5. Charles I and the English Civil War
Charles I and the English Civil War 28 1. The accession of Charles I When Charles I (1625–49) succeeded to the throne on his father James' death in 1625, he brought with him two ingredients for a colossal explosion in English society: a hostility to parliaments and a hostility to Calvinism.
On the first point, Charles had inherited from James a belief in the "divine right of kings": the view that monarchs are accountable only to God, not to their subjects as represented in any kind of parliament. James, however, had at least realized the practical value of cooperating with the English parliament. Charles did not, and soon gave up the attempt. From 1629 to 1640, he ruled without summoning any parliament, by methods his opponents found unlawful or destructive of the English constitution. They would refer to this period as "the Eleven Years' Tyranny". Modern historians more impartially call it the period of his personal rule.
Perhaps it would not have mattered so much, had Charles not used those same years energetically to advance the High Church movement within the English national Church. This was more than the usual monarchical assault on Puritanism. It was a much wider assault on the Reformed faith, which had a broad base of support among Anglican clergy and laity extending far beyond the boundaries of Puritanism. To many, it looked as though Charles was assaulting Protestantism itself: undermining or even undoing the work of the English Reformation. This ignited against him a religious passion which, combined with his inability to work with the English ruling classes represented in parliament, would finally topple him from the throne.
2. High Church Arminianism and Archbishop Laud Charles' High Church beliefs were sincere, not a tool to achieve political ends. He admired High Church divines like Richard Montagu and John
Cosin for their scholarship and devotion to the Church of England. The High Churchman with whom Charles forged the closest and most fateful bond, however, was William Laud (1573–1645). Born at Reading in Berkshire, and educated at Saint John's College, Oxford, Laud's career in the Anglican Church overflowed with variety: president of Saint John's
College (1611); Dean of Gloucester (1616); Bishop of Saint Davids (1621), of Bath and Wells (1626), and of London (1628); and finally Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633.
Through all of this, Laud was guided by a sense of mission to conform Anglicanism to High Church ideals. Once he had obtained power at the heart of England's political and religious establishment, as Bishop of London and then Archbishop of Canterbury, he used all the legal machinery at his command to compel a reluctant Church to embrace his vision. Some of Laud's policies were offensive only to Puritans, such as enforcing the proper use of the Anglican Prayer Book in worship; no minister was henceforth to leave parts out, or add in parts of his own. Strict conformity or deposition—such was Laud's message to the Anglican clergy. The previous Archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbot (born 1562; archbishop
1611–33), had been strongly Reformed, and inclined to give his clergy latitude in how they observed the Prayer Book, as long as they preached soundly. But Abbot's Calvinism meant that he was in disgrace with King
Charles, and had little or no influence any longer. Laud, as Bishop of London and the king's confidante, had far more power than Abbot, and was
Charles' obvious choice to replace an impotent Abbot at Canterbury when he died in 1633.
Calvinist Abbot's disgrace showed that High Church theology had become permeated by an Arminian stance on salvation. There was no necessary link between the two. High Church views could be held alongside a strict Augustinian understanding of grace, as in the Jansenists (see
Chapter 6, section 4). On the other side, there was nothing High Church about the evangelical Arminianism of Jacob Arminius and his Dutch disciples (see Chapter 2, section 2). The combination, however, of High
Church and Arminian doctrine proved a uniquely volatile mixture in 17th
century England. Dutch Arminianism did undoubtedly have some influence on the English High Churchmen; for example, John Cosin, the erudite High
Church prebendary of Durham cathedral, corresponded with the leading Dutch Arminian Hugo Grotius, and is known to have possessed some of Arminius' writings in his library. But Anglican Arminianism was rather different, wedded to the visible Church as the mystical vehicle of grace. In the thinking of Laud and his colleagues, the human will had to cooperate with the grace that flowed through the Episcopal hierarchy and its sacraments.
The High Church party, therefore, with their sacramental Arminianism, did not perceive Puritanism alone as an enemy, but all forms of Calvinism, no matter how conformist it might be in matters of church government and worship. The whole Reformed idea of the bondage of the will and the sovereignty of grace, something far wider than Puritanism, was deemed dangerous by Archbishop Laud and his High Church Arminian confederates. It was under the Laudian regime that all Calvinists began to be labeled "Puritan"—a gross distortion of all previous Elizabethan and Jacobean history. The Calvinist Bishop John Davenant (1572–1641) howled in protest: why that should now be esteemed Puritan doctrine, which those held who have done our Church the greatest service in beating down Puritanism, or why men should be restrained from teaching that doctrine hereafter, which hitherto has been generally and publicly maintained, wiser men perhaps may but I cannot understand.
Davenant had good reason to be disgruntled. Laud's policy was only too successful in putting High Church Arminians in power throughout the Anglican establishment, to the detriment of Calvinism. In the words of a popular joke of the time, "Question: what do the Arminians hold? Answer: all the best bishoprics and deaneries in England!"
There were other aspects of Laud's High Church ideals which offended not merely Puritans and Calvinists, but the great majority of Anglicans, who had no zeal for Puritanism, and perhaps no great theological understanding of Calvinism, but who understood themselves and their Church to be
Protestant. Anti-Catholicism had entered very deeply into the English soul after several generations of non-stop government propaganda. So when
Laud began enforcing changes in the Church that seemed fundamentally at odds with Protestantism, the sense of outrage spread vastly beyond the Puritan constituency. Two of these changes were especially controversial.
First, the communion table was transformed into an altar. This was part of Laud's wider campaign to repair the fabric and restore the beauty of English churches. But this particular architectural act was charged with a contentious theology. Laud ordered all churches to put their communion tables at the east end of the building and rail them off. The east end of a church had symbolic significance in medieval Christianity: the sun rises in the east, so the east end was associated with Christ's second coming. For this reason the medieval altar was traditionally located at a church's east end. At the Reformation, Anglican altars were generally destroyed and replaced with tables in the nave (the central part of the church). Moving the communion table back to its medieval position at the east end seemed ominous in Protestant eyes: was this an attempt to drag the English Church back into the Middle Ages spiritually and doctrinally? Laud further decreed that worshipers must come up to the altar rails to receive holy communion there in a kneeling posture. When he was Dean of Gloucester cathedral, he required all who entered the cathedral to bow to the altar. Such practices were unknown in the reformed Anglican Church; to the popular mind, they meant simply transubstantiation, the mass, Romanism. And if this was the archbishop's outlook, the king must surely agree with it. So the anxiety and hostility aroused by Laud spilled over to envelop Charles as well.
Second, Laud took draconian measures to silence any preaching he did not like (mostly Calvinist). Here he was not only fully supported by Charles, he followed the king's own lead. As early as 1626, Charles had on his own authority, as supreme governor of the English Church, forbidden all preachers to discuss predestination in their sermons. When no less a person than John Davenant, Bishop of Salisbury, James I's chief representative at the Synod of Dort, disobeyed this injunction in 1630, he was summoned before the king's Privy Council and officially rebuked by the High Church
Arminian Archbishop of York, Samuel Harsnett (1561–1631). Charles and Laud especially clamped down on "lecturers": that is, clergy unable to find a parish, but appointed as lecturers (preachers under another name) by voluntary subscriptions. Lay patrons of Puritanism had often used this method of finding employment for preachers who could not get a parish church, or who had been deprived by higher authority. In 1629, Charles imposed a new and severely restrictive law on lecturers that tied them closely to the Prayer Book and the disciplinary structures of the Episcopal
hierarchy. It made it almost impossible for any lecturer with a Puritan conscience to function.
Archbishop Laud also suppressed an important Puritan organization, the "Feoffees for Impropriations". This group purchased "impropriations"
(profits from the sale of church properties, which then became a sort of fund controlled by individual laymen or a corporation) and used them to buy "advowsons" (legal rights to appoint a minister to a particular position in the Anglican Church). The Feoffees of course made sure that Puritan ministers were appointed. The organization was hauled before the courts and dissolved in 1632; all its assets were seized by the crown.
When people saw this crackdown on Reformed preaching at the same time that Laud was turning communion tables into altars, many concluded that it was a conspiracy to undo the Reformation, and make clergy into sacrificing priests rather than teachers of Scripture. Preaching, we should remember, was enormously popular in that era; a good preacher could command the same enthusiasm and crowd-appeal that perhaps only pop stars and media celebrities can today. To silence so many "godly preachers" was to incense and provoke popular opinion, particularly in the cities, in a dangerous way.
High Church Arminians also forged a strong alliance, not just with King Charles personally, but with his view of absolute monarchy unchecked by parliaments or other institutions. One of the most outspoken High
Churchmen, Richard Montagu, promised Charles, "defend me with the sword and I will defend you with my pen". This helps explain the political opposition to High Church Arminianism. Those committed to the role of parliament were almost bound to oppose the High Church party for its espousal of the king's absolutism.
The fear that Charles and Laud were Romanizing the English Church found apparent fuel in Charles' marriage in 1625 to a French Catholic princess, Henrietta Maria (1609–69), the sister of the French King Louis
XIII. The marriage was political in intent: part of an Anglo-French phase in the foreign policy of the English government. However, it meant that Protestant England now had a Catholic queen, and that her Catholic servants and friends (including her father-confessor, the Scottish Catholic priest Robert Phillip) were tolerated in the English court. Henrietta Maria was passionate and flamboyant about her religion, scandalizing Protestant opinion by doing things like praying in public for the English Catholic
martyrs—those whom the English government had executed since Elizabeth's reign for alleged treason. Ordinary people began calling
Henrietta Maria "Queen Mary", thereby linking her with Mary Tudor, the arch-persecutor of England's Protestants, who had reigned from 1553 to 1558. No doubt they also remembered the more recent "Gunpowder Plot" of 1605, when English Catholic conspirators (Guy Fawkes was the most famous) had planned to blow up King James, the House of Lords, and the House of Commons, at the opening of parliament on November 5th, and seize control of the country in the name of a restored Catholicism. The plot was of course foiled, but more than any other single event it helped create a national fear of Catholicism as violent and seditious. Most English
Catholics were in fact perfectly loyal to England and its monarchy; but in Protestant eyes, bloodshot with fright, they became the dreaded terrorists of the day, always about to repeat the atrocities of Mary Tudor or November
5th.29
In retrospect, it is easy to see that King Charles and Archbishop Laud were heading for disaster. Yet monarch and bishop remained strangely blind. Neither man had any understanding of those who differed from them; both were narrow-minded pedants. Laud, however, was the greater offender, and attracted an extraordinary degree of popular hatred. It did not help that he often made himself and his cause seem both pompous and ridiculous. At one service of worship, the choir sang the anthem from Psalm 24:9, "Lift up your heads, ye gates, and lift up yourselves, ye everlasting doores, and the King of glorie shall come in"—at which point the church doors opened, and in bustled Laud. He was a little man, and King Charles' jester caught the public mood when he quipped, "Give great praise to God and little laud to the devil!"
During the eleven years of King Charles' personal rule, many High Church Arminians occupied bishoprics: there was Laud at Canterbury (1633 onwards), Richard Montagu at Chichester (1628) and then Norwich (1638),
Richard Neile at York (1631), Francis White at Ely (1631), William Juxon at London (1633), and Matthew Wren at Hereford (1634), Norwich (1635), and then Ely (1638). It may be asked whether there were any Calvinist bishops, and if so, what they were doing. The answer is that there were certainly Calvinists in the Episcopate. In England we find John Davenant of Salisbury,30 Joseph Hall (1574–1656) of Exeter (abidingly famous for his rich devotional writings, especially his Contemplations), and Thomas
Morton (1564–1659) of Durham. Over in Ireland, at that time wholly governed by Britain, with the Irish national Church part of the Anglican system, there was the esteemed scholar-archbishop James Ussher (1581–
1656) of Armagh (famous for dating the creation at 4004 BC), and William Bedell (1571–1642) of Kilmore. Perhaps oddly, however, these Calvinist bishops did nothing to oppose the High Church Arminianizing policies of Charles or Laud. Maybe they had been cowed into silence—we remember
Davenant's reprimand for daring to preach on predestination. Maybe their reverence for monarchy made it hard for them to resist Charles. Whatever the reason, it would not be from the Calvinist bishops, but from a Calvinist
House of Commons, that an effective challenge to Charles and Laud would finally come.
3. Manifestations of spiritual life: Donne, Herbert, and Sibbes John Donne John Donne (1573–1631) was one of England's greatest poets and preachers from any age. Born into a Catholic family (his mother was the sister of a Jesuit priest), he attended Hart Hall, Oxford University, followed by further studies, and entered the legal profession in the 1590s. Around this time Donne became deeply concerned about his religious loyalties, torn between the Catholicism of his youth and the Protestantism of his country.
His immediate solution was to distance himself from both, and be a simple Christian. By 1598, however, his decision was made: he embraced
Protestantism, and would ever after be a faithful member of the Anglican Church. That same year he became private secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, the Lord Keeper (an important official, who had charge of the crown's great seal, with authority to affix it to public documents). However, Sir Thomas sacked Donne in 1602 for having secretly married his niece the previous year. Donne was actually thrown into prison for a brief spell, along with the minister who performed the marriage ceremony. Years of poverty and reliance on charity followed for Donne and his wife Anne, and their evergrowing family (10 children, eventually).
The turning point for Donne came with two anti-Catholic treatises he published in 1610 and 1611, which brought him to the attention of King
James. The monarch exhorted him to enter the Anglican ministry, and after much hesitation and much persistent urging by James, Donne was finally ordained in 1615. In 1621 he was appointed Dean of Saint Paul's cathedral in London, and it was from the cathedral pulpit that he made his mark as a preacher, a popular favourite who also wove his spell over both King James and King Charles.31
Donne's literary fame rests on his poetry, his Devotions (1624), and his sermons. His poetry can be divided into secular love-poems (largely from his younger days) and religious poems (largely from his years of trouble and poverty). His Holy Sonnets and the Hymn to God the Father are generally regarded as the most brilliant of the religious poems. Donne is considered perhaps the foremost of a group of poets known as the "Metaphysical Poets". George Herbert (see below) was another. The term was coined by Dr. Samuel Johnson, author of the famous dictionary, in the
next century. A characteristic feature of their style is the use of exaggerated and unusual metaphors known as conceits.
Donne's Devotions are a series of meditations and prayers on human frailty and mortality, the most famous of which—Meditation 17—has become almost proverbial ("No man is an island…. Send not to know for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for thee").
Donne's sermons are less well-known today, but they give him a secure place in the literary history of English religion. We have 160 of the sermons, including 34 on selected Psalms, 16 on Matthew, and 16 on John.
Donne did not cease to be a poet when he got into the pulpit, and his preaching exploited the English language to the limit of its resources, full of vivid imagery and arresting rhetoric. His chief theme was the overwhelming mercy of God toward sinners; Donne was always overshadowed by a sense of personal sin, and he preached to others what he needed to hear himself.
His sermons caught fire whenever he spoke of the love of Christ for the lost; the cross was never far away. They also bristle with quotations from the early Church fathers, especially Augustine: Donne's passion was always blended with learning. Izaak Walton (see below under Richard Sibbes) has left us a graphic portrait of Donne the preacher:
…preaching the Word so, as showed his own heart was possessed with those very thoughts and joys that he laboured to distil into others: a preacher in earnest; weeping sometimes for his auditory, sometimes with them; always preaching to himself, like an angel from a cloud, but in none; carrying some, as St. Paul was, to heaven in holy raptures, and enticing others by a sacred art and courtship to amend their lives: here picturing a Vice so as to make it ugly to those that practised it; and a Virtue so as to make it be beloved, even by those that loved it not; and all this with a most particular grace and an unexpressible addition of comeliness.
Donne was strongly opposed to Puritanism, but it is difficult to classify him as High Church. In most respects he was more "establishment Anglican" of a Richard Hooker type.
George Herbert George Herbert (1593–1633) was another master-poet, but more obviously in the High Church mould. Born to the politically important Anglo-Welsh
Herbert family in Montgomery, on the border between Wales and England, he was the younger brother of Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1582–1648). Lord
Herbert was the founding father of Deism (a view that accepted God as Creator but denied the need for any supernatural revelation or intervention: hugely popular in the 18th century). Unlike his Deist brother, the younger
Herbert developed into a devout Christian. Educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, the flowering of his faith came only after his attempt at a courtier's life failed through the death of his various patrons, including
King James. Disenchanted with politics by 1625, Herbert's mind turned to spiritual things; he was especially impacted by his friend Nicholas Ferrar
(1592–1637), founder of a religious commune at Little Gidding, near Huntingdon. This was the first Protestant attempt in England at creating a spiritual community that reflected something of the traditional monastic ethos, but without embracing celibacy—it was family-based. All community members learned a trade; bookbinding was their speciality, and they ran a school for local children. The commune enjoyed the favour of King Charles and Archbishop Laud, but was fiercely denounced by Puritans as "the Arminian nunnery", and deliberately destroyed by parliamentary soldiers during the Civil War.
Deeply influenced by Ferrar, Herbert now studied theology, was ordained, and in 1630 became minister at the parish of Bemerton in Wiltshire, virtually bullied into it by Laud who had to overcome Herbert's sense of unworthiness. By all accounts he was a model pastor, but died after only three years, aged 39. He left a widow, Jane Danvers, and a literary legacy of some of the finest Christian poetry in English. The poems were published after his death by Nicholas Ferrar. They have had a huge influence on subsequent poets of all religious persuasions, depicting the believer's relationship with God in imaginative and intimate yet chaste language. Their distinctive quality has been compared to the parables for a surface simplicity concealing depths of meaning, and a rich use of homely imagery to convey spiritual truth. It is difficult to say whether any of the individual poems have achieved particular fame, but perhaps Love bade me welcome would be a front-runner.32
Richard Sibbes Richard Sibbes (1577–1635), one of the most influential Puritans of Charles I's reign before the Civil War, has probably the most famous epitaph of any theologian or preacher. The epitaph was written by Izaak
Walton (1593–1683), who said of Sibbes:
Of this blest man, let this just praise be given, Heaven was in him before he was in heaven.
Walton himself was no Puritan; an establishment Anglican, he wrote what was in effect a series of "Anglican saints' lives", which included Richard
Hooker, John Donne, and George Herbert. However, Walton's spiritual tastes were wide-ranging, and he penned his famous epitaph for Sibbes on reading his treatise The Returning Backslider (14 sermons on Hosea, published in 1639). Nor was Walton alone in his non-Puritan appreciation of the Puritan divine. Sibbes' preaching and writings were treasured by people from all schools of thought, for "the heavenly Sibbes" radiated the reality of divine things to anyone remotely receptive. Born at Tostock,
Suffolk, he studied at Saint John's College, one of Cambridge University's Puritan seminaries. Sibbes experienced a decisive spiritual awakening under the preaching of the Puritan Paul Baynes (c.1573–1617), successor to William Perkins as preacher at Great Saint Andrews Church. Sibbes' own pulpit fame (despite a stammer) came when he was appointed preacher in 1617 to the legal community at Gray's Inn, London, which he served for the rest of his life. He was also Master of Saint Catherine's Hall, Cambridge, from 1626.
Although Sibbes was decidedly Puritan in sympathies, and strongly opposed to Archbishop Laud, he always conformed to the requirements of the Anglican Church, and had the respect of Charles I, who appointed him to Holy Trinity Church, Cambridge, in 1633 (while still retaining his post at Gray's Inn). His collected writings filled seven volumes, and presented
"practical Calvinism" at its most winsome. Sibbes excelled at raising up the downcast; his most famous tract in this vein was The Bruised Reed and Smoking Flax, although The Soul's Conflict with Itself was perhaps of equal power. Among those deeply influenced by Sibbes were his contemporary, the illustrious Congregationalist minister Thomas Hooker, who founded the American colony of Connecticut in 1636, and the great English Puritan divines of the next generation, Thomas Goodwin and Richard Baxter. His influence continued to stream on, and the 19th century testimony of C.H.Spurgeon summed up what multitudes have found in Sibbes:
Sibbes never wastes the student's time; he scatters pearls and diamonds with both hands.
Manton [another Puritan] says of Sibbes, that he had a peculiar gift in unfolding the great mysteries of the Gospel in a sweet and mellifluous manner, and therefore he was by his hearers usually termed the Sweet Dropper, "sweet and heavenly distillations usually dropping from him with such a native elegance as is not easily to be imitated."
4. The first Calvinistic Baptists The first English Baptists, as we have seen, had abandoned Reformed theology. In the 1630s, however, a momentous step was taken by some
London Puritans in renouncing infant baptism but retaining the rest of their Puritan-Calvinist theology and spirituality. The place where this threshold was crossed was a semi-Separatist fellowship in Southwark, gathered by Henry Jacob (1536–1624). Jacob had begun as a Puritan-minded Anglican minister who signed the Millenary Petition in 1603. His concerns over an unreformed Anglicanism, however, led him to express moderately critical views in 1605 in his tract Reasons Taken out of God's Word, for which he was thrown in prison. On his release he went into exile in the Dutch
Republic, pastoring a Separatist church in Leyden. Jacob was the mildest of Separatists; he held that there were true churches (faithful congregations) within Anglicanism, but that the overall system was unscriptural. Hence the label "semi-Separatist" that has been applied to Jacob.
Returning to England in 1616, he helped found the semi-Separatist congregation in Southwark. It often goes under the name of the "JLJ church", after the initials of its first three pastors—Henry Jacob, John
Lathrop (or Lothrop/Lothropp), and Henry Jessey. The church was not part of the Anglican establishment, but it allowed its members to attend
Anglican services, e.g. to have their children baptized, and continued to recognize some Anglican congregations as true churches. There is some obscurity about the details, but it seems that in 1633 a group of 17, led by Samuel Eaton (d.1639), withdrew from the JLJ church—amicably—in order to form a Baptist congregation. Or at least, it was a congregation of believers baptized on profession of faith: we cannot be absolutely sure whether they rejected all infant baptism, or only Anglican baptism.
However, it is certain that six more members of the JLJ church withdrew in 1638 specifically because they had embraced believers' baptism.
Contemporary sources say they joined a church led by John Spilsbury (c.1593–1668), who was probably now in charge of the 1633 group.33
So by 1638 at the latest, there was definitely a Calvinistic Baptist church in London. It was to be the first of many. They are often called "Particular
Baptists", because of their Reformed convictions about particular redemption (Christ died not merely to make salvation generally available, but with a "particular" intent to save His elect efficaciously). By 1644, there
were seven Calvinistic Baptist congregations in London, and that year they published a confession of faith, in which they distinguished themselves from the Continental Anabaptists (like the Mennonites) and the Arminian
Baptists (see section 4.3). It was the Calvinistic Baptists who spearheaded the practice of baptism by immersion; this happened among some
Calvinistic Baptists connected with the JLJ church in 1640–41.
5. By the sword divided: the Civil War and its consequences The circumstances that ended Charles' 11 years of personal rule are described in detail in Chapter 5. The Covenanter movement in Scotland destroyed Charles' authority over his northern kingdom; when the Covenanters invaded England and occupied Newcastle and Durham,
Charles was forced to summon an English parliament. Not only did he need money and resources to deal with the northern crisis, which he could only get through parliamentary cooperation, but the Covenanters themselves had also stipulated that they would accept no treaty from Charles unless it was ratified by an English parliament. The first of these parliaments, the Short
Parliament, met for a mere three weeks (April-May 1640) before Charles dissolved it again for its rebellious mood. But it was no good; the king could do nothing to solve the crisis without parliamentary help. In November 1640, the Long Parliament met—the longest in English history to that point, since it was not officially dissolved until 20 years later.34
Charles once again found parliament in a rebellious state of mind. The vast majority of MPs had no wish to discuss the Scottish crisis. Indeed, some of the foremost MPs had been in correspondence with the Covenanters, treating them as allies against Charles. What the MPs wanted to do was make it impossible for Charles or any king ever to rule again without parliament. So constitutional reform dominated the agenda. A humiliated Charles had to watch parliament strip away his prerogatives one by one: for instance, the Trienniel Act of February 1641 legislated that a parliament had to be summoned every three years, rather than whenever the monarch wished it. At this early stage, there was no division of opinion among MPs into "royalist" and "parliamentarian". The most melodramatic act of the united parliament was to put Charles' chief minister, Thomas
Wentworth, Earl of Strafford (1593–1641) on trial—with parliament itself serving as the court. Strafford had effectively and ruthlessly enforced the king's will in Ireland; parliamentarians feared he might do the same in England, perhaps using Irish troops. Charles had promised Strafford absolute loyalty, but when the London mob rioted, crying for Strafford's blood, the king relented, fearing for his family. He signed the parliamentary death warrant for his great minister, who was duly executed on May 12th
1641. The earl's execution was to haunt both sides in the conflict. Charles could never shake off a sense of guilt for having thrown Strafford to the
wolves. Parliament, for its part, had "played dirty", by denying Strafford a proper trial and simply voting him to death. (They were terrified he would be acquitted by a lawful trial.) Archbishop Laud was also arrested, but left languishing in prison for several years. Few shed any tears for him. In 1645, parliament finally disposed of him as it had disposed of Strafford—voted him to the chopping block without a proper trial. It is difficult to see what crime worthy of death the 72 year old archbishop had committed, but the London mob hated him with a passion and would not see him spared. Laud managed to die with dignity, and High Churchmen regarded him as a martyr to Puritan fanaticism.
Once the MPs had cut their king down to size with political reforms, their unity vanished. Religion now came to the fore, and the House of Commons divided more-or-less along the old fault-line of Puritan reformer versus
Anglican establishment. By now, Puritanism of one sort or another had managed to win the allegiance of a solid proportion of England's lawyers and country gentleman (those who sat as MPs). Most of the Puritan-minded
MPs favoured some sort of Presbyterian or quasi-Presbyterian system of church government, possibly with bishops who would be little more than superintendents of different regions rather than glorified royal servants. It seems plausible that a good number of the staunchly Protestant ruling class had been driven into a more Puritan stance as a reaction against the High
Church policies of Charles and Archbishop Laud. They may have felt that the only way to preserve the Protestant character of the English Church was by taking it out of the hands of king and bishops, and putting it under parliamentary control, in alliance with the "godly brotherhood" of Puritan preachers, who had always looked to parliament and exalted it as the best hope of further reformation.
However, many MPs had a sincere attachment to the Anglican Prayer Book, to which Puritans were hostile, and these "Prayer Book" MPs were not prepared to see Archbishop Cranmer's rich and exalted prose replaced by some humdrum Reformed liturgy like Scotland's Book of Common
Order. With the harmony of parliament breaking down, Charles began cultivating the support of the Anglican traditionalists. It became increasingly clear to them that their only real guarantee for the worship they prized was an alliance with the king. Hardly any of these MPs wanted to give Charles back the political power they had taken from him; they were,
in that sense, still parliamentarians. However, they were ready to stand with the king in a common religious front, defending a more historic
Anglicanism against the experiments proposed by Puritan reformers.
Civil war probably became unavoidable in October 1641 because of a massive Catholic insurgency in Ireland. At that point in its history, Ireland was a largely Catholic nation ruled by a British Protestant establishment.
King Charles had already been dabbling with ideas of raising a royalist Catholic army to subdue his rebellious English and Scottish kingdoms. This in turn had prompted English parliamentarians and Scottish Covenanters to start talking about invading Ireland, and crushing its Catholics even more thoroughly. Panic swept through the ranks of Irish Catholic landowners, who planned a pre-emptive uprising. Led by Irish Catholic noble Phelim
O'Neill (d.1653), the insurgency quickly turned into a popular revolt of apocalyptic dimensions, as the Catholic peasantry vented their long pent-up wrath on their Protestant rulers. Historians argue about the numbers of Protestants killed; a modest estimate accepted by many modern scholars puts the figure at 12,000.
A counter-panic now swept through England. People trembled at the thought of hordes of murdering Catholics crossing the Irish Sea and rampaging through the English counties. Clearly an English army had to be raised to suppress the Irish insurgency. But who should control this army?
Traditionally that right belonged to the king; the parliamentarian MPs, however, were in no mood to trust Charles with an army. He might use it against them. So they demanded control of the army: a revolutionary act that had no precedent in the English constitution or English history. This helped deepen the divide in the House of Commons, as royalist MPs began to perceive the parliamentarian opposition as lawless radicals who would stop at nothing to overthrow their country's traditions and erect their own power on its ruins.
To shore up crumbling support for his cause, the parliamentarian leader John Pym (1584–1643), devout Puritan MP for Tavistock, Devon, submitted a "Grand Remonstrance" to the House of Commons on November 22nd 1641. The Remonstrance detailed all the alleged failings of Charles' regime since he came to the throne, and set out by contrast the parliamentary reforms achieved in the past year. It proposed two positive measures: to set up an assembly of theologians to help parliament reform the Church, and to make the king's choice of ministers subject to
parliamentary control. Pym's strategy was to win support for the revolutionary part of his programme (the second positive proposal) by wrapping it up in an eloquent reminder of Charles' untrustworthiness, and the possibility that all parliament's recent reforms could be undone if so unreliable a king were given personal charge of an army.
The Grand Remonstrance provoked a fiercely heated debate that went on well into the small hours of the following day. Finally, the MPs voted for the Remonstrance by a wafer-thin margin: 159 votes for, 148 against.
Royalist MPs made an attempt to protest at the vote's outcome, but a shouting match developed and swords were almost drawn. Even then there was a slim chance that a civil war could be averted; but all was shipwrecked on January 4th 1642, when Charles burst into the House of Commons, with 400 armed men at his back, to arrest the five MPs he regarded as leaders of the parliamentarian faction.35 This invasion of the Commons by the king was a breath-taking violation of parliament's time-honoured privileges.
Now it seemed to be Charles who was trampling on the constitution and acting as a lawless revolutionary. Fortunately for the five MPs, the royal plot had been leaked, and they were already in hiding. Charles left emptyhanded. London was now seething with hostility to him, and within a week the king had departed, leaving the capital in the hands of a rejoicing citizenbody that was wildly parliamentarian. Charles would not see London again until he was brought back a prisoner to be tried and executed seven years later.
It is not for us to follow the twists and turns of politics over the next six months which ended with the king "raising his standard" at Nottingham in August—in effect, declaring war on parliament. By then, the royalist MPs had deserted the House of Commons, and set up their own parliament in Oxford. The London parliament, meanwhile, had appointed a "Committee of Safety" to supervise the conflict with Charles, set about raising a parliamentary army, and commissioned Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex
(1591–1646), as their troop commander.
Parliamentarians began nicknaming royalists "Cavaliers", which meant something like swaggering, licentious bullies (literally it merely means horsemen). However, royalists redefined the word to mean a brave man of honour, loyal to the king for conscientious reasons. The royalist nickname for parliamentarians was
"Roundheads". Some have thought this referred to a Puritan male habit of cutting the hair short, but this is not borne out by the evidence of portraits;
many Puritans evidently had long hair. It seems more likely that it derived from the London apprentices, who made up a large proportion of the parliamentarian mob that terrorized royalists in the capital. Apprentices typically had close-cropped hair.
The first major battle of the English Civil War was fought at Edgehill in Warwickshire on October 23rd 1642. We will not, however, describe the military progress of the war except when it impacted on, or illustrates, religious events.
6. The Westminster Assembly and its work The assembly of theologians to help parliament reform the Church, proposed in the Grand Remonstrance, began regular meetings in July 1643.
Parliament selected two theologians each from Oxford and Cambridge universities, four from London, two from each English county, one from each Welsh county, and thirteen others. This was the celebrated Westminster
Assembly (named from the Jerusalem Chamber of Westminster Abbey, where they met). King Charles sternly forbade anyone to attend, which deterred most Episcopalian Anglicans from taking part. However, the contemporary royalist historian Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, tells us that 20 of the Westminster divines had Episcopalian sentiments. We know that parliament summoned nine Episcopalian divines as delegates, including
Archbishop James Ussher who was highly esteemed as a Reformed theologian (he refused to attend). This is significant; it shows that parliament was trying to construct a broad-based Assembly, not one committed in advance to dogmatic Presbyterianism.
The Assembly's chairman was William Twisse (1578–1646), a moderate who wished to see a reformed, downsized Episcopacy, although his doctrinal Calvinism was of the highest kind (a supralapsarian). Twisse's physical frailty meant that his vice-chairman, the distinguished Presbyterian preacher Cornelius Burges (or Burgess) (c.1589–1665), often stood in for him. The Assembly gained a new dimension when it was joined by a delegation of Covenanter theologians—Alexander Henderson, Samuel
Rutherford, George Gillespie, and Robert Baillie—who arrived in September.
The arrival of the Scottish divines flowed from a new military alliance between parliament and the Covenanters, formalized in the Solemn League and Covenant, which was signed on September 25th 1643. The Civil War had been going badly for the parliamentarians; the last act of their dying leader, John Pym, was to turn the tide of conflict back in their favour by drawing the Covenanters onto the battlefield on parliament's side. Pym succeeded completely; the presence of a Covenanting army on English soil, fighting alongside parliament's forces, proved an irresistible combination that would shatter King Charles and his cause. The Solemn League and Covenant also had a religious aspect, as we will see in Chapter 5; it bound the Scots and English together to embrace uniformity of doctrine and
church government, "according to the Word of God and the example of the best Reformed Churches".
The Scots trusted that this meant Presbyterianism in church government, but it turned out that the English were not so sure.
The Westminster Assembly was a gathering of glittering theological talent. Richard Baxter, who was not a member, and possessed a theologically independent mind unlikely to grovel before anyone or anything, said of the Assembly:
The divines there congregated were men of eminent learning, godliness, ministerial abilities, and fidelity; and being not worthy to be one of them myself, I may the more freely speak the truth, even in the face of malice and envy, that, as far as I am able to judge by the information of all history of that kind, and by any other evidences left us, the Christian world, since the days of the apostles, had never a synod of more excellent divines (taking one thing with another) than this and the Synod of Dort.
Not surprisingly, the documents the Assembly produced have enjoyed a widespread and enduring appreciation. These were its confession of faith
(the Westminster Confession), its two catechisms (the Larger Catechism and Shorter Catechism), its handbook of worship (the Directory for the Public Worship of God), and to a lesser extent, its Form of Presbyterial
Church Government.36
The Assembly was not theologically monolithic. It included Presbyterians, Independents, moderate Episcopalians, and Erastians (those who believed that ultimate ecclesiastical authority lay with the state).
The Presbyterians, who formed the majority, were themselves divided into a ius divinum (divine right) party, who held that Scripture prescribed a definite and detailed Presbyterian form of church government as binding for all time, and a ius humanum (human right) party, who held that Presbyterianism was generally agreeable to Scripture in principle, but that all kinds of details might vary according to need and circumstance. (The Westminster documents reflect the ius divinum view.)
The Independents were a distinct minority, some ten or twelve members, but what they lacked in quantity they made up for in theological sharpness, eloquence, and persistence. They exercised an influence far in excess of their numbers.
The moderate Episcopalians were also few in number and exercised little or no influence on the debates, partly through the sporadic nature of their attendance; the king's ban on the Assembly had deeply dampened their
enthusiasm. The only Episcopalian member we know for sure attended regularly was Daniel Featley, Provost of London's Chelsea College, founded in 1609 to produce anti-Catholic polemics. He spoke up for Episcopacy at the Assembly, but eventually even Featley withdrew on the direct orders of King Charles.
The Erastians were an even smaller group of two—Thomas Coleman (1598–1647), and John Lightfoot (1602–75). Like the Independents, they compensated for their fewness by their formidable and vociferous erudition.
The Erastian divines were strongly supported by the parliamentary lay delegates (20 from the House of Commons, 10 from the Lords), especially
John Selden (1584–1654), MP for Oxford, a legal and theological scholar who was quite capable of trouncing the most learned divine in debate.
Selden was also unusual in being an Arminian (of the evangelical rather than High Church variety).
There were other differences among Assembly members unrelated to church government. The Scottish delegate Robert Baillie, for instance, lamented the influence that Amyraut and Amyraldianism had on the English divines:
Unhappily Amyraut's questions are brought in on our Assembly. Many more love their fancies here than I did expect… Amyraut's treatise goes in our Assembly from hand to hand.37
The Westminster Confession was the Assembly's greatest achievement.
Completed in November 1646, it was a majestic monument to Reformed Orthodoxy (see Chapter 2, section 1), embracing its later characteristic framework of covenant theology. The Confession's chief source was the Irish Articles of 1615, a confession of faith drafted by Archbishop Ussher for Ireland's established Church; the Irish Articles were more fully and explicitly Reformed than the English Church's 39 Articles. The Westminster
Confession largely follows the Irish Articles in the order of topics, the chapter headings, and the phraseology.
The Confession was adopted by the Covenanters as the Scottish Kirk's new confession by the general assembly in August 1647; among conservative Presbyterian Churches of Anglo-Scottish origin, the Westminster Confession retains its place today as their doctrinal standard, with slight modifications in some Churches. It failed, however, to function in England as the new confession for the established Church owing to the breakdown of parliament's authority (see below). Even so, the Confession's
influence reached far outside its original Presbyterian constituency. In slightly modified form, it was adopted as the Savoy Declaration by the English Independents or Congregationalists at their gathering in the Savoy,
London, in 1658. The Independents tightened the Confession's Reformed theology (e.g. by making a much clearer distinction between Christ's active and passive obedience than Westminster). They also added an entirely new appendix on Congregational church government.
The Westminster Confession was also adopted by the English Calvinistic Baptists, modified to teach their distinctive view of baptism and church government (and with some additions from their previous 1644
Confession). The Baptist Confession was first set forth in 1677, but is generally known as the 1689 Baptist Confession since in that year, at a meeting of 107 Calvinistic Baptist churches, their delegates affixed their names to the Confession. Both the Independents and Calvinistic Baptists stated that they embraced the Westminster Confession (albeit in slightly adapted form) to demonstrate their essential unity with their Reformed brethren on all the major issues of theology. Westminster therefore became an exercise in Reformed ecumenism.
The Directory for the Public Worship of God was constructed to give the widest latitude to all shades of Puritan and Covenanter opinion on worship.
This was especially the case in the Directory's approach to prayer. It neither imposed nor prohibited liturgical prayer. Many Puritans were happy enough with the idea of a liturgy, but they did not wish to bind all ministers to one exclusive format. Others, notably Independents, were so opposed to all liturgical prayer that they rejected the Lord's Prayer itself as a sub-Christian relic of the Old Testament.38 So the assembled divines produced guidelines for prayer, which a minister could fulfil either by using a regular liturgy, or by composing his own prayers. It should be noted, however, that no Puritan believed in "extemporary" prayer; the most ardent critics of liturgy insisted that all public prayer must be studiously prepared in advance. What they were contending for was the freedom of each individual minister to prepare his own prayers, instead of all ministers being compelled to use a single prayer-book. The leading Independent, Philip Nye, affirmed in a speech at the Assembly concerning liturgical and extemporary prayer, "I plead for neither, but for studied prayers." The rest of the Directory followed the same pattern: a set of guidelines for how any service of worship should be
constructed and conducted, rather than a set of specific forms that had to be followed to the letter.
In addition to the Confession, the other documents of the Assembly—the Larger and Shorter Catechisms, the Directory for the Public Worship of God, and the Form of Presbyterial Church Government—were all adopted by the Scottish Kirk. The Directory replaced John Knox's liturgy. The Shorter Catechism was adopted well beyond the borders of Presbyterianism in modified form, e.g. as Keach's Catechism among the Calvinistic
Baptists. Its opening answer became the most famous of any catechism:
"Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever."39
The Assembly also undertook the work of providing a new translation of the psalter for congregational worship. There were already English psalters in use. The most popular was the Sternhold and Hopkins psalter (1562), generally bound with copies of the Anglican Prayer Book and the Geneva
Bible. There was also the newer Bay Psalm Book (1640), produced by the American colonists of Puritan/Separatist outlook. The Assembly revised an existing psalter by the Congregationalist Francis Rous (1579–1659), MP for Truro in Devonshire; first published in 1638, it was Rous' second edition of 1643 that the Westminster Assembly worked on. The revised
Rous was then revised again by the general assembly of the Scottish Kirk, and the result in 1650 was the version commonly called the Scottish metrical psalter.40 Authorized by the general assembly, it became the Scottish psalter, soon hallowed by usage and the object of deep devotional affection that has endured to the present. It was, however, only one among several psalters utilized by the English and Americans. Sternhold and Hopkins, for example, continued in use until the end of the 18th century, while Americans sang from the Bay Psalm Book for a hundred years.