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‘The Good Old Way’: Prayer Book Protestantism in the 1640s and 1650s
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
Between 1640 and 1642 the Church of England collapsed, its leaders reviled and discredited, its structures paralysed, its practices if not yet proscribed, at least inhibited. In the years that followed, yet worse was to befall it. And yet in every year of its persecution after 1646, new shoots sprang up out of the fallen timber: bereft of episcopal leadership, lacking any power of coercion, its observances illegal, anglicanism thrived. As memories of the 1630s faded and were overlaid by the tyrannies of the 1640s … the deeper rhythms of the Kalendar and the ingrained perfections of Cranmer’s liturgies bound a growing majority together.
Professor John Morrill, quoted above, has rightly identified a set of historiographical contradictions about the Stuart Church in a series of important articles. Historians have until recently paid little attention to the positive and popular elements of conformity to the national Church of England in the period before the civil war. The lack of interest in conformity has led to a seventeenth-century version of the old Whig view of the late medieval Church: the Church of England is presented as a complacent, corrupt, and clericalist institution, ‘ripe’ – as the English Church in the early sixteenth century was ‘ripe’ – to be purified by reformers. However, if this was the case, how does one account for the durable commitment to the Prayer Book demonstrated during the 1640s and 1650s and the widespread – but not universal – support for the ‘return’ of the Church of England in 1660?This paper contributes to the larger exploration of the theme of ‘the Church and the book’ by addressing in particular the continued use by clergy and laity alike of one ‘book’ – the Book of Common Prayer – after its banning by Parliament during the years of civil war and the Commonwealth.
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- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2004
References
1 Morrill, John, ‘The attack on the Church of England in the Long Parliament’, in idem, The Nature of the English Revolution: Essays by John Morrill (1993), 89 Google Scholar. I am grateful to Elizabeth Clarke, Arnold Hunt, Elizabeth Macfarlane, and Alison Shell for comments on this essay.
2 ‘The religious context of the English Civil War’ (1984); The attack on the Church of England in the Long Parliament’ (1984); ‘The Church in England 1642–1649’ (1982), republished in Morrill, Nature of the English Revohition. See also the introduction to that volume, ‘Introduction: England’s wars of religion’. There are useful discussions of the Church of England in the 1640s and 1650s in Spurr, John, The Restoration Church of England 1646–1689 (New Haven, CT, 1991 Google Scholar), ch. 1, and Ashton, Robert, Counter-Revolution: the Second Civil War and Its Origins, 1646–8 (New Haven, CT, 1994 Google Scholar), ch. 7. The most thorough treatment in print of the Church of England in this period, however, remains W.A. Shaw, A History of the English Church During the Civil Wars and Under the Commonwealth 1640–1660, 2 vols (1900).
3 Morrill, ‘Attack on the Church of England’, 89–90.
4 For a historiographical critique, see Maltby, Judith, Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Cambridge, 1998), 1–19 Google Scholar. The work of Professor David Underdown is also critical to our concerns. Perhaps more than any other historian, Underdown has uncovered the popular elements of conservative or traditional politics in the 1640s-50s and has alerted us to the existence of considerable attachment to the ‘Old Church’, to the Prayer Book and Church festivals: see idem, Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England 1603–1660 (Oxford, 1987), esp. chs 5, 8, 9, 10.
5 Ashton, Counter-Revolution, 230, though see below, 253–5, for caution about the shades of Royalism amongst Church of England loyalists. Maltby, Prayer Book and People, ch. 3; eadem, ‘Petitions for Episcopaey and the Book of Common Prayer 1641–1642’, in Stephen Taylor, ed., From Cranmer to Davidson: a Church of England Miscellany, Church of England Record Society, 7 (Woodbridge, 2000), 105–67; Underdown, David, A Freeborn People: Politics and the Nation in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1996), 56–7 Google Scholar. Cf. Christopher Haigh, The Church of England, the Catholics and the people’, in Peter Marshall, ed., The Impact of the English Reformation 1500–1640 (1997), 253–4 (first published 1984); Alexandra Walsham, ‘The parochial roots of Laudianism revisited: Catholics, Anti-Calvinists and “Parish Anglicans” in early Stuart England’, JEH, 49 (1998), 620–51.
6 By the end of the eighteenth century the range of religious options available created, despite the existence of two established Churches in Britain, a pluralism more akin to the new United States than to much of the rest of Europe: James Obelkevich, ‘Religion’, in F.M.L. Thompson, ed., Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750–1950 (Cambridge, 1990), 311 and passim.
7 MacCulloch, Diarmaid, ‘The myth of the English Reformation’, JBS, 30 (1991), 1–19 Google Scholar. See also Maltby, Prayer Book and People, 233–7; Peter Lake and Questier, Michael, ‘Introduction’, in Lake, Peter and Questier, Michael, eds, Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1360–1660 (Woodbridge, 2000), xix Google Scholar. However, see e.g. Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics and Society under the Tudors (Oxford, 1993); Walsham, ‘Parochial roots’; Morrill, ‘Church in England’; Ashton, Counter-Revolution, for the use of the word ‘Anglican’ in this period.
8 Morrill, ‘Church in England’, 149–54; Shaw, English Church, 1:337-57; Hardacre, Paul, The Royalists During the Puritan Revolution (The Hague, 1956), 39–44 Google Scholar; Firth, C.H. and Rait, R.S., eds, Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum 1642–1660, 3 vols (1911), 1:582, 607 Google Scholar.
9 Lake and Questier, ‘Introduction’, xv-xvi. Cf. Marshall, impact of the English Reformation, 232–3.
10 Davis, Horton, The Worship of the English Puritans (Glasgow, 1948), 98–114 Google Scholar. For a detailed discussion of the formation of the Directory, see Bryan Spinks, Freedom or Order?The Eucharistie Liturgy in English Congregationalism 1643–1980 (Allison Park, PA, 1984), 14–15, 31–51 (I am grateful to Prof. Spinks for his assistance); Peter King, The reasons for the abolition of the Book of Common Prayer in 1645’, JEH, 21 (1970), 335–7; Shaw, English Church, 1:337-49.
11 Morrill, , ‘Church in England’, 152–3 Google Scholar; Shaw, English Church, 1:353-4.
12 A Directory for the Public Worship of God, Throughout the Three Kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland (1645), 1–2.
13 Ibid., 4.
14 Ibid., 6. Petitions defending the Prayer Book early in the Long Parliament made much use of the honoured status of the Edwardian bishops and martyrs who championed the Prayer Book: Maltby, Prayer Book and People, ch. 3; eadem, , ‘Petitions’, 113–67 Google Scholar.
15 Rateliff, E.C., ‘Puritan alternatives to the Prayer Book: the Directory and Richard Baxter’s Reformed Liturgy ’, in Ramsey, Michael, ed., The English Prayer Book 1549–1662 (1963), 64 Google Scholar; Davis, Worship, 127–42; Spinks, Freedom or Order?, 31–6.
16 Directory, 45, 62–3. Ironically it paraphrases the Prayer Book in several places. For example, in the directions for baptism the minister is reminded that those baptized are ‘bound to fight against the Devili, the World and the Flesh’ – a paraphrase of the Book of Common Prayer (ibid., 42, see also 49–50).
17 Cressy, David, Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, 1997), 153, 347 Google Scholar.
18 Based on my survey of extant Cheshire churchwardens’ accounts; Morrill, ‘The Church in England’, 152–3, 136, 164–7; York, Linda, ‘“in dens and caves”: the survival of Anglicanism during the rule of the Saints, 1640–1660’ (Auburn University, AL, Ph.D. thesis, 1999), 100–1 Google Scholar; Underdown, Revel, 255–6; Cressy, Birth, 175; King, ‘Reasons for Abolition’, 337; Ashton, Counter-Revolution, 230–1.
19 Morrill, ‘Church in England’, 168.
20 Journal of the House of Lords, 11:470.
21 Maltby, Prayer Book and People, 44–5.
22 Rateliff, ‘Puritan alternatives’, 72.
23 Parishioners took offence when clergy did not allow them to make the authorized responses in the Prayer Book. Maltby, Prayer Book and People, 40–4.
24 From Book V.xxv.4 in Hooker, Richard, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, in The Works of Richard Hooker, ed. Hill, W. Speed, 7 vols (Cambridge, MA, 1977), 2:116 Google Scholar.
25 See Guiver, George, Company of Voices: Daily Prayer and the People of God (1988), 115–26 Google Scholar.
26 However impoverished the Protestant liturgy was, compared to its late medieval counterpart, Eamon Duffy has admitted that ‘Cranmer’s sombrely magnificent prose, read week by week, entered and possessed their minds, and became the fabric of their prayer, the utterance of their most solemn and vulnerable moments’: idem, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven, CT, and London, 1992), 593 Google Scholar.
27 On 8 June 1647 Parliament abolished church festivals, though the Directory had already ordered their extinction: Firth and Rait, Acts and Ordinances, 1:954, 607. A further proclamation against the observance of Christmas was issued on 24 Dec. 1652: Steele, R.S., A Bibliography of Royal Proclamations of the Tudor and Stuart Sovereigns 1485–1714, 2 vols (Oxford, 1910), 1:360 (no. 2981 Google Scholar).
28 ‘Christmas day no sermon anywhere, so observed it at home, the next day we went to Lewisham, where was an honest divine preach’d on 21 Matt. 9 celebrating the Incarnation, for on the day before, no Churches were permitted to meet &c; to that horrid passe were they come’: Evelyn, John, The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. de Beer, E.S., 6 vols (Oxford, 1955), 3:78–9, 203–4 Google Scholar.
29 Plume, Thomas, An Account of the Life and Death of the Right Reverend Father in God, John Hackett, Late Lord Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, ed. Walcott, Mackenzie M.C. (1865), 64–6 Google Scholar. This incident dates from just after the Restoration but illustrates the point. John Evelyn was able to give his mother-in-law a traditional Prayer Book funeral in 1652: Cressy, Birth, 416.
30 Morrill, , ‘Church in England’, 164–8 Google Scholar; Spurr, Restoration Church, 16–17; Ashton, Counter-Revolution, 230–4, 247, 259–61.
31 Ibid., 238–41.
32 Virginians modified the Prayer Book calendar as well to take into account the different rhythms of the colony’s agriculture and of its premier crop, tobacco. Local events led to the development of additional days along the lines of Armada Day or the Fifth of November, such as the designation of 22 March as a day of thanksgiving for the deliverance of the colony from an Indian massacre in the 1620s. The Assembly ordered that day ‘be yeerly Solemnized as [a] holydaye’: Bond, Edward L., ‘Religion in seventeenth-century Anglican Virginia: myth, persuasion, and the creation of an American identity’ (Louisiana State University, Ph.D. thesis, 1995), 188–95 Google Scholar. For more on colonial ‘Anglicanism’, see below, 244–5.
33 Cited in Geoffrey Nuttall, Richard Baxter (1965), 54. Baxter did defend the keeping of Easter Day, as the evidence was much stronger for its observation by the earliest Christians, and commended the celebration of the Lord’s Supper on that day: ibid., 55.
34 Evelyn, Diary, 3:47-8, 144, 235, for Gunpowder Plot celebrations in the 1650s; Hutton, Ronald, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: the Ritual Year 1400–1700 (Oxford, 1994), 212, 221–2 Google Scholar.
35 New Haven, CT, Beinecke Library, Osborn MS b.49: Elizabeth Newell, ‘Collection of devotional verse, c. 1655–1668’, 12–13. I am grateful to Dr Elizabeth Clarke for bringing this manuscript to my attention and for other helpful discussions concerning Newell.
36 Underdown, Revel, 230. See also King, ‘Reasons for abolition’, 338–9; John Morrill and Walter, John, ‘Order and disorder in the English Revolution’, in Cust, Richard and Hughes, Ann, eds, The English Civil War (1997), 315 Google Scholar (first published 1985). For widespread support for the Prayer Book across social divisions in the pre-civil war period, see Maltby, Prayer Book and People, 80–1, 181–227.
37 Underdown, Revel, 156–9, 180, 226, 255; idem, ‘The chalk and the cheese: contrasts among English Clubmen’, in Cust and Hughes, English Civil War (1997), 295 (first published 1979).
38 Underdown, Revel, 260.
39 Ibid., 256–63, 267.
40 See above, 237–8.
41 Conformity to the Prayer Book was also enforced in Barbados during the 1650s: Gragg, Larry, ‘The pious and the profane: the religious life of early Barbados planters’, The Historian, 62 (2000), 269–70 Google Scholar, 271–2, 275–7. Between 1637 and 1660, nearly 30 ministers migrated to the island: ibid., 268, but cf. 281–2.
42 Bond, ‘Religion in seventeenth-century Anglican Virginia’, 186–222; Brydon, George MacLaren, Virginia’s Mother Church and the Political Conditions under which it Crew, 2 vols, Virginia Historical Society (Richmond, VA, 1947-52), 1:122–3 Google Scholar, 129–31. I am grateful to Prof. Robert Prichard for this reference and for the possible connection made to the development of Anglicanism in America in the late eighteenth century.
43 Evelyn, Diary, 3:2034, see also 3:978, 144, 225.
44 Richard Owen, D.D.: ibid., 3:79.
45 Ibid., 3:75, 76, 89, 90, 147, 195. For home churchings see Cressy, Birth, 225; idem, ‘Purification, thanksgiving and the churching of women in post-reformation England’, Past and Present, 141 (Nov., 1993), 140–1.
46 Spurr, Restoration Church, 21–2.
47 Walsham, ‘Parochial roots’, 651.
48 Cf. Claire Cross, The Church in England 1646–1660’, in G.E. Aylmer, ed., The Interregnum: the Quest for Settlement 1646–1660 (1972), 114.
49 The incumbent in Evelyn’s description was Thomas Malory, deprived in 1661: Evelyn, Diary, 3:80-1, 81 n.5.
50 This issue will be explored with others in a forthcoming volume of essays edited by Christopher Durston and Maltby, Judith, Religion and Society in Revolutionary England (Manchester University Press Google Scholar).
51 Cross, ‘Church in England’, 110–14; Susan Doran and Durston, Christopher, Prima, Pastors and People: the Church and Religion in England 1529–1689 (1991), 154–7 Google Scholar; Anne Laurance, ‘“This sad and deplorable condition”: an account of the sufferings of northern clergy families in the 1640s and 1650s’, in Diana Wood, ed., Life and Thought in the Northern Church c. 1100–1700, SCH.S, 12 (Woodbridge, 1999), 465–7. Prof. Green estimates around 2,780 clergy were deprived: Ian Green, ‘The persecution of “scandalous” and “malignant” parish clergy during the English civil war’, EHR, 94 (1979), 508. See also Clive Holmes, ed., The Suffolk Committees for Scandalous Ministers 1644–1646, Suffolk Records Society, 13 (1970), 10–14, 18–20. Dr Holmes notes that charges of ‘popish innovation’ were more common that accusations of dissent from Calvinist orthodoxy (ibid., 19). Hill, J.W.F., ‘Royalist clergy of Lincolnshire’, Lincolnshire Architectural and Archaeological Society, Reports and Papers, 40 (1935), 34–127 Google Scholar.
52 Roots, Ivan, The Great Rebellion 1642–1660 (1966), 261 Google Scholar.
53 Hutton, Ronald, The British Republic 1649–1660 (1990), 91–2, 97 Google Scholar; Cross, ‘Church in England’, 110–14.
54 Nigel Yates, Robert Hume, and Hastings, Paul, Religion and Society in Kent, 1640–1914 (Woodbridge, 1994), 5–6 Google Scholar.
55 See above, 246–7.
56 Spurr, Restoration Church, 9, 141–3 (Jeremy Taylor paraphrased ibid., 142); Cross, ‘Church in England’, 110–14; Hutton, British Republic, 91–2; Doran and Durston, Princes, Pastors and People, 156–7. For examples of episcopal ordinations in the 1650s, see Evelyn, Diary, 3:8-9 (in Paris), 172 and n.1. For the question of what should replace ordination by bishops in England, see Shaw, English Church, 1:243, 320–37.
57 Judith Maltby, ‘From Temple to Synagogue: “old” conformity in the 1640s-1650s and the case of Christopher Harvey’, in Lake and Questier, Conformity and Orthodoxy, 94–103, 114–16.
58 Harvey, Christopher, The Complete Poems of Christopher Harvey, ed. Grosart, A.B. (The Fuller Worthies’ Library, privately printed, 1874), 88–9 Google Scholar. The poem was reportedly written in 1654(/5?). See Maltby, ‘Temple to Synagogue’, 114–15, 120.
59 Washington DC, Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.a.454: The Letterbook of John Martin’, 18. I am grateful to Mr David Cleggett, the Archivist of Leeds Castle Foundation, and Miss Laetitia Yeandle, the Archivist of the Folger Shakespeare Library, for their assistance with this manuscript.
60 Ibid.
61 See the oration of John Hales to Elizabeth I in 1559 in Foxe, John, Acts and Monuments (1576), 2005–7 Google Scholar. Also Catherine Davis, ‘“Poor persecuted little flock”: Edwardian protestant concepts of the church’, in Peter Lake and Maria Dowling, eds, Protestantism and the National Church in Sixteenth-Century England (1987), 78, 81, 94–5. I am grateful to Dr Tom Freeman for these references. For the attempts by English radicals to make sense of their defeat in 1660, see Hill, Christopher, The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries (New York, 1984 Google Scholar).
62 This is likely to be Henry Spelman’s De non tenerandis ecclesis (1st edn 1613). Clement’s letter is almost certainly to John Cosin and dated c. 1660–2: Durham, Durham University Archives [hcreafter DUA], Cosin LB 1b, no. 94. See also ‘Clement Spelman’ and ‘Sir Henry Spelman’ in New DNB (on-line, 1995).
63 DUA, Cosin LB 1b, no. 94.
64 Ibid. Clement was very much his father’s spiritual and intellectual heir. Sir Henry’s extensive treatment of his theme in The History and Fate of Sacrilege was not published until 1698. He provided a gazetteer of former monastic lands in Norfolk and catalogued a variety of terrible fates which befell the families that turned church property to secular uses: ibid., 243–82; Walsham, Alexandra, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999), 109–10 Google Scholar.
65 DUA, Cosin LB 1b, no. 94. This remarkable description of Charles’s last hours is not mentioned in the classic account by Wedgewood, C.V., The Trial of Charles I (1964), 177–82 Google Scholar.
66 Spurr, Restoration Church, 20–1; Maltby, ‘Temple to Synagogue’, 115.
67 DUA, Cosin Library B.IV.4: A Forme of Prayer, used in the King’s Chapel upon TuesAayes, in these Times of Trouble and Distresse (?Paris, 1649).
68 Harvey, Poems, 26–7; Maltby, ‘Temple to Synagogue’, 115.
69 DUA, Cosin Library, B.IV.4.
70 Brightman, F.E., The English Rite: Being a Synopsis of the Sources and Revisions of the Book of Common Prayer, 2 vols (1921), 2:516–17 Google Scholar; Hatchett, Marion J., Commentary on the American Prayer Book (San Francisco, 1995), 190 Google Scholar.
71 For a discussion of earlier ambivalence towards the royal supremacy, see Davis, ‘Edwardian protestant concepts’, 78–9.
72 See Martin’s, Jessica excellent study, Walton’s Lives: Conformist Commemoration and the Rise of Biography (Oxford, 2001 Google Scholar); Lake, Peter, Anglicans and Puritans?Presbyterian and Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (1988), 225–30 Google Scholar; Maltby, , Prayer Book and People, 235–7 Google Scholar.
73 Morrill, ‘Church in England’, 150.