The Puritan Gentry

The Great Puritan Families of Early Stuart England

J. T. Cliffe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000222975
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Originally published in 1984, this was the first detailed study of the impact of Puritan influences on the wealthy county families of early Stuart England. It discusses one of the central issues in the history of the English Civil War: what motivated those men and women who risked all in opposition to King Charles I. The book looks at the role played by gentry families in the advancement or defence of 'true religion', and considers the reasons why powerful families which helped to govern the counties were to be found among the godly. It explores the conflict between class values and the exacting demands of an austere religious philosophy and examines the relationship between the Puritan gentry and the clerical Puritans who included authors, university dons, schoolmasters, lecturers and parish clergy.

Chapter One

God’s Elect

Looking back on the reign of Charles I, a nonconformist divine wrote that the country was ‘then mostly divided into but Two Parties, Puritan and Prophane’.¹ There is a common belief among historians that in the time of Elizabeth and her early Stuart successors the name ‘Puritan’ was used only as a term of abuse. This, however, is not strictly true. Often it was employed in a neutral sense, without any polemical overtones, as when James I gave direction, in August 1622, that no preacher should inveigh against the persons of either papists or Puritans without just cause or ‘invitation from the text’, or when Sir James Oxinden asked one of his nephews, in December 1641, to make approaches to as many Puritan divines as possible.² What is true is that, in the main, those who were accounted Puritans by their contemporaries indignantly rejected the title as a ‘false and adulterate nickname’.³

Persons of quality who objected to being termed Puritans did so because the name had associations for many Englishmen with narrow-mindedness, hypocrisy and opposition to the established order in the Church and Commonwealth. The ruling classes had a horror of factions but in any event the Puritans considered themselves to be the guardians of orthodoxy in doctrine and, at least in the Laudian era, in matters of worship; if there were divisions within the Church these, they maintained, were primarily due to the ‘Arminians’. If, however, they resented any suggestion that they were a faction they undoubtedly saw themselves as a spiritual elite. The wife of Sir William Springett, a man who was highly critical of the Church, related how he had joined with the Puritans, ‘a nickname which those who feared the Lord in that day went under’. Sir Simonds D’Ewes condemned the practice of deriding ‘those whose lives in respect of outward testimonie doe onlie witnes our religion to bee true and branding them by those foolish and senceles titles of Puritans, Prescitians’. In doing so he drew support from certain passages in Isaiah and the Book of Proverbs:

Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil. …

Which justify the wicked for reward, and take away the righteousness of the righteous. … He thatjustifieth the wicked, and he that condemneth the just, even they both are abomination to the Lord.⁴

Bulstrode Whitelocke records in his autobiography that his mother was extremely zealous and devout,

being of that persuasion and practise which was then in scorne termed Puritanisme, which how ever derided by men of the world will be found acceptable with God … certainly she feared God truely and if that be to be a Puritan she was so and happy in being so.

Recalling a visit he had made to Banbury, that citadel of Oxfordshire Puritanism, he told his children

Heer (as in other places) were two sorts of Puritans, a knave Puritan or an Hippocri te and a knave’s Puritan, one that is religious in heart as well as in profession butt knaves reproach him with the name of Puritan because he will not doe ill as they doe; may you all be such Puritans.⁵

In describing the spiritual brotherhood to which they belonged the Puritans tended to use such words as ‘the godly’, ‘the saints’, ‘the professors of religion’, ‘the truly religious’ and even simply ‘the religious’. Generally they thought of themselves as a small minority among a large mass of merely nominal Christians, despised and scoffed at by the worldly because of their zeal for religion and their strict code of morality; and indeed this accorded well with their belief that the elect were relatively few in number in comparison with the legions of the damned.

In 1623 Sir Martin Stuteville sent his friend Joseph Mede of Christ’s College, Cambridge some verse which he had composed on the subject of Puritanism. In acknowledging receipt of this verse Mede wrote that he had found in it three types of Puritan: first, there was the ‘Puritan in Politicks or the Politicali Puritan’ whose concern was with such matters as the liberties of the people and the prerogatives of sovereigns; second, the ‘Ecclesiasticall Puritan for the Church Hierarchie and ceremonies who was at first the onely Puritan’; and finally the ‘Puritan in Ethicks or morali Puritan sayd to consist in singularity of living and hypocrisie both civili and religious which may be called the vulgar Puritan and was the second in birth and hath made too many ashamed to be honest.’⁶ As Mede clearly recognised, the character of Puritanism as a religious force had not remained static since the word ‘Puritan’ had first made its appearance during the early years of Elizabeth’s reign; on the other hand, it is also true that there was no fundamental break in continuity between Elizabethan Puritanism and the Puritanism of Charles I’s reign. Under governmental pressure the Presbyterian movement had petered out before the end of the sixteenth century and there would be no further attempt to secure a major alteration in the system of church government until the time of the Long Parliament. The fact remains, however, that Presbyterian ideas had never been embraced by more than a small minority of the Puritan clergy and laity.⁷ At the Hampton Court Conference in 1604 the debate was primarily concerned neither with church government nor with doctrine but with matters of worship. Soon afterwards the public agitation over the Church’s ceremonial requirements completely subsided and it was not until the advent of the Laudian innovations that there was a reawakening of controversy. Yet this apparent acquiescence does not mean that the Puritans had suddenly changed their convictions. Two main factors were responsible: in the first place, the campaign which Archbishop Bancroft waged against the dissenting clergy induced many of them to conform sufficiently to ensure that their congregations continued to enjoy the benefits of godly preaching; second, a great deal of nonconformity went unpunished under the liberal rule of Archbishop Abbot. Although there is some substance in Mede’s opinion that the moral Puritan emerged after the ecclesiastical Puritan it cannot be accepted without qualification. The exacting standards of human behaviour to which the Puritans subscribed were basically a product of Calvinist doctrine which the Marian exiles, men such as Laurence Humphrey and William Cole, did much to propagate following their return to England after the accession of Elizabeth. Humphrey, who was for many years President of Magdalen College, Oxford, wrote a treatise on education in which he stressed the importance of such qualities as humility, temperance, continence and thrift: this was published in 1563, eight years before the commencement of the parliamentary campaign for ecclesiastical reform.⁸ Nevertheless Mede was right in the sense that matters of private morality and conduct received much greater attention in Puritan circles during the early seventeenth century. From the beginning of James I’s reign there was an unprecedented flow of Puritan manuals offering detailed guidance for those who aspired to walk in holiness while the Puritan group in the House of Commons made persistent efforts to secure the passage of legislation aimed at punishing such evils as swearing, drunkenness and adultery.⁹

Aside from their dislike of ceremonial in public worship which predated the Laudian innovations the general attitude of the Puritans on religious matters did not differ fundamentally from that of large numbers of their fellow Protestants. Neither the belief in the necessity of keeping holy the Sabbath nor the practice of regular Bible reading was an exclusively Puritan characteristic. Many who accepted the validity of Calvinist doctrine were to be found outside the ranks of the Puritans and indeed were sometimes sharply critical of them: in November 1628, for example, Bishop Davenant of Salisbury complained in a letter to another Calvinist divine that he could not understand why the doctrine of predestination was now regarded as a Puritan doctrine when it was embraced by those ‘who have done our Church the greatest service in beating down Puritanisme’.¹⁰ To a large extent the Puritans were distinguished from other Protestants by differences of degree rather than of kind. The conviction that the Bible was the supreme authority on issues of religion was part of the mainstream Protestant tradition; the Puritans, however, were fundamentalists par excellence. In a treatise published in 1605 William Bradshaw, a nonconformist divine, described the principal opinions of ‘the rigidest sort of those that are called Puritans’ and assigned pride of place to the belief that

the word of God contained in the writings of the Prophets and Apostles is of absolute perfection, given by Christ the head of the Church to bee unto the same the sole Canon and rule of all matters of Religion and the worship and service of God whatsoever. And that whatsoever done in the same service and worship cannot be iustified by the said word is unlawfull.¹¹

The Puritans did not merely accept that Calvinist doctrine was scripturally well founded: they were convinced that it was necessary to do more than pay lip-service to the stringent requirements which it laid on the individual. As their ministers never tired of reiterating, true religion demanded total commitment and the subordination of all worldly interests. When publishing the sermon which he had delivered at the funeral of Lady Judith Barrington an Essex clergyman wrote in the epistle dedicatory

Looke first with all Possible care to your foundation, that it be well laid in Regeneration and heart-renovation; then build upwards, as high as you can in a holy life and heavenly Conversation. Make Religion your Businesse and let the Exercises of it in Publick, Private and Secret have the Preheminence of all your Employments.¹²

Puritan worship tended to be frequent and prolonged and it required a rare kind of diligence. According to a contemporary account Sir Thomas Scott was religious without pretending to any extraordinary piety and for this reason he neither loved nor was commended by the Puritans. Writing to Viscount Cranbome in 1604, Archbishop Hutton of York assured him that the Puritans, though fantastically zealous, were substantially the same in religion as the Reformed Church.¹³ At the same time they recognised that it was incumbent on them to live their daily lives in accordance with their religious beliefs. Lucy Hutchinson tells us much about the character of Puritanism when describing how the godly had been maligned:

whoever was zealous for God’s glory or worship, could not endure blasphemous oathes, ribald conversation, prophane scoffes, sabbath breach, derision of the word of God, and the like; whoever could endure a sermon, modest habitt or conversation, or aniething that was good, all these were Puritanes.¹⁴

As the Puritan divines were not slow to recognise, the wealthy squires who ruled the counties and often had considerable resources of ecclesiastical patronage at their disposal would have much to contribute if they could be won over to the cause of true religion. Thomas Gataker, who as a lecturer at Lincoln’s Inn had made the acquaintance of many young heirs, acknowledged the point when dedicating one of his published works to John Hobart, the son of Sir Henry Hobart, the Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas and the owner of the Blickling estate in Norfolk. By setting a good example, he told him, those who were ‘more eminent than ordinary, either for place or parentage’ could draw many others on. ‘In this ranke it hath pleased God to range your Worship whose religious cariage therefore shall not onely benefit your seife but may pricke on and encourage others, both at home and abroad.’¹⁵ Another Puritan author, Richard Baxter, put the matter more bluntly:

O what a world of good might Gentlemen and Knights and Lords do that have a good many of Tenants and that are the leaders of the Country if they had but hearts to improve their interest and advantage!… You have the greatest opportunities to do good of most men in the world. Your Tenants dare not contradict you lest you dispossesse them or their children of their habitations. They fear you more than they do God himself.¹⁶

In practice it was not easy for a man of social position to embrace the ideals of the Puritans. In making open profession he ran the risk of being held up to ridicule. During the reign of James I, writes Lucy Hutchinson, the enemies of the Puritans

made them not only the sport of the pulpitt, which was become but a more solemne stage, but every stage and every table and every puppett-play belcht forth prophan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 God’s Elect
• 2 A Life of Piety
• 3 Holiness and Sobriety
• 4 Marriage and Parenthood
• 5 The Puritan Undergraduate
• 6 Riches and Morality
• 7 Social Attitudes and Relationships
• 8 Godliness Under Threat
• 9 Godly Patronage
• 10 Despair and Hope
• 11 Doing God’s Work
• Postscript
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index