What happened to Puritanism?

PURITANISM is an inescapable phenomenon in historical accounts of the first six decades of the seventeenth century, interwoven in the fabric of politics and society, literature and culture, under the early Stuarts and during the Civil Wars and Cromwellian Interregnum. Here was a vibrant movement which, from the Elizabethan era onwards, sought a more thorough Reformation, believed that England's Protestant settlement was ‘but halfly reformed’, and set about infusing godliness into every aspect of public and private life. In the middle of the seventeenth century this zeal exploded into violence and among our most persistent epithets for the trauma of mid-century is ‘the Puritan Revolution’. And yet, mysteriously, Puritanism seems to leave centre stage at the Restoration in 1660. Perhaps it was simply thus: a movement delegitimised, decomposed, and destroyed, by its own hubris, excesses, and contradictions, its remnants crushed – or seduced – by the most guileful, and longest reigning, of the Stuart monarchs, Charles II, and by triumphant Cavaliers and resurgent Anglicans. In the pages of Samuel Pepys's Diary and the verses of Samuel Butler’s Hudibras the Puritans became objects of lampoon and ridicule: and nothing is so denatured as when it is the butt of satire.

True enough, we hear of ‘Dissent’ and ‘Nonconformity’ when we study the Restoration, and perhaps ‘Puritanism’ has simply changed its nomenclature. But those new terms apparently no longer denote something central to, adamantine within, English society, but instead marginal and separated: and consequently hived off by historians into narrowly ‘religious’ history. The end point of a trajectory defined by ‘Nonconformity’ will no longer lie within the broad stream of the English Reformation, a dynamic impulse internal to the national fold, but rather part of a history of modest tributaries known as ‘denominations’, subsisting quiescently beyond the majoritarian ambit of a now sedate ‘Established’ Church of England. In the second half of the century, ‘the idea of a common godly aspiration ceases to have any relevance for English Protestants’. Thus William Lamont in his arresting book Godly Rule, echoing Thomas Carlyle's famous remark about ‘the last glimpse of the godlike vanishing from England’.