JOHN DAVIDSON (D. 1604) WAS worried—and angry. Why were ministers in his Scottish homeland unfaithful servants of Christ, speaking “so coldlie that their flocks were consumed with hunger”? And why were they allowing the people of Scotland to decline into “grosse sinnes”? Invited to address the General Assembly that met in March 1596, Davidson detailed “the cheefe of-fences and corruptiouns in all estats.” His strong words were approved a little later by the assembly, which fashioned them into a catalogue that “spared no sin and mitigated no offence,” from tavern keeping and “filthie gain” in commercial transactions to misconduct among the clergy, the worst of these their failure to denounce public sins. As the assembly was ending, Davidson urged his colleagues to emulate Ezekiel, the prophet instructed by God to warn the “house of Israel” of its “wickedness” (Ezek. 3–4). Moved by these sermons, to which he added another on the parable of the faithful steward, the assembly accepted Davidson’s advice to enter “into a new league with God,” a covenant committing them “to walke more warily in their ways and more diligentlie in their charges.”1
Davidson was singing a familiar tune. As those who signed the Covenant of 1596 surely knew, perceptions of “decline” had prompted fast days in Scotland ever since the 1560s. Several of these exercises in repentance and covenanting were means to the end of a firmer alliance between a Protestant state church and a monarchy (or civil state) susceptible to Catholic or more moderate tendencies. This was the purpose of the Negative, or King’s, Confession of 1580/81, when the young James VI and most of the political class pledged never to allow “the usurped tyranny of the Roman Antichrist” to return to Scotland. John Knox had organized a similar event in 1565 at a moment when the political fortunes of Mary Stuart were on the mend. Akin to what Davidson was recommending in 1596, Knox had called on the General Assembly to institute a countrywide fast directed against “idolatry,” with the queen as its implied target. Responding to Knox’s sense of crisis, this assembly endorsed a “reformation of manners” and “public fast” as the means of “avoiding of the plagues and scourges of God, which appeared to come upon the people for their sins and ingratitude.” Simultaneously, it urged the queen to suppress “the Mass” and other “such idolatry and Papistical ceremonies.”2
Forty-three years after Davidson’s fiery words of 1596, an English correspondent of Archbishop Ussher in Ireland warned him that England was in an irrevocable situation of decline, “this being the last and worst age of the world, and surely for all crying and notorious sins, as whoredom, lying, swearing, and drunkenness.” John King, the man who wrote these words, was “persuaded that . . . our own nation is become the very worst of any in the Christian world.” Hence the certainty that God would enact “some heavy judgment” on England if it persisted in its sinfulness. Venturing to imagine what this judgment might look like, King singled out the possibility of an invasion by Spanish troops aided by “English papists, whereof the kingdom is too well stored.” “All things concur very untowardly against us,” he concluded.3
These assertions took for granted a covenant God had established with the people of Scotland and those of England, each of them paralleling the covenant He had fashioned with ancient Israel. Unlike the covenant of grace, a national covenant was contractual and inclusive; freighted with conditions, it encompassed everyone.4 The essential condition was resolute, heart-centered obedience of divine law. Otherwise, the God who promised to sustain a covenanted people would turn on them in anger, an assumption based on the many examples of covenants broken and covenants renewed in the Old Testament. Both versions of divine action appear in Psalm 78, which summarized what would happen when a “generation” charged with keeping God’s commandments became “stubborn and rebellious” or, as noted by the psalm-ist, “forgot” what God had done for them. Provoked in this manner, a “wrathful God” (v. 21) “delivered” these covenant breakers to “captivity” (v. 61). Yet God was also “full of compassion” (v. 38) and enabled David, when he emerged as Israel’s leader, to reclaim the covenant his people had come close to rejecting.
How were a covenanted people to know if they had ignored its obligations? The answer was obvious. God spoke to them through wonders or portents as well as through ministers who acted as His “watchmen,” a role undertaken in ancient Israel by Hosea, Nehemiah, Jeremiah, and many others. Discerning the meaning of wonders was something almost anyone could attempt thanks to books such as Thomas Beard’s The Theatre of Divine Judgments, a vast collection of stories about supernatural (or “preternatural”) signs of God’s wrath—comets, voices, apparitions, people who fell down dead after uttering a curse, corpses bleeding in the presence of a murderer, Catholic persecutors of the faithful choking on their own blood. Many other stories of this kind circulated via Stephen Batman’s The doome warning all men to the iudgemente (1581) and cheap pamphlets publicizing “wonders.”
In general, portents signaled God’s dismay and possibly an impending crisis. Hence their importance to the genre of preaching known as the jeremiad. The English minister Laurence Chaderton used the occasion of a sermon he preached in London in 1579 to cite a host of “signs and forerunners of God’s wrath” (floods, earthquakes, plague) He was using to summon England and especially its clergy to reform their behavior. Some forty years later, John Preston discerned a similar crisis for England and the Reformed international at a moment when French Protestants and English soldiers sent to help them were overwhelmed by Catholic troops. Preston interpreted these defeats as a sign of God’s determination to punish the English people for betraying their covenant. Worse would follow, Preston warned, unless his countrymen repented: “Are not our allies wasted? Are not many branches of the Church [a reference to the Thirty Years War raging in Germany] cut off already, and more in hazard. . . . Are not these cracks to give warning before the fall of the House?”5
A narrative shaped around covenant, decline, and rebuke was double-edged. A nation or church that disobeyed divine law would be punished, but righteous monarchs and a faithful people could expect great blessings—the downfall of Mary Stuart, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the failure of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. The greatest of these blessings was the arrival of Protestantism, which had released Britain from the “tyranny” Knox and his heirs associated with Catholicism. More often, however, this narrative reiterated the scenario of decline or disobedience, a narrative played out in ceremonies of covenant renewal. As was said at the General Assembly of 1565, this ritual was God’s means of “straitlie command[ing] reformation of maners in all estates.”6
A process of this kind was widely endorsed. As historians of social discipline have reminded us, campaigns directed against “moral transgressions” occurred within the whole of “western Christendom” during the early modern period and (leaving aside the Inquisition), were especially important to societies where the Reformed international had a strong presence. In this chapter, however, the focus is on England and Scotland. At every level of governance in these two countries, officeholders acknowledged their responsibility for the well-being of families, towns, and nation. Ministers recognized a role for themselves as watchmen, and laypeople lobbied for reform as a means of warding off epidemics or devastating fires. This agenda was never a Puritan program in any strong sense of the term, or singular to British Protestants. Catholicism had its moral reformers and, in the Late Middle Ages, prophets such as Savonarola. For this reason, my narrative begins with a description of the common wisdom about decline and renewal, followed by a description of a more specifically Puritan version of this politics.7
Moralists agreed.8 Britain was in “decline,” its moral and social health undermined by multiple versions of corruption. Long before Elizabeth I came to the throne, but resonating in her reign and continuing into the seventeenth century, high-pitched complaints about declension filled countless sermons, fast-day proclamations, collections of wonder stories, and sessions of the General Assembly in Scotland and of Parliament in England. According to the English homily “Against Whoredom and Uncleanness,” England was beset by an “outrageous sea of adultery, whoredom, fornication, and uncleanness,” all of them “grown into such an height that in a manner among many it is counted no sin at all.” Nowhere was decline evoked more dramatically than in Philip Stubbes’s The Anatomie of Abuses: Containing A Discoverie, or Brief Summarie of . . . Notable Vices and Corruptions (1583). Stubbes sounded the alarm about everything from stage plays to dancing and much else; in his overheated imagination, dancing was a “quagmire or puddle of all abomination” and a “preparative to wantonness” that “sprang from the teats of the Devils brest, from whence all mischeer els dooth flow.” A prolific writer of inexpensive tracts about portents, Stubbes employed the same exaggerated language in his description of a covetous woman who, refusing to excuse a dying man for the debt she was owed, was stricken by the Devil, whereupon her body became “as black as pitch” and spewed “fesses most fettulent.” Decline or decay was also occurring in the natural world, “dame Nature herself . . . “sending foorth . . . untimely births” and “monsters . . . both in man & beast.” Hence the imperative that people repent, for “The day of the Lord cannot be farre of[f].”9
Extreme but not unique, Stubbes’s litany of complaints serves as a useful point of entry into commonplaces about decline and its remedies. As in his publications, so elsewhere the conventional wisdom about decay, corruption, and disorder relied on a stock of truisms dating from Scripture, Late Antiquity, and the Middle Ages.10 Some of this wisdom evoked the “sea of troubles” experienced by Shakespeare’s Hamlet; his were inward or spiritual, but moral-ists discerned a sea of troubles everywhere they looked. Spiritual decay and social disorder had their counterpart in nature—the stars misaligned, the weather punctuated by storms and droughts, the birth of shockingly deformed fetuses. “Many are the wonders which have lately happened,” declared the compiler of A Miracle of Miracles (1614) “as of sodaine and strange death upon perjured persons, strange sights in the Ayre, strainge births on the Earth, Earthquakes Commets, and fierie Impressions, with the execution of God himself from his holy fire [lightning] in heaven, on the wretched man and his wife, at Holnhurst.” Portents of this kind confirmed the moral decay so shockingly apparent in the “overflow[ing]” of “adulteries, incests . . . robberies . . . and savage cruelty.”11
Moralists likened this process of decay to the “plague,” an all-too-familiar reality thanks to the presence of the bubonic plague in early modern Britain but even more alarming because of the biblical plagues God had inflicted on a disobedient people, first and foremost the plague of Exodus 32:35 that struck everyone who worshipped the golden calf, but also the seven plagues forecast in Revelation, a sequence culminating in an outbreak of disease as Babylon was being overthrown (Rev. 21:9). For other moralists, deformed births and similar corruptions of nature, all of them characterized as “monsters” or “monstrous,” were telling signs of disorder. Or perhaps the appropriate term was an unstoppable “gangrene,” which is how the mid-seventeenth-century English minister Thomas Edwards represented the religious turbulence of the 1640s.12
Taking this master narrative of decline for granted—“every day groweth worse & worse,” Beard declared in A Theatre of Divine Judgements—moralists agreed on its causes. Chief among them was the immorality associated with a craving for alcohol (“drunkenness”) and sex out of marriage. The first led to brawling and violence, the second, to unwed mothers whose illicit children burdened local systems of welfare and threatened the sanctity of marriage.13 Sex between adults who were married to someone else—adultery—violated the seventh commandment and, in Jewish law, was considered a crime punishable by death, a penalty some Puritans wanted to revive. Incest, sodomy, and buggery (sex with an animal), were just as troublesome. Alongside sex, alcohol consumption, and a generalized “intemperance,” church leaders and local magistrates placed “Sabbath-breaking,” the practice of avoiding church services or, more commonly, of merrymaking on Sundays. In the Elizabethan Second Book of Homilies, moralizing about the Sabbath expanded into a Stubbes-like denunciation of people who “rest in ungodliness and in filthiness, prancing in their pride . . . painting themselves to be gorgeous and gay; . . . they rest in wantonness, . . . in filthy fleshliness; so that it doth too evidently appear that . . . the devil [is] better serviced on the Sunday than upon all the days in the week beside.” Sabbath breaking was rivaled by a much-publicized site of disorder, the local inn or alehouse. Its role in moral decline figured in an archbishop’s insistence that parish officials in Yorkshire make sure “that no innkeeper, alehouse-keeper, victualler, or tippler . . . admit or suffer any person or persons . . . to eat, drink, or play at cards, bowls, or other games in time of . . . preachings, or reading of homilies, on the Sundays or holy days.” Like most of his fellow bishops, Edmund Grindal wanted to protect the sanctity of “holy” time by prohibiting shops from being open or allowing “fairs or common markets” during morning services. Beard agreed. In one of the chapters of A Theatre of Divine Judgements, he asserted that the Sunday Sabbath had been turned into a “day for tipling houses and taverns to be fullest fraught with ruffians” who pass the time singing “lecherous and baudie songs.” This too was “the day when . . . blasphemies flie thickest and fastest: this is the day when dicing, dauncing, whoreing, and . . . hatred” rise to the surface.14
More signs of decline emerged from the intersection of the marketplace and moral values. The world of commerce was overrun with “oppression,” a word denoting self-serving or dishonest practices—inflated prices, mislabeled goods, the abuse associated with money lending, the government’s practice of granting lucrative monopolies. Hence Richard Greenham’s gloss on the eighth commandment (“Thou shalt not steal”), which he interpreted as obligating tradespeople and artisans never to deceive, extort, or oppress anyone. Self-interest contradicted the moral imperative of neighborliness and its near-synonym, social peace. Valuing peace, moralists complained of people who uttered curses (itself a violation of the third commandment), or shouted insults at others. Peace and peacemaking were high on the list of positive values, as was the golden rule (Matt. 7:12). Speaking as a good Elizabethan, William Perkins reminded his readers that “the office of love is to pour out again the same goodness that it hath received of God upon her neighbor, to be to him as it feeleth Christ to be to himself.” For him and many others, peace was also about “equity” or fairness or “justice.” Indeed, “public equity” was the “glory of all Christian commonwealths.”15
As moralists pointed out, time, gender, and the body were deeply complicit in the making of disorder. The wrong kinds of people thronged the everyday world, people characterized as “brawlers” and “masterless” or as the “wicked, wandring, idle people of the Land” (beggars, thieves, vagrants, ex-soldiers, the unemployed). Their behavior threatened every aspect of social and moral order. As the conforming minister George Herbert complained, “idleness” was “great in itselfe and great in consequence; for when men have nothing to do, then they fall to drink, to steal, to whore, to scoffe, to revile.”16 The visible evidence of idleness included locations or practices as diverse as the London theater and dancing around maypoles. Commonplaces about the misuse of time flowed into representations of women as always and everywhere overly sexualized because of their “painted faces, resembling Jezebel,” whose flagrant behavior aroused God to order that she be fed to dogs (l Kings 16:31; 21:23). The opposite of the painted lady was the witch. Adding fuel to the flames of village conflict wherever she appeared, the witch overturned every moral rule by allying with the Devil and using her tongue to poison a community.17 Books could also be frightening if they encouraged people to turn away from the moral discipline associated with the right kinds of reading. Hence the objections of William Tyndale to the appeal of “Robin Hood, and Bevis of Hampton . . . with a thousand histories and fables of love and wantonness, and of ribaldry, as filthy as heart can think,” an outburst he concluded by citing St. Paul’s criticism (1 Cor. 6) of “fornication, and all uncleanness, or covetousness.”18
Other moralists focused on real-life enemies of British Protestants—the Catholic regimes in Europe and the presence of Catholics in Britain itself—for they threatened every aspect of moral order and civil authority. Catholicism had its own array of martyrs and wonders to rival the evidence assembled by Beard and John Foxe, a repertoire that included modes of spiritual healing that British Protestants had rejected. Above all, the presence of Catholicism contradicted the premise that the social health of a nation depended on unity, or a common confession and a common set of values. A house divided against itself cannot stand (Mark 3:25): mindful of this precept, moralists took for granted that deep fractures around religion—not only Catholic/Protestant but also conformist/Puritan—weakened moral order and the authority of the state. Looking back on the unprecedented disunity of the Civil War period in British history, a minister underscored its consequences: “envy, malice, seditions, factions, rebellions, contempt of Superiors.” Hence the many ritual occasions during which unity as an ideal was evoked, one of these the ceremonial opening of new Parliaments in England, when the Speaker of the House of Commons reminded everyone of the harmony that existed (or should exist) between the values of Parliamentarians and those of the monarchy.19
Across the Protestant spectrum, moralists agreed on the moral, social, and political alternative to a world so filled with disorder. In the aftermath of the Catholic uprising of 1569 in England, the Church of England homily (1571) “Against Disobedience and Wilful Rebellion” characterized Lucifer as “the great captain and father of all rebels” and rebellion itself as “the first and principal cause both of all worldly and bodily miseries” and the “very cause of death and damnation eternal.” Hierarchy made its way into this argument because God had “ordained” the subordination of wives to husbands and children to parents, and “people” to the “governors and rulers” commissioned to serve in His stead, a principle based on Romans 13:1–2, which begins with the assertion, “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers.” Hence the imperative to bear the “yoke of subjection” willingly. The alternative was “confusion” that, disease-like, would destroy every benefit of authority. As the forceful Scottish minister Robert Bruce pointed out in sermons he was preaching in the 1580s, without such restraints no kirk “could be gathered” or “society” persist. When Elizabeth I complained to Archbishop Parker about the politics of a book she had read, he found himself imagining the disorder that was likely to erupt in England if the book was not suppressed, a disorder he likened to the Anabaptist “commonwealth” in 1530s Münster. For many moralists, “Münster” served as shorthand for a world turned upside, the kind of world likely to emerge from an insurrection. Little wonder, then, that memories of the recent past and ongoing Protestant-Catholic conflict fed the “obsession” of monarchs and moralists with the scenario of subversion from beneath.20
Social theorists valued authority for another reason, its role in the making of “common weal” or “common wealth.” Popularized during the reign of Edward VI and a central theme of humanist social theory, this image and ideal took for granted that the right kind of leadership could restore social health to society. As was said in an English tract of 1542, “A king is anointed, to be a defense unto the people, that they be not oppressed nor overyoked, but by all godly and politic means to seek the common wealth of his people.” In popular politics as well as within the discourse of common weal, a country’s leader would use his or her authority to aid those most in need. Scripture was one source of this ethical-social program and its bearing on leadership. Thomas Sternhold’s translation of Psalm 41 included the counsel that “The Lord will help that man again, / that helpeth poor and weak,” and his paraphrasing of the Hebrew of Psalm 49 included a strikingly forceful lament about the “rich men” who “oppress the poor” and because of “vainly trusting in their goods,” will “perish evermore.” The “Book of Orders” issued by the government of Charles I in 1631 addressed these broad objectives by way of “orders” aimed at employing the poor, suppressing alehouses, and curtailing vagrancy—an agenda so encompassing that, in the words of a twentieth-century historian, “it is difficult to distinguish” the king’s version of “social regulation” from that of the “Puritans.”21 Guided by these ethics, theorists of common weal called upon the Christian prince to enact policies that would remedy the grievances of the people. Speaking to the queen in 1570, Edward Dering advised her to “defend the fatherless and widow[ed], relieve the oppressed, and have no respect of persons in judgment.”22
This was the high road, the path taken by an exemplary magistrate. The high road mattered to the governments of England and Scotland. In England, Henry VIII and his chief advisor, Thomas Cromwell, undertook a remarkable program of “renewal and reform” under the aegis of “commonweal.” Slowly but surely, the civil state strengthened its means of regulating popular behavior and intervening at times of social and economic crisis. The Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601 and, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, measures to suppress vagrancy were the doing of a reinvigorated administrative state—as it happened, a state gripped by a “paranoia” about disorder. In Scotland, James VI did his best to shut down interclan violence. In both countries, the administrative state wanted to regularize the rules that governed marriage. And in both, moralists supported an alliance of magistrates and ministers in behalf of order. Their cooperation epitomized the benefits of unity and hierarchy. Working together, judges and ministers could reestablish peace and order.23
Where civil governments led in the making of moral and social reform, state churches followed. Their principal mission may have been saving souls, but every parish church was also responsible for maintaining peace and order. What was special to the church was its responsibility for making everyone aware of moral rules God Himself had prescribed. Chief among these was the imperative to obey parents, superiors, ministers, monarchs, and God. When Grindal tried to persuade Elizabeth to tolerate the exercise of “prophesying” (see chap. 2), he emphasized the church’s role in abetting obedience, using sermons as his example: “By preaching,” he reminded the queen, “due obedience to Christian princes and magistrates is planted in the hearts of subjects: for obedience proceedeth of conscience, conscience is grounded upon the word of God, and the word of God worketh this effect by preaching.” Godly critics of the Church of England made the same point whenever they complained of nonresidency and pluralism; without ministers on hand to provide “publick instruction,” the “multitude” would lapse into “wicked and traitorous practices” and become ungovernable.24
An ethics of obedience was pervasive in the collections titled Homilies (1562, 1571), which included sermons on topics such as “idleness,” “drunkenness,” “strife and contention,” “swearing and perjurie,” and “whooredome and adulterie,” all of them preceded by the assertion that sermons were “the principal guide and leader unto al godlinesse and virtue” and the means by which “the people . . . may . . . learne their duety towards God, their prince, and their neigh-bours.” The same connection between moral order and institutional religion threaded its way through visitation articles. Typically, Archbishop Parker used his visitations of the 1560s to ask if ministers in his diocese were “peace-makers [who] . . . exhort the people to obedience to their prince, and to all others that be in authority.” Hence the importance of the well-ordered family or “little commonwealth,” for it nurtured the practice and ethics of obedience. Summing up this wisdom, a minister of Puritan inclinations described the family as a “school wherein the first principles and grounds of government are learned.”25
Ritual processes implemented what was said in sermons. Fast days tied to situations of the plague or other crises were the church’s way of reincorporating laypeople into a community practicing peace and love.26 Never staged with the same frequency in England as in Scotland, government and church-ordered fasts were usually a way of responding to unexpected disasters—a crippling fire, an outbreak of the bubonic plague—or to moments when social and political conflict seemed to worsen. As the literary historian Timothy Rosedale has pointed out, the rituals included in the Book of Common Prayer and, for that matter, the book itself abetted the common good. Instead of separating clergy from laity and those who knew Latin from those who conversed in the vernacular, the liturgy presumed an entire nation united around a pattern of worship. Moreover, its origins under Edward VI and its rebirth under Elizabeth I as a mandatory scheme of worship made it a sign and instrument of an “Erastian” state committed to hegemony in matters of religion.27
Baptism and, especially, Holy Communion were other means of sustaining peace and an ethics of “charity” or mutual love. In the Scottish Book of Common Order, the frightening language of 1 Corinthians 11:27–29 (see chap. 4) justified the assertion that “any” person who was “a blasphemer of God, an hinderer or slaunder of his worde, an adulterer, or be in malice or envie” could not participate in the sacrament. According to the 1552 version of the Book of Common Prayer, anyone who wanted to receive the bread and wine had to reconcile beforehand with neighbors, share with those in need, and practice an ethics of “charity with all men.” In his much-reprinted catechism, Alexander Nowell parsed the sacrament as enabling “brotherly love to our neighbours, that is, to all men, without any evil will or hatred.”28 More expansively, Nowell and his fellow clergy emphasized both parts of the “great commandment” (Matt. 26:36–40): love God and love your neighbor. Behind such injunctions lay the premise of interdependence, which Philip Stubbes translated into the moral imperative of generosity toward to others so “that all may live jointly together.” In an England and Scotland experiencing fractures of many kinds—religious, social, economic, political—love and/or generosity to others were antidotes to decline. So was mercy. An English Protestant urged the readers of a funeral sermon he preached in 1601 to practice the traditional “sixe works of mercy” relating to the soul and “seven” relating to the social body: “To visit them which be sicke: to give drinke to them which be thirstie: to feed them which be hungry: to rdeeme the captives: to cloath the naked: to lodge the harbourlesse: and to bury the dead.” On the eve of immigrating to Massachusetts in 1630, the layman John Winthrop reiterated this wisdom in a “Charitie Discourse” he shared with some of his fellow immigrants and others in England. Its message was simple. A people “knit together” by a “bond of love” would care for those in need. At his most eloquent, Winthrop imagined a community in which people lived “together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality,” to the point of being able to “mourn together, labor, and suffer together . . . as members of the same body,” a passage he based in part on Ephesians 4:3.29
For sheer repetition of moral rules, however, nothing matched the weekly exercise of learning a catechism. The Ten Commandments had a prominent place in every such book, their importance underscored by how broadly they were interpreted. In a typical exegesis, an English catechism transposed the prohibition of murder in the sixth commandment into an indictment of quarreling and other versions of anger, an exegesis sanctioned by Jesus’s words about anger in Matthew 5:21–22. An expansive reading of the seventh commandment, which prohibited adultery, described it as encompassing “lust” of many kinds—excesses of food and drink as well as “uncleannes with our neighbors wyffe” or the mere “desire” of such pleasures. An equally expansive reading of the eighth, “thou shalt not steal,” turned it into a critique of marketplace ethics by emphasizing that the true Christian never sold something for more than it was actually worth or used “deceitful mesure or waightes.” The same commandment also bound the godly to “be liberall to the poor” and “labor” in a “lawfull calling.”30
The state churches had one other means of social discipline, a system of ecclesiastical courts. Delaying a description of the Scottish kirk session (see below, sec. 3), church courts in England were responsible for regulating marriage, divorce, inheritances, church attendance, Sabbath breaking, drunkenness, defamation, children born by unmarried women, adultery, and the ale-house. As well, these courts handled cases of nonconformity by both Catholics and Protestants, together with complaints about the behavior of parish clergy. The hard work was done by local church wardens who, year after year, “presented” people who had misbehaved. Penance was the most common punishment, with excommunication—that is, barring someone from coming to church, receiving the Eucharist, and being buried in consecrated ground—imposed in exceptional cases. Exceptional, because the goal was really reconciliation and reform. The ideal outcome was getting some one to confess and commit to (self-) reform. Whenever this happened, a local court customarily responded by welcoming lawbreakers back into the church. Often reconciliation broke down, perhaps because people failed to show up or courts bent over backwards to favor the more privileged or, in Puritan eyes, abused their authority to excommunicate laypeople. Nonetheless, they enclosed many local people within a framework of moral discipline.31
Alongside these rituals lay a set of rules that originated within Christian humanism. Relying on sources as diverse as the moralists of ancient Greece and Rome and the Christian tradition, humanists fashioned an ethics of self-discipline that foregrounded the contrast between idleness and work, the first a source of disorder, the second a means of strengthening the whole of society. Idleness and poverty were two sides of the same coin, a relationship the humanists wanted to alter in the context of a larger project of social and moral improvement. For them, a crucial means of doing so was education—for most people, a practical education aimed at equipping the poor to become productive workers. The making of a good society also depended on leaders and citizens who actively promoted a life of virtue centered on the humanist version of “moderation.”32
The outcome of these perceptions and proposals was a widely endorsed reformation of manners33—endorsed, but never actually accomplished, or so it seemed to the moralists who lamented decline. Moral reform was the stone that constantly rolled back down the hill, thwarted by the reluctance of kings, nobles, and magistrates to do their part; the presence of so many ineffective ministers; and the resistance of sinners to the twin imperatives of repentance and self-regulating “watchfulness.” Or was the problem the great mischief-maker Satan? As depicted by Nowell in his Catechism, “that subtle, guileful, and old wily serpent” was “like a ravening lion,” ever active in exploiting “our own lusts” and “enticements of this world.” Like his fellow moralists, Nowell ascribed “vices and offences” or more simply, “sin,” to the Devil’s cunning. Necessarily, most people would disobey divine law at some moment in their lives. Whatever the reason, year after year, church courts in England and kirk sessions in Scotland admonished unmarried men and women for having sex; year after year, church wardens and justices of the peace complained of Sabbath breaking.34
From a more recent perspective, the ineffectiveness of reform had social and economic sources. Twentieth-century social historians with no interest in churches or theology have proposed that programs of moral and social reform were thwarted by the demographic and social history of Tudor-Stuart Britain, a period in England that saw the rise of “a market society” and its consequences, one of them the “gradual separation of economic activity from social morality.” More telling, perhaps, was the intersection of population growth and inflation. In England, many of the people who owned no land or other property wandered in search of work as servants or day laborers. Never fully incorporated into the routines of religious practice and social discipline, such people (most of them unmarried) were more likely to haunt a local alehouse or defy the village constable. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, their numbers were increasing while the cost of living was on the rise. Add in the social and economic disruptions caused by episodes of the plague and it seems inevitable that social practice among a very large share of the British people would contradict what churches and moralists were prescribing.35
Decline as perceived and perhaps as actual persisted for an entirely different reason, the confusion that accumulated around the meanings of authority and obedience.36 In principle, authority was seamless. In practice, it was deployed in erratic or contradictory ways in towns, boroughs, and villages. Edinburgh was a case in point, for the burgesses who administered town affairs remained wary of James VI and I’s attempts to dictate who could hold civil or religious office. Here as in London and elsewhere, a culture of “civic republicanism” (to borrow a phrase from the German historian Heinz Schilling) blunted the efforts of the civil state and state churches to curtail the “burgher elites” that dominated civic office. Something deeper was also involved, a suspicion of rules and values imposed from outside, a point of view that favored localism—that is, putting local values and communal peace ahead of instructions originating elsewhere.37
Since towns were where campaigns for reform can be most fully analyzed, it is crucial to recognize that these communities had their own means of sustaining social and religious harmony, one of them a realism about the consequences for social and family networks of punishing Catholics and nonconformists. Why fan the flames of difference when, in places such as Edinburgh, Aberdeen, and London, social peace endured thanks to the agility of Catholic and Protestant artisans and merchants to sidestep controversies about religion. As for sex between unmarried adults, was it all that dangerous given the likelihood that most of the men and women summoned before a church court for premarital sex would end up marrying each other? Irrevocable evidence of disorder to some, premarital pregnancies were more matter-of-fact events for others. Taverns, too, could be valued for the sociability they fostered.38
Thanks to popular wisdom of this kind, the authority of civil courts, kirk sessions, and orders emanating from afar was blunted.39 Just as telling was the disarray at the highest levels of government. In theory, an ethics centered on unity and obedience was sustained by hierarchies that were God’s making. At every turn, however, political rivalries and the indifference of rulers to a strong version of common weal principles contradicted this assumption. Conflict extended into the very heart of civil government thanks to competition for the prizes of office, a process overlaid in Scotland with the antagonism between clans and the nobility who led them. Another enduring source of tension was the reluctance of privileged groups to submit to church courts, a practice James VI endorsed when he told the General Assembly that no member of the nobility in Scotland could be excommunicated without his approval. Simultaneously, the workings of a nascent public sphere were undermining the aura of authority in high places. By the close of the sixteenth century and continuing into the seventeenth, the disarray at the highest levels of the English government was being publicized in manuscripts that passed from hand to hand or in printed pamphlets and books. No version of censorship halted the flow of gossip and criticism.40
The news was not all bad. According to another set of commonplaces, too much authority in the wrong hands was dangerous. By the early seventeenth century, the French social philosopher Jean Bodin was advocating a strong version of monarchical authority. Traces of this “absolutism” appeared in how James VI and I described himself and, more emphatically, in his son Charles I’s self-understanding. For most British moralists, however, absolutism was dangerous given the tragic history of ancient Rome and Greece and the biblical record of God’s response to evil kings. What happened again and again in the classical world and the Old Testament was frightening, the mutation of good kings and Christian bishops into “tyrants” who abused the “liberties” of the people or flouted divine law. Stories of this kind filled a section of The Theatre of Divine Judgments, which included a remarkable warning about the culpability of “great men” who “are more guilty and culpable of sin than any other.” Reminding his readers that “there is a God that judgeth the earth,” Beard singled out those who “are in the highest places of account, who being more hardened and bold to sin, do as boldly exempt themselves from all corrections and punishments due unto them, being altogether unwilling to be subject to any order of justice or law whatsoever.” He was voicing a widely held disenchantment registered elsewhere in a Puritan-linked funeral sermon of 1602 where, having introduced the “works of Princes,” the minister characterized these works as “done foolishly, rashly, and uniustly.” In a commentary on parts of the Book of Revelation (1628), the English minister Henry Burton noted that a “lawful good King” could easily become a “usurping Tyrant.” In another commentary on Revelation dating from circa 1640, the Massachusetts-based John Cotton observed that where “transcendent power is given,” it “will certainly over-run those that give it.” The corollary was obvious: “all power that is on earth [must] be limited.”41
With institutions wavering in their zeal for enforcing the rules and vested interests intervening to protect their privileges, it should not surprise us that the response to decline and decay was spasmodic and the consequences of any action—a fast day or proclamation, a bishop’s visitation, a harsh sentence by an ecclesiastical court—short-lived. Moral panics came and went, their arrival signaled by a flurry of new laws and/or an outpouring of complaints about the failure to enforce the laws that already existed. Simultaneously, witch-hunting surged, portent-mongering flourished, and the Antichrist raged more furiously against the faithful—or so it was alleged from dozens of pulpits. No historian has charted these spasms, but it seems likely that the enthusiasm for reform at the beginning of Elizabeth I’s reign, the flurry of fast days accompanying Protestant objections to Mary Stuart, the surge of witch-hunting in some parts of lowland Scotland in the late 1590s, and another phase of it in mid-1640s England and Scotland fall into this category. Or moral panics could emerge in response to the plague, bad harvests, and a resurgence of Catholicism of the kind that seemed to be happening in late sixteenth-century Scotland and again in the 1620s. As night follows day, these seasons of moral fervor were succeeded by a sense of exhaustion and a slackening of rigor—to give way, at some point in time, to a fresh sense of crisis.42
The circumstances that impeded any national or collective reformation of manners also impeded the godly version of moral and social reform. We turn now to this version and its singularities. What made a godly reformation of manners unusual was how it was aligned with Martin Bucer’s summary of Reformed themes and practices in De Regno Christi, the book he wrote for the eyes of Edward VI. Together with the practical divinity, Bucer’s manifesto nurtured the hope that England and Scotland could be transformed into sanctified societies.
A reformation of manners was immensely important to the advocates of a perfect reformation in Scotland and England. From the earliest days of Elizabeth I’s reign, the godly in England were identified with this very program. When Job Throckmorton rose to speak on behalf of “puritans” in the English Parliament of 1585–86, he itemized practices he regarded as singular to Puritan-style reform: “To reprove a man for swearing, it is Puritanisme. To banishe an adulterer out of the house, it is Puritanisme. To make humble sute to Her Majestie and the high courte of Parliament for a learned ministery, it is Puritanisme.” In 1621, a bill to strengthen the Sunday Sabbath was described by someone in the House of Commons (England) as “savour[ing] of the spirit of a Puritan.”43
What was obvious to contemporaries should be just as obvious to us. Although “civic godliness” was widely endorsed, it had a special importance to a movement that envisioned a sanctified society, a sanctified church, and, among laypeople, a faith-centered commitment to living righteously. Armed with these legacies from Calvin, Bullinger, and Bucer, Puritan-influenced presbyteries, synods, general assemblies, ministers, justices of the peace, magistrates, and laypeople pressured church and state to accomplish more by way of reform. Simultaneously, moral vigilantes insisted that ministers denounce sin and sinning wherever they discerned it.44
Puritan-style moral reform is dogged by stereotypes and half-truths. A few of these date from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, but the stereotypes that abound in modern Britain and America were mainly the doing of liberal Protestants and secular cultural critics who propagated the image of the Puritan as hostile to the arts, intolerant of dissent, and hyper-legalistic, a paradigm closely tied to a narrative of modernity freeing itself from unnecessary restraints. Independently of this rhetoric, sociologists have attached the Puritan movement to a “disciplinary revolution.” By the middle of the twentieth century, the assumption that social change and social discipline were parallel processes was endorsed by those historians who turned Puritanism into a project of a “middling” social group that aspired to control those beneath them. More recently, another generation of social historians has discounted every aspect of this argument. Simultaneously, theologians, social theorists, and historians have invalidated any strong version of the “Weber thesis,” the argument—already noted in chapter 4—that a new version of asceticism (the “Protestant ethic”), driven by deep anxiety about the doctrine of predestination, abetted the rise of capitalism.45
Setting aside grand theory, what does Puritan-style reform look like when it is situated in the contexts of Scripture, the Reformed international’s emphasis on discipline as means to the end of a sanctified church, and the practical divinity? In outline, this program becomes an array of themes and practices that included the following:
—having a broad definition of idolatry that melded the inward or “spirituall” with the outward or “bodily” aspects of idol worship from “monument” to tavern haunting on Sundays. Idolatry infected churches, local communities and the hearts and minds of every Christian;46
—recognizing that sin is omnipresent and, unless held in check, certain to overwhelm love, justice, mercy, and righteousness in both the church and the commonwealth;
—accepting divine law as binding on civil society and the church;47
—adding the judicial laws of Moses, including those about adultery and the Sabbath, to British law. The Church of England wanted to protect holy time, but the Puritan movement went much further by purging the Christian year of holy days and festivities and expanding “rest” to include all of Sunday, a day Richard Greenham characterized as “the school of all the other commandments”;48
—insisting that civil governments and monarchs endorse “wholesome Lawes” and rebuking them in God’s name when they ignored this responsibility;
—relying on a Word-based ministry to carry out the process of social and moral transformation, and being confident (in the words of the English minister Richard Baxter) that “the People would certainly be reformed” by such men, a premise reiterated in the 1620s by Samuel Ward of Ipswich: “where God hath raised up zealous Preachers, in such townes this Serpent [of drunkenness] hath no nestling.” In godly circles, stories circulated of how the right kind of preaching had altered the behavior of a town, family, or person—stories without any counterpart among conformists;49
—embedding reform in descriptions of repentance and sanctification. According to the firmest of commonplaces within the practical divinity, being “sanctified” or walking “uprightly before God” was linked to assurance of salvation, an argument grounded on biblical verses such as 2 Peter 1:10 and Hebrews 12:1–14. Conversely, those who “doe noe good works declare that they neyther are justified nor sanctified,” an argument reiterated in the Scottish Confession (1560), which described everyone from murderers and oppressors to drunkards and idolaters as having “neither true faith, neither any portion of the Spirit of the Lord Jesus,” the proof of this being their “wickedness.” In his English sermons, Thomas Hooker was emphatic: people who “will not . . . forsake their lewd practices . . . cannot . . . obtaine” grace. On the other hand, it was never too late to repent and return to God. Collective and personal repentance was the real driver of this process, as Bucer recognized by emphasizing the ritual of the fast day;50
—making discipline a mark of the true church, relocating supervision of moral and social behavior to local parishes, introducing the office of elder, and extolling the possibility of a “most perfect and absolute order” purged of “unbridled license of ungodly living”;51
—tightening access to the sacraments of baptism and Holy Communion to strengthen the identity of the church as a sanctified community, a goal more within reach and, in fact, more important than achieving a sanctified society;52
—emphasizing the special relationship among the godly in their symbolic identity as the body of Christ, an identity manifested in peace, mutuality, and “love of the brethren” (1 John 3:14) and particular covenants to keep “lives and hearts in good order.” Arguing in favor of gathered churches (see chap. 8), an English minister extolled the spiritual temper of such communities: “there is, or can be, the like love one to another; the like care one for another; the like spiritual watchfulness one over another; the like union and communion of members in one mystical body, in a sympathy of affections . . . as is described, Psalm. Cxxxiii.” Sympathy or “compassion” was also how the godly should respond to the suffering of others;53
—attaching a reformation of manners to the workings of divine providence and the covenantal relationship between God and those He favored. Providentialism, or the practice of deciphering signs from heaven deemed of God’s doing, was not unique to Puritans but, as Alexandra Walsham acknowledges in her acute history of this way of thinking, the godly were drawn to it more than others;54
—nurturing literacy among ordinary people as a means of expanding their knowledge of Scripture and therefore of divine law;
—regarding “oppression” and poverty as morally wrong and hoping to undo their consequences for as many people as possible, although favoring the worthy poor;55
—evoking “equity” and “justice” as key aspects of “righteousness,” and, in their name, calling for reform of English civil and criminal law;56
—accepting coercion by the civil state and state church as part of any comprehensive program of reform, but hoping that people would participate voluntarily via oaths, covenants, and a heartfelt response to the Word;
—urging restraint or “moderation” in appetites for worldly goods, and condemning “popular” customs such as card playing and dancing. Like everyone else, Puritan moralists were troubled by women’s sexuality and dress.57
A single book spelled out this agenda and may have influenced its British advocates. When Martin Bucer was in England (1549–51), he drafted a blueprint for transforming the state church and country into sanctified communities. He addressed the document to the young king Edward VI, the person he was counting on to “restore the Kingdom of Christ in your realm.”58 In the first and longer section of De Regno Christi (kingdom of the Son of God), Bucer described a church restored to the purity of the apostolic period because it adhered to Scripture in determining doctrine, discipline, and worship. Such a church would be a “communion, not of profane persons, but of saints,” made so by the authority of Scripture and the power of the Holy Spirit. Via these instruments, it would undertake a process of sanctification, doing so voluntarily because Christians are “a free and voluntary community, serving God not out of constraint but willingly, as if there were no laws to compel us.” Such a church needed a corps of ministers who taught the reality of God’s “unbearable anger” with those who disobeyed divine law. Although Bucer hinted at Anabaptist-style exclusivity in his understanding of a sanctified church, he acknowledged that it would continue to include “hypocrites” but also bar them from the Lord’s Supper, which he wanted to restrict to those who could demonstrate “true repentance for sin.” The point of having lay elders was to ensure each church had officers who kept everyone but the “worthy” from the sacrament. (Deacons would look after the poor.) Access to baptism was also restricted. These steps taken, the church would emulate the church described in Acts 4:32, a group of people who “embrace each other . . . with supreme love and have a most attentive mutual concern for each other” or, as Bucer also said, fulfill the obligation (Matt. 7:12) of love of one’s neighbor.59
In the second part of De Regno Christi, Bucer described the ideal Christian commonwealth and the responsibilities of the Christian prince, Parliament, and other civil institutions. Reiterating a core premise of Reformed political theology, Bucer called on Edward VI and England’s godly magistrates to fulfill the role of “Christian prince” modeled by certain kings in the Old Testament. Thereafter, he outlined fourteen policies the king should pursue. Much of what he said about education, idleness, luxury, and poverty echoed humanist teachings. When it came to the legal system, however, Bucer’s biblicism took over. The moral rules spelled out in the Ten Commandments were everlasting, as much a part of the new covenant with Christ as they were of God’s covenant with ancient Israel. Hence the recommendation that capital crimes include Old Testament rules about adulterers and children who rebelled against their parents. Both should be put to death, as should those who blasphemed. On the other hand, Bucer disapproved of English laws that made theft of property above a certain amount a capital crime. In a godly commonwealth, thieves would not be executed but, in keeping with biblical rules, make restitution. Marriage should become a matter of civil law and divorce permitted. In general, Bucer emphasized repentance and reconciliation as what the law should encourage. He also endorsed the importance of fast days as means to the same end.60
It may seem audacious to attribute the making of a Puritan-style reformation of manners to a book that was not printed in English in the sixteenth century—in fact, it was not printed in its entirety in English until the mid-twentieth century. Yet it shaped the First Book of Discipline (1561) and the second of 1578, and a case has been made for its importance to Matthew Parker and Edmund Grindal, who made notations in his personal copy. That other Elizabethans admired the book is apparent from a letter Thomas Sampson sent William Burghley (undated, c. 1573) urging him to “apply” himself to a Bucer-like program of ecclesiastical reform.61 Many years later (1641), a group of Puritan clergy writing under the pen name of Smectymnuus cited it, as did John Milton, who incorporated Bucer’s comments on divorce into a brief tract, The Judgement of Martin Bucer, concerning Divorce (1644), to bolster the case he was making for its legality, in the same decade in which Scottish Presbyterians were citing De Regno Christi. And, in the 1650s, Richard Baxter came under its spell.62
Like other schemes of reform, the Bucer-Puritan version was dogged by the indifference of local people and, in Scotland especially, of the privileged few. In that country, assembly after assembly rebuked the nobility for their “great negligence in the punishing of vices” as diverse as “adultery, blood shedding and sorcery.” Everywhere, as well, strong words about protecting the Lord’s Supper did not prompt systematic efforts to exclude the unworthy, and in towns such as Aberdeen the magistrates were reluctant to enforce the letter of the law when it came to “horning” (banishing) vagrants. Godly reform was also dogged by the contradiction between its aspirations for peacemaking and the conflict it aroused. Where there was smoke—the many assertions that the Puritan movement was divisive or seditious—there was fire. Time and again, godly ministers emphasized the gulf between the worthy few and the many who were servants of Satan. In Chelmsford, where the blunt-spoken Thomas Hooker preached in the 1620s, he characterized most of the townspeople as members of “the Devils camp.” In his vision of the town’s culture, the godly were at war “with the drunkard, with the profane swearer, with the maypole dancer.” Others were just as confrontational—Davidson in Scotland, Samuel Ward in Ipswich—even as some urged the importance of peacemaking.63
Covenant making involved other contradictions, as did any evocation of conscience. Was a covenant meaningless if people were coerced into taking it? Theologically, the correct answer was yes, for covenanting presumed the workings of repentance and the presence of faith. Nonetheless, the political importance of broad-based covenanting seemed to have justified coercion (see chaps. 7–8). And, although endorsing the injunction to obey rulers even if they were tyrants, the movement wrestled with the question of how to behave in the presence of a ruler who violated divine law.64
Despite an enduring confusion about means and ends, the agenda of the godly became a significant presence in certain parts of England and informed the activism of political leaders such as Henry Huntington (see chap. 2). In keeping with what was said in De Regno Christi about men of his rank as leaders of a reformation of manners, Huntington founded schools, subsidized the distribution of coal to poor people in Leicester, set up a workshop to train cloth workers, and helped the unemployed during an epidemic of the plague. These many services were summed up in an inscription on his tomb that read, “To poor and to needy, to high and to low, / Lord Hastings was friendly, all people doth know; His gates were still open the stranger to feed, And comfort the succourless, always in need.”65
What Huntington attempted in his part of England others were attempting in towns and villages in the southeast and the west.66 The three Suffolk County towns of Bury St Edmunds, Kedington, and Dedham are among the best-documented examples of this process. In Bury St Edmunds, a change of leadership in the mid-1580s enabled “godly townsmen” to begin a local version of “lectures by combination” staffed by ministers who took turns preaching on market days. With town government in the hands of the godly, the leadership “set out in meticulous detail their vision of the godly borough” in an elaborate list of bylaws. Typically, one of these was about idleness and how to curtail it. As a first step, the town council told the overseers of the poor to prepare an accurate census of the able-bodied poor and place them in a local industry. In other bylaws, the new leadership took aim at alehouses, telling constables to inspect these places at least once a week so that fines could be levied on anyone who played “unlawful games” or drank too much. Knowing that these activities distracted people from observing the Sunday Sabbath, the leadership added rules prohibiting alehouse keepers and others from hosting stage plays, comedies, and other forms of entertainment. In Kedington, the townspeople were “very ignorant and prophane, being generally aliens and strangers from the commonwealth of Israel.” Or so they seemed to Samuel Fairclough when he arrived as the parish minister in the late 1620s. Before long, his sermons (four a week, it seems) and catechizing had persuaded hundreds of people to undertake a more disciplined way of life. Fairclough owed some of his success to the support of the local magnate and staunch parliamentary Puritan Nathaniel Barnardiston, who helped him persuade “the substantial men of the town” to enforce the “attendance” of entire households at the exercise of catechizing. Another goal, also apparently a success, was getting the townspeople to accept tighter rules for access to the Eucharist. Fairclough’s was a notable experiment in what could be accomplished when ministry and magistracy collaborated.67
In Dedham, a town where the godly had a strong presence, a group of men drafted fifteen “orders” in 1585 to abet the securing of “Christian order.” A mixture of the social and the moral, and “imprinted” throughout “with the earnest godliness” of the men who drafted the document, it opened with an emphasis on “the right use of the lordes daie.” Thereafter, parents were told to make sure their children were catechized, a schedule was set up for examining anyone who wanted to participate in the monthly Eucharist (a key criterion being if they lived “charitablie with all their neighbors”), and householders (“as many as may be spared” from work) were summoned to attend twice-weekly lectures. As in Bury St Edmunds, the makers of this document wanted all children in the town to learn how to read. More unusual was the decision to meet the expense of teaching “pore mens children” by a special offering at each month’s service of Communion. The town officers added other means of bringing order to the lives of the poor, one of them a scheme of household visits aimed at identifying the “disordered” and urging them to leave the town, information the officers also used to discern certain needs and remedy them. As well, the Orders of 1585 touched on premarital sex, or “filthines before . . . marriage,” which the town minister was asked to denounce in ways that would “terrify” anyone who committed this sin. The most significant of the orders was akin to a covenant. Limited to townspeople deemed worthy of participating in Holy Communion, the document asked them to “settle” any “discord” privately before turning to civil or ecclesiastical courts. More unusually, the social ethics embedded in the orders touched on the relationship between people deemed “of habilitie” and their “poore neighbors” who aspired to godliness, with the first group encouraged to invite the second to dine with them. Via this practice, the orders endorsed the goal of reconciliation or unifying fellowship emphasized in De Regno Christi and the ethics attached to Holy Communion.68
One other well-studied project of reform, this time in the Dorset county town of Dorchester, was exemplary. There, some of the townspeople were accustomed to mocking the godly as a “Counterfeit Company and pack of Puritans.” The situation began to change with the arrival in 1605 of John White, a conforming but resolutely evangelical minister. When a fire in 1613 destroyed half of the town, White and his allies seized on the disaster as a warning sign from heaven. A decade later, with “puritan reformers” dominating its membership, the town council undertook a remarkable array of initiatives: a new hospital (akin to what we would characterize as a workhouse) “for the setting of poor children on work,” a “vast increase in poor relief,” “improved care for the sick and elderly,” and better opportunities for becoming literate. Simultaneously, magistrates and constables were doing their best to clear streets and taverns of vagrants and curtailing disorder on Sundays. Soon, the success of this program was evident in higher attendance at church services, substantial donations of money to charitable causes, and fewer pregnancies among unmarried women.69
In the early 1630s or a little earlier (the dating is uncertain), White summed up his aspirations for Dorchester in a list of “Ten Vows.” The first of these, which called on everyone to “cleave unto the true and pure worship of God” and oppose “all ways of innovation or corruption,” referenced the anti-puritan policies of Charles I that prompted the Parliament of 1628–29 to warn against “innovations” (see chap. 7). The same politics of religion accounted for the eighth and ninth vows, which singled out “the gospel at home and abroad” as needing support—that is, support for Protestants who were refugees from the Thirty Years War. As in other programs of reform, however, the central themes emerged directly out of the practical divinity and its emphasis on sanctification. Hence the importance of devotional exercises as a means to the end of sustaining “Christian peace” and overcoming selfishness: children learning a catechism, adults “watch[ing]” themselves “daily” and acknowledging their “failings,” the practices of “reading hearing and meditating Gods word,” humbling of “hearts,” being willing to accept “brotherly admonitions,” abandoning “groundless suspicions, slanders, and contentions,” reconciling with neighbors, avoiding “all ways of gain” that were “scandalous,” attending church services, “using time wisely for spiritual ends,” and “work[ing] out” their “salvation with fear and trembling” (a reference to Phil. 2:12).
In a preamble White attached to the Ten Vows, he placed his vision of Christian fellowship or community in the context of decline. The punishments God was inflicting on “neighbor” churches—another reference to the Thirty Years War—were judgments He was entitled to make of Dorchester, which had its share of sinners. The signs of decline were obvious: “security” and “deadness of heart, “pride and self love,” “love of the world,” “contention and envying one another,” and a cooling of “love and affection towards our brethren.” All these were signs of mutual affection gone sour, as was another word he used, “lukewarmness” in “zeal for God’s honour and unto his truth.” Most of those who read or listened to the vows would have recognized the reference to Laodicia (Rev. 3:15–16), the “luke-warm” city that God threatens to disown, a verse the English Puritan minister Thomas Brightman had recently interpreted as an allusion to the Church of England (see chap. 7).
From diagnosis White turned to the antidote of “love” or mutuality that Christ had endorsed and the apostle John reiterated in 1 John 3:14. For White, a love-centered ethics should characterize the relationship of the godly with those who were experiencing duress. “Take nearer” to your “hearts” our “afflicted Brethrens distresses,” he urged the townspeople, and provide them the necessities of food and clothing. Did White ask the town council to adopt these vows or expect the people who were attending church services to enter into covenant? This seems likely given his recommendation that the townspeople “bind” themselves “by a solemn vow, and covenant with the Lord our God to endeavor . . . the practice” of the ten duties he had listed.70
The town records say nothing about how the vows were publicized or enforced. Presumably, White incorporated their spirit and substance into his everyday preaching. Like the vows themselves, he owed his understanding of the Word as an agent of transformation to the practical divinity and the example of men such as Edward Dering, the minister who spoke so forcefully in the presence of Elizabeth I. White wanted Dorchester’s town officers to do everything they could to align social behavior with moral and ethical values, yet he took for granted that outward or merely institutional-driven changes would never be as effective as a grace-driven righteousness or sanctification. In a very real sense, the making of a sanctified society and sanctified church depended on both. An agenda of social reform from one perspective, the Ten Vows was also deeply rooted in the practical divinity.
To understand the connections between social reform and spiritual renewal or rebirth, it may help if we glance again at Arthur Dent’s Plain Mans Path-way to Heaven and a text of the next generation, Henry Scudder’s The Christians Daily Walke (1631). Dent was unrelentingly moralistic in his description of the true “pathway” to heaven. As he pointed out repeatedly, the quest for grace was also a quest for self-discipline and unstinting watchfulness. Without these, no one would be included among the redeemed. In the early pages of The Plain Mans Path-way to Heaven, he characterized the people who fell outside the economy of grace as infected with “plague sores,” his evocative phrase for moral and social faults that included pride, whoredom, covetousness, swearing, lying, drunkenness, idleness, and oppression. Personal and collective at the same time, these were “Deadly venome . . . to the Soul” and also the sins of an entire “Nation”—that is, a nation guilty of flouting divine law, as England most certainly was. In passages of this kind, The Plain Mans Path-way became a warning cry to Dent’s countrymen to repent. Returning to assurance of salvation in the book’s closing pages, Dent argued that, next to the inward “work of God’s grace” apparent in the soul, the surest evidence of knowing who was saved and who was among the reprobate was social ethics, or behavior. The reprobate were amoral in every possible way—Sabbath breakers for sure, but also the kinds of people Dent addressed collectively as “you”: “You break out sometimes into horrible Oaths and cursings. . . . Your wife is Irreligious, your children dissolute and ungracious, your servants profane and careless. You are an example in your own house of all Atheism and conscienceless behavior. You are a . . . spend-thrift, a drinker, a common Ale-house haunter . . . and, to conclude, given to all Vice and naughtiness.” On the other hand, the elect were known for “Keeping of . . . Sabbaths. Truth. Sobriety. Industry. Compassion. Humility. Chastity. Contentation,” “temperance” and “Brotherly kindness,” all of these practiced in response to the imperative to “subdue” the body, “dye to sin, and live to righteousness.” Turning, once again, to England as a whole, Dent credited godly ministers and the godly themselves with preserving it from the wrath of God, the godly doing so by forming a “bond” with civil magistrates obligating them to uphold divine law.71
Scudder’s The Christians Daily Walke brings us even closer to the social ethics embedded within the practical divinity. Writing three decades after Dent, he was more confident that Protestantism had overtaken Catholicism as the faith of the English people. Even so, he was realistic about popular indifference to rule-bound moralism. He worried, too, that some of the godly were not practicing the pilgrim-style “duties” he regarded as normative. His description of the spiritual life included ecstatic experience and a social ethics of “equity” and “affection toward others” (chap. 9), but his principal theme was “strictnesse” in how time was used, the “frugall” appearance of the clothes someone wore, and the day-long observance of Sunday Sabbath. Preparing for the Lord’s Supper was another means of implanting a “constant and . . . unfained endeavor to perform all duties.” Crucial, too, was the moral and social distance between the godly and those who “yet remain mere world-lings” or were “lukewarme professours.” From Scudder’s perspective, such people were little better than the “drunkards” and “whore-masters” who thwarted every attempt at a reformation of manners. Like Dent before him, he invited his readers to compare their own “watchfulness” with those who were undisciplined.72
In De Regno Christi, Bucer had emphasized the institutional means of accomplishing a reformation of manners: church, ministry, magistrates, education, measures to alleviate poverty. All these, plus the family, continued to figure in local programs of civic godliness. Yet by 1600 and increasingly thereafter, the practical divinity and a reformation of manners were two sides of the same coin. Everyone seeking assurance of salvation knew that this process entailed doing the hard work of self-examination, repenting for sins both small and large, and reordering everyday life around the imperatives of watchfulness and edification. Heart-centered piety and outward behavior (or social ethics) were really one and the same.
A reformation of manners was high on the agenda of the earliest Scottish reformers. At the very debut of the Scottish reformation, they incorporated this goal into the First Book of Discipline and the Confession of 1560, which underscored the “wickedness” of humankind as evidenced in “murderers, oppressors, . . . adulterers,” and “filthy persons.” By the close of the 1560s, John Knox and his allies had added two other texts to this repertory, an “Order for a Fast” (1565) followed in 1569 by an “Order of Excommunication and of Public Repentance.” According to the First Book of Discipline, “No Commonwealth can flourish or long indure without good lawes and sharpe execution of the same, so neither can the Kirk . . . be brought to purity . . . without . . . ecclesiastical discipline.” The list of sins the church should punish began with “drunkenness” and extended to “fornication, oppressing of the poore,” and “slander.” Nearly two decades later, the General Assembly of 1588 reported an appalling array of practices among “the poor,” most of them apparently practicing “filthy adultery, incest [and] fornication, [their] children unbaptized, and they themselves never” attending services or participating “in the sacraments.” Apart from recommending another general fast, the assembly urged that alms be withheld from such people until they proved their own baptisms and had any children baptized. This year, too, the kirk reported that, contrary to law, people were attempting to bury corpses within a parish church, a practice that signaled the persistence of Catholic teachings about consecrated ground. Progress must have seemed impossibly slow, a perception that may account for the stern tone of the Order of Excommunication: “all crymes that be [against] the law of God deserve death, deserve also Excommunicatioun from the societie of Christis Church.” Yet the records show that statements of this kind existed alongside others affirming an ethics of “equitie, justice” and “compassion upone the poore.”73
Despite the headwinds of civil war in the late 1560s and early 1570s, general assemblies continued to reiterate this agenda and strengthen the apparatus for carrying it out. Described in the Book of Discipline, lay elders and the kirk session (the Scottish equivalent of English ecclesiastical courts) were incorporated into the more hierarchical structure outlined in the Second of 1578, which emphasized the role of presbyteries and synods. Up and running in a few towns by the 1570s, kirk sessions gradually spread through lowland Scotland.74 Where the kirk led, Parliament was quick to follow. As early as 1563 it singled out witchcraft and adultery as capital crimes. Fornication and incest were condemned in 1567, adultery again in 1581, and the Sunday Sabbath repeatedly protected (1579, 1593 and 1594). Before long, the list of public and private sins had expanded to include drinking, “oppressing of the poor,” contentious speech (“slander”), celebrations of Christmas, usury, and the reprise of Catholic-style burials. The moralizers’ agenda also encompassed several of the priorities Bucer had borrowed from humanism—in particular, overcoming illiteracy and limiting poverty. At a moment (1596) when the assembly was convulsed by a sense of moral decline, it expanded this list to include the presence of “idle persons without lawfull calling” whose children were unbaptized, unlawful marriages that local judges were ignoring, “cruell oppression” of “poore tenants,” idolatry (as evidenced in pilgrimages and carol singing at Christmas), and the decay of family religion.75
As in England, the advocates of moral discipline incorporated the Lord’s Supper into the process of parish discipline, a principle insisted upon in the Book of Common Order. In “preparation” sermons for the sacrament, Robert Bruce was marvelously evocative about the importance of being “in love and charity” with neighbors,” insisting that, without love of this kind, “you are not a member of His [Christ’s] Body.” On the other hand, John Craig was prompted to write his Shorte Catechisme by the apparent indifference of the “great multitude” to the requirement that anyone wanting to participate in the sacrament know the “Principal Heads of our Christian Faith.” Subsequently, Craig prepared a much briefer version, Ane Form of Examination before the Communion that ministers were urged to buy in “bulk” and distribute to every family in their parish.76
Strong words from the General Assembly and local initiatives to impose social discipline became a prominent aspect of Scotland’s Protestant culture. As the historian Michael Graham has emphasized, the leaders of the kirk became adept at refining the substance of reform in response to political circumstances, as happened in the 1590s when Catholicism seemed so menacing and James VI stepped out of line. Yet in ways that paralleled the campaign for social discipline in England, the Scottish version was hampered by the reluctance of judges, burgh leaders, magistrates, and parliaments to come down hard on offenders or do so consistently. Nonetheless, detecting and (it was hoped) suppressing sex out of marriage, adultery, cursing, violations of the Sunday Sabbath, and the like kept kirk sessions busy. Human nature being what it was, success in any grand sense of the term was elusive, as evidenced by the complaints of a kirk session in early seventeenth-century Glasgow about the women who entered “the Kirk dore . . . with their plaids upon their heads” and, faces covered, slept during most of the service. Or perhaps it was the habit among some people of leaving church services early or not attending at all.77
Nonetheless, kirk sessions were where, in real life, thousands of Scottish men and women repented their misdeeds. The workings of these courts overlapped with the workings of the civil government. Careful studies of who served on them has revealed close ties between elders and those who served in town governments. (Parish ministers were also involved.) At this level, the two-kingdoms theory was overtaken by a common concern for moral discipline and social peace and, more tellingly, overtaken by the assumption that civil authorities should do the actual work of punishing the people convicted of adultery, witchcraft, or other major faults. For sure, kirk sessions were never “of the people” or their members democratically elected by the parish. Nonetheless, they were no respecters of persons. As John Knox and others repeatedly emphasized, Scots of high status and low were equally under the watch and care of these groups.78
In the main, kirk sessions wanted the people brought before them to repent, as many in fact did, for this process opened the door to reconciliation with that person’s parish church and civil community. A ritual thus came into being, a carefully scripted process of shaming wrongdoers. Customarily, the women and men caught having premarital sex or violating the rules about the Sunday Sabbath were asked whether they were willing to confess their mis-deeds and acknowledge the authority of the church. As part of this procedure, some of these people were required to attend church services wearing a white robe and sitting on a “stool of repentance” in full view of everyone. The “Ourder of Repentance” (1569) specified the “feare and terrour . . . of God’s Judgments . . . and dolour for the same” that the repentant person should experience and, if these emotions were deemed “unfeigned,” the rite would conclude with “reconciliation” between the “Penitent” and the congregation. In a dozen years in Perth (1577–1590), a substantial majority of the people who came before the court acknowledged their faults—commonly, sex out of marriage—and were fined, shamed by having to sit on the stool of repentance, briefly imprisoned, or threatened with banishment. In the longer workings of this system, very few people were excommunicated, a penalty local courts seem to have avoided because it was too severe.79
Another ritual the kirk sessions endorsed was the sacrament of baptism. Not, of course, baptism as it happened within intact families, but as a means of incorporating abandoned children or those born to unmarried women into the church by providing them with the equivalent of godparents. Doing so was so important that kirk sessions sought out parents who would sponsor abandoned children and orphans for the rite.80 Yet rigor could rise to the surface, as it did in 1585 when Perth was experiencing a severe epidemic of the plague and a man and woman convicted of adultery were executed. With sermons ringing in their ears about the relationship between plagues and public sins, the kirk sessions enforced the parliamentary statute that otherwise it preferred to ignore.81
Accomplishing a reformation of manners was as unlikely in England and Scotland as the aspiration to turn everyone into the piously repentant. These two goals were inseparable but, from another point of view quite different, for church courts or the state could coerce the unruly into behaving and remedy the situation of the poor. On the other hand, heart-centered repentance could not be coerced, and as Hooker’s lecture-day sermons in Chelmsford indicate, Puritan-style evangelism took for granted that many people would not become sincere Christians. Moral reform was potentially inclusive, but the practical divinity was shadowed by the possibility that a sanctified church would be limited to the faithful few.
Like the ocean, moral reform rose and fell, energized at some moments and subsiding at others. Each spasm illuminated inconsistencies or contradictions in the workings of moral reform. What the moral laws of the Old Testament prescribed was different from what kirk sessions and local churches or governments practiced. Instead of handing cases of sex out of marriage or adultery over to the civil state, kirk sessions resorted to shame and similar penalties. In England, a “godly” Parliament made adultery a capital crime in 1650. But the statute was crafted to exempt members of Parliament from its penalties and was rarely enforced. Much was said in sermons and manuals of devotion about keeping the unworthy from the Lord’s Supper, but as the Scottish minister George Gillespie suggested in his defense of Presbyterianism (see chap. 8), local churches and ministers hesitated to do so knowing the outcome could be severe conflict.82 In early New England, the capital crimes that seem so abusive to a modern eye—children disobeying parents, for example, or adultery—were rarely (or never) enforced. And, as the historian Philip Benedict has shown in his comparative study of Reformed churches, the same inconsistency and inefficiency dogged every attempt to install disciplinary religion.83
To these thickets of ideology, representation, mythmaking, and actual history, theology contributed the assumption that the church on earth, although always imperfect because it contained both tares and wheat, was moving toward greater purity in keeping with God’s grand design and Christ’s vision of the coming kingdom. On the one hand, therefore, it was imperative that the church have the means of doing so. This was why the church as an institution needed the right kind of minister and why church discipline should be transferred from ecclesiastical courts to local churches themselves. Just as important was ensuring that local churches excluded unrepentant or uninformed people from the sacraments. Scripture and theology validated two other aspects of this program, the presence of a Christian magistrate who protected the church from its enemies and the enforcing of laws God had given the children of Israel.
Another basic premise was the reality of human sinfulness. Because sin and sinning were so omnipresent, the means of keeping them at bay had to combine discipline within the church with state-sponsored policies aimed at quelling disorder. Keeping sin at bay was why godly people joined together in “bands” and covenants. The prevalence of sin and sinning also meant that the visible church was never coeval with civil society—institutionally for the time being, perhaps, but as the kingdom neared, the saints would withdraw from the “world.”
The punitive or disciplining aspects of Puritan-style moral reform were real, but they coexisted with an insistence on the “liberty” God was restoring to the saints. Thanks to the workings of the Holy Spirit, some people passed out of bondage to sin and became “free” in a special way. Hence the emphasis in the Scottish kirk sessions and descriptions of fast days and covenants on repentance, for it enabled sinners to reclaim their place at the table (as it were) and communities or nations to reclaim God’s trust. At such moments, openness or possibility overcame restraint or condemnation. Liberty and obedience (or human freedom and divine sovereignty) existed side by side in this story, each tightly intertwined with the other. Here, especially, the underpinnings of a Puritan-style reformation of manners mirrored what was said about becoming a “new creature.” To be liberated from sin was never to be liberated from sinning; to experience the terrors of the law or “deadness” was never to forfeit the joyous experience of union with Christ. Conjunctions of this kind became less plausible once western culture moved toward “individualism.” But their presence in early modern England and Scotland (and as well, early New England) go far toward explaining the substance of a Puritan-style reformation of manners.