This chapter introduces the volume by asking the questions pertinent to the subject matter of church polity and politics in the British Atlantic world. It summarises the developments of church polity in the period before the time frame of the volume. The chapters of the volume are introduced so that the wider issues explored in common are brought together.

This chapter provides a historical account of the British episcopal churches from the Tudor Reformation until the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy and Church of England in the later seventeenth century. It explores the connection between episcopal polity and the liturgy of the Church of England. The chapter argues that episcopacy and liturgy provided the resilient bedrock that preserved the Church of England through the civil wars and interregnum.

This chapter presents a fresh analysis of the nature of the Association Movement in interregnum England and Ireland. It surveys the various local associations, using their constitutions and position statements to modify the long-held view that the association movement was an outgrowth of Richard Baxter’s drive for Christian unity. The chapter argues that the associations in general had a presbyterian basis, looking back to the Westminster assembly’s project as the foundation of local unity. The chapter then focuses on the political status of the associations in the interregnum, arguing that in the later years of the 1650s, the associations were eclipsed by a renewal of the struggle between congregationalists and presbyterians for control of religious policy in government.

This chapter looks at the issues surrounding church polity in mid- to late seventeenth-century colonial New England. It looks at the debates surrounding the role of synods in the congregational churches of New England, as well as disputes concerning the role of the laity in church governance. The chapter focuses on the gradual seventeenth-century drift in the American colonies away from the pure congregationalism of its founders towards more presbyterian forms of government. This retreat from congregational and lay governance was made more rapid by the New Englanders witnessing the events of the civil war and interregnum in England and the chaos caused by the de facto toleration of religious sects.

This chapter focuses on local government policy in Wiltshire from the immediate aftermath of the passing of the Race Relations Act 1976 through to the late 1990s. It charts an increase and diversification in Wiltshire’s immigrant, integration and diversity policies within the national context of an ever-growing emphasis on multiculturalism, integration and positive race relations. Amidst what was a reluctance by some to devote resources to Wiltshire’s small migrant populations, a national-level mandate was often considered and adhered to, and a range of local policies and measures were introduced. These addressed community relations and racial equality, multicultural education, and equal opportunities and anti-discrimination in employment and entrepreneurship, housing and social services. This period also witnessed an increased awareness of local Muslim communities’ practices, needs and demands in the form of prayer spaces, Muslim burials and halal slaughter.

In July 1864, Emile Pereire II wrote a letter to his brother Henry in Egypt in which he expressed some slight annoyance with their sister, Fanny. This chapter explores the inner world of the Pereires as they maintained and experienced it: the relationships between wife and husband, mother and children, siblings, and extended family, for family was crucial to the contentedness, the well-being, and, ultimately, the success of the Pereire brothers. And it was to Herminie and Fanny that the construction of a close, intimate circle of family and friends was entrusted. A notable feature of this inner circle was the importance of continuing and close personal friendships with former Saint-Simonians. In Herminie’s case, the Rodrigues family of ten children was large in comparison with other French Jewish families.

The chapter looks at the issue of political policy and church polity in mid-seventeenth-century Wales. It eschews the focus on the formation of independency and baptist churches traditionally found in studies of Wales in the period. Instead, the chapter looks at the activities of the Long Parliament, particularly the Herefordshire MP Sir Robert Harley, in the attempt to institute the Long Parliament’s projected presbyterian settlement in Wales. The chapter argues that the failure of presbyterianism to take roots in Wales in the period was due to its essentially English and politically metropolitan character. Conversely the success of independency and baptists’ forms of church polity owed much to its propagation by godly Welsh preachers.

This chapter focuses on autobiographical material left by the episcopate of the Church of England during the early years of the Restoration. Reassessing the use of autobiographical material, this chapter analyses the narratives of suffering and survival found in the writings of the Restoration episcopate. These narratives are used to explore how the Restoration bishops used their experiences of the interregnum proscription of the traditional Church of England as a basis to rebuild the polity of the Restored church. It is argued that the first generation of Restoration bishops betrayed a commonality in this regard that is often dismissed in the historiography.

The extended Rodrigues Henriques family descended from the brothers Abraham and Moïse, both négociants (merchants) of Bordeaux. Rachel Herminie Rodrigues, known as Herminie, was born in 1805 into a singular family. This chapter illuminates the influences of the Rodrigues inheritance on her and on her own family, an inheritance that was at once multilayered, for we cannot explore Herminie’s life without reference to the Sephardic community from which she emerged nor to the family into which she had been born, at once representative and yet unique. Women of considerable independence, achievement, cultural importance, and intellectual capacity emerged from the extended Rodrigues family, whose presence in Herminie’s life was not without effect. The Rodrigues family legacy provided a pathway towards which, as Jews, they would see themselves increasingly also as citizens of France.

This chapter looks at the role of covenanting in the early modern Scottish presbyterian tradition in establishing ideas of Scotland as a godly nation. The chapter argues that the Scottish understanding of covenanting, based on deep roots in the Reformed theology of the Scottish Reformation, was deployed by clergy and theologians to argue that the Scots were a people in covenant with God similar to that of the biblical Jews. Such arguments were applied to argue that, even if not all Scots were the elect of God, the nation was still a godly nation. The chapter traces this idea through the Scottish Reformation into the Covenanter revolution of the late 1630s and 1640s. It explores the decline of the idea of national covenanting in face of the Cromwellian conquest and the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy and episcopal forms of church polity in the later seventeenth century.