The Revisionist paradigm of consensual politics—particularly the tendency to dismiss polarized polemic as distorting—has shaped recent scholarship interested in the “lived experience” of religion in post-Reformation England. This scholarship, perhaps best embodied in the writing of Alec Ryrie, has suggested that attention to works of practical devotion for lay audiences, rather than a focus on works of doctrinal controversy, allows for the near dissolution of those categories of religious division within the Church of England that have tended to dominate historical interest.Footnote 1 Ryrie has argued that when devotional works are placed at the center of analysis, distinctions between the categories of Puritanism, Calvinist conformity, and, to some degree, Laudianism dissolve, leaving a comprehensive and amorphous Protestant experience.Footnote 2 Two early seventeenth-century texts that have featured prominently in these studies of allegedly a-polemical works of devotion are Daniel Featley's Ancilla Pietatis: or The Handmaid of Devotion (1626) and John Cosin's A Collection of Private Devotions, in Practice of the Ancient Church, called the Hours of Prayer (1627).Footnote 3 Both prayer manuals were bestsellers—Ancilla Pietatis ran to nine editions by 1675; Hours of Prayer, to twelve editions by 1693—and so have been used to consider how Protestants prayed in private, and to suggest that a focus on these texts and the experiences they fostered can move us away from a historiographical overemphasis on theological controversy.Footnote 4
That these two works of devotion might be separated from the vaguely defined category of “polemic,” however, is undermined if we pay further attention to the context in which these prayer manuals were written and the women to whom they were addressed. Featley dedicated Ancilla Pietatis to Katherine Manners, the Duchess of Buckingham, and Susan Feilding, Countess of Denbigh, respectively the wife and sister of the royal favorite, George Villiers. Cosin seemingly drafted Hours of Prayer at the behest of Susan Feilding.Footnote 5 Placing these women, and their wider circle at court, near the center of consideration, alters our understanding of what Featley and Cosin were attempting to do with these works of practical divinity, and throws categories of religious division in the post-Reformation Church of England into sharp relief. I argue that these popular works of devotion cannot be properly understood outside of an extended interconfessional and intra-Protestant polemical exchange, a multidirectional confessional conflict with women at the center. This is not to subsume the category of devotion into polemic, but rather to demonstrate that devotional texts could model, and harden, competing doctrinal positions.
An examination of this confessional conflict also provides a more robust conceptualization of female agency: the women at the center of these exchanges were neither excluded from the realm of polemic or banished to the apparently private spaces of devotional practice, nor were they engaged in a crude form of struggle against patriarchal authority.Footnote 6 Rather, with an issue of conscience at stake, male divines were forced to cede agency to wavering women before whom a range of theological positions were presented and out of which these women could forge their own confessional identities and commitments. A recontextualization of these two prayer manuals thus allows for a broader understanding of the lived experience of religion, particularly for lay women, whose faith did not only dwell within practices of devotion and reverence, but was also structured through intellectual disputation, where theological division and vitriol were anything but irrelevant.
The Countess of Buckingham and the Polemical Context of Ancilla Pietatis
Both Ancilla Pietatis and Hours of Prayer were written for powerful women at court whose religious identity mattered, and mattered particularly in the 1620s, when first the specter, and then the reality, of a Catholic queen meant that the shape of female piety at court had potentially significant political implications.Footnote 7 As I have argued elsewhere, we can find Mary Villiers, the Countess of Buckingham—with her public conversion to Catholicism in 1622 and subsequent attempts to recover her to the Church of England during the politically sensitive Spanish Match moment—near the center of what Nicholas Tyacke termed the “rise of Arminianism.”Footnote 8 As the mother of the royal favorite, the countess's conversion proved problematic, and emblematic of the dangerous encroachment of popery that would be enabled, as some feared, by King James's dynastic policy. Accordingly, her defection spurred a series of disputations at court in late May 1622 between the priest responsible for her conversion, the Jesuit John Percy, alias Fisher, and two Protestant divines: Francis White, then a lecturer at St Paul's, and William Laud, then bishop of St Davids. Both White and Laud were associated with the anti-Calvinists organized around Bishop Richard Neile's Durham House and were seemingly selected for their politically sensitive approach to anti-Catholic engagements. These disputations, however, failed to recover the countess, who, by late 1622, was openly professing her Catholic faith and living in the countryside with Percy as her confessor. This failure, circulated and publicized by the countess's Jesuit associates, spurred a series of further disputations the following summer between Percy and divines of the Calvinist establishment, most prominently Daniel Featley, then serving as chaplain to Archbishop George Abbot.Footnote 9
The apparent cause of the countess's conversion, and the topic of the resulting disputations, was the issue of the continuity of the true church. This was a question about which church contained an unbroken succession of professors “teaching the unchanged Faith of Christ in all ages.”Footnote 10 Tracing such a succession was necessary to counter the accusation so often lodged by Romanists: where was your church before Luther?, which framed reformed faiths as being schismatic novelties. One way of answering this prompt, in the model of John Foxe, was to trace a lineage of hidden believers who had carried the torch of true (Protestant) faith through the later ages of anti-Christian popish corruption. This was the traditional Calvinist line of argumentation employed by divines like Featley against this Catholic challenge. There was, however, another approach that did not hinge upon a sharp world-historical view of the rise of a papal antichrist. Rather, one might acknowledge the Church of Rome to be a true, but error-ridden, church and the Church of England to be a reformed continuation of the pre-Reformation Latin Church. Developed from Richard Hooker's defense of the institutional church, this presented a way to trace a Protestant lineage while maintaining a moderated approach to Catholic errors in points of faith, which, as the divines around Durham House suggested, might prove more persuasive to wavering individuals such as the Countess of Buckingham.Footnote 11
These in-person disputations with the Jesuit Percy, conducted across 1622 and 1623, at court and in London, bled into an explosive print exchange, carried on from late 1623 to mid-1624, during which divines within the Church of England not only worked to counter Jesuit arguments around the continuity of the true church, but also argued with one another over the proper and most effective way to confront Catholic clerics on this topic.Footnote 12 That the Countess of Buckingham remained unrecovered after White's and Laud's intervention left those around Durham House open to the charge that their approach was neither proper nor effective. As Featley would argue, theirs was an argumentative path “perhaps beaten by some,” but which seemed to him “a slipperie & dirty way.”Footnote 13
It was during the course of this intra- and interconfessional polemical exchange that Richard Montague, a divine on the forward edge of the Durham House group, published A New Gagg for an Old Goose (1624). Montague framed this text as an attempt to recover some women of his Essex parish who had supposedly been convinced by the same sort of Romanist arguments around the continuity of the true church as had swayed the Countess of Buckingham.Footnote 14 While New Gagg has traditionally been considered an aggressive argumentative thrust, in the context of this broader polemical exchange, the text appears, rather, as a defensive intervention against a wave of Calvinist attacks on the Durham House position.Footnote 15
This was a work of anti-Catholic polemic with sharp anti-Puritan edges. It was controversial in part because of Montague's definition of Puritanism, which might be read as encompassing a large section of the Calvinist establishment. Defending the moderation of his Durham House associates, Montague suggested it was the extremism of some privately held beliefs that had left the Church of England open to these Catholic pastoral incursions. He argued that it was the errors of Puritan (really, Calvinist) positions on the relative invisibility of the true church, on the papal antichrist, on predestination, on ceremonies and the sacraments that had alienated individuals who struggled to see the relationship between those positions and the saving faith and traditions of the primitive church. New Gagg, and Montague's subsequently printed defense, Appello Caesarem (1625), provoked a firestorm of controversy in Parliament and in print.Footnote 16 Montague was accused of reducing the fundamental differences between the Church of England and the Church of Rome, creating, as Daniel Featley suggested, “a convenient bridge” to walk “over to popery.”Footnote 17 Indeed, Featley positioned himself at the forefront of the political and polemical assault on Montague and this anti-Calvinist position—and, as chaplain to Archbishop Abbot, might be seen as having coordinated the response out of Lambeth Palace. He allegedly denounced New Gagg as “Scurrility and Popery”; helped fuel the parliamentary censure of Montague; and indeed, authored three works of controversy that year aimed at the errors of “the appealer.”Footnote 18
It was in the midst of this polemical assault on Montague that Featley also published Ancilla Pietatis, a work of practical devotion dedicated to the Countess of Buckingham's daughter, Susan Feilding, and her daughter-in-law, Katherine Manners. This was a continuation of the same debate, the same intra- and interconfessional conflict, now carried out through devotional means. Indeed, that is how Featley himself framed Ancilla Pietatis, directly placing this devotional text into the context of the larger polemical exchange with the countess's Jesuit, John Percy. Featley justified his dedication to Feilding in respect of her “conference with [him], about [his] conference with the Jesuits,” noting her “gracious acceptation of the relation and defense therof,” presumably the printed relation and defense of his conference with Percy, The Fisher Catched in his Owne Net (1623) and The Romish Fisher Caught and Held in his owne net (1624).Footnote 19 In his dedication to Manners, Featley noted that, in drafting this prayer manual, he was now giving “over those waters of strife wherin” he had previously “met with the Romish Fisher, intangled in his owne Net,” and would seek the calmer waters of devotion.Footnote 20 Featley thus placed this apparently apolemical work of practical divinity, this handmaid of devotion for the Buckingham women, within an explicitly controversial context.
Notably, Featley also positioned this devotional text against the efforts of the Durham House group. Perhaps with Montague's challenge in mind, Featley recognized the need for a style of practical piety that addressed Catholic accusations of irreverence of the ceremonies and practices of devotion followed by the Fathers, and accordingly wished to separate the rectifying of (popish) “abuse” from the “abolishing” of “right use.”Footnote 21 This was, then, a book of practical piety intended to address questions related to the Church of England's continuity with, or schism from, the practices of the primitive catholic church. Yet, in introducing this work, Featley warned against careless divines within the Church of England who might turn to the same task. “It is an easie taske, and almost every ones labour now a dayes[,] to gather flowers of Paradice, and make Posies, or Garland of them for Christ's Spouse,” but, Featley cautioned, “it is not for every hand to meddle with those thornie difficulties, which yet must be carefully handled by them who will make a strong hedge or sure fence for the Lord's Vineyard.”Footnote 22 This was, arguably, an aspersion aimed at divines such as Richard Montague, whom Featley was simultaneously attacking in print for reducing the points of difference between the Church of England and the Church of Rome, for tearing down that hedgerow in the Lord's vineyard.
When placed within this series of events, Featley's Ancilla Pietatis appears both the result of, and instrument of, deepening theological divisions within the Church of England. Both Greg Salazar and Sara Wolfson have suggested that John Cosin's Hours of Prayer was produced in competition with Featley's devotional text.Footnote 23 To properly contextualize that competition, the Hours of Prayer needs to be understood as emerging from a continuation of this same conflict. It was a response to the conversion of yet another woman in this Buckingham circle: Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess Falkland.
The Viscountess Falkland and the Political Context of Hours of Prayer
Elizabeth Cary and her conversion have received extensive scholarly attention, primarily as a result of her remarkable literary production. She is credited as the first female English playwright, publishing The Tragedie of Miriam in 1613. Cary was also the author of The History of the Life, Reign, and Death of Edward II, drafted in 1626/27 and published posthumously in 1680, and the translator of a number of other works.Footnote 24 Her conversion, read as an act of feminine rebellion, apparently part of her “inner imperative to resist and challenge authority,” has been used by literary scholars such as Barbara Kiefer Lewalski as an interpretive key to her writing.Footnote 25 While a great deal has thus been made of Cary's conversion as part of an ongoing conflict with (male) authority, rather little has been made of Cary's conversion as part of this ongoing polemical and pastoral contest, an examination of which renders her engagement with that male authority, both of state and church, more complex.
Notably, Daniel Featley would later recount Cary's 1626 conversion by describing that the Lady Falkland had been “seduced by deceitfull guides”—a reference not to Cary's Catholic confessors, but to divines within the Church of England who, according to Featley, had led her “out of the right way into the Arminian tract, and afterward into the high rode of Popery lying not farre off.”Footnote 26 Examining a series of exchanges leading up to, and following, Cary's conversion can thus place Featley's and Cosin's devotional works into a shared context. This, in turn, offers a more robust understanding of the role these women played within this matrix of confessional exchange, suggesting a conceptualization of their lived experience of religion that extends beyond the private use of these prayer manuals drafted for their benefit.
According to a biographical text written around 1650 by one or more of Cary's daughters—Benedictine nuns living in a Cambrai convent—their mother had harbored religious doubts from an early age.Footnote 27 At twelve, Elizabeth apparently read Calvin's Institutes under her father's instruction. She was left with a number of “objections” and her father, chief baron of the Exchequer, Sir Lawrence Tanfield, was left with the impression that his daughter had a “spirit averse from Calvin.”Footnote 28 Yet, it was the experience of reading Richard Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1594) that reportedly provoked her first profound experience of religious doubt at age twenty, around 1605.Footnote 29 As described above, Hooker, in reaction to the rise of Presbyterianism in the late Elizabethan church, had undermined the Foxeian tradition of tracing the true church out of an underground succession of believers living in the shadow of the anti-Christian papacy by insisting that, despite “her gross and grievous abominations,” by adhering to the “main parts of Christian truth wherein they constantly still persist,” the Church of Rome ought to be considered part, if a degenerated part, “of the family of Jesus Christ.”Footnote 30
But, in reading Hooker, Cary apparently found that “he left her hanging in the air, for having brought her so far,” she “saw not how, nor at what, she could stop, till she returned to the church,” the Church of Rome, “from whence they were come.”Footnote 31 Cary's reflection here notably resonated with the moderate Puritan critique of Hooker—the accusation, as Peter Lake has described, that “his position was indeed half way to popery,” and that “intentionally or not, Hooker was in effect selling the pass to the common adversary.”Footnote 32 This spiritual struggle induced by Hooker was only intensified by Cary's careful study of the Church Fathers after her brother-in-law, Adolphus Cary, returned from the continent “with a good opinion of Catholic religion” and the belief that Augustine was “of the religion of the Church of Rome.” Her “distrust of her religion increased by reading,” and, for an unspecified period of time, Cary “refused to go to church,” though she eventually “satisfied herself” that “she might continue as she was,” that is, within the Church of England.Footnote 33
Doubt, however, crept back in when she journeyed to Dublin with her husband, Henry Cary, Viscount Falkland, who was appointed as Lord Deputy of Ireland in 1622. There, she befriended Dermond O'Brien, Baron Inchiquin, the first Catholic “she had yet met,” and a man of such “wit, learning, and judgment” that his own faith did “somewhat shake her supposed security” in the Protestant church.Footnote 34 Cary's faith was further shaken when she returned to England in mid-1625. After a brief stop at court to kiss the hands of the newly arrived Queen Henrietta Maria, the spread of plague led Cary to retire to Oxfordshire with her children. In the course of their journey, an accident befell her eldest daughter, Catherine, leading to the loss of both her life and that of her prematurely born child. On her deathbed, Catherine described a Marian apparition, an experience which Cary took as a remarkable sign of the truth of Catholic teachings, particularly because her daughter had no real knowledge of Catholicism and, indeed, had heard a great deal “against it,” her husband's family being “most earnest Scotch Puritans.”Footnote 35
Attempting to deal with the salvific insecurity reintroduced by these events, when Cary returned to London she began to visit “the house of a Protestant bishop”—Richard Neile's Durham House—“which was frequented by many of the learnedest of their divines,” and she “there grew acquaint[ed] with many of them.” At Durham House, Cary witnessed “diverse times” the “examination of such beginners, or receivers, of new opinions, who were by them esteemed heretics,” and through these disputations she was again “persuaded she might lawfully remain” within the Church of England, if “never making question for all but that to be in the Roman Church were infinitely better and securer.”Footnote 36 While remaining within the Protestant fold, Cary did desire “(at least) to do as like Catholics in all and to draw as near them,” to the clergy, “as she could.” Accordingly, “she resolved to go to confession to one of them, making choice for the purpose” John Cosin.Footnote 37
Cosin, serving as a chaplain to Bishop Neile after 1619, was a divine on the forward edge of the Durham House set. He was an intimate friend and constant correspondent of Richard Montague; he had a hand in editing and licensing both New Gagg and Appello Caesarem; and, in early 1625, he had provoked a royal censure of Daniel Featley for his licensing of “Puritan” works in response to Montague.Footnote 38 Cosin was also a man whom Cary in “every way much esteemed,” seemingly because he was one of those Protestant clerics who “pretended to” the dignity that she had learned of and respected “in the Fathers, and histories of former Christian times.”Footnote 39 In their correspondence from this period, Montague joked with Cosin that, having been seen to visit him, Cosin had sparked rumors that he had been a “Jesuite sent hether to bring me a booke.” As Montague explained, this was because, “contrary to our fashion” in the Church of England, Cosin “carried” himself “so devoutly at prayers, which fewe of us doe.”Footnote 40 Cosin's perceived proximity to the reverence and devotion Cary found in her studies of the historical church perhaps explains why she selected him to act as her confessor. Cosin, however, initially “excused himself” from that act, “not being used to take confessions.”Footnote 41 He assured Cary that he would “take time to prepare himself for it by studying casuists,” though he soon after left London, traveling north in July 1626 to perform his duties as rector of Brancepeth.Footnote 42
Cary's attempt to align her understanding of the practices of the primitive church to her spiritual relationship with Protestant clergy like Cosin appears as a genuine effort on her part to find salvific security within the Church of England. Durham House was a logical place for her to conduct that search for satisfaction. While their arguments proved ineffective with the Countess of Buckingham, other women in Cary's court circle, indeed, other women within the Buckingham household, had been effectively recovered or kept within the national church by the sort of arguments proffered by this group of divines. Katherine Manners, daughter of the Catholic Earl of Rutland, had been brought into communion with the Church of England before her marriage to Buckingham in 1620 by the discreet efforts of Bishop John Williams. While Williams’ relation to the Durham House set, and particularly William Laud, was fraught, the tactics he employed to recover Manners were of the same character as those employed by divines like White and Laud. As Anthony Milton and Alexandra Walsham have described, Williams attempted to “convince the future duchess that she might attend the Church of England's services without breaking her existing ‘Catholic’ sympathies” by providing her with a privately printed prayer manual proving that “we have not coin'd a new Worship or Service of God.”Footnote 43 Richard Corbet, an anti-Calvinist client of Buckingham on the edge of the Durham House set, had likewise provided the (then) marquess with a manuscript tract, likely for his bride's use, addressing the “location of the church before Luther” and stressing that the differences between the churches were “negative only, and not positive.”Footnote 44 Some years later, Buckingham's sister, Susan Feilding, would make direct recourse to Durham House divines, particularly to Richard Montague, in an attempt to settle her own doubts about the Protestant faith, presumably doubts induced by the same topic of continuity that had shaken her mother, sister-in-law, and close friend Elizabeth Cary.Footnote 45
By early 1626, the ability of the Durham House set to keep women like Feilding or Cary within the Church of England was increasingly high stakes as their anti-Calvinist position faced intense political opposition. During the 1625 parliamentary session, MPs denounced Montague's Appello as a book of “mediation to reconcile us and the papists where, of 47 questions,” Montague defended “but 7 or 8 to be matters of difference between us and the papists.”Footnote 46 There was a fear, as one member of Parliament vocalized, that if Church of England divines held the Church of Rome to be a true church without difference “in any fundamental points,” while the Catholics held “us heretics, and not to be saved,” then who would “not think it safer for us to be in their church than in ours?”Footnote 47 This was, it might be noted, the conclusion that the Countess of Buckingham had come to, and a position that was clearly tempting for individuals like Elizabeth Cary. Montague was briefly held in contempt of the House but was set at liberty by the intervention of King Charles, who claimed Montague as his “servant” and “chaplain-in-ordinary,” a position to which he was hastily promoted to save him from further parliamentary censure.Footnote 48
Following the tense dissolution of the session, Charles and the Duke of Buckingham increasingly went out on a limb to protect Montague and his associates. In February 1626, two conferences were held at Buckingham's residence of York House, during which two principal champions of the Calvinist establishment, Bishop Thomas Morton and John Preston, attempted to prove Montague's specific doctrinal errors, including his offense in asserting that the Church of Rome had not erred in matters of faith—a stance that rendered him one of those “moderates … who are nothing else but openers of gaps to let in popery.”Footnote 49 Divines associated with Durham House, including John Buckeridge, Francis White, and John Cosin, mounted an effective defense of Montague.Footnote 50 This marked a moment, as Roger Lockyer has argued, when Buckingham publicly abandoned his alliance with, and earlier patronage of, the godly. As Cosin later claimed, it was in the aftermath of these conferences that Charles swore “his perpetual patronage” to their cause.Footnote 51
If York House was an attempt to settle the controversy surrounding Montague in anticipation of a renewed assault in the 1626 Parliament, these conferences revealed to a broader public the degree to which the Calvinist character of the Church of England, and its relationship to the Church of Rome, was up for debate at this conjuncture. The attack on Montague was, indeed, revived during the parliamentary session, now wrapped into the Commons’ attempt to impeach Buckingham, whose evident support of Montague was grouped with his countenancing of popery, including the popery in his own household.Footnote 52 With the political pressure raised by the contentious dissolution of Parliament in June 1626, there was a real concern among the Durham House set that royal favor had finally run out. During the course of the session, Buckingham's clients in the Commons had attempted to distance the duke from Montague, and, the day before the dissolution, Charles issued a proclamation for the “peace and quiet of the Church of England,” prohibiting any “new Inventions, or Opinions concerning Religion,” which was taken, by some, as aimed squarely against the anti-Calvinist faction.Footnote 53 Montague himself feared the proclamation signaled he would “be not only not preferred … but be abandoned.”Footnote 54 Montague's correspondence with Cosin reveals a deep anxiety across the summer of 1626 regarding whether the “Puritans be like to prevale” and “whether there be like to be a Parlement agayne.”Footnote 55 “Were the King furnished with mony, I would not dreame of a P[arliament] nor fear the Puritan faction,” but the king's dire need of funding put him at risk.Footnote 56 Montague had reason to believe that Charles might adjust his ecclesiastical policy and abandon those around Durham House to solve his compounding political and financial difficulties.
It was in August 1626 that Montague was finally assured that they had not been cut loose by the king and favorite. Rather, William Laud would be translated from St Davids to the see of Bath and Wells and Francis White would be elevated to the episcopate, as bishop of Carlisle. The news that he remained within royal favor was seemingly imparted to Montague by the Duke of Buckingham during a dinner, at which was also present the Countess of Buckingham, Susan Feilding, and Elizabeth Cary, with whom he “had much good talke.”Footnote 57 It was on this occasion that Montague also learned that Daniel Featley, whose Ancilla Pietatis had recently been put to print, had now “insinuate[d] to my Lady Denbigh disavowing Puritanisme, and all he had don against the Appeale”—“I thincke I have cast a bone in his way,” Montague wrote to Cosin.Footnote 58 In this ongoing contest, which had brought them to the brink of political ruin, Durham House now appeared to be prevailing, both in terms of royal patronage and in terms of the sympathies of this group of court women.
Notably, the sympathies of this circle of women had become acutely significant by the summer of 1626. As Sara Wolfson has demonstrated, the proselytizing efforts of Henrietta Maria's household, including public displays of piety like an alleged pilgrimage to Tyburn by the queen in late June 1626, paired with the domestic religious practices of her French dévot entourage, had exposed Englishwomen at court “to alternative devotional methods.”Footnote 59 The potential influence of counter-Reformation Catholicism on the “inner spirituality” of these court women fostered a broader theological instability and provided an immediate confessional context for Charles's August expulsion of the majority of the queen's household. French attendants were quickly replaced by English ladies, including Elizabeth Darcy, Viscountess Savage; Lucy Hay, Countess of Carlisle; the Countess of Buckingham; Katherine Manners; Susan Feilding; and Feilding's daughter, Mary, Marchioness Hamilton.Footnote 60
Henrietta Maria's bedchamber had offered not only an alternative (Catholic) devotional community, but also an alternative source of influence at court, which, as Malcolm Smuts has shown, operated as a center of opposition to the duke. The removal of her French household and the packing of the queen's bedchamber with Buckingham's kinswomen allowed Charles and the favorite to eliminate a rival base of power and potentially stem the parliamentary assault on Buckingham by demonstrating his anti-Catholic bone fides.Footnote 61 The confessional character of those surrounding the queen accordingly held political importance and drew public interest in the aftermath of the restructuring of Henrietta Maria's household. Ladies Savage and Buckingham, along with the duke's mother-in-law, the Countess of Rutland, were all professed Catholics—a point of comment and concern—and so the significance of keeping women like Katherine Manners and Susan Feilding in communion with the Church of England was heightened at this moment.Footnote 62 Here, female agency, specifically the agency of the women at court to decide between various theological positions and confessional identities, was paramount, particularly when the political influence of the court is considered alongside Charles's (and Buckingham's) increasingly fraught relationship with Parliament.Footnote 63
It was thus of real import that around the time of John Cosin's departure from London in late July 1626, Elizabeth Cary turned from Durham House to Drury Lane, where she began to visit the London residence of Walter Butler, 11th Earl of Ormond. There she “met and grew acquainted with some Catholics and priests,” including the Benedictine Fathers Dunstan: “White” Father Dunstan Everard and “Black” Father Dunstan Pettinger.Footnote 64 Under their influence, Cary attended a series of disputations by which she was, again, “convinced” of the “danger and unsecurity of her present state.” Cary was now resolved to be reconciled to the Church of Rome and consulted on a course of action with “her friend” Susan Feilding, who had been present at “some of the disputations.” Feilding apparently asked Cary to wait, “promising her that after hearing one more dispute, she would be reconciled together with her,” which, “having heard,” Feilding then “desired another,” and another thereafter. These conferences and delays continued in this manner for “a little less than half a year,” at which point Cary decided to move forward, with or without Feilding.Footnote 65
On 14 November 1626, Cary went to Lady Denbigh's residence at court and informed her that she was resolved to be presently reconciled and that if Feilding “would now dispose herself to do the same, she might.”Footnote 66 Feilding still “continued to make her old requests”—to wait, to hear another disputation—but when she realized she could “not prevail as before,” she attempted to keep Cary in her chambers.Footnote 67 Feilding was, no doubt, aware that the conversion of yet another woman in this court circle would be controversial, made more so by the fact that Cary was the wife of the Lord Deputy of Ireland, responsible for securing England's backdoor against European Catholic influence (and invasion).Footnote 68 Feilding was a keen political actor, who, as the First Lady of the Bedchamber and Mistress of the Robes, held the highest female office and had more to lose than Cary in this affair of conscience. Moreover, she was a woman who, seemingly confronted with the same sort of salvific doubts as Cary, had found a way to remain within the Church of England.Footnote 69
Elizabeth Cary, however, resisted Feilding's attempts at persuasion, along with the attempted confinement, and went “with all speed” to Drury Lane, where she was reconciled in Lord Ormond's stables by Father Pettinger.Footnote 70 She then returned to court, telling Feilding that “she was now content to stay with her as long as she pleased, for all was done.” “Much troubled,” Feilding promptly informed her brother, the Duke of Buckingham, who, in turn, informed the king. There was an immediate effort by those at court—including Charles, “who showed himself highly displeased”—to recover her. They sought “most earnestly to persuade her that whilst it,” her defection, “was yet unknown she should return.”Footnote 71 However, when asked directly by the king “wheather [she] would nor not, declare [her] selfe Catholicke,” Cary would not deny her newly confirmed faith.Footnote 72
Seeing she would be “moved neither by persuasions nor displeasures,” Cary was permitted to return home, though she was followed by Secretary John Coke, who carried an order from Charles confining her to “her house during his Majesty's pleasure.”Footnote 73 Placing Cary under house arrest was an effort, as her enraged husband soon urged from Dublin, to “keepe her safe, and free from any Communication” with “those Inchanters,” so that she might be “recover[ed] out of those Distractions whereinto they [had] putt hir,” but it was also likely an attempt to mitigate the visible evidence of her defection.Footnote 74 As the newsletter writer Joseph Mead suggested, Cary had been “banned the Court, for lately going to masse with the Queene.”Footnote 75 Cary's confinement, however, also illustrates the limits of duress that could be applied to matters of conscience. The king might keep her from court, (attempt to) keep her from her Catholic priests, and prevent her from attending mass at the queen's chapel, but Charles could not, and could not be seen to, force Cary in her faith. Henry Cary, too, had limited tools at his disposal to induce her return to the Church of England. In response to his wife's conversion, Henry cut off her maintenance, but Elizabeth's connections dulled the effect of this pressure.Footnote 76 She would remain in London with expenses covered by loans from Katherine Manners and the Countess of Buckingham.Footnote 77 Her court connections also rendered her confinement rather short: Cary was set at liberty only six weeks later, in January 1627, by the intercession of a new lady of the queen's bedchamber, Lucy Hay, and Cecily Manners, the Countess of Rutland.Footnote 78
If Cary's conversion had produced something of a panic at court, it also produced a panic among the Durham House set, who were “sensible of the disgrace which they sustain[ed] by reason of her fall.”Footnote 79 Apparently the very “day after her reconciliation,” Cary was visited by John Cosin, recently returned to London, who “having heard from her all that had been done, fell into so great and violent a trouble that casting himself on the ground, he would not rise nor eat from morning till night, weeping even to roaring.” Cosin reportedly cried that this would lead to the “disgrace of their company”—those around Durham House—as she “would hurt others” by “making them afraid of them.” Cosin, pleading for her to recant, bemoaned that “everyone would say this”—evidently popery— “was the end of those that received their opinions.” They sat together “fasting … all day,” but Cosin in “no way prevailed with her.”Footnote 80
As news of Cary's conversion spread, divines around Durham House redoubled their efforts.Footnote 81 According to Alexander Cooke (no friend to Durham House, which, in his opinion, was populated with “Men of corrupt Minds”), Richard Montague visited Cary and told her, bluntly, that “dying an English Papist, she died in the state of Damnation.”Footnote 82 In a less harsh approach, apparently at Charles's insistence, Cosin delivered to Cary a “paper” written by an unidentified Protestant bishop, with “arguments, pretended examples, and authorities, to prove that, were Catholic religion true, yet it were lawful to communicate with them” (that is, with the Church of England) still.Footnote 83 This was, perhaps, something akin to the tract written for Katherine Manners by Bishop John Williams, and it should be remembered that this was a legitimate position, convincing enough to Manners and Feilding, who were seemingly able to hold the Church of Rome to be a true church and yet remain in communion with the Church of England. Cary relayed this paper to her “ghostly father,” William Benet Jones, a Benedictine better known by his alias, Price.Footnote 84 Price then passed along the tract to his superior, the president-general of the English Benedictines, John (Leander) Jones, “who answered it,” and “so satisfactorily,” that when Cary then “returned the answer to the hand from whence she received the paper,” she was “sent to” by the unnamed bishop who authored the tract desiring that she should not “publish it.”Footnote 85 This answer, however, circulated to some degree, as it fell into Cooke's hands. He found the priest's response “a very silly one.” According to Cooke, at this point Cosin chose not to reply and apparently “took his farewel of the Lady, without purpose of ever visiting her again.”Footnote 86
Cosin's direct attempts to argue Elizabeth Cary back into the Church of England were evidently failing. However, just weeks later, on 3 December 1626, Cosin preached a now-famous sermon at Durham House upon the occasion of Francis White's consecration as bishop of Carlisle, a sermon that was part of this broad effort to recover Cary and to keep other wavering individuals like her within the fold.Footnote 87 Delivered before an audience of some five hundred, including Lady Denbigh, Cosin's sermon was predominately a defense of English episcopacy, a defense against the “new Pharisees of our time,” who asked, as Christ was asked, “By what authority do ye these things?” Cosin declared that bishops drew their authority, as they had for “these fifteen hundred years and upwards” from Christ's own charge: “as My Father sent Me, so I send you.”Footnote 88 Cosin lamented the papists’ false accusation, leveled “in the beginning of the late Queen's reign, that our bishops had then no lawfull succession, no orderly consecration but laid one another's hands upon their heads, and so made themselves bishops.”Footnote 89 This was “as true as if the father of lies had said it,” for theirs was a church “which ever held firm … in a continued line of succession from former known bishops, and so from this very mission of the Apostles.”Footnote 90 Cosin's sermon was thus part of the ongoing polemical exchange over the continuity of the true church and should be viewed as a defense against the Romanist rejection of the antiquity of the doctrines and ceremonies of the Church of England.
After outlining the authority of English bishops and the origin and continued succession of their mission from Christ, Cosin then outlined the nature of that commission, the description of which could be easily taken as a defense of the style of anti-Catholicism advocated out of Durham House. “It is the care and wisdom of our Church, therefore, and so it has been in all antiquity, before any man be ordained a priest, or consecrated a bishop, to put this question to him, ‘Will you maintain quietness and peace among all Christian people?’” And so, Cosin wondered whereby “they had their orders, or of whose sending they were,” who “cry us up ‘No peace,’ and ‘No moderation.’” Those who now cried out against moderation were “fomenting the factions on both sides, and they hate the very name of peace on all sides.”Footnote 91 This was an attempt to assimilate the extreme positions on both sides of the confessional divide, a version of anti-Puritanism pressed by the likes of Montague, whose New Gagg broadly denounced those divines who aimed “not at peace, nor would procure unity,” but rather endeavored “to keepe a faction on foot, and maintaine opposition, even where it needeth not.”Footnote 92 It was, as Cosin then declared, the office of the bishop to “mark and to rebuke them that sow dissensions among us” and to endeavor “that all Christians may agree in the truth of God's holy Word, and live in unity and godly love.”Footnote 93
Bishops must “make men observe and do what the Church teaches them.” This was critical in the struggle against encroaching popery: “we suffer scandal from them of the Church of Rome in many things, in nothing more than this, that we are sent to preach sermons to the people, as men that had some pretty commodities to sell them which, if they liked, they might buy and use; if not, they might let them alone.” The Church of England might “talk of devotion,” but they lived “like the careless;” they had “churches, but keep them not like the houses of God;” they had “Sacraments, but few to frequent them; Confession, but few to practice it”—the “old discipline” was “neglected.”Footnote 94 Here, as Anthony Milton has argued, Cosin was publicly laying out a style of anti-Catholicism that “displayed a greater sensitivity towards Romanist criticisms of irreverence, and a more acute awareness of the need to meet such criticisms in a positive and practical way.”Footnote 95
Notably, this sermon was delivered at the same time that Cosin was finishing his Hours of Prayer, drafted across late 1626 and published in early 1627, a work of practical devotion apparently written “at the Request, and for the Satisfaction” of Susan Feilding.Footnote 96 In his dedication, Cosin framed this text as a way to, again, counter the Catholic accusation that, “here in England,” they had “set up a New Church, and a New Faith,” “abandoned All the Ancient Formes of Piety and Devotion,” had “taken away all the Religious Exercises and Prayers of our Forefathers,” and “despised all the old Ceremonies, & cast behind us the Blessed Sacraments of Christs Catholique Church.”Footnote 97 There was, then, an explicit interconfessional polemical edge to this work of devotion, reacting to the same sort of Catholic arguments that had recently provoked Cary's conversion, addressing the same critiques Cosin had addressed in his December consecration sermon.
There was also a sharp intra-Protestant edge to this primer, despite Cosin's assertion that he intended to provide “daily and devout order of Private Prayer” so that individuals might spend time each day “in God's holy worship and service; not employing themselves so much to talk and dispute as to practise religion.”Footnote 98 Yet, devotional texts could also stir up talk and dispute. Hours of Prayer generated a vocal Calvinist backlash, with attacks that echoed those made against Montague's earlier polemical works, namely denunciations of Cosin's book as “prejudicial to our Church and advantageous onely to the Church of Rome.”Footnote 99 There was specifically a controversy surrounding Cosin's inclusion of a “prayer to be sayd for a man after his soule is departed,” which was deemed altogether too popish and was scandalous enough that Cosin excused it as a printer's error and altered the pages for later impressions.Footnote 100 Hours of Prayer, then, can be placed decisively within this ongoing multidirectional confessional conflict, a conflict near the center of which sat Elizabeth Cary.
Cary's reaction to Cosin is particularly interesting as it demonstrates that Cary was keenly aware of the tense intra-Protestant dimensions of the effort to recover her to the Church of England. In a December 1626 letter to Susan Feilding, Cary thanked both her and the Duke of Buckingham for their “care,” noting that she was “bound to mr cosens … for the paines he takes,” but she “wish[ed] any man else, had bene imployed rather.”Footnote 101 Alexander Cooke alleged that Cary had “protested, that if she ever turned again,” she would “turn Puritan, not Moderate Protestant, as she phraseth it; for Moderate Protestants, viz. Mr Coosens, &c. are farther from Catholicks than Puritans.”Footnote 102
While Cooke might not be uncritically believed, Cary was clearly capable of making a distinction between these categories of Puritanism and the moderate Protestantism of Durham House. Her understanding, and, indeed, manipulation, of these points of division within the Church of England were brought to the fore during yet another disputation, organized in early 1627 by her sister-in-law, Jane Cary, and her husband, Edward Barrett, Lord Newburgh.Footnote 103 According to her daughters’ account, this was a disputation held between “Black Father Dunstan,” the Benedictine Dunstan Pettinger, and “Doctor Wheatley.”Footnote 104 Existing scholarship has assumed “Wheatley” to be William Whately, vicar of Branbury and well-known Puritan preacher.Footnote 105 According to Cary's daughters, an account of this disputation with Black Father Dunstan was subsequently printed by this “Wheatley,” though no record of such a publication by William Whately has been identified.Footnote 106 There is, however, a printed account of a disputation held between Daniel Featley and White Father Dunstan, Dunstan Everard, on 25 January 1627, which Featley then detailed in his 1630 tract, The Grand Sacrilege of the Church of Rome. Footnote 107 “Wheatley,” as recorded in The Lady Falkland Her Life, would thus appear to be a corruption of “Featley.” That this tract very plausibly records the same event as is recounted in Cary's spiritual biography renders Featley's narrative of this conference highly relevant to our understanding of her conversion and situates the reaction to her conversion firmly within the polemical context described here.
Indeed, in his printed account of this disputation, Featley unambiguously placed his efforts with Cary within the ongoing intra-Protestant contest in which he was engaged. He opened the tract with the description of her conversation addressed above: an assertion that the Lady Falkland had been led into the Arminian path and afterward into the high road of popery. Moreover, he located this disputation within a broader controversial context by issuing a printed challenge to both Dunstan Everard and the Countess of Buckingham's Jesuit chaplain, John Percy, urging them jointly to answer his challenge “touching the visibilitie of a Church, professing the Trent Faith 500 yeeres after Christ.”Footnote 108 In this manner, Featley explicitly connected this conference for Cary to his earlier exchange with Percy, relating Cary's conversion to the countess's conversion and the continued Durham House failures to keep this group of wavering women within the Church of England.
According to Featley, for Cary this January 1627 disputation ranged across a number of topics (most prominently, a discussion of Rome's denial of the cup to laity in the sacrament of communion, the “grand sacrilege” that gave his tract its title), but there were only two points that were brought up by Elizabeth Cary herself on this occasion. First, she opened the discussion by asking, “Doctor Featly resolve mee, whether thinke you a Church may be with out a Bishop, or no?” As became clear in her subsequent questioning, Cary was asking about the continuity of episcopal authority, a question about how priestly and episcopal authority was conferred within the Church of England, a topic with suggestive correspondence to the subject of John Cosin's sermon preached the month before at Durham House. Featley attempted to dismiss this question as irrelevant to her. He urged Cary “not to trouble [her] selfe with such curious questions of small, or no moment to [her].” It was a question, he emphasized, “wherin learned men, without hazarding of their salvation, may have different opinions.”Footnote 109 Yet, Cary insisted that she held “it a matter of great moment” and entreated him to deliver his “judgment therof,” and, after a short break prompted by the arrival of a meal, “revived the former question” by demanding of Featley, “Who should ordaine Priests in a Church, where there are no Bishops?”Footnote 110 Featley, however, would have the topic “forborne,” asking “what doth this question concern any here present?” It was not a “matter of faith, necessary to salvation to resolve this way or that.”Footnote 111
The only other topic that Cary herself brought up during this meeting was the question of prayers for the dead. She asked Featley directly “Whether hee thought the ancient Fathers prayed not for the dead?” Featley answered that “questionlesse they did,” clarifying that Protestants did not “condemne” all “commemoration, or prayers for the dead, but the Popish manner of praying for the release of their soules out of Purgatory.”Footnote 112 Here, Cary was, again, engaging with ideas she may have drawn from Cosin. The inclusion of prayers for the dead in his Hours of Prayer was highly contentious, and, in insisting that Featley should address this topic, Cary drove the disputation headlong into an intra-Protestant controversy over the alleged popish errors out of Durham House. These were, specifically, points of intra-Protestant controversy that she may well have gleaned from the devotional texts produced for her and the women in her circle.
Featley had approached his encounter with Cary (which he was assured would be only in the company of “such as [were] sincerely affected to the truth of the Gospell”) as an opportunity to give soteriological counsel and comfort to a woman in doubt.Footnote 113 Everard's presence came as a surprise to Featley, who framed the priest as Cary's “second” in what then became a live polemical exchange through her intercession—her “mouth,” as Featley dismissed, “used only as a trunke to shoote out those poysoned bullets,” which her confessor “had chammed before with his teeth.”Footnote 114 If Featley's account is to be believed, Cary was not particularly interested in his imputed concerns; she appears not to have been seeking comfort in devotion but in reasoned arguments about where she might find salvific security. Rather than remain an object of pastoral intervention, Cary became a participant in theological disputation, forcing Featley to engage with various positions that had been presented to her by her Benedictine fathers and by divines around Durham House, in conversation, in polemical exchange, and in devotional texts.
Strikingly, three years later, in 1630—the same year that Featley put this conference account to print—Cary published an English translation of Cardinal Jacques Davy du Perron's Réplique à la response du sérénissime roy de la Grand Bretagne (1620), an aspect of her impressive corpus that might be viewed as a direct intervention in the intra- and interconfessional print exchange that had structured her interactions with these divines at the time of her conversion.Footnote 115 In translating a section of Du Perron consisting of a “catalog of the errors of the English Church and the rightness of the Roman Church,” Cary was not only contributing to the long-standing post-Reformation debate over the nature and continuity of the true church. She was also, arguably, responding to a 1629 publication out of Durham House: an edition of the late Lancelot Andrewes's sermons and minor works, edited and assembled by William Laud and John Buckeridge at Charles's insistence.Footnote 116 The selected sermons were arranged by liturgical feast days, an arrangement, which, as Peter McCullough has noted, was an “example of the Laudian devotion to the church calendar” made familiar first by Cosin's Hours of Prayer. Footnote 117 Among Andrewes's minor works included in the edition was an unfinished response to Du Perron's treatment of “the agreement of the ancient Catholicke Church with the moderne.”Footnote 118 The corresponding timing of Cary's publication of the first English translation of Du Perron—dedicated to Henrietta Maria and suppressed by Archbishop Abbot—suggests that Cary was now publicly engaging in theological controversy on the very topic that had provoked her own conversion.Footnote 119
This depiction of Cary as both a consumer of, and active participant in, theological controversy was echoed in contemporary sources, including a circulating Catholic play, Hierarchomachia, or the Anti-Bishop, written between 1629 and 1630, precisely at the moment when Cary published her translation of Du Perron and Featley published his account of their 1627 disputation.Footnote 120 The play was a sharp intervention in an ongoing intra-Catholic ecclesiological dispute over the authority of the papally appointed titular bishop of Chalcedon, Richard Smith, to demand that regulars obtain his approbation, as ordinary, before hearing the confession of the laity. This demand provoked serious opposition by the Jesuits and their lay backers, opposition that would eventually lead Smith to resign his office in 1631.Footnote 121 While Cary was firmly associated with the Benedictines, she had publicly thrown her weight behind the episcopal cause in early 1628 when she was confirmed by the bishop in the Drury Lane residence of Smith's most prominent lay backer, Anthony Browne, Viscount Montague.Footnote 122 A pro-episcopal satire, Hierarchomachia, staged the arguments at the heart of this intra-confessional controversy, arguments that, as the drama unfolds, are presented before and adjudicated by three female characters, one of whom, Nivetta, is a convincing caricature of Cary, whose mother-in-law's maiden name was, recognizably, Knyvett.Footnote 123
Repeatedly, Nivetta makes explicit claims regarding her ability, and proper role, in parsing a range of arguments and versions of the Christian faith presented to her and her less-episcopally inclined female companions, Celia and Valeria. For example, as the Jesuit-associated Bitomattus attempts to convince Nivetta that the bishop had not been given ordinary powers, she countered: “like foxes you would steal the goose/ And stick us up a feather, you would mean/ The faith we owe to pastors to bestow/ It wholly on your dreams and idle tales;/ Which, though I be a woman and but weak, I could convince.”Footnote 124 Nivetta adds, perhaps with a tongue-in-cheek nod toward Cary's literary prowess, that “though I never could translate/Saint Augustine's Confessions …Yet can I say my creed, believe the church,/ And be as sensible of any wrong/ Done to her in her pastors as the best.”Footnote 125 While Celia would defend the Jesuits, particularly for their role in opposing their Protestant adversaries— “who knows not by report/ Sheriffus [John Percy (Fisher)] … and the rest/ That beat down pamphlets daily peeping forth/ of Doctor Eatfly [Featley] … with other giant writers of this land?”—Nivetta tells Bitomattus that it was the interference of men like him that forced “us women to peruse/ Both briefs and canons to find out your shifts,/ That we may know our pastor's voice from yours.”Footnote 126
The ability of women to engage with, decide between, and endorse various conflicting clerical voices forms the center of action in Hierarchomachia's main set piece—a familiar scene of a religious disputation (now between opposing Catholic factions) staged before these three women.Footnote 127 Nivetta emerges, as Cary had, not merely as the subject of pastoral intervention, but as an active participant in the controversy. While Valeria chides Nivetta for her sharp exchanges with the men assembled, asking, “did I invite you hither to contend/ And rail” or “rather to be silent and inform/ Your understanding better of the men/ And of their rare example?,” Nivetta persists, repeatedly probing the clerical disputants over the authority of bishops and the necessity of their approbation.Footnote 128 When Celia insists, essentially as Featley had in his conference with Cary, that this was an adiaphoric ecclesiastical question of no real moment to the women involved (“Pray, madam, keep your choice and leave us ours;/ Our souls are warranted as well as yours”), Nivetta doubles down, insisting, “‘Tis that I seek to know with such desire.”Footnote 129 While some in the audience here bid Nivetta that her “silence … would become” her “more than such questions,” insisting that “women should not speak/ In open synods,” one pro-episcopal layman defended her right to engage in such a manner: “who should stop their mouths/ When once they are admitted?”Footnote 130 She might have “privilege to speak/ Till she be satisfied in her demand.”Footnote 131
This was, then, a contemporary dramatization of the dynamics of these very real disputations, where the space of religious controversy was opened to the interventions of women like Cary. These were women of high social status whose interactions with influential clergy on both sides of the confessional divide were acknowledged to hold real significance, partly through the presumption that such interventions must be guided by conscience, given their protection from the crudest forms of political pressure that might be applied to men of similar status with ambitions at public office. Yet, this contemporary image of a woman, untainted by formal learning and political commitments who might serve as a font of unmediated or pure religious zeal, fits as uncomfortably with our understanding of the activities of Cary, or Feilding, or the Countess of Buckingham, as does the image of these women constructed in some strains of scholarship—women whose time was spent in prayers and private devotions, sheltered from the spaces of theological and ecclesiological discord.
Indeed, by the mid-1630s, Elizabeth Cary was not only participating in these spaces, she had transformed her London residence into a site of religious disputation: “the discourse” at her table “was frequently religion, there being those that were very capable on both sides,” often including her two eldest sons, Lucius and Lorenzo, and “many of their friends (Oxford scholars and others),” who would form the core of the Great Tew Circle later in the decade.Footnote 132 Included here was William Chillingworth, an Oxford man and godson of William Laud, who was converted to Catholicism by the Countess of Buckingham's Jesuit, John Percy, in 1628.Footnote 133 While described as a “long waverer” in his confessional commitments, Cary “made great account” of Chillingworth, whom she engaged to instruct her daughters in the Catholic faith and assist them in their devotions.Footnote 134 When Chillingworth then experienced a spiritual crisis, convinced that the supposed errors of the Church of England were but “private men's irregular devotions,” Cary organized a series of disputations with Catholics divines for his benefit. These included John Percy and Christopher Davenport, the latter a chaplain of Henrietta Maria who had recently published an irenic interpretation of the Thirty-Nine Articles, which built directly upon arguments in Richard Montague's Appello Caesarem.Footnote 135 While these disputations did not produce the intended effect and Chillingworth subsequently retired to Lucius's Great Tew, where he drafted The Religion of Protestants (1638), we see here a version of female religious activity that extended far beyond the confines of domestic devotion and out into the “theological blizzard.”Footnote 136
Conclusion
If Daniel Featley's Ancilla Pietatis and John Cosin's Hours of Prayer are properly contextualized, and due attention is given to the women for whom they were written, then it becomes clear that these works of private devotion were not, as has been suggested, “innocent of the controversies which have consumed so much historical attention.”Footnote 137 This case study of two of the most popular devotional manuals produced in the 1620s, and the web of relationships and interactions that shaped their production, demonstrates that turning attention to works of practical divinity does not minimize categories of religious division in the post-Reformation Church of England, but rather casts those divisions in sharp relief. Indeed, if the resulting analysis dissolves anything, it is any clear distinction between the imposed categories of polemic and devotion, precisely because these works of private devotion were so deeply embedded in the complex intra- and interconfessional conflict that characterized the shifting theological landscape of the early Stuart period. Devotional literature was used to model and enact competing polemical positions by different means, for a potentially distinct audience. While not every reader of Ancilla Pietatis or Hours of Prayer (indeed, a very few) would have explicit knowledge of the circumstances of textual production, those circumstances shaped the form, content, and intention of these prayer manuals. Accordingly, how people prayed in private using these manuals was not a neutral or apolemical practice. If there were contested visions of how one should properly perform faith and reverence, then the “lived experience” of religion, both for the dedicatees and broader readership of these devotional works, cannot be divorced from the intra-Protestant and interconfessional controversy out of which these texts emerged and to which they contributed.
Women thus ought to be placed near the center of this triangulated confessional conflict, not only as imagined prisms of unmediated piety or even as the intended consumers of these prayer manuals, but as active participants in the conflict that prompted the production of these texts. An unfortunate result of scholarship on the lived experience of religion, and particularly on the lived experience of religion for lay women, is that such an experience is often constrained to the contemplative and affective and thus reduced to the physical, material, and, above all, emotional reality of using devotional texts like Ancilla Pietatis or Hours of Prayer. Yet, to recognize that religion is not merely a “disembodied set of doctrines” but rather “consists of people who have found a way of building their daily lives around it,” does not (or should not) necessitate the representation of that daily religious life as a largely unintellectual experience of dwelling in faith and reverence, a space approached “through devotion rather than through doctrine” where theological discord was apparently irrelevant.Footnote 138 This representation is too narrow and, in a manner, is dismissive of the evident interests and agency of the lay women at the center of these polemical exchanges. If we want to understand post-Reformation English Protestantism (or Catholicism) by appreciating how “these Christians live[d] out their religion”—if we want to approach the study of religion by asking, as a child might ask of an animal at the zoo, “but what does he do all day?”—then we must recognize that part of the lived experience of religion for women like Mary Villiers, Katherine Manners, Susan Feilding, and Elizabeth Cary might consist of reading Richard Hooker, or examining competing position papers drafted by Protestant bishops and Catholic priests, or attending (and organizing) disputation after disputation, prompting divines on both sides of the confessional divide to argue with one another, sometimes over questions of proper devotion, but also over theological points, as Featley told Cary, of little or no moment to them.Footnote 139
The women addressed here, at the center of these intra- and interconfessional exchanges, may be considered non-representative, given their privileged status and position at court. Yet, the very position that rendered these women atypical also renders them central to the public politics of conversion at this historical juncture.Footnote 140 It was the prospect, and then reality, of a Catholic queen in England—the foreign policy that necessitated such a dynastic match and the alterations to legal controls over domestic religious conformity made to facilitate this cross-confessional alliance—that allowed for both a visible resurgence of English Catholicism and for the advance of the anti-Calvinist Durham House set within the ecclesiastical infrastructure of the Church of England. This was a moment when the religious character, not only of the queen's bedchamber or of the Caroline court, but of the entire post-Reformation English church and its relationship to the Church of Rome was unsettled, subject to debate and, potentially, to change.
An awareness of this fact might, in part, explain these women's determination to engage with and publicly endorse versions of the Christian faith that various divines were presenting for their consideration. Accordingly, paying attention to these women's confessional commitments and the intense controversy surrounding their religious identity yields a more rounded picture of what it might mean to be Catholic, or to be Puritan, or to be a moderate Protestant, and, indeed, illuminates how these unstable confessional categories were defined, and redefined, in relation to one another. When placed within this context, bitter theological division was anything but irrelevant to the lived experience of religion for these women, and the attempts by divines like Daniel Featley or John Cosin to shape their devotional practices reflected the sharp edge of a theological renegotiation taking place on a national scale during the political upheaval of the 1620s and 1630s.
Kathryn Marshalek is an Assistant Professor at the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida. She would like to thank Peter Lake, Paul Lim, and the anonymous reviewers of this journal for their comments and suggestions. Earlier versions of this article were presented at Vanderbilt University and the 2025 Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies. The author is grateful for the questions and comments received on both occasions.
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