This chapter investigates the significance for the succession of the Archpriest controversy, an intra-Catholic dispute between a group of secular priests and their Jesuit foes. It is shown that that the controversy was a genuinely significant aspect of the Elizabethan fin de siècle, with much to tell us about the political dynamics of the post-Reformation and the politics of incipient regime change. Robert Persons’s Conference and Memorial, and the Appellant pamphlets printed with the connivance of the English government are examined with a view to unpicking the pitch the various factions made to James VI. Catholics of all stripes are shown to have been proffering their support to the prospective Stuart king in return for a promise of toleration. Their disappointed hopes would eventuate in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.

Peter Lake tracks how the size, cost, and format of John Andrewes’s cheap religious pamphlets conditioned their approach to doctrinal content. In doing so, Lake resists the impulse to categorise all cheap print as ‘popular’ and therefore theologically unorthodox. John Andrewes, the so-called ‘market place theologian,’ is shown to struggle with some of the same paradoxes and tensions that motivate William Perkins’ more mainstream protestant writing, undermining false assumptions about the antagonism of popular and orthodox predestinarian religious thought.

This chapter is about how what was unsayable in late sixteenth-century England became sayable by mid-seventeenth-century England. The dynamics of what we might call free speech were worked out in a series of tensions, and sometimes conflicts, between the duty of certain public men to defend the public interest – crudely that of the commonwealth and of true religion – and the constraints placed on who got to talk about such things and where and to whom they got to talk about them. The result was a very restricted circle of persons comprising in secular affairs Privy Counsellors, in practice certain courtiers and favourites, and in ecclesiastical matter the bishops and certain godly leaned clergy, and on some topics, but not on others, Parliament-men. Under the right circumstances, most often those created by actual or perceived crisis and threat, these very restricted ranks of the counsel-giving classes could be expanded. While one should not ignore, or even play down, the contingency of the political events that drove this narrative, one can also surely see a dialectical progression at work here, as acts of free speech, each designed to describe, unmask and denounce various conspiracy-based emergencies, practised by one group or another – by the state and its (either Catholic or Puritan) critics, by various Parliament-men and the defenders of the court, or the Crown, or indeed by the monarch himself, by the opponents or defenders of the Spanish Match – elicited other such acts from their opponents. The result was a series of claims to and outbreaks of ‘free speech’ of increasing frequency, if not intensity. But what this was not was the rise of free speech in anything like the modern sense, since the aim of each of these exercises in parrhesia was to achieve a situation in which certain groups got to speak and certain things got to get said while others most definitely did not.

This chapter offers a substantial historiographical introduction, reflecting upon the debates of the last fifty years, upon the ‘fate’ of the English Revolution, and upon the possibilities for reasserting the significance of the events of the 1640s and early 1650s, not least in response to ‘revisionist’ scholarship. Arguing that responses to the revisionist challenge have in many ways been less robust regarding the ‘course’ – as opposed to the ‘causes’ – of the civil wars, it builds upon the most important recent work in the field – much of it by contributors to this volume – by highlighting the need to analyse the conduct and content of ‘public politics’, as revealed in and transformed by developments in print culture. This makes it possible to reflect not just upon issues like ‘mobilisation’ and the ‘creativity’ of contemporary politics, but also to revisit issues like localism and radicalism, and to reconfigure our appreciation of the dynamic processes of contemporary debates. In other words, while the chapters are informed by analysis of print culture, they seek to integrate print culture into different aspects of public life, in order to rethink the fissures and fault lines within contemporary society, and to reframe how these affected political and religious change. Finally, the introduction sets such work in the context of, and in dialogue with, the work of Ann Hughes, in whose honour the volume has been produced.

This chapter uses the court sermons of Robert Skinner, a coming man at court and in the episcopate, to explore the relationship of Arminian theology to the churchmanship and political attitudes of the Personal Rule, and in particular to the virulent anti-puritanism that was so constitutive of Caroline religio-political ideology. It argues that such theology was at the root of the Laudian programme and that Skinner’s sermons, only one of which was printed at the time, give us a privileged insight into the inner workings of the Laudian and Caroline regimes. Through them we can in fact observe those regimes talking to themselves. By taking what we find there seriously we can gain real insight into what Caroline insiders up to and including Laud and Charles I thought they were doing and what true Christianity amounted to.

This chapter analyses three collections of sermons, preached during the reign of Charles I in 1636/37 in prominent pulpits by Daniel Featley, Griffith Williams, and John Prideaux as powerful statements on the pre-Laudian status quo ante, a version of Jacobean Reformed orthodoxy. Their publication coincided with the renewed prospect of Charles I re-entering the Thirty Years War. If war forced Charles to seek parliamentary supply, then in order to appease parliament a new ecclesiastical establishment might very well be required. Since Williams was very close to his kinsman Bishop John Williams, who had been positioning himself as the moderate Calvinist alternative to Laud since the late 1620s, and Featley had been George Abbot’s chaplain and a long-standing adversary of Arminianism, and Prideaux was the Regius Professor of Divinity and Rector of Exeter College, Oxford, their three volumes of sermons can be read as advertisements for what such an establishment might look like. All three were explicitly anti-Catholic, apologists for iure divino episcopacy and the Prayer Book, and employed the hypothetical universalist position on predestination to oppose what they termed Pelagian or Arminian error. They were also resolutely anti-puritan, although on terms very different from those espoused by the Laudians. Aggressively conformist, all three nevertheless distanced themselves from the Laudian ideal of the beauty of holiness. These massive tomes thus represent a detailed evocation of what had passed for Reformed orthodoxy under James I, an account now rendered newly relevant by the shifting political circumstances of the later 1630s.

The introduction explores the historiography of the county study. It traces the flowering of the genre in the 1970s and 1980s and describes the new approaches since then that justify revisiting this approach to understanding the English civil war. It then explains the approaches adopted in this book.