Puritans in Conflict

The Puritan Gentry During and After the Civil Wars

J. T. Cliffe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000223330
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Originally published in 1988, and the companion book to The Puritan Gentry, covering the period of the Civil War, the English republic and the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, this book gives an account of how the godly interest of the Puritans dissolved into faction and impotence. The fissures among the Puritan gentry stemmed, as the book shows, from a conflict between their zeal in religion and the conservative instincts which owed much to their wealth and status.

One

Reformation Deferred

In a fast sermon preached before members of the Commons in December 1641 Edmund Calamy made it clear that there was much still to be done. Drunkenness, he thundered, had ‘growne to that Gyant-like bignesse as that there is no hope of redresse but in the Parliament.’ Blasphemous swearing was so prevalent that it appeared that men took a pride in offending God, while adultery and fornication were spreading through the kingdom like an epidemic. The Sabbath continued to be profaned and in the churches idolatry and superstition were flourishing. The time had come, he stressed, ‘to bury all superstitious Ceremonies in the grave of oblivion and perfect a Reformation according to the Word of God.’¹ The Puritan squires who sat in the Long Parliament would have wholeheartedly agreed with his account of the evils of the day and with his proposal that there should be a national synod of divines which would provide advice on the settlement of religion. Some of these men had ministers under their patronage whose views were at least as radical as those of Calamy. The same month Stanley Gower, the minister of Brampton Bryan in Herefordshire, wrote in a letter to his patron, Sir Robert Harley, who was the senior knight of the shire that he was now expecting a major alteration in religion: ‘The Atheists, papists and prelats, our common enemys, are now to be scoured and swept away… our Land hath bene long sick and yow are the physicians.’² In April 1641 Samuel Fairclough, the pastor of Kedington in Suffolk, had exhorted Parliament in another fast sermon to extirpate the Achans, a name which he applied to papists, ‘idle, scandalous, negligent ministers’, blasphemers, Sabbath-breakers and others whom the Puritans regarded with disfavour. When the sermon was published he dedicated it to his patron, Sir Nathaniel Bamardiston, who was one of the knights of the shire and in his estimation a man who had proved to be a true Joshua by ‘countenancing and incouraging the vertuous and opposing the profane and vitious.’³

Shortly after Calamy delivered his sermon the Commons considered a report from a committee which had been charged with the task of preparing an order for the speedy execution of the laws against swearing, drunkenness and profanation of the Sabbath and decided that a bill should be drafted for this purpose. During the debate Sir Simonds D’Ewes argued that justices of the peace who were guilty of the sins of swearing and drunkenness should be removed from office.⁴ In the ecclesiastical field there was little to suggest that the dreams of a new Jerusalem were about to be realized. With Laud and most of his bishops in confinement the system of episcopal government was no longer functioning but at the parish level there were many clergymen whom the Puritans condemned as unworthy of their calling; and in most counties there were relatively few churches which had godly preaching ministers. In February 1642 it was claimed in a petition from Oxfordshire that the county had ‘many corrupt and scandalous Ministers’ and that there were ‘not above thirty Ministers that were constant preachers’ in a diocese with nearly 280 parishes. Similarly, Sir Robert Harley was informed that a survey of the parishes in his own county of Herefordshire had revealed that there were 225 churches and chapels but only twenty ministers who regularly preached two sermons each Sunday. In a Herefordshire petition which was presented to the Commons in May 1642 it was stressed that the county was in great need of more preaching ministers,

it now abounding with insufficient, Idle and Scandalous Ministers, whereby the people generally are continued in Ignorance, Superstition and prophanenesse and are ready to become a prey to popish seducers, which Idolatrous profession hath of late yeares with much boldnesse appeared in this County.⁵

Sir Simonds D’Ewes had spoken in favour of legislation for the abolition of all idolatry and had served on the committee which had been assigned the task of preparing a bill. In the event the bill had failed to make headway and on 8 September 1641 the Commons had decided instead to issue a parliamentary order for sweeping away the Laudian innovations in the parish churches. In some areas Puritan magistrates like Sir Robert Harley and John Hutchinson had sought to ensure that the order was complied with but on the whole it appears to have had only a limited impact.⁶

With the Church in a state of considerable disarray Puritan divines were now able to preach with much greater freedom than had normally been possible in recent years and many Puritan books and pamphlets were published which would previously have fallen foul of the Laudian censorship regime. At the same time the breakdown of ecclesiastical discipline had opened up the way for the gathering of Independent congregations which had no parochial affiliations and the emergence of sectaries who boldly claimed that they owed no allegiance to the established Church. According to a Kentish gentleman the sectaries were maintaining that ‘there is noe nationall church, and so seperat from us and the puritans as being no true church.’⁷ These separatist tendencies were viewed with growing concern by most Puritan squires because of their attachment to the concept of a national Church; what they wanted was a Church which had been thoroughly cleansed and purified and which offered a fruitful abundance of godly preaching. Of all the ecclesiastical issues which had still to be resolved the most pressing was the question of how the Church was to be governed in the future. During the course of 1641 the attempts of the Root and Branch party to secure the abolition of episcopacy had sharply divided both the Commons and the country at large. In the House there were many wealthy Puritans who were in favour of putting an end to the institution of bishops, among them Sir Robert Harley, Sir Arthur Hesilrige, Sir Nathaniel Bamardiston, Sir John Wray, Sir Henry Vane the younger, Sir Thomas Barrington, Sir Simonds D’Ewes, Sir Walter Erie, Sir William Brereton, John Pyne and John Hampden. This upper-class radicalism, which often went hand in hand with an innate conservatism in other respects, was the product of a number of factors: in particular, the conviction that there was no scriptural justification for a hierarchical system of church government; an antipathy towards bishops which had been generated by their activities during the Laudian era; and a belief, which sometimes reflected apocalyptic influences, that it would never be possible to achieve a true reformation of religion so long as the Church remained under episcopal control.⁸ John Pyne, who in the words of Bulstrode Whitelocke was ‘of the more rigid party’ in the Commons, had been incensed by the thoroughgoing way in which William Peirs, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, had implemented Laud’s ecclesiastical policy in Somerset. In December 1640 Pyne had written to a friend that he was confident that the county would soon be delivered ‘from soe oppressive a Person, the excommunications for not Bowinge att the Name of Jesus, not tumeinge the Communion Table Alterwise &c doubtlesse will be held sufficient charges.’⁹ No doubt many Puritan MPs would have agreed with the view expressed by Sir Thomas Widdrington, when advocating the impeachment of Bishop Wren, that an arbitrary government in the Church was ‘more dangerous, more grievous then that in the state; this is exercised upon men’s consciences, the most tender parts, and is the very penacle of tyranny, and of all other most intollerable.’¹⁰

Some Puritan MPs did not consider it necessary or expedient to abolish episcopacy altogether. Harbottle Grimston had made a scathing attack on Laud and his ‘popish’ bishops and had pointed out that ‘we meete not with the name of Arch Bishopps or a deane or Archdeacon in all the new Testament’; but he had subsequently argued in favour of doing no more than depriving the bishops of their temporal powers on the grounds that abolition could have far-reaching political consequences.¹¹ Another Puritan opponent of the Root and Branch approach was John Crewe who was described as ‘a man of a very exact strict life’ and ‘a person of great parts, piety, and a great countenancer of Religion’. As a member of the Commons he displayed no little zeal in the cause of ecclesiastical reform but he caused some surprise by suggesting that it would be sufficient to reduce the powers of the bishops.¹² In spite of this disagreement such men as Grimston and Crewe would remain loyal to Parliament. More politically significant was the opposition to the Root and Branch party among wealthy Protestants whose religious sympathies lay somewhere between Puritanism and Laudianism. This opposition was motivated not only by genuine anxieties about the future of the Church but by fears that the abolition of episcopacy might encourage the common people to question the legitimacy of other institutions and eventually lead to a major social upheaval.¹³ In some counties Root and Branch petitions were followed by counter-petitions which favoured the status quo. In December 1641 Robert Sutton, one of the knights of the shire for Nottinghamshire, sought to present a petition for the continuance of bishops which was in effect a belated response to a petition calling for their abolition which his colleague Sir Thomas Hutchinson had sponsored in April. Sir Samuel Luke claimed that the authors of this new petition had resorted to unscrupulous practices in collecting signatures, pretending that it was for the removal of altar rails; and Sutton was refused leave to introduce the petition.¹⁴

In the Grand Remonstrance it had been alleged that the bishops had been guilty of introducing popery into the Church.¹⁵ Many Puritans were convinced of the truth of this accusation and believed that Laudianism was intimately linked with such features of Charles I’s reign as the prevalence of Catholic influences at Court, the indulgence shown towards Catholics and the growth of recusancy which this policy had helped to encourage. Apocalyptic prophecies about a final conflict between the contending forces of Protestantism and Catholicism which would end in the downfall of the Roman Antichrist acquired increased significance in the light of the war which was raging in Germany and the rebellion of the Irish Catholics which broke out in October 1641. The Irish rebellion made a particularly profound impression on Puritan minds. Lucy Hutchinson comments, with some exaggeration, that in this ‘cursed rebellion … about 200,000 were massacred and many of them most inhumanely butcher’d and tormented.’ While Parliament wanted to see it suppressed with all speed, the king’s response was dilatory and half-hearted; and his ambivalent attitude offended ‘all the good protestants in England, and confirm’d that this rebellion in Ireland receiv’d countenance from the King and Queene of England.’¹⁶ Another consequence of the rebellion was that English Catholics now became the object of intense suspicion and hostility. In this overcharged atmosphere rumours were circulating that the papists were conspiring together and might even be planning to stage an armed insurrection. Considered objectively, the idea that the Catholics might rise up in rebellion was highly implausible, if only because they were a relatively small minority; indeed a papal emissary who had visited England in the 1630s had estimated that the number of Catholics, both recusants and conformists, was only of the order of 150,000.¹⁷ However, the marked decline in their total strength which had occurred since the reign of Elizabeth had been obscured by the fact that convictions for recusancy had been increasing; and in some counties the Old Religion still commanded the allegiance of a significant number of gentry families. Moreover, the revelation that in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations Used in References
• Introduction
• 1 Reformation Deferred
• 2 Drifting into War
• 3 An Unnatural War
• 4 A Nation Divided
• 5 For Liberty and Religion
• 6 Degrees of Loyalty
• 7 The Price of War
• 8 Presbyterianism and Independency
• 9 A Godly Church
• 10 A Lame Presbyterianism
• 11 Religion in the Provinces
• 12 The Growth of Faction
• 13 Revolution
• 14 The Twilight of Godliness
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index