patrick Collinson wrote, ‘The sometimes deceptive advantage of reading history backwards makes it difficult to appreciate that Church’ (the Church of England) ‘as it appeared to its contemporaries and defenders and even as it evidently … was.’

This is undoubtedly true for those who see the Church of England through the nineteenth-century eyes of the Oxford Movement or English nonconformity or the twentieth-century eyes of secular sociologists. By progressing from the Elizabethan Puritan movement to the Jacobean church Collinson has produced a series of splendid tapestries that has helped us see ‘the intrinsic merits’ of the Jacobean church before the ‘post revolutionary history of a Church of England erected on narrower and more exclusive principles deceived historians’.

In his preface to these memorable Ford Lectures Collinson refers to the destruction of ‘the archaeological’ remains of the Jacobean church interiors due to the ‘Victorian restorations’. It is to the reconstruction of these scattered remains that this essay is addressed.

When James VI of Scotland heard that he was also James I of England he was, said the man who brought him the news, ‘like a poor man bereft wandering forty years in the wilderness and barren soil and now arrived at to the land of promise’. But he was still king of the wilderness and barren soil, and he brought to his rule of the land of promise the skills and presuppositions he had acquired during his considerable time of rule over Scotland.