Key points

• • This chapter disrupts the academy by explaining how the experiences of people with lived experience of suicidal ideation should be considered and addressed in collaborative research on this topic.

• • People with lived experience must have agency and equality with project team members throughout the research and co-design processes, with the same people with lived experience involved throughout.

• • We should be encouraged to share our experiences to challenge traditional research-based and practice paradigms that often fail to legitimise subjective experience and experiential insight.

• • Suicide should not be viewed as a disease in search of a cure. Given the life experiences and circumstances of individuals with suicidal ideation, it can seem to be a perfectly rational choice, and their reality must be validated and respected as ‘normal’ before help is offered.

Introduction

Suicide is the leading cause of death for Australians aged 15 to 44 years (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2020). Between 50 and 60 per cent of individuals who die by suicide ‘fly under the radar’, that is, without receiving formal mental health care (Johnston et al, 2009). Most have been in contact with services for physical health issues in the days or months preceding an attempt but did not receive help for their suicidal thoughts or mental health problems (Stene-Larsen and Reneflot, 2019). Little is known about individuals at risk of suicide who are not receiving mental health care.

In 2021, the Black Dog Institute, a mental health research organisation in Sydney, Australia, undertook a four-year research project to develop a person-centred service for individuals at risk of suicide but not in care. The project consisted of multiple phases and several stakeholders including a project manager, institute research teams, a design team, a lived experience team and representatives from external organisations. The project aimed to adhere to a co-design methodology and a governance structure was created with a Core Co-Design team established at the outset. At the time of writing this chapter (August 2022), the first three phases had been completed.

This chapter discusses the positive content of the Laudians’ position on predestination. Particular attention is paid to seven authors prepared to deal with this topic in extenso – Edward Kellett, Robert Shelford, Thomas Chown, Thomas Hoard, Robert Jackson, Edmund Reeve and Robert Skinner, not to mention the anonymous J. A. of Ailward. The latter attempted to attribute an essentially Arminian version of the theology of grace to the English church though the appropriation of what at the time was regarded as an essentially heretical work, which survived only in the refutation of it by the Edwardian protestant, and future puritan, Robert Crowley. This chapter concerns itself with the relation between divine foreknowledge and the double decree. These discussions were often conducted in terms of the divine attributes, chief amongst them divine mercy and justice. On this topic particular attention is given to the work of Thomas Jackson and Robert Shelford.

This chapter explicates the language of mystery, which was one of the Laudians’ preferred modes for treating the topic of predestination. The workings of the divine will were held to be so far above the puny categories of human reason that the process of subjecting the former to the demands of the latter was taken to be in itself a form of the presumption, perhaps even the sacrilege, of which the Laudians so frequently accused the puritans. The fine print of predestination was thus far better left wreathed in the language of mystery, a language that wise divines also used to deal with topics like the Trinity or Christology. There were, the Laudians maintained, central features of the Christian faith which were best simply believed rather than reduced to a list of numbered doctrinal propositions, to be then defended through entirely human procedures of syllogistic reasoning. In some circumstances, and certain moods, the Laudians held predestination to be one of those areas of difficulty, presented by God for human belief, rather than for theological enquiry.

This chapter traces the consequences of the Laudians’ view of the church as the house of God for the internal arrangements and beautification of the church and its fabric. It draws out the full practical and theological significance of the Laudian ideal of the beauty of holiness. Their claims that their policies and practices were based in part on the Jewish temple and in part on the cathedrals and the Chapel Royal are outlined and assessed.

This chapter sets the Laudian view of the Sabbath within their wider account of the feasts and festivals of the church and their account of the church’s capacity to constitute holy times as well as places. The Laudians’ opposition to puritan sabbatarianism is thus explained within their wider position, which enabled them to diminish the significance of the Sabbath attributed by the puritans as the only day marked down for worship by scripture, while simultaneously exalting the role and status of the other holy days denominated by the church, which were thus placed on an at least equal footing with the Sabbath. It was a position adumbrated in conscientious opposition to what was presented as the crude scripturalism and divisive effects of puritan sabbatarianism.

This chapter outlines the Laudian critique of puritan scripturalism, and the ways in which what the Laudians saw as the puritan insistence of the right of every Christian to a private judgement of what the scripture meant and a consequent duty, on the basis of that judgement, to hold the doings of their superiors in church and state to account. This, the Laudians claimed, undermined the authority of both the clergy and the church, not to mention order in church, state and society. At stake was not only a right to interpret scripture, but also claims to the testimony of the Holy Spirit. For the Laudians, such claims upset, indeed inverted, social and gender hierarchies, and utterly subverted the authority of the clergy. Again the result was a de facto, if not all too often, a de jure, separation.

This chapter defines Andrewes’ position in terms of its opposition to a body of both religious and political opinion labelled puritan. While Andrewes’ anti-puritanism is shown to have been rooted in traditional conformist concerns about conformity and church government, it also, Hooker-like, encompassed wider issues of religious style and modes of being. Crucial here was what Andrewes identified and excoriated as the puritan cult of the sermon and view of faith centred solely on knowledge rather than practice or works. According to Andrewes, the result was hypocrisy on a heroic pharisaical scale and a histrionic, wholly performative, style of both preaching and piety.

This chapter analyses the ways in which a variety of men negotiated the collapse of the Personal Rule and the Laudian project. On the one hand, we have the Calvinist conformist Robert Sanderson, who, by shifting the emphasis of what remained the same set of opinions was able to distance himself, and the church of England, from the excesses of Laudianism, while still protecting that church from what he presented as the reckless assaults and absurdities of the puritans, and rallying support for the king. On the other hand, we have Peter Heylyn, by this point the archetypal Laudian, engaging ideologue, tacking and trimming by emphasising his opposition to popery, even as he used the same arguments that he was deploying against the papists to continue his remorseless assault on the puritans. Here, in effect, we can watch the Laudian coalition coming apart at the seams under the pressure of the Scots war and the political crisis that ensured in England.

This chapter traces the careers of various erstwhile puritans, who, with varying degrees of enthusiasm and commitment, jumped on the Laudian bandwagon, or more politely converted to the Laudian way of seeing things. On the one hand, were those who, displaying the zeal of the convert, became more Laudian than Laud himself. Here the best examples are Foulke Robartes, John Yates and Samuel Hoard. Then, on the other hand, there are others who, far from going all-out, merely accommodated themselves to certain Laudian styles, values or modes of speech. Here the best example is Nehemiah Rogers, and the chapter features a relatively extended account of his career, connections and opinions.

This chapter analyses the Laudian attitude to Sunday sports, in a discussion designed to include the meaning of the altar and the sacrament in the constitution of the Christian community. Allowing Sunday sports re-inscribed the line between the secular and the spiritual as defined by the Laudian notions of holy places and holy times. It allowed affirmations of two different versions of the social body to be made on the same day, the one reinforcing the other, and it also prevented the day being dominated, and the social body being divided, by the essentially private, household-based, religious observances of the puritans. Here was affirmation of a broad-based Laudian version of the Christian community being enabled and maintained by the rites and observances of the national church against the divisive practices and beliefs of the puritans.

This chapter demonstrates that the Laudian avant garde was not limited to the university but encompassed older men in rural livings, whose commitment to Laudian values was, by this point, decades old, but whose views were also connected to the universities. The chapter reveals lively exchanges amongst such provincial ministers, in print and the pulpit, on some of the hot issues of the day. The chapter homes in on three men in rural livings, Robert Shelford, James Buck and Edward Kellett, all of whom have featured prominently throughout the book. Shelford’s works can be connected to firebrands in Cambridge like Richard Crashaw or Edward Martin, and to bulwarks of the provincial puritan establishment like Samuel Ward of Ipswich, who borrowed the image of the lodestone from Shelford in order to refute, in print, some of the central Arminian contentions that underpinned Shelford’s position. Some of the central claims made by Buck developed themes canvassed in the university and elicited a response, again in the pulpit and in print, from Humphrey Sydenham in Somerset. In this way something of the liveliness and fluidity of the theological scene during the 1630s is recaptured.

This chapter charts the careers of a series of convicted Laudians; some of them coming men, rising in the establishment, in the court, the church and the universities through the patronage of the prime movers of the movement, most notably Laud himself; others, old men whose commitment to the central tenets of what emerged as Laudianism dated back, in all likelihood, to the 1590s, and who were enabled by the shifts in power in the church and court of the 1630s finally to come out of the woodwork. Still others tried to leverage local issues into appeals to central authority in order to shift the balance of power in their locality and to enhance their own careers. The chapter features a comparison between the successful attempt to do that of Peter Studley in Shrewsbury and the rather less successful attempts of Peter Hausted, whose failure to become the next Peter Heylyn has as much to tell us about the dynamics of Laudianism’s rise, as some of the success stories also told in this chapter.

This chapter examines the ways in which the Laudians mixed and matched the authorities of scripture, of natural law, of apostolic and ecclesiastical tradition and of the positive law of the church. Where, on the issue of church government, the Laudians pushed the claims of scripture and of apostolic precept and precedent to assert and exalt the iure divino status of episcopacy, on the Sabbath they played down the authority of scripture and of apostolic practice, while exalting the authority of the church. The result was a nuanced position which refuted the scripturalist sabbatarianism of the puritans, while allowing the Laudians to retain an account of Sunday worship exalted enough for their own purposes and perfectly compatible with their account of the power of the church to consecrate holy times as well as places.

The chapter analyses the Laudian critique of puritanism as politically subversive of both monarchical and episcopal authority. Puritanism was portrayed by the Laudians as an ideology organised around ‘popularity’. This word denoted two things: firstly, the search for popular approval and applause, to be gained by a rabble-rousing espousal of singularity and an unprincipled criticism of those in power in church and state, and secondly, institutional arrangements – in the church, presbyterianism, and, in the state, an enhanced role for parliament – that subjected the rulers to the whims and opinions of the people. The organising trope was the puritan as a firebrand or incendiary, or alternatively as a malcontent tribuni plebis, with frequent either glancing or direct references being made to the so-called puritan triumvirs, Burton, Bastwick and Prynne.

This chapter shows how the Laudians conceived the history of the church as a succession of sacrifices and altars stretching from Adam or Abel through the actual sacrifices of the Jews, under first natural, and then Mosaic law, and then through the spiritual sacrifices offered up by and in Christian churches. Where there were sacrifices there also altars and priests, and so the history of the church was conceived as a succession of consecrated persons and spaces, centred on altars, and then on episcopal chairs, stretching from the apostles to the present. The chapter shows the Laudians attempting to trace the presence in the primitive church, and then in the church of England, of the basic triad of priest, sacrifice and altar. They encountered some issues in so doing in the post-reformation church of England and the chapter shows some of their critics, most notably Bishop Williams, pointing that out and the Laudians responding with difficulty to those criticisms.

This chapter explores the Laudian critique of the (allegedly) puritan doctrine of absolute predestination, and particularly absolute reprobation. This critique imputed an absolute, fatal or stoic necessity to questions of salvation and damnation, which, the Laudians claimed, reduced the role of human free will and moral effort to nothing. In so doing it created desperately difficult pastoral dilemmas for ministers trying to rescue members of their flocks from the desperation such doctrines all too often induced. This was particularly the case for absolute reprobation. It was in the course of dealing with puritan error on this subject that the Laudians came to deal with the topic of predestination, and faute de mieux, to adumbrate their own position, asserting that saving grace was offered to all, that Christ died for the sins of the whole world, that God willed the salvation of every sinner, that human effort was required for salvation, that true faith could be totally and finally lost and that no one was simply doomed to damnation; contentions which they defended not as resolutions of the paradoxes at the heart of the debate about predestination, but rather as saving truths central to the nature of Christianity.

Having dealt with Laudianism as an ideology, and sought to reconstruct it in all its coherences and inner tensions, this chapter introduces the notion, and explains the value, of viewing it as a coalition made up of persons and groups of different views, with different levels of commitment to the Laudian agenda; some fully signed up to the whole package, others committed to some parts of it but not to others, others still merely performing compliance and collaboration with varying degrees of intensity and conviction.