THE YEAR 1640 BEGAN BADLY for Nehemiah Wallington, as his hopes for a newly summoned Parliament, the first in eleven years, were dashed when Charles I sent it packing three weeks after it convened in April. By midsummer, the situation of the godly was worsening in the aftermath of the canons adopted at a Convocation in May (see chap. 7) and the king’s insistence on using military means to suppress the Covenanters in Scotland. Rumor ran rife that, in Ireland, Thomas Wentworth was colluding with local Catholics to add Irish troops to the king’s forces. Little wonder, then, that “the poore people of God” took for granted that “papists and Malicious Enemies of God” were plotting against them. Wallington would have agreed with an illicit broadside of 1639 that characterized the king’s hostility to the Covenanters as “part of a full-fledged attempt to bring in popery.” At moments such as this, he envied the friends who had gone to Massachusetts. Writing to one of them in 1638, he characterized his homeland as so “overrunne with Idoletry and popery and all manner of abominations” that God was on the verge of sending “heavy Judgments among us which many of you did [foresee] which did make you fly to new England as to a city of refuge for to preserve yourselves.”1
Then came news of a Scottish army entering England in August 1640 and seizing the town of Newcastle. The second Bishops’ War having ended in defeat, Charles was advised by a council of peers to summon another Parliament, which met at the beginning of November. Among the earliest actions of the House of Commons was to order Laud imprisoned on charges of treason. Simultaneously, it demanded the release of Bastwick, Burton, and Prynne from their places of imprisonment, a step Wallington regarded as a sign that freedom would be regained by those of “Gods children that have bin persecuted.” Several months later, he was among the thousands who gathered outside Westminster Hall to clamor “with one voice” for “justice” to be done to Wentworth. Hearing about the same time that a picture of the Virgin Mary in his parish church had been destroyed and an “idol” dismantled, he vowed to preserve a shard of stained glass as a remembrance “to shew to the generation to come what God hath don for us to give us such a reformation that our fathers never saw.”2
What had happened in Scotland between 1637 and 1640 and New England in the 1630s seemed underway in England, “darkness” and tyranny giving way to a “light” that foreshadowed the return of Christ in judgment. In fast-day sermons preached at the request of the new Parliament, ministers reiterated the tried- and-true theme of deliverance: God was enabling England’s faithful Protestants to emerge out of spiritual darkness and restore the nation’s covenant with divine law.3 A theme built into Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and illustrated on the title page of the Geneva Bible, its revival in 1640–41 implied the possibility of eliminating every trace of popish idolatry. As Wallington may have realized, the disruptions rippling throughout the king’s three kingdoms—his authority in Scotland impaired, the House of Commons contesting it in England, and imperial rule in Ireland threatened by the emergence of a Catholic-centered confederation with ties to Catholic powers on the Continent—were strengthening the hand of the godly in England. Was the reformation Elizabeth I and two Stuart kings had frustrated about to unfold?
In A Glimpse of Sions Glory (1641), an ecstatic evocation of the new day that was dawning, the anonymous author, possibly the Puritan-affiliated minister Thomas Goodwin, reminded his readers of Thomas Brightman’s prediction that the pouring out of the final vial upon “the beast” and the beginning of a millennium-like “middle advent” would happen in the 1640s. Now, as prophesied in Revelation 19:6, “And I heard as it were the voice of a great multitude,” Goodwin praised the “common people” for demanding that “Babylon” be overthrown. The outcome would be a “pure church,” the “most pure” that anyone could imagine, a community in which the “people of God” would triumph over those—unnamed, but clearly a reference to Laud and Charles I—who regarded them as “schismatics, and Puritans.” The work of the new day was to purge everything deemed idolatrous and initiate a dynamic process of spiritual enlightenment: “Glorious truths shall be revealed, and above all the mystery of the Gospel . . . shall be discovered.”4
The high hopes of A Glimpse of Sions Glory and kindred texts such as Henry Burton’s The sounding of the two last trumpets (1641), a narrative, in part, of his personal deliverance from “Babylon,” were still resonating when the Scotch Presbyterian George Gillespie preached a fast-day sermon in March 1644. Unhappy with the pace of reform, Gillespie wondered out loud whether Parliament intended to fulfill God’s plan for England and Scotland. Were its members unaware that they were witnessing the “last times” when the “beast” of Rome would be overthrown, the Jews converted to Christianity, and both state churches transformed into a glorious “Zion”? “The work is upon the wheel” (an allusion to Ezek. 1:16), he insisted. Hence the imperative that Parliament act with “zeal” to “build a more excellent and glorious temple than former generations have seen.”5
Four years later, Gillespie was dead and his fellow Covenanters in despair, as was Wallington. Instead of a new Zion, the years between 1641 and 1648 had spawned a “Flood of Errors and sinnes.” Even worse, in 1648 “Brother” had gone “to war against Brother” in a phase of civil war that pitted a parliamentary army against a Scottish government allied with Charles I. Turning, as he so often did, to divine providence as the key to discovering what “these seven yeers” signified, Wallington discerned “windings and turneings and overturninges,” the doing of a God who “walkes in the darke” and hides “his ways from our eyes.”6
The “windings and . . . overturninges” of the 1640s and early 1650s were unprecedented in British history. For the Puritan movement, they were devastating. At the debut of the 1640s, the godly in England seemed on the verge of securing the reformation they had sought since the 1570s. As late as 1646 or possibly 1647, the classic goals of the movement still seemed within reach. Yet by 1650 the principles of a comprehensive state church and magistracy-ministry alliance had been displaced by voluntary versions of Protestantism and state support for liberty of conscience. Not in name but in practice, moral discipline had virtually collapsed. Doctrine, too, had become unhinged, although blasphemy remained a civil crime. Order of a quite different kind returned in 1660–62 with the restoration of the monarchy. With it came episcopacy throughout Britain and a line drawn in the sand (1662) about conformity. Some 1,600 ministers were unwilling to conform and, thereafter, became Dissenters (as did some of their congregations) who could not worship openly..
What accounts for the excitement of the early 1640s and the collapse of consensus in the same decade? The answers are twofold. Even before the mechanisms for controlling opinion and practice broke down, long-lasting contradictions within the Puritan movement were springing to life. In the decades leading up to the 1630s, the tug-of-war between conscience and conformity had gradually been muted. Something similar happened with the tension between lawfulness and “things indifferent.” Nonconformity of various kinds persisted, as did complaints about worship, but many of the godly preferred to emphasize what Puritans and the more moderate conformists shared—consensus on most matters of theological doctrine, a reformation of manners, the repression of British Catholics, and some sort of magistracy-ministry alliance. By the mid-1620s, this middle ground was beginning to erode as James I turned toward clergy who rejected the consensus of circa 1620, a policy repeated by his son and successor, Charles I. Reaction in one direction prompted reaction in another. In Scotland, nonconformity emerged in the 1620s and, in England, the old nonconformity began to implode. As indicated by the three martyrs of 1637, the fierce response to “Arminianism” by the Parliament of 1628–29, and the re-emerging of Separatist-like communities (see below, sec. 3) the space for compromise was diminishing. Simultaneously, the colonists in New England were creating gathered congregations and empowering laypeople in ways that seemed akin to Separatist policies. There, as in Scotland, the royal supremacy had been dismantled and the compromises endorsed by the old nonconformity replaced with a fervor for aligning church and state with divine law.
The tipping point was the Scottish insurgency, which Charles I and his advisors denounced as a rebellion. His freedom to act acutely limited by defeat and financial crisis, momentum shifted to the new Parliament of November 1640. Though ill-equipped to rethink the constitutional foundations of government and what God mandated by way of true religion, it was thrust into this role by the king’s insistence on his privileges, an upwelling of objections to episcopacy, acute anxiety about a royal coup (spring 1641) to suppress the government’s critics, and paranoia about a popish plot that intensified in the aftermath of a Catholic rebellion (October 1641) in Ireland. The stakes were already high in May 1641 when a majority in the House of Commons endorsed a Protestation that, like the National Covenant in Scotland, differentiated loyalty to English Protestantism from loyalty to the Crown.7 Abruptly, constitutional politics (the capacity of Parliament to curtail the royal prerogative) and the politics of true religion coalesced, an explosive combination that in Scotland had all but eliminated the royal supremacy. With other moments of crisis adding to the confusion, Charles I decided to solve the question of his authority by military means. In the absence of compromises the king and his supporters would accept, the Long Parliament of 1640 elevated the Puritan wing of the state church into a place of privilege. Doing so had seemed to work in Covenanter Scotland. Yet there, as in England, authority began to fracture in the mid-1640s, a process that intensified after royalists and moderates allied with Charles I took control of the government in late 1647. By the 1650s, the outcome was a policy of toleration imposed by the government of Oliver Cromwell.8
In 1640, no one foresaw the conflicts and confusion that lay ahead. We begin with the promise of the new Parliament, saving the collapse of the Puritan program for subsequent sections of this chapter. One by one, the major players come on stage—John Pym and a House of Commons zealously unwinding a popish plot; the Westminster Assembly, which Parliament summoned into being in 1643; the advocates of toleration and the “sectaries” who benefitted from that argument; the Scottish advocates of jure divino Presbyterianism and their English allies; and the king.
The Parliament that met in November 1640 was restless and resentful. So were the thousands of men and women who rioted in London in May 1640 after the “Short Parliament” had been dissolved, spilling out into the streets in response to a placard urging the city’s apprentices to attack Lambeth Palace, the place where Laud lived in his capacity as archbishop. In 1628–29, tensions between Charles I and Parliament had prompted the Petition of Right and a strong statement about the dangers of religious innovation. Now, in the aftermath of the king’s personal rule, the House of Commons wanted to curtail the scope of royal authority or “prerogative” and reclaim its own privileges. Angered by the collection of “ship money,” Commons voted to abolish this form of taxation and resolved in December that Parliaments should meet every three years (the Triennial Act). A few months later, it protected itself from dissolution by ordering that any attempt of this kind, a privilege Charles I and his predecessors had taken for granted, would require the approval of Parliament itself. Another vote (June l641) did away with the “prerogative” courts of Star Chamber and High Commission. A united House of Commons and House of Lords endorsed these measures, which Charles reluctantly approved. Simultaneously, the Commons reaffirmed the privileges of free speech and freedom for its members from imprisonment. Suddenly, the substance of monarchy as Charles I understood it was shrinking and the authority of Parliament beginning to expand.
These steps left unanswered the larger question of how Parliament and the king would share the work of governance. Before 1641, no English Parliament had enacted laws on its own or overturned the monarch’s “negative voice” (veto). Moreover, it was widely acknowledged that foreign policy, governance of the state church, and most aspects of taxation were the king’s to regulate or decide. By early 1641, some of these restrictions were unraveling thanks to the insistence of the Scottish government that negotiations to settle the second Bishops’ War involve the new Parliament. The traditional structure of governance was breaking down for another reason, the outcry about a “popish plot” to subvert Parliament and the state church. In his opening speech (November 7, 1640) to the House of Commons, John Pym repeated his prediction that a “designe to alter the Kingdome both in religion and government” was unfolding. Others shared his sense of alarm—the London crowd clamoring for Thomas Wentworth to be punished; the Scots, who distrusted Wentworth because he had encouraged the king to wage the two Bishops’ Wars; and the many who knew that he had run Ireland with an iron hand. Summoned back to London in 1639, Wentworth seems to have offered Charles the services of an Irish army dominated by Catholics. Remarks he may have made about using this army against the king’s English critics persuaded a majority in the House of Commons that he should be executed as an enemy of the state (May 1641). The hysteria about a popish plot had claimed its first Protestant victim.9
Not until the late fall of 1641, however, did more evidence emerge of Irish or possibly Continental Catholic troops being mobilized. Rumor overtook fact, a process abetted by Pym and his allies, who relied on a sense of crisis to keep the House of Commons in line. Learning of two plots by officers of the army to intervene on Charles’s behalf, the earliest of these exposed in May 1641, and alarmed by an uprising of Irish Catholics that began in late October, the House of Commons resolved that officers of their choosing should command the army being formed to subdue the rebellion. As well, the House used the fiction that Charles I had been misled by advisors implicated in the popish plot to insist on its authority to approve anyone he wanted to appoint to the Privy Council or other high offices of state. That bishops were voting members of the House of Lords was another bone in the throat of those who discerned a plot against true religion. To Pym and his allies, the remedy was obvious. The House of Lords should exclude the bishops from voting, a proposal that expanded into an insistence that they give up their seats in that body. In general, the distrust of Charles and those who were closest to him, a group that included his Catholic wife Henrietta Maria, was palpable.10
Seeking to rally support for his program at a moment of disarray in the Commons (late November 1641) and foot-dragging by an obstinate House of Lords, which was reluctant to alter the royal prerogative or exclude the bishops from their place in that chamber, Pym orchestrated the publication of the Grand Remonstrance, a massive list of complaints tied to the specter of a popish plot. Narrowly endorsed by the Commons, where many of the gentry did not welcome its overheated rhetoric, the Remonstrance reiterated the argument that “divers Bishops” and some of the king’s advisors had formed a “malignant” party aspiring to alter “religion and government.” Hence the importance of “abridging” the “immoderate power” in secular affairs of the bishops, an imperative best fulfilled by denying them their seats in the House of Lords. Simultaneously, the Remonstrance called for removing untrustworthy men from the king’s presence, a step that trespassed on the royal prerogative. These assertions gave way to a lengthy description of events in recent English history—unjust taxes, the two Bishops’ Wars, the canons of 1640, the presence of a papal nuncio in London, the workings of the Court of High Commission—that confirmed the existence of a Catholic-tilting conspiracy.11
As is often pointed out by historians of this period, Charles could have rallied moderates to his side had two events not intervened, one of these his attempt in early January 1642 to arrest several members of the Commons and the second, the Catholic revolt in Ireland. Both worked to the advantage of the faction that wanted to curtail the king’s prerogative.12 Trust came close to vanishing, as did the possibility of a workable compromise. In January 1642, both houses of Parliament finally agreed to exclude bishops from their place in the House of Lords, a measure the king accepted in February. In March, both also endorsed a bill giving Parliament the authority to appoint commanders of the militia, a measure the king promptly rejected. In response, the House of Commons asserted its legislative authority and, by April, began to enact “ordinances” (de facto laws) the king refused to approve.
Had agreement been reached on the “Nineteen Propositions” the king was given in June 1642, the English government might have mutated into a “king-in-Parliament” structure, with each granted a significant role, but not what Charles regarded as rightfully his.13 By midsummer if not earlier, he had decided that raising an army to fight on his behalf would serve him better than negotiating with a Parliament dominated by Pym and like-minded members of the nobility and gentry. Negotiations aimed at restoring peace continued even as the country slid into civil war. In the early going, the generals who led the parliamentary armies were ineffective and, in the judgment of what may be termed a “war party,” too bent on reconciliation with the king. Gradually, the temper of Parliament changed as royalists left to join Charles or, for other reasons, withdrew from politics. A “hardening of the parliamentary cause” was noticeable by mid-1643, if not earlier, evidenced by the enacting (June 1643) of a “sacred Vow and Covenant” justifying armed conflict as a means of preserving “the true Protestant Religion.”14 The death of Pym in December 1643 prompted a struggle between different factions in the Commons, one of them determined to defeat the king even if this goal forced them into an alliance with the Scottish government, another hoping to bring the war to a close by persuading Charles to accept a package of reforms. In mid-1644, with victory in the civil war still in doubt, the faction that favored war was able to arrange a reorganization of the parliamentary army. Before the “New Model Army” came into action, a regional force crushed the king’s troops at the battle of Marston Moor (July 1644). The following June, the New Model Army defeated the king at the battle of Naseby, a victory that effectively ended the conflict, although sieges and skirmishes continued for several more months.15
What came next? Even in defeat, Charles clung to episcopacy and the royal prerogative. Nor had he given up on the possibility that an Irish Catholic army or possibly French soldiers recruited by his wife would turn the tide, or that Scottish, English, and Irish royalists would reemerge as a political and military force. For the next three years (1646 to the end of 1648), his agents in Ireland tried to patch together a coalition of Irish Catholics, Old English, and some elements of the New English, an uphill task, given the distrust each had of the other. On the other hand, the Scottish situation seemed more promising. With his defeat, the military alliance formed in 1643 between the Long Parliament and the Covenanter government was no longer necessary. Nor, by this time, were many in Parliament willing to endorse the model of a single state church implied by the Covenant of 1643 (see below, secs. 2–4). When Parliament initiated another attempt in mid-1646 at negotiating a settlement of constitutional and religious questions, the Scots welcomed the provision in the “Newcastle Propositions” that Charles sign the “Solemn League and Covenant,” agree to replace episcopacy with presbyterianism, and support a crackdown on Catholic recusants. Other proposals called for Parliament to control the army and militia for twenty years before this authority reverted to the Crown and have a voice in the naming of officers of state. Nothing was said, however, of a limited union between Scotland and England, as the Scots had previously proposed.
Hoping to capitalize on Scottish disaffection with a Parliament tilting toward liberty of conscience, Charles negotiated secretly in late 1647 with moderates who had gained control of the Scottish government (see below, sec. 4). The embers of war flared up anew, royalists in England engaging in local uprisings and a Scottish army marching into England in what became known as the Second Civil War—a short-lived war, for this army was routed at the battle of Preston (August 1648). His allies defeated or dispersed, the king had no chance of returning to power unless he acceded to the demands of the House of Commons. Momentarily, the peace party regained control of the House, but in December 1648 an army-led event known as “Pride’s Purge” drove them out, at which point negotiations with the king ceased and he was indicted for treason.16
Well before this turn of events, the more moderate or “presbyterian” faction in the House of Commons had been wrestling with the politics of the army it had created. In 1644–45, no one anticipated that the New Model Army would become a key player in religious and constitutional politics or, in the aftermath of victory, would refuse to heed requests that some regiments disband and others move to Ireland, where fighting continued. To the dismay of those who favored uniformity of religion, large parts of the army wanted something closer to toleration or liberty of conscience. A group of “political Independents” in the House of Commons favored the same policy. By this time, the king’s intransigence was prompting some in and outside of Parliament to propose that monarchy was unnecessary. The years 1647 and 1648 were filled with the unexpected: the mobilizing of “presbyterians” in London and elsewhere, the New Model Army entering the city and shaking off its parliamentarian masters, a last-ditch attempt to negotiate with the king, “Pride’s Purge,” and (in January 1649) the king’s execution. In May, the “Rump” of the Long Parliament transferred authority in England and Ireland to a Council of State. England was on its way to becoming a commonwealth or republic, with Oliver Cromwell, the generals of the New Model Army, and the Rump sharing in its governance until 1653, when Cromwell abolished the Rump and his government mutated into a Protectorate. The repercussions in Scotland were immense and in Ireland, no less so. There, in 1649, Cromwell and the New Model Army crushed the forces arrayed against the new government, doing so with unusual brutality.
This summary of the circumstances that led to civil war, the king’s execution, and the collapse of the Church of England as an effective institution must suffice, for the details of the religious side of the story beckon. As we turn to that story, it is imperative to keep in mind that the projects of reforming the Church of England and preserving the Covenanter revolution were inherently political.17 Already, the revolution in Scotland had revealed how daring this politics could become—Presbyterianism replacing episcopacy, the royal supremacy radically curtailed, a restructuring of the institutions of civil governance. Would a similar politics emerge in England and the visionary rhetoric of “deliverance” become state policy?
Religion was high on the list of problems the new Parliament would face. The “Short” Parliament, which met for three weeks in April 1640, had been deluged with petitions protesting Laudian “innovations.” Come November, the first session of the new House of Commons heard John Pym declare that “the last and greatest grievance” (of the many he cited) concerned “the throne of God.” Some in a more divided House of Lords agreed. In September 1640 a group of nobles had told Charles I that “innovations in matters of religion” were among the most pressing of the “evils and dangers” affecting the country. In Commons as well as among the general public, many took for granted the popish plot that Pym and Francis Rous regarded as the real purpose of the Laudian program. No one could say so openly, but the king was implicated in that plot, as was his understanding of the royal prerogative. As Pym pointed out, the makers of the plot had insisted on the “divine authority and absolute power in the king to do what he will with us.”18
Moved by a sense of urgency and generally in agreement on limiting the authority of the bishops, Parliament began to dismantle rules and practices associated with the Laudians or the king’s own doing.19 The Book of Sports was an easy although belated target, nullified in May 1643 by the House of Commons. Well before this (December 1640) the same House repudiated the canons of May 1640. Their authority vanished once it was decided that these contradicted the “right of parliaments.” With the canons suspended and fines levied on those who participated in the Convocation that endorsed them, the Commons voted in December to prosecute Laud for treason. The Laud-hunting hounds unleashed in the mid-1630s by William Prynne and John Bast-wick began to bay as soon as the Long Parliament convened. Prynne returned to the fray with two brief pamphlets, and in the House of Commons, Harbottle Grimston assailed Laud and his allies as “the Authors and Causes of all the Ruines Miseries, and Calamities, we now groane under.”20
Subsequently, the House voted to bar clergy from serving on courts of any kind, a measure justified by the assertion—emphasized in a petition from the county of Kent—that “government . . . by . . . bishops” was “very dangerous both to the Church and Commonwealth,” as instanced by their “lordly power,” harsh treatment of “godly preachers,” and the “claim” they were making to “Divine right for their office.” The scholar and temperate Puritan Simonds D’Ewes added his voice to the furor when he underscored the contradiction between the role of the bishops in spiritual affairs and the power they had acquired in the workings of the civil state. The broader point, which a substantial majority in the House of Commons endorsed, was that clergy should be excluded from “secular Affaires.”21
Should episcopacy be replaced by another structure? In December 1640, Parliament was handed a petition signed by some 15,000 Londoners demanding that it suppress episcopacy and the Book of Common Prayer. Procedurally, the “root and branch” petition became a hot potato—some members in the House of Commons insisting that it be rejected and others urging that it be referred to a committee. In January, nineteen county-based petitions voicing a similar politics arrived, one of them signed by “above 2800 persons” who endorsed “the abolishing of Episcopacie.” Simultaneously, a substantial group of ministers solicited signatures on behalf of a revamped version of episcopal office.22 For the moment, the “root and branch” petitions said nothing about what should replace episcopacy. Nor did anti-Laudians in the House of Commons have a plan up their sleeves. Amid much uncertainty, the House of Lords, which continued to include the bishops, sought the advice of James Ussher, John Williams (newly released from prison after being punished by Star Chamber), and other moderate bishops on what to do about “Innovations in the Doctrine and Discipline of the Church of England.” In the 1630s, Williams had vigorously objected to the transformation of communion tables into altars. Now, he and others agreed to characterize that practice as an innovation. When it came to episcopacy itself, Williams, Ussher, and Joseph Hall recommended a “limited” or “reduced” or “primitive” version that walked the office back from Laudian-style jure divino status and barred those holding it from serving on the Privy Council.23
Despite the best efforts of Hall and his colleagues and the sympathy of many in the House of Lords, this scheme never had a chance. As soon as it became public, a coalition that included the bishop-hating Prynne, a youthful John Milton making his first appearance as a political writer, Henry Vane Jr., and five ministers using the pen name “Smectymnuus” assailed episcopacy on various grounds. Several of the Scottish commissioners who arrived in London in late 1640 to participate in negotiations about a treaty of peace added their voices to the outcry against episcopacy, doing so not only because of its troubled history in Scotland but because they knew that Charles’s commitment to the principle of “no bishop, no king” contradicted the Covenanter revolution. Common sense told them that, until bishops were replaced with a presbyterian system in England, the Covenanter regime would never be secure. The outcry also included a book by Robert Greville, Lord Brooke, a Puritan-affiliated nobleman. By the close of A Discourse opening The Nature of that Episcopacie, which is exercised in England (1641), Greville had mocked the logic of “no bishop, no king,” a point Milton transposed into the argument that episcopacy was the real threat to monarchy. More unusually, Grenville urged the civil state to forgo suppressing religious dissent.24
For the individuals grouped together as Smectymnuus, the case against episcopacy was political, the bishops’ role in nurturing a popish plot. Backdating this plot to the middle of the sixteenth century, they described it as a design to “maintain, propagate, and much increase the burden of human ceremonies; to keep out and beat down the preaching of the word; and to silence the faithfull preachers of it”—in short, a plot against the essence of Puritan-style religion. To these ministers, the Book of Common Prayer was also unacceptable because of the damage it did to a true preaching ministry.25 On the sidelines, as it were, Robert Baillie and Alexander Henderson added their fuel to the firestorm ignited by the “root and branch” petition. Baillie oversaw the London printing of a much-expanded version of a diatribe against Laudianism he had previously published in the Netherlands. Fresh from Scotland, Henderson weighed in with The Unlawfullnes and Danger of Limited Prelacie, or Perpetuall Presidencie in the Church, Briefly discovered (1641). His objections were twofold: episcopacy was an unlawful “invention” that should be “removed root and branch”; and the current crop of bishops had abused their power to such an extent that nothing they said or did could be trusted. To these strong words, he added an allusion to “the changes, and revolutions . . . in other kingdoms” (i.e., Scotland), which he hailed as signs that “divine Providence is about some greate worke” on behalf of “the Kingdome of Christ.”26
On paper, episcopacy remained the structure of the state church, but in practice it was faltering by mid-1641. That it survived on paper was largely the doing of the House of Lords, conservatives in the House of Commons, and especially Charles I, who drew a line in the sand in early 1641 when he told the new Parliament that he would never allow it to be abolished; to “reformation” he could say yes, but not to an “Alteration” that threatened the “Fundamental Constitutions of this Kingdom.” A king who sometimes concealed his real feelings remained unequivocal on this point, citing conscience, his coronation oath, and the antiquity of the office as reasons for preserving it. “I am constant for the doctrine and discipline of the Church of England, as it was established by Queen Elizabeth and my father,” he remarked in 1642, “and resolve (by the Grace of God) to live and die in the maintenance of it.” In mid-1644, after receiving Holy Communion at a service in Oxford, he reasserted his support for “the establishment of the true Reformed Protestant religion, as it stood in its beauty in the happy days of Queen Elizabeth, without any connivance at Popery.”27
Even though the system he favored was not officially abolished until 1646, its fate was being affected by other events and policies.28 Desperate for revenue to cover the costs of civil war, Parliament began to seize and sell church properties of various kinds, a process lasting into the early 1650s that, before it came to a close, did serious damage to the financial basis of episcopacy. The petitions of circa 1641 had underscored the plight of local churches staffed by pluralists, Laudians, or ministers who, for other reasons, were unappealing. In a fast-day sermon (December 1640) addressed to the Long Parliament, the future congregationalist Cornelius Burgess evoked the “thousands and millions” who “miserably perish” from spiritual starvation. He exaggerated the situation, but not by much, for complaints were pouring into Parliament and reaching county magnates such as Robert Harley. In his home county of Hertfordshire, godly people in the town of Walford begged him for assistance in getting rid of their “drunken, debauched” vicar. The signers of a petition to Parliament from Oxfordshire were blunt. By their reckoning, the whole of the diocese contained “not above thirty Ministers” who were “constant preachers.” By 1643, with civil war forcing ministers to take sides, Parliament was also being urged to dismiss “malignant” clergy who favored the king.29
A host of such testimonies prompted the House of Commons in January 1641 to take a leaf out of John Field’s program of the 1570s and urge local groups to identify ministers deemed “scandalous.” A month later, it endorsed a bill to suppress pluralism and nonresidency that was not adopted by both houses until mid-1642. Meanwhile, Commons had set up a committee to oversee a purge of incompetent or politically incorrect clergy, a task resumed by a “Committee on Plundered Ministers,” which also found new positions for godly ministers displaced by the tides of war. The publicity that arose around these purges included a person-by-person description of The First Century of Scandalous Ministers, Malignant Priests Made and Admitted into benefices by the prelates (1643), which opened with a depiction of “dumb dogs,” followed by a case-by-case portrait of parish ministers whose faults encompassed everything from “buggery” to royalism.30 By the time the ejections ended, nearly 2,800 ministers had been ousted or “harassed.” During the Protectorate, another 300 suffered some sort of displacement. All told, these campaigns affected far more ministers than those who suffered for their nonconformity during the previous three-quarters of a century. In Kent, a full half of the ministers in that county were displaced, and in Leicestershire, a third. In Scotland, purges of a more political kind were also unfolding in the second half of the 1640s. Meanwhile, the reformist broom was sweeping dozens of faculty and fellows out of the two English universities.31
Simultaneously, another version of reform was unfolding, outbursts of iconoclastic violence directed against the material fabric of Laudian-style Protestantism. The iconoclasm that rippled through London in 1640 and 1641 was mainly directed at altar rails but also included other décor in Westminster Abbey. In response (February 1641), a House of Commons committee began to consider a bill that would empower local groups to “abolish all idolatrie.” The first real step in this direction, an “Order for the Suppression of Innovations” (September 1641), authorized church wardens and local clergy to initiate the systematic destruction of crucifixes, images, and pictures and prohibited the use of candlesticks on communion tables, among other practices. A more conservative House of Lords demurred, but the issue was revived in February 1642 when Commons debated a similar measure that both houses eventually approved in November. In April 1643, Commons revisited this program and empowered a “Committee for the Demolition of Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry” in London’s churches and especially its cathedrals. Down came Cheapside Cross and other markers of the city’s Catholic past. In August, Parliament expanded the scope of this crusade by an ordinance authorizing the “utter demolishing, removing, and taking away of all Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry” and extending it to the entire country. The “all” included whatever remained of Catholic or Laudian-style structures: altar rails, candlesticks, and the like, with communion tables restored to their traditional location. Several months later (May 1644), the final bill in this sequence included sterner language: images, statues, and the like were to be “utterly defaced” or “taken away, defaced and utterly demolished.”32
A forceful purge of stained glass and the like unfolded in Suffolk in 1643–44 after the Earl of Manchester, the military-political leader of the region, appointed the layman William Dowsing to serve as “Commissioner for the destruction of monuments of idolatry and superstition.” As reconstructed by the historian John Morrill, the sources of Dowsing’s iconoclastic fervor included his close reading of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, from which he learned of an episode in English military history that coincided with an outburst of iconoclasm in late 1540s London, a story repeated in a fast-day sermon Dowsing owned and read in 1643. Starting that December and continuing for a year or so, Dowsing visited dozens of churches in search of objects to destroy. In one of these, his crew tore down “about an hundred superstitious Pictures” and “beat down a great . . . cross on the top of the church.” Elsewhere, others were carrying out similar campaigns.33
Neither of these processes resolved the problem that the Long Parliament had yet to confront head-on: the task of replacing episcopal governance and the Book of Common Prayer.34 Leaving aside differences of opinion within Parliament about episcopacy and the constitutional problem posed by Charles I, the obstacles in the way of simple elimination were practical and conceptual—practical in the sense that a good many people remained on the fence or continued to prefer episcopacy and the prayer book, and conceptual when it came to choosing a new version of church, worship, and ministry. As of 1642–43, three options were in play. One of these had deep roots within the English Reformation and the Reformed international, the idea and ideal of the nation worshipping in the same manner. That church and commonweal were a unity or, as was often said, a single “body,” was a commonplace John Whitgift had deployed against John Field–style presbyterians. Apologists for the state church had reiterated it ever since, as had James VI and I and, even more emphatically, the Laudians. During James’s reign, the moderate wing of the Puritan movement conceded this point, as did the authors of the Grand Remonstrance (November 1641), who agreed that “there should be throughout the whole realm a conformity to that order which the laws enjoin according to the Word of God.” Implicitly, this statement also nodded at the importance of edification as an ongoing process sustained by church discipline.35
Uniformity had a special significance in Scottish theology. The radicals in that country had never questioned the lawfulness of the kirk even when its integrity was compromised by the “Black Acts” or other measures. For the Covenanters, therefore, any gestures toward voluntary religion or Separatist-style purity were out-of-bounds. In a paper written by Alexander Henderson and printed in London (1641), where Henderson and his fellow commissioners were negotiating with Charles I on the terms of a treaty to conclude the second Bishops’ War, he emphasized the merits of the Scottish system as the best means of sustaining “truth and unity.” For him and his fellow Scots, there were but two alternatives, episcopacy and the newly reinstated Presbyterianism of the kirk, and as he pointed out, the first of these had already been renounced in Scotland. Knowing that Charles had insisted on retaining episcopacy (January 23, 1641), Henderson reassured his readers that the Scottish version of church government was compatible with royal authority. Knowing, too, that any such proposal would be regarded as an example of Scottish imperialism, he insisted that “no kingdom or Church” should dictate to another. In August 1642, the General Assembly reiterated the gist of Henderson’s statement in a letter to the Long Parliament, this time employing a rhetorical question to dramatize what Scotland would gain from uniformity: “What hope can the Kingdome and Kirk of Scotland have of a firme and durable Peace, till Prelacie . . . be plucked up, root and branch”?36
To the dismay of the Scots and many in and outside of the Long Parliament, alternatives to this policy were suddenly in play. A novel possibility, which Lord Brooke suggested in 1641 and others quickly endorsed, would allow voluntary or gathered congregations to exist alongside a state church, a proposal akin to what Henry Jacob had attempted in London in 1616. In 1641, Henry Burton was also extolling voluntary congregations as a counterweight to the “Anti-christian yoke in the Prelacy” and a means of protecting the Lord’s Table from the unworthy, a point he reemphasized in Satisfaction Concerning Mixt Communions Unsatisfactory (1643), which underscored the “vast difference” between “hypocrites” and visible saints (p. 7). A scheme of this kind—roughly akin to what the colonists in New England had implemented—would quickly become known as Independency. It presumed the possibility of people being able to choose between a simplified state church and voluntary congregations limited to the godly. To add to the confusion, a more radical possibility emerged. Roger Williams, who came to London in 1643 to lobby on behalf of the settlements in Rhode Island, proposed that the state withdraw from policing religion, or matters of “conscience.” Williams also took for granted that a state church would disappear. Parliament ordered Williams’s The Bloody Tenet of Persecution (1644) burned, but others—Baptists, the sociopolitical theorists known as the Levellers, John Milton, and less emphatically, most Independents—endorsed toleration or liberty of conscience, some for tactical reasons and others as a matter of principle.37
These were sharply different possibilities, so different that achieving consensus on any one of them was unlikely. Burton’s scheme of gathered churches implied the unlawfulness of parishes within the state church and this, in turn, implied Separatism. From the standpoint of Robert Baillie and his fellow Scots, it was incredible that Independents would keep children from being baptized and adults from participating in the Lord’s Supper unless they “give . . . satisfactory signes of reall regeneration.” Men of Baillie’s persuasion wanted to preserve the sacramental and incorporating features of the national church and retain a reformation of manners enforced by state and church alike. Yet beneath their feet the ground was shifting as “sectaries” (as those who wanted to eliminate any version of a state church were nicknamed) began to question every aspect of magisterial Protestantism. On the periphery of the Atlantic world, the outcome was acute conflict. Within Britain itself, a similar politics unfolded, with devastating consequences for what fast-day preachers of circa 1641 had anticipated.38
The confusion was troubling to many and exciting to a few, a confusion rooted in differences of opinion that no one in the 1620s could have predicted. How early did these differences emerge? If we include the hostile reaction in mid-1630s England to the polity the colonists were creating in New England, the alternatives were being clarified earlier than most historians have recognized. Another phase of debate arose in response to Scottish Covenanters, who were extolling Presbyterianism as early as 1640.39
Already incandescent, the politics of reform found another venue as of 1640–41: fast days arranged by the new Parliament, the first of them held in November 1640 and becoming a monthly event in early 1642. For the most part, the ministers who preached on this occasion spoke in generalities about divine providence, covenant, and the like, some more fervently than others but usually agreeing that the process of reform should be guided by Scripture as the alternative to the “traditions and inventions of men.” Thomas Case, who participated in this series in 1642, may have wanted a “pure and perfect reformation,” and Edmund Calamy, a process of “reform[ing] the Reformation it selfe,” while the much-punished nonconformist Thomas Wilson called for the destruction of episcopacy as thoroughly as had happened with the “mysticall” Babylon of Revelation 18:1, “throwne down” and “found no more at all.” Yet slogans of this kind left unclear the meaning of “purer ordinances” and “more refined churches.”40
Reticence to endorse grand schemes was widespread, a reticence rooted in the compromises of the “old non-conformity” but also in a lingering affection for the Book of Common Prayer and a wariness of alternatives that could include “democratical” schemes of church governance. As the tempo of reform began to accelerate, many in England who equated Separatist-style behavior with social unrest were beginning to insist that Parliament should preserve as much as possible of a state church.41 Another context for this silence about grand schemes was a tacit agreement among most of the clergy in early 1640s London to say as little as possible about the details of church order. Future Independents and Presbyterians concurred on this decision, possibly because they found themselves agreeing that parishes should be given more authority over discipline and a greater role in choosing their ministers than episcopacy had permitted. Within the longer history of the Puritan movement, these were commonplaces that Cartwright’s generation had endorsed. Now, they made sense all over again, especially since so few of the London ministers were versed in jure divino Presbyterianism. In the early going, it was up to Henderson and his fellow Scots to make the case for that form of church government, Samuel Rutherford weighing in with A peaceable and temperate plea for Pauls presbyterie in Scotland (1642) and The Due Right of Presbyteries; or, a peaceable plea for the Government of the Church of Scotland (1644), this time comparing it to the colonists’ version of church government and its Separatist predecessors.42
Unable on its own to resolve this confusion about the substance of reform, the Long Parliament handed the task of redesigning the Church of England to a special “assembly.” The history of the Westminster Assembly, so named because of the building in which it met, began with Parliament recognizing that a Synod or Convocation was the appropriate body to resolve the status of the Book of Common Prayer, the Thirty-Nine Articles, and episcopacy. Mentioned in petitions as early as January 1641, the concept of a “free Nationall Synod” was endorsed in the Grand Remonstrance and fast-day sermons, seriously discussed in Parliament in January 1642, approved by both Houses that June, included in the Nineteen Propositions submitted to the king that same month, and backed by moderate royalists such as the minister Thomas Fuller.43 Civil war finally made it possible for an assembly to meet in July 1643 without royal consent. No bishops were on hand, although Ussher had been invited, nor any clergy associated with the Laudian program.44
The decisions of the Westminster Assembly enjoy a special place in the history of British and American Protestantism thanks to the Confession it produced, the last in a long line of Reformed creeds and catechisms and the most enduring, for the “Articles of Christian Religion” (to quote the formal title of the Confession) and the two catechisms it spawned, the Larger and the more pastoral Shorter, were widely used in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America and Scotland and, to this day, remain important statements of doctrine for some Protestants. Deferring the theological work of the assembly to chapter 9, what matters here is how this body navigated the politics of reform. At the outset, it was handed the task of preserving an inclusive state church governed in some other manner than by bishops. It was also handed the challenge of working in the shadow of a major political event, an alliance formed in August 1643 between Parliament in England and the Scottish government at a moment when royalists seemed to be winning the civil war.45
Spelled out in a document known as the “Solemn League and Covenant,” the purpose of this alliance was to “sincerely, really and constantly” collaborate on matters of religion. More concretely, its purpose was to preserve “the Reformed Religion” in Scotland and, in England and Ireland, pursue “the reformation of religion . . . according to the Word of God, and the example of the best reformed Churches.” The emphasis on “reformed” signaled that episcopacy was no longer an option. Did the wording of the Covenant also oblige the Long Parliament to endorse Scottish-style Presbyterianism? Not in so many words. Instead, the agreement called for “bring[ing] the Churches of God in these three kingdoms to the nearest conjunction and conformity” in “confession of faith, Church government, [and] directory for worship” (emphasis added).46
During the negotiations that led to the drafting of this covenant, the Scots ignored the uneasiness of the English negotiators with uniformity along Scottish lines, perhaps because article 2 committed both sides to “endeavor the extirpation of Popery, prelacy . . . and whatsoever shall be found to be contrary to sound doctrine and the power of godliness,” a slap at those in England who questioned uniformity of any kind. English anxieties about the constitutional status of Parliament and Scottish support for some version of monarchy account for the promise in article 3 to “preserve the Rights and Priviledges of the Parliaments” and “defend the King’s Majesty’s person and authority” alongside “true religion and the liberties of the kingdom.” That the English negotiators wanted a “civil” alliance and the Scots a “religious” compact, as the Scottish minister Robert Baillie remarked at the time, points to deeper differences. Nonetheless, there was no confusion about the significance of the agreement: episcopacy was on the way out, and a system derived in some manner from the Reformed international on the way in. At long last, the time had come to bypass compromise and, in the words of a modern historian of the assembly, “finish the job” of creating a biblically aligned church.47
After the covenant was affirmed by Parliament and the Westminster Assembly in public ceremonies in September, a delegation of Scots headed to London, some to serve on a committee overseeing the war and others—Henderson, Baillie, George Gillespie, and Samuel Rutherford in their capacity as ministers and Archibald Johnston as lay elder—entering the assembly not as voting members but as representatives of the kirk. As Baillie recognized once he arrived in London, the assembly had nothing in common with the general assemblies of the Church of Scotland, which were “free.” On this difference, the ordinance of June 1643 was explicit. Characterizing episcopacy as a “great impediment to Reformation and growth of Religion” as well as “very prejudiciall to the state and Government of this kingdome,” it authorized the assembly to recommend to Parliament a form of church government “as may be most agreeable to Gods holie word and most apt to procure . . . nearer agreement with the Church of Scotland and other reformed churches abroade.” Recommend was the operative term, with Parliament assigned the role of proposing what the assembly should discuss, a rule strengthened a little later by the phrase “give their advice and counsell . . . when and so often as they shall be thereunto required (emphasis added).” Whatever the assembly decided could be approved or rejected by Parliament; as was said in the concluding sentence of the ordinance, Parliament was not granting the assembly “Jurisdiction power or Authoritie Ecclesiasticall whatsoever, or any other Power than is herein particularly expressed.” Before it met, the assembly’s wings had been clipped by its masters.48
With authority resolved to the satisfaction of Parliament, which also chose the 132 ministers and thirty members of Parliament who made up its membership,49 the assembly began to clarify the more ambiguous of the Thirty-Nine Articles. By October, the Solemn League and Covenant, together with the imperative to ordain clergy who would replace the many being purged, prompted fresh instructions. Now, the assembly was told to “forthwith” decide on “a discipline and government” that would take the place of episcopacy and satisfy the Scots, who were lobbying for their version of church government. In August 1644, doctrine reappeared on the agenda, as did worship. In December, the debates on church order ended with a rough consensus, preceded several months earlier by agreement on a “Directory for Ordination.” (Day in and day out, the assembly was examining candidates for ministry; in all, nearly two thousand persons were vetted.)50 In January 1645, Parliament abolished the statutory status of the Book of Common Prayer and replaced it with A Directory for the Publique Worship of God. Agreeing on a statement of doctrine dragged on until December 1646. The two catechisms were sent to Parliament in late 1647 and finalized in April 1648. For all intents and purposes, the assembly ceased to meet by the close of February 1649, although it limped along until 1653.51
Worship was the easiest of the three projects the assembly undertook. Agreeing on how to administer the Lord’s Supper was accomplished by acknowledging different ways of receiving the sacrament. On set prayer versus free-form prayer, the naysayers prevailed, to the point of eliminating all set prayer from the Directory except for the Lord’s Prayer. Instead of providing actual texts, the Directory recommended certain words or subjects ministers could incorporate in their prayers. It also included guidance for what should be said or done at funerals and weddings, the first of these stripped of prayer, singing, sermons, and the encouraging words of the Book of Common Prayer about the fate of the deceased. Marriage became essentially secular—legal, although the suggestion that it was “expedient that marriage be solemnized by a lawful minister” and the rubric denoting “the solemnization of marriage” kept it from being entirely so. Much space was given to directions about preaching, the prayer of adoration and confession that preceded the sermon, and the thanksgiving that followed. Much was also made of the reading of Scripture—far more of it on a weekly basis than what the Book of Common Prayer required. As in Scottish practice and as recommended by the presbyterians of Cartwright’s day, a sermon would precede the administering of Holy Communion, from which “the ignorant and the scandalous” were barred.52 In retrospect, the most interesting section of the Directory was its endorsement of baptism as “a Seale of the Covenant of Grace . . . and of our Union with him, of Remission of sins, Regeneration, Adoption, and Life eternall,” assertions tempered by what was said a few sentences later about the “seed . . . of the faithfull” acquiring “the outward Priviledges of the Church” (emphasis added) and characterizing the sacrament as “not so necessary” as a means of grace.53
When it came to an alternative to episcopacy, debate was punctuated by efforts at “accommodation” between the alternatives of a national church organized along Presbyterian lines and semiautonomous congregations existing alongside a state church. In October 1643, the assembly took up a question that was instantly controversial: did Scripture contain a specific model of church government that everyone could acknowledge as jure divino? A handful of members insisted that Scripture validated a congregation-centered version of the true church. Simultaneously, the Scottish delegates and their English allies argued that Scripture favored a Presbyterianism system. Week after week, this premise forced the assembly to rehearse long-standing questions of biblical exegesis and their implications for church structure. Did the word “church” in Matthew 18:17 or “keys” in Matthew 16:19 refer to ministers, as Presbyterians argued, or to both ministers and laypeople, as those of congregational sympathies insisted?54 The Scottish delegates wanted a collective ministry of teacher, pastor, deacon, and ruling elder but, as others pointed out, the New Testament never specified the last of these offices or differentiated between teacher and pastor. Was the church on earth best understood as “universal catholic visible,” as most in the assembly believed, or “particular visible,” as a few were insisting? The first of these would make it possible to define ministry as an office directly created by Christ and receiving its authority from him, not from a congregation. It would also elevate the importance of ordination and turn it into a ministry-centered rite. Were interchurch structures of a Presbyterian kind fully Scriptural? The Scots and their English allies insisted that the church in first-century Jerusalem and Ephesus had been several churches, in which case some sort of interchurch structure had been necessary. Summing up the “chief point” that mattered to the assembly’s Presbyterians, Baillie described it as establishing “the real authoritie, power, and jurisdiction of Synods and classical Presbyteries over any the members, or the whole of a particular congregation.” This is how the assembly eventually voted, over the objections of its Independents.55
That Baillie added “the right of ordinarie professors to the sacrament” to this statement signaled the struggle underway over the handling of church discipline and, simultaneously, over the scope of church membership.56 It was easy to agree that the church should include “Visible saints” or “believers,” defined as those who “professed faith in Christ, and obedience unto Christ,” together with their children. Yet Independents wanted local churches to “require” not only “a fair profession, and want of scandal” but “such signs of true grace as persuades the whole congregation of their true regeneration,” whereas Baillie and his allies wanted churches to encompass “ordinarie professors, though they can give no certaine or satisfactory signes of reall regeneration.”57 Abruptly, debate shifted from membership per se to church discipline and the practice of excommunication. Almost to a person, the assembly acknowledged the importance of protecting the Lord’s Supper from the unworthy, doing so soon after it met in July, when it recommended a fast to remedy “the grievous . . . pollution of the Lord’s Supper.” After listening to speakers complain that this version of discipline was faltering, the assembly wanted to ensure that local ministers were empowered to do whatever was necessary and, in the draft document of December 1644, listed “authoritative suspension from the Lords table” as one of their “power[s].” Nonetheless, debate erupted about the pertinence of Old Testament references to excluding people from the Passover (Num. 9:6–9) and whether someone who was suspended (not excommunicated) could be barred from the sacrament.58
Confusion deepened when the biblical scholar John Lightfoot challenged the New Testament basis for excommunication, an argument introduced in January 1644 by the scholar, lay delegate and member of Parliament John Selden (1584–1654), who, like Thomas Erastus before him, viewed excommunication as a civil penalty and rejected the customary proof texts from the Old and New Testaments. Selden wanted the civil magistrate to have the last word on whether church courts—which would reappear in a Presbyterian scheme—had acted fairly. He attached this argument to another, that Scripture did not support a jure divino understanding of the true church, an argument that William Prynne was also making outside the walls of Parliament.59 Within the assembly but not within the House of Commons, Selden’s was very much a minority position. What the majority favored became chapter 30 of the Westminster Confession, which described the church’s authority in matters of discipline as by direct gift or commission from “Lord Jesus Christ, as King and Head of his Church.” In its entirety, this chapter was omitted from the version approved by Parliament and printed at its request. So was a part of chapter 20, which touched on church discipline, and, because it acknowledged the possibility of divorce, chapter 24 on marriage.60
Meanwhile, Prynne, John Milton, and Independent ministers such as John Goodwin were fanning the flames of anti-presbyterianism. One tactic was to imply that this system would give too much power to the clergy. In a poem Milton contributed to the campaign against Presbyterianism, he opined that “New Presbyter is but Old Priest writ Large.” In response, the Scottish commissioners pointed out that their system included checks and balances wholly absent from the congregation-based scheme of the Independents.61 Within the assembly itself, Henderson, Baillie, and their fellow delegates continued to oppose any compromise that undercut the church’s jure divino authority in matters of discipline, an argument made at length by George Gillespie in Aarons Rod Blossoming: or The divine ordinance of church government vindicated (1646). Aware of how the government of James VI in Scotland had interfered with discipline, and familiar with the religious politics of Prynne and other “erastians,” Gillespie warned that churches were the last resort in situations “where the Magistrate doth not professe and defende the true Religion.” To him and his fellow Scots, it was imperative that parishes take “special care . . . that there be not a promiscuous admission of all sorts of persons” to the sacraments.62
The back- and-forth was intense and compromise apparently impossible. Anyone familiar with the history of the reformation in Scotland or the struggle in Calvin’s Geneva would have recognized what was at stake. Did the church look to Christ as its sole head or “king,” as had been said so many times by Reformed and Puritan theorists, or was it subordinate to civil authority, as the Long Parliament assumed when it drafted the ordinance of 1643 that brought the assembly into being? Passing by the details of this struggle,63 the outcome was a parliamentary ordinance (August 1645) on the membership of church courts that made laymen the majority, and another ordinance (October 20, 1645) laying out its version of “the Rules and Directions concerning Suspension from the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper in cases of Ignorance and Scandal,” which the assembly denounced as “contrary to that Way of Government which Christ hath appointed in His Church, in that it giveth a Power to judge of the Fitness of Persons to come to the Sacrament unto such as our Lord Christ hath not given that Power.” The smidgeon of good news was that churches and pastors could continue to exclude the scandalous and ignorant from the sacrament; the bad was that Parliament undercut this possibility by allowing anyone “aggrieved” with these decisions to appeal them to other church courts and eventually to Parliament itself, a rule enhanced a few months later (January 1646) by an order assigning lay commissioners to evaluate whether someone had been sufficiently scandalous to warrant being excluded. Protests by the assembly persisted, to the point of declaring that ministers could not in conscience participate in such a system. It had the satisfaction of knowing that, in March 1646, Parliament endorsed a Presbyterian system shorn of any independent authority and never equipped with anything akin to a general assembly. In June, Parliament also modified the initial plan for handling appeals relating to church discipline; instead of insisting on county-based courts of “Commissioners of Appeals,” it endorsed a single Parliamentary committee based in London. That October, the government finally voted to abolish episcopacy, and by midwinter, the Westminster Assembly and its London allies “made a quiet and grudging peace with” what Parliament had adopted.64
As these events were unfolding, London-based Presbyterians, the city government (which had come back into Presbyterian hands), the Scots, and others who endorsed uniformity of belief staged a last-ditch campaign on behalf of the alliance of 1643 and the model of a comprehensive state church. Among its weapons were petitions to the Long Parliament, sermons, public demonstrations, and learned treatises, one of them Jus Divinum Regiminis Ecclesiastici; or, The Divine Right of Church-Government, Asserted and evidenced by the holy Scriptures, a lifeless defense of the proposition that (as was said on the title page) “The Presbyteriall Government . . . may lay the truest claime to a Divine Right, according to the Scriptures.” A response to “erastians” in and outside of Parliament as well as to advocates of toleration, its author(s) reiterated two assumptions of immense importance to these heirs of Cartwright, Knox, and Andrew Melville: Christ as “King” had endowed the church with an authority wholly different from the authority of the civil state, and Scripture dictated the form of church government. Independency was faulted for other reasons, chief among them the perception that a “gathered” church membership contradicted the Reformed understanding of the visible church.65
Another product of this campaign was a wave of books, pamphlets, and petitions publicizing the sorry consequences of toleration (see below, sec. 3). In March 1647, a parliamentary ordinance recommending a fast to bewail the prevalence of “errours and blasphemies” was abetted by the anonymous pamphlet Hell broke loose, which drew attention to the unorthodox theologizing of the ministers John Goodwin and John Saltmarsh and the New Englander Samuel Gorton (see chap. 9), among others. In December, fifty-two ministers added their names to A Testimony to the Truth of Jesus Christ, which specified a long list of “abominable Errours” and named the men responsible for them. Simultaneously, ministers in New England weighed in on the benefits of theological orthodoxy: Thomas Shepard in a letter of 1645 to his former colleague Thomas Weld, and John Cotton in The bloudy tenant washed and made white with the bloud of the Lambe (1647), a response to Roger Williams that touched off more back- and-forth. At a popular level, stories proliferated of divine interventions to punish wayward women. After the New Model Army entered London in mid-1647 and parliamentary “Independents” regained control of Parliament, both houses agreed on “giving ease to tender consciences” (but not those of Catholics), to which the riposte in May 1648, after “presbyterians” briefly reclaimed control of the House of Commons, was an ordinance “For the preventing of the growth and spreading of Heresy and Blasphemy” that authorized the execution of anyone who rejected the Trinity, the divine origins of Scripture, the existence of God, and the meritorious benefits of Christ’s death on the cross, among others.66
Despite these efforts, the state church that limped into being in 1646 was a toothless version of voluntary religion. No national assembly was ever authorized, synods rarely met, protecting the Sunday Sabbath faltered despite various attempts to preserve it,67 and mandatory attendance at church services gave way to unrestrained movement back and forth between old-style parishes and congregations organized by Independents, Baptists, and others. Nonetheless, the Presbyterian community in London busied itself appointing lay elders and initiating the machinery of associations and synods. The mosaic of belief and practice also included ministers and laypeople who preferred the Book of Common Prayer and an unknown fraction of people who withdrew from organized religion in any of its forms.68
As had always been the case in post-Reformation England, the new system achieved a certain success wherever ambitious, energetic, and evangelical ministers took over a parish. Richard Baxter in Kidderminster (Worcestershire), and Henry Newcome in several places labored to preserve the shell of a state church, protect the sacraments, and sustain moral order. For Baxter, catechizing every household was the key to making people and parish into a genuine Christian community. With the help of others, he arranged his weekly schedule to include visits of this kind. Simultaneously, he insisted on protecting the Lord’s Supper from those without faith, although never requiring the spiritual testimonies that most Independents favored. Looking back on the 1650s, Baxter recalled how the church in Kidderminster had to be expanded five times to accommodate everyone who wanted to attend. He remembered, too, that instead of “disorder” on “the Lord’s days,” “you might hear an hundred families singing psalms and repeating sermons as you passed through the streets.” A few of the local gentry refused to attend his services, but the town had no “private church” or any “sect against sect.”69
When all was said and done, however, Baxter could not keep “sectaries” from increasing in his part of England. Meanwhile, old-style conformists were also avoiding the Lord’s Supper and possibly church services in general.70 The most obvious index of their resentment was a dramatic decline in the numbers of children being baptized. How social discipline fared remains uncertain, but in the historian Derek Hirst’s careful survey of attempts to guard the Lord’s Table, protect the Sunday Sabbath, and uphold moral discipline, the evidence assembled from local records, ministers’ diaries, and the like suggests the near complete failure of those projects. Likewise, this evidence calls into question the capacity of Presbyterian and Independent ministers in the 1650s to sustain parish-wide catechesis. In his words, “noise” about reform abounded but follow-through or “action” rarely happened. Intermittency of one kind or another was nothing new, but the situation after 1650 in England and Scotland seems much worse, with more people slipping through the cracks by staying away from services, spurning baptism for their children, and giving up on the practice of catechizing.71
Baxter’s perspective on the 1650s, together with his unsuccessful attempt in 1659–61 to bring together moderates of all persuasions in a reconstructed state church, underscore the impact of those he characterized as “sectaries” on the classic program of moral discipline, a ministry-magistracy alliance, and top-down evangelization. Who were these people and what did they want?72
Of the many disruptions that rippled through the 1640s, the most alarming to mainstream Puritans may have been the emergence of people who repudiated an inclusive state church and of others who jettisoned a learned ministry and orthodox theology. As early as 1641, the presence of these “sectaries” was being publicized in A Discovery of 29 sects here in London: all of which, except the first [Protestants], are most devilish and damnable and other pamphlets of the same ilk, several of them the doing of the royalist sympathizer John Taylor, whose contributions to the outcry included A Swarme of Sectaries, and Schismatiques (1641) and A Tale In a Tub, Or a tub Lecture As it was delivered by M-heele Mendsoale, an Inspired Brownist, and a most upright Translator, In a meeting house neere Bedlam (1642).73 This publicity, which redoubled in the mid-1640s, painted London as a world turned upside down, the city’s book-stalls piled high with unlicensed pamphlets and churches overtaken by illicit conventicles. As reported by the moderate royalist and episcopalian Robert Sanderson, more “new doctrines” sprang up during the opening months of the new decade than in the previous eighty years, a process facilitated by the abolition of Star Chamber and the Court of High Commission, the two most powerful instruments for curtailing heterodoxy and unauthorized versions of voluntary religion.74
Simultaneously, a broader reaction against hierarchy and entrenched privilege was unfolding. By January 1642, the elitist and monarchy-favoring aldermen who controlled affairs in London had been displaced by a more openly elected and Puritan-tilting Common Council.75 This was shocking to conservatives, but the real story was the emergence of a popular politics that mobilized ordinary people to influence public affairs in new ways. Its instruments included a vast increase in petitions, demonstrations or riots outside the walls of Parliament, contested elections, and conventicles mutating into self-administered congregations. As was reported in 1640 of one conventicle, its members were asserting that there was “no true Church but where the Faithful met. That the King could not make a perfect Law, for that he was not a perfect man” and not to be obeyed “but in Civil things.” Where the Long Parliament feared to go because of its instinctive conservativism, the sectaries rushed headlong thanks to a liberating awareness of the Holy Spirit, the powerful workings of conscience, and a fresh understanding of Scripture.76
Another source of this politics was far greater freedom of expression. With Star Chamber abolished, booksellers and printers could publish anything that came to hand unless they abided by the rules of the Stationers Company, the guild that traditionally cooperated with the government to restrain what was printed. In the main, booksellers wanted it both ways: their “rights to copy” preserved and competition (or “piracy”) held in check, yet also profiting from the breakdown of control. Competition won out despite a parliamentary ordinance in June 1643 reinstating a process of licensing. With opinion about true religion beginning to fracture, the book trades began to mirror the shifting relationship between popular politics and the world of print. Before 1640, it was uncommon for petitions to be printed or for disagreements among the elite to be openly publicized. Now, however, appealing to the public became imperative—or seen as such. Hence the amazing increase in the number of books and broadsheets being published, many of them unbound, inexpensive pamphlets and others in the format of newssheets or news books that, before the 1640s, had appeared intermittently as a way of reporting news from overseas. In the 1630s, the annual production of books in Britain or printed elsewhere in the English language averaged 624. In 1641, the number rose to 2,042 and in 1642, 4,038, a trend fattened by wave upon wave of imprints that transgressed the boundaries of what had hitherto been regarded by the government and state church as acceptable.77 In the words of a Stationers Company remonstrance to Parliament in 1643, the situation was such that “every libeling speritt” was free to “traduce the proceedings of the state, every malicious speritt may then revile whomsoever he pleaseth . . . yea every pernicitious hereticke may . . . poison the minds of good mynded people of wicked errors.”78
Once unleashed, these “speritt[s]” turned their fire on theological orthodoxy and the church-state axis. The best-known of these assaults, which many in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain and the United States celebrated as a sign of moral and political progress, was directed at state-imposed uniformity, which the sectaries wanted to replace with toleration or liberty of conscience. These two should not be regarded as identical; toleration was a means of limiting the authority of the civil state to enforce any single version of Christianity but would preserve a state church and, in most versions, require the state to set limits to what counted as truth. As the historian George Yule has pointed out, advocates of toleration in the 1640s and 16540s did not welcome “anti-religious belief.” Any strong version of liberty of conscience severed the connections between the state and religious affiliation, leaving everyone free to choose what form of religion he or she preferred. (In point of fact, arguments on behalf of liberty of conscience excluded Roman Catholics and Muslims or in other ways limited the scope of religious freedom.) Mainstream Puritans opposed each of these possibilities and called on Parliament to reaffirm the government’s control over the marketplace of ideas. Others, like John Owen (1616–83), wanted toleration for everyone who remained within the boundaries of theological orthodoxy, a middle-of-the-road position that most Independents favored because it preserved a place for them if the state church became Presbyterian.79
The sectaries have always had both friends and enemies. Present-day Baptists are excited to see their denomination emerge out of the shadows, while religious and political liberals hail the advocates of toleration or liberty of conscience.80 Many others have been critical—for example, most nineteenth-century Anglicans and, as the mid-century “revolution in print” was unfolding, the Scottish and English Presbyterians who staged a counterattack on the disruptive and possibly blasphemous doings of the sectaries. The chief architect of this attack was Thomas Edwards (d. 1647), a nonconforming English minster jolted into print by what he saw happening around him. As early as 1641, he was predicting that religious liberty would open the way to “libertinisme, prophaneness, errors, and . . . no religion at all,” a refrain he repeated in a slashing attack (1644) on the authors of An Apologeticall Narration (see below).81
Edwards’s magnum opus was Gangraena; or, A Catalogue and Discovery of many of the Errours, Heresies, Blasphemies and pernicious Practices of the Sectaries of this time (1646; reprinted the same year in two larger versions), which he filled with a biting analysis of dissent and its implications for true religion. Others, including Prynne, shared this agenda. After being freed by the Long Parliament and resuming his assault on Laud, he attacked the sectaries in A fresh discovery of some prodigious new wandering-blasing stars, *& fire-brands stilling themselves new lights (1646). Prynne and Edwards had allies in the moderate Puritan minister Ephraim Pagitt, who anticipated Edwards in Heresiography; or, A description of the hereticks and sectaries of these latter times (1645); the Scottish minister Robert Baillie, who filled A Dissuasive against the Errours of the Time (1645) with insinuations about John Cotton’s role in the “Antinomian” crisis in 1630s Massachusetts; and the makers of A Discovery of the Most Dangerous and Damnable Tenets That Have Been Spread Within This Few Weeks (1647), among others.
The heresiographers wanted to uphold theological orthodoxy, but above all they wanted to uphold the assumptions and practices associated with state churches backed by the authority of the civil state. What was happening around them in 1640s London and elsewhere was upending that possibility. Edwards and the Scots blamed the tumult on English congregationalists (or Independents) who were sympathetic to toleration and opposed the model of an inclusive state church backed by the state; as Baillie remarked in mid-1644, the “evill of Independency” was “the mother and true fountaine of all the church distractions here.” By 1646, the heresiographers were also blaming Independents and others for the anti-presbyterian politics of the New Model Army. In the words of a modern scholar, the goal was to fashion “a seamless connection between the Anabaptists, antinomians, and antitrinitarians [those who questioned the traditional doctrine of the Trinity]” to the end of “reestablish[ing] the indispensability of Presbyterianism as the way to ward off sectaries and heretics.”82
Today, we value Pagitt, Prynne, and Edwards because they preserved much of what the sectaries were saying and doing. Edwards was especially detailed, for he added eyewitness accounts from a network of informants to his own observations.83 Out of this mass of evidence, which included alarm bells about groups that were “utterly fabulous” (i.e., someone’s invention) and women taking on a role as preachers and prophetesses, emerged a picture of “confusion and disorder” as evidenced by the presence of “illiterate mechanic Preachers yea of Women and Boy Preachers,” none of them punished by the government. It was horrifying when Edwards realized that most were advocating “dangerous and false Doctrines.” For readers who wanted to know what these were, he assembled a nineteen-page “Catalogue of the Errours, Heresies, [and] Blasphemies” for the first version of his book, with more examples added in the second. From it his readers learned that old bugaboos were reappearing alongside others of more recent origin. Edwards’s list included Arminianism, Antinomianism, Socinianism, Familism (the teachings of the sixteenth-century Dutch “Familist” Hendrik Niclaus, whose ideas had been circulating in England since the late sixteenth century), chiliasm (belief that the end times were about to happen), mortalism (belief that bodies do not immediately pass to heaven at the moment of death); and perfectionism (belief that absent sin of any kind, people could enjoy “worldly delights, begetting many children [i.e, plenty of sex], eating and drinking”), among others.84
That opinions of this kind were being voiced in the 1640s seems certain, but most of the men and women who throng Edwards’s pages were objecting to core themes of the practical divinity. According to Edwards, some were insisting that “the doctrine of repentance is a soule-destroying doctrine.” Others spurned the concept and practice of the Sunday Sabbath and questioned the veracity of the Bible. His list also encompassed a strident version of Separatist-style purity, as evidenced by the argument that “ ’tis unlawfull for the Saints to joyn in receiving the Lords supper, where any wicked men are present, and that such mixt Communion doth pollute and defile them.” The same pairing of purity and pollution reappeared in the assertion—possibly stemming from Roger Williams—that no one should pray with someone who was not among the godly.85
The routes by which people arrived at these ideas included the Puritan movement itself. William Erbury (1604/5–1654), a nonconforming minister who gave up on institutions and became a “Seeker” (see below), was unusual in referencing Richard Sibbes and John Preston as teachers of free grace.86 Separatist-style behavior drew on a long-standing sympathy for John Foxe’s story of the faithful few or “remnant” contending against corrupt and oppressive regimes. This narrative reappeared in almost every version of sectarian self-identity, as did the distinction he inscribed between false church and true. As well, sectaries were familiar with the commonplace that Christ spoke in a simple manner that everyone could understand, a proposition easily translated into the argument that those touched by the Spirit could dispense with learned intermediaries altogether.87
Another source was the apocalypticism (or “millenarianism”) that flourished after 1640. Its sources included the musings of Thomas Brightman and many others about the imminent conversion of the Jews, an outpouring of the Holy Spirit, and Christ’s return in judgment. In the 1630s and 1640s, this way of thinking ripened into an understanding of sacred history as a sequence of dispensations: the purity of apostolic times, followed by a descent into darkness, followed by the return of the Holy Spirit and a “new light” that would liberate the worthy few from the coercive authority of a state church and learned ministry. Themes of this kind explain why “illiterate” men and women were asserting a role as prophets after hearing a voice from heaven or claiming to be filled with the Holy Spirit.88 It explains, as well, the preference for gathered churches fashioned by people who joined them voluntarily. A more daring version of sacred history prompted the emergence of “Seekers.” Never a self-acknowledged group or possibly a group at all, these people took for granted the “cessation and departure of the glory of God” from Christianity as currently constituted. It followed that no “true visible . . . Gospel Church” would reappear until God dispatched apostle-like messengers to reveal the truth.89
The visionaries and newborn saints who, in the 1650s, acquired the nickname of “Quaker” wanted nothing to do with an inclusive, institutional church of any kind.90 Familiar with the narrative of true religion succumbing to corruption, these “Friends” or “Children of the Light” situated themselves within a sweeping emancipation from Sion’s “long enthralled captivity in Babylon’s kingdom,” a story they used to justify their rejection of all outward “forms . . . kept by priests.” According to the itinerant layman George Fox, the “mixed multitude” of the state church contradicted the New Testament insistence on a church composed of “living stones.” Fox centered his own awakening on the immediacy of the Holy Spirit and the simplicity of Scripture, themes he owed to a life-altering encounter with the Gospel of John. For some of the women who joined him in preaching and prophesying, it was the biblical prophecy (Joel 2:28–29 and Acts 2:17–18) of an era when the Spirit would empower women to speak.91
When Fox began to speak of an “inner light” that liberated him from outward forms, he found a receptive audience in the north of England among people who were worshipping on their own but uncertain of where the truth lay. The more they learned of Fox’s realized eschatology and his emphasis on Spirit-centered prophesying, the more some of these people were moved to share this message with those who lived in darkness. Off went missionaries to Europe, where a few traveled as far as Rome hoping to persuade the pope to acknowledge the new dispensation. Others carried the message of the light to Ireland, the English colonies in the Caribbean, and the mainland of North America. This zeal for witnessing reached something of a climax in the person of James Naylor (1616–1660), who entered Bristol, England, in October 1656 riding a horse and preceded by a group of women hailing him as a Christ-like figure. Naylor’s overreaching unnerved the government, which used the provisions of the Blasphemy Act of 1650 to punish him harshly. He and Fox were already at odds and, after Charles II returned to the throne in 1660, Fox and his allies reassured the new government that the Quaker rhetoric of kingdoms being overturned by the Spirit was apolitical. Thereafter, the “peace testimony” became a core theme of Quakerism. Naylor’s boldness also pushed the movement into creating methods of self-regulation centered on the all-male London Meeting.92
Quakers, Independents, and Baptists were the only survivors of the explosive possibilities of the Civil War period. Independents were the earliest of these three to emerge if we accept the argument of nineteenth-century denominational historians that this way of thinking originated with Robert Browne and Henry Barrow. Baptist sentiments and practice—that is, substituting adult baptism for the baptism of infants—had also cropped up in sixteenth-century England and, in the first decade of the seventeenth, acquired two articulate advocates, the Separatists John Smythe and Thomas Helwys (see chap. 6); after Smythe affiliated with the Mennonites in Amsterdam, Helwys returned to England and spent the final years of his life nurturing half-hidden communities of which little is known. The stringent primitivism of these early Baptists may account for the turmoil inside Henry Jacob’s semi-Separatist London congregation, which spawned tiny groups that adopted adult baptism, most of them choosing to do so by immersion rather than by sprinkling. Aware of sixteenth-century Anabaptist opposition to oaths and civil governments, these people usually chose a more moderate path. By 1640–41, they were becoming better known and attracting more adherents. On the other side of the Atlantic, Roger Williams and a few others in Rhode Island rebaptized themselves in 1639 and formed the first Baptist church in British North America, although the ever-restless Williams left the group a few months later.93
These steps provoked an outpouring of anti-Baptist propaganda and state action against “Anabaptists” bearing public witness to their faith. As leaders of the new group were quick to realize, it was not in their best interests to be identified with the wildest of the sectaries, a policy reaffirmed in the 1650s in response to Quakers. By 1643, some Baptists were meeting with congregation-alists (and vice versa) to discuss their differences, and in late 1644 other discussions unfolded with London-based Presbyterians. In their own words, Baptists undertook these ventures to clear themselves of the “calamy” heaped on them by the heresiographers. As their most careful historian has noted, “all shared the determination of Episcopalians and Presbyterians to outlaw views taken to be blasphemous or undermining of Christianity as a whole,” a policy they essayed to combine with a tempered understanding of liberty of conscience—in essence, the liberty for them to practice their own tenets. In the 1650s, the same politics prompted the leading Baptist of the day, John Tombes, to lambast the Quakers in True Old Light Exalted above Pretended New Light (1660).94
One outcome of this quest for a more moderate identity was a Confession of Faith, published in 1644 and endorsed by seven English congregations; two years later a second, slightly revised version was published. Never coupled with any means of enforcing its provisions, the Confession (chap. 19) authorized anyone “gifted and enabled by the Spirit” to prophesy and undertake other aspects of ministry. On the other hand, its strictly theological provisions mirrored the five points of the Synod of Dordt and the practical divinity: some were of the elect and would always remain so; the elect “believe” because they have been “effectually called by a special, gracious, and powerful work of his Spirit” (language directed at Arminians who “do maintain a freewill and sufficient ability . . . to believe, and do deny election”); the law remains binding, because Christ “commandeth” the elect to “walk in the way . . . of righteousness” spelled out in the Ten Commandments. The Confession also validated the office of magistrate and omitted any argument for “toleration in broad terms.” Far from being sectaries bent on turning the world upside down, the makers of the Confession represented themselves as a “conscionable, quiet, and harmless people (no ways dangerous or troublesome to human society).”95 Other small groups of Baptists aligned themselves with an Arminian version of Reformed orthodoxy defined, in part, by Thomas Lambe in The Fountain of Free Grace Opened (1644/45) and a statement of doctrine of 1653. Subsequently, some moved on to other affiliations—in the late 1640s with the Levellers, a group that aspired to dismantle every version of privilege in England, and in the early 1650s, to the Fifth Monarchists, who prophesied the impending restoration of Christ’s kingdom and urged Cromwell and the first Parliament of the Protectorate (1653) to entrust civil authority to the saints.96
Independents (or congregationalists) were the most numerous of the new groups. By the close of the 1650s, something like 250 congregations of this kind had come into being in England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, many of them founded after 1649.97 In general, their organizers echoed what had been said by the colonists to their English critics. Because this scheme encompassed the authority of ministers as well as laypeople, it avoided the democratic excesses of “Brownisme.” On the other hand, it also eliminated the centralizing and hierarchical aspects of Presbyterianism, or what was stigmatized as “tyranny.” And, by creating churches limited to the godly, this scheme solved the problem of deciding who was worthy to participate in the sacraments.
The contexts that explain the emergence of Independency resemble those that explain the making of this system in New England. For the five ministers who decamped to the Netherlands in the late 1630s (see chap. 6), a crisis of conscience akin to what John Cotton, John Davenport, and others had experienced led them to abandon the old nonconformity and create covenanted congregations. How much this group owed to the manifestos of Jacob, Bradshaw, Parker, Baynes, Robinson, and Ames is unclear, but Thomas Goodwin and his friends certainly knew of the experiments in church order Thomas Hooker and Hugh Peter had introduced in Rotterdam and elsewhere. Once the political situation in England changed for the better, all five returned and began to publicize their understanding of the true church, a process interrupted in September 1641 when they agreed with London-based Presbyterians to remain silent for the time being—not entirely silent and certainly not invisible, since Robert Baillie knew of them as soon as he arrived in London. On his own, Henry Burton had already begun to advocate for something akin to Independency in Christ on his Throne; or, Christs Church-government briefly laid downe (1640) and The Protestation Protested (1641), an all-out-assault on prayer-book worship and episcopacy as anti-Christian, combined with a plea to “come out from among them that are unclean” and form gathered churches. His bold words indicated that the fat was in the fire—explicitly so, for someone asks, “How will this stand with a National Church . . . ? This would make for division, and separation,” a question Thomas Edwards answered in another tract (1641) detailing the weaknesses of a congregation-centered system. By the mid-1640s, others besides Burton were openly advocating for such a system, some because they had been persuaded of its merits after reading what Cotton, Davenport, Richard Mather, and their colleagues said about the New England version in a string of London-printed books, and still others because it satisfied their Separatist-like disdain for a state church of any kind. John Owen, who became the most important Independent in 1650s England, gladly acknowledged his debt to John Cotton’s The Keyes of the Kingdom of Christ (1644), which persuaded him that the colonists had tamed their “democratical” polity. Other newcomers to Independency cited the same “non-separating” theorizers—Henry Jacob, Robert Parker, William Ames—that Cotton and his colleagues had also been citing.98
In early 1643, the improbable alliance of 1641 among London-based Presbyterians and Independents was still functioning, as witnessed by efforts to prod the House of Commons into restraining lay preaching and “Antinomianism.” Yet in the Westminster Assembly, lines were being drawn and issues clarified. The turning point for some English and Scottish moderates was An Apologeticall Narration, Humbly Submitted to the Honourable Houses of Parliament (January 1644), signed by the five ministers who had gone to the Netherlands in the late 1630s. A political text aimed at winning the sympathy of Parliament, it evoked a “clearer light” and a review of “Apostolique directions pattern and examples of . . . Primitive Churches” as the sources of their decision to replace the customary “practice” of “Reformed Churches” with gathered and autonomous congregations. Doing so would truly be a further reformation given the judgment that Continental Reformed churches had not fully purified their membership. Hence the situating of a congregation-centered system as a “middle way” between extremes—not the Scottish version of a middle way, which located Presbyterianism between Catholicism and some sort of anarchy, but a self-promoting version framed by episcopacy and—to the fury of the Presbyterian party in the assembly—their version of the church. What was said about church membership echoed the practice in New England, not a “promiscuous multitude” but only those who “may be supposed to be the least of Christ.” It followed that no child could be baptized unless a parent had joined a covenanted congregation. Among the criteria for becoming a member was “the evidences of . . . conversion,” a rule enforced in John Goodwin’s London-based gathered congregation despite protests from people who had welcomed Goodwin as their parish minister. As in New England and among some of the Separatists, the Narration also endorsed the free movement of the Spirit and rejected “set” prayer.99
The great strength of Independency (a name spurned by the authors of the Apologeticall Narration) was its cadre of university-educated ministers, which included men who went to New England in the 1630s but returned once they realized that nonconformity was no longer being punished. Despite his harsh words about the Independents, Thomas Edwards realized that these men did not fit the profile of the prototypical sectary. So should we. On the whole, they were doctrinally orthodox and, when it came to being hired, preferred parish “livings” purged of “scandalous” incumbents or vacant for other reasons, a tendency lamented by some historians of congregationalism. After being entrusted with a congregation gathered out of a parish, many Independents continued to catechize the townspeople or possibly by other means sustain a “parochial congregationalism” akin to what was being practiced in New England. In other parishes, however, conflict erupted once it became apparent that some people were no longer being admitted to the sacraments. Dissidents forced Thomas Larkham out of Tavistock once they encountered this policy, and conflict along the same lines happened in Bermuda and elsewhere.100
This church-like congregationalism never rivaled the appeal of Presbyterianism, and its influence was tempered by a Separatist-flavored version led by laypeople and ministers who abandoned a state church corrupted by the Laudian program by withdrawing into conventicles or covenanted communities, a process underway well before the two Bishops’ Wars. Wales was one such region, thanks to the missionary outreach of the quasi-Separatist and eventual Baptist Henry Jessey (1603–63), who went there in 1639 to assist local people in forming a congregation of their own. As had already happened with the Jacob-Lothrop group, which Jessey led after Lothrop left for Massachusetts, the congregation he established in Llanvaches began to nurture others. Another hotspot was St. Stephens Parish in London, where the cobbler Samuel How was sharing a Spirit-centered understanding of Scripture that downplayed learnedness.101
Emerging from beneath, as it were, this “populist, plebian Puritanism” was enabling certain women to acquire a public presence. Together with her husband Daniel, Katherine Chidley (1616–1653) had participated in conventicles in their home county of Shropshire in the 1620s. Moving to London by 1630 to avoid being punished for nonconformity, she and Daniel joined one of the groups that had withdrawn from the Jacob-Lothrop-Jessey congregation. When Chidley learned of Thomas Edwards’s Reasons against the Independent Government of Particular Congregations, which included a sneer at “men ignorant and low in parts” setting up their own churches, she insisted in her response (also 1641) that it was “lawfull” to abandon state churches dominated by the Antichrist and replace them with churches based on “Christs true Discipline, grounded and founded in his Word.” Authority as traditionally understood was at the heart of Edwards’s objections to this practice. Chidley endorsed a quite different version of authority. Citing John Robinson on the privileges of laypeople, she emphasized the empowering consequences of the Holy Spirit on the “whole” of the church and questioned the age-old trope of the “unlearned” who needed guidance from a learned ministry.102
Chidley’s fiery words on behalf of a decentered church recall the stirrings of lay protests during and after the reign of Mary Tudor. Once underway, the rebirth of this quest for purity became the driving force behind a burst of church foundings. One well-known example is the congregation established in Broadmead (Bristol). There, for several years if not longer, a group of lay women and men had met “together to repeat sermon-notes” while also “fasting and praying . . . frequently.” Their disaffection with the state church had everything to do with modes of worship to which Puritans had traditionally objected: kneeling to receive the sacrament, making the sign of the cross in the liturgy of baptism, deploying of “pictures and images” in a church. The alternative was “lively” preaching that communicated a “taste of [Christ’s] Spirit” and strengthened their identity as “sanctified” believers who “forsook profaning the Lord’s day” and all other “superstitious” practices.103 The impulse to separate overcame Dorothy Hazard after reading Revelation 14:9–11, a passage warning that anyone who “worship[s] the beast and his image” will kindle the “wrath of God.” After forming a covenanted congregation “to worship the Lord more purely,” she and a handful of others continued to hear the sermons being preached by her husband in a parish church until John Canne, the sometime Separatist printer-publisher and publicist based in Amsterdam, turned up. According to a history of the group written some years later, Canne “showed them the difference betwixt the church of Christ and antichrist,” whereupon Hazard and her allies cast off every minister who did not repudiate anti-Christian worship. “Thus the Lord led them by degrees, and brought them out of popish darkness into his marvelous light of the gospel,” a process that culminated in a decision to practice adult baptism by immersion.104
Another experiment of this kind came and went in early 1650s Dublin, a Spirit-centered reformation guided by the ardent millenarian John Rogers. A university-trained minister, Rogers (unrelated to John Rogers of Dedham, the minister famous for his preaching of terror) began as a Presbyterian but shifted to a Spirit-centered version of Independency by 1650, when he arrived in Dublin, a city where liberty of conscience had become state policy. There, as well as organizing a covenanted congregation that included both advocates and enemies of infant baptism, he broke with New England–style Independency by allowing women to vote in church affairs and serve as “prophetesses.” Knowing of Brightman’s argument that 1650 would be a turning point in sacred history and influenced by Fifth Monarchist assertions of impending change, Rogers insisted that “Sion is to be restored” in the form of “gathered churches” liberated from the “mixed multitudes” of the Church of England. No hypocrites would be included (although Rogers admitted that mistakes would be made), for the postapocalyptic church would contain those “in whom . . . the graces of Christ, and the gifts of his Spirit [reside] in some measure.” He put this principle into practice by requiring Spirit-centered testimonies of those who wanted to join his congregation. Harkening back to a theme of great importance to John Robinson and others, Rogers also imagined a church of this kind as a community where the “mutual edification of one another” would flourish, with the saints expressing “saint-like” love to each other. All too quickly, Rogers learned the lesson that the goal of purity could be co-opted by groups even more determined than he was to get rid of restrictive structures. Dublin was a hothouse of Baptist sentiments. Before long, most of the congregation abandoned him and went in that direction.105
Rogers, Chidley, and the founders of the Broadmead church were exciting figures. Yet most of the makers of Independency tempered their commitment to gathered churches by practicing local versions of “parish” congregationalism. Although their sympathy for toleration was a bone in the throat of Presbyterians, the Independents never welcomed complete religious liberty and, when Presbyterian hegemony vanished in the aftermath of Pride’s Purge in December 1648 and the collapse of the alliance with Scotland, a more institutionally minded version came to the fore. Already, Roger Williams had recognized while he was in England in 1643–44 that the “faction” of “so-called Independent[s] . . . though not more fully, yet more explicitly than the Presbyterians, casts down the crown of the Lord Jesus at the feet of the civil magistrate.”106 With Cromwell ascendant after the king’s execution, the leaders of Independency could openly celebrate their high hopes for a state church refashioned along congregational lines. Baptists, too, were enthusiastic, to the point of speculating that Christ’s kingdom was on the verge of being reestablished.107 Some of this confidence faded in response to circumstances that included the Quaker assault on ordained ministers, the publicizing of Socinianism (see chap. 9), the disappointing history of the nominated Parliament of mid-1653, which started out as an experiment in “godly rule,” and the politics of the Fifth Monarchists. By mid-decade, Quaker and Fifth Monarchist visions of social and religious change were fanning the fears of a “paranoid gentry” that people of their status were being threatened by a “social revolution.” Simultaneously, Socinianism and sectarian assaults on institutional religion prompted a coalition of ministers to urge Cromwell to endorse a statement of doctrine his government would enforce, an argument laid out in The Humble proposals of Mr Owen . . . and Other Ministers for the furtherance and propagation of the Gospel . . . For settling of right constituted churches, and for preventing persons of corrupt judgment, from publishing dangerous errours (1652). In the fourteenth of these proposals, the group recommended rules against allowing laymen or anyone who disagreed with the basic principles of Christianity to preach. In December, a stronger version of this manifesto specified certain principles the government should uphold, a list that included its obligation to suppress heresy.108
Nothing happened along these lines. The Instrument of Government (1653) that brought the Protectorate into being had already affirmed the “Christian religion . . . as the public profession of these nations.” Language of this kind previously appeared in the “Agreement of the People” (January 1649) fashioned within the New Model Army. Its reappearance may seem almost pointless, perhaps because the policies it endorsed were a curious mixture of new and old. What was new was the provision that the civil state could not coerce anyone in matters of religion. Already (1650), the Rump Parliament had eliminated the requirement that everyone in England attend a parish church. What was old or conventional was the willingness of the Rump to bolster the financial situation of ordained ministers and its recommendation that the civil state employ “able and painful ministers” to confront “error, heresy, and whatever is contrary to sound doctrine.” Subsequently, a small group of ministers that included Owen met to devise something like a creed for all English Protestants (see chap. 9), a project that never came to fruition.109 For conservatives and moderates, a more positive step was the government’s decision to regulate the appointment and quality of ministers, initially (March 1654) by setting up “triers” charged with scrutinizing the credentials of candidates for ordination. In August 1654, the government also began to appoint “ejectors” who resumed the process of eliminating “scandalous” or otherwise unacceptable ministers. And, at a moment when Fifth Monarchists and some Independents were urging the government to abolish the tithes that funded many ministers, an unlikely coalition of Independents, Presbyterians, and others blocked this proposal when it came up for debate in the nominated Parliament of 1653. Throughout the 1650s, ministers who straddled the line between congregational and Presbyterian perspectives worked their way to common ground on ministry, a reformation of manners, guarding the sacraments from the unworthy, and protecting orthodox doctrine. Yet in the face of opposition from various quarters and the Lord Protector’s unwillingness to curtail liberty of conscience, the institutional consequences were quite limited.110
Only after the Lord Protector’s death in 1658 did Owen and some of his fellow Independents decide to create a statement of doctrine. Half or more of the congregations in Britain were represented at the “Savoy conference” that met in London in December 1658 and endorsed a statement of faith. In all but a few respects it replicated the Westminster Confession. Despite the ups and downs of the 1650s, it included (chap. 26) a hint of Brightman-like optimism about the future by imagining “that in the latter days, Antichrist being destroyed, the Jews called, and the adversaries of the Kingdom of his dear Son broken, the Churches of Christ” would be “edified through a free and plentiful communication of light and grace.”111 Four years later, the Restoration Parliament voted to exclude from the state church any minister who did not acknowledge episcopacy, the royal supremacy, and the Book of Common Prayer. Like hundreds of others, Owen left the church he had worked within his entire life and became a “Dissenter.” Independency would persist, as would Baptists and Quakers. Never again, however, would Independents lay their hands on the levers of power in Britain.
For Archibald Johnston and other leaders of the insurgency of 1637, the National Covenant of 1638 had been an extraordinary example of divine providence. In its aftermath, more wonders followed in quick succession: the General Assemblies of 1638 and 1639, victory in the second Bishops’ War, the “free” Parliament of 1640. In October 1640, the two governments, one of them still unreformed, began to negotiate a treaty of peace that would allow the Scottish army to leave England. To London, therefore, came commissioners to negotiate the terms of that treaty, a group that included Johnston, Robert Blair, Robert Baillie, and Alexander Henderson. Entrusted with eight objectives by the Scottish government, the commissioners secured most of them: no penalties imposed or threatened on those in Scotland who led the insurgency, the royal castle in Edinburgh surrendered to the new regime, suppression of anti-Covenanter propaganda, a promise to never declare war against Scotland (or vice versa) without the approval of each country’s parliament, and money to cover the costs of raising and sustaining the Scottish army. The two most significant clauses were constitutional. Charles I agreed to legitimize what the Scottish Parliament of 1640 had enacted, although saying he would do so officially when he visited Scotland, and he accepted a role for that Parliament in naming the king’s officers of state, a privilege he was unwilling to concede to the Long Parliament. These were remarkable concessions, yet what the Covenanters really wanted was something no treaty or monarch’s good will could provide, a structure (not a document!) that would preserve the revolution of 1638–1640. For the men who had taken over the kirk and civil government, the best means of doing so would be a Church of England organized along Presbyterian lines. To this end, Alexander Henderson drafted and a bookseller published Arguments Given in by the Commissioners of Scotland unto the Lords of the Treaty perswading Conformity of Church government, as one principall Meanes of a continued peace betweene the two Nations (1641). Paradoxically, in Scotland itself high hopes for stabilizing the revolution of 1638 were giving way to cracks within the Covenanter movement and, here and there, resistance to the actual Covenant of 1638. It had never been signed by all the nobility or every parish, a fact acknowledged by the Scottish Parliament in 1640 when it ordered every adult to sign, and tensions increased after the government dispatched soldiers to Ireland in 1642 to combat the Catholic rebellion and organized another to join parliamentary forces in England. Warfare was burdensome, felt in higher taxes and the impressment of men to serve as soldiers alongside ongoing reprisals against Catholic or Catholic-tilting nobility.112
Nor did the political and social elite of Scotland always welcome the daring of the General Assembly of 1638 and its successors. The royal supremacy was another sticking point, a supremacy the Covenanter government had essentially rejected. Was the institution of monarchy also being undermined, as Charles I had been saying ever since the insurgency of 1637 erupted? Questions of this kind prompted a small group of nobles in 1640 to endorse a “band” that added a royalist tinge to the Covenant of 1638. The most important of the signers was James Graham, Earl of Montrose, the head of Clan Graham. An effective leader of Scottish troops during the two Bishops’ Wars, he began to tilt toward the king and, when civil war broke out in England in 1642, sided with Charles.
The king did this group no favors when he visited Edinburgh in late summer of 1641, his second visit as monarch and, as it turned out, his last. Ahead of time, he signaled that he would acknowledge “the Religion, and Church government of Scotland, according to the acts of the late Assembly” (a reference to the assemblies of 1638 and 1640) and respect the authority of Parliament. Privately, he hoped to unwind the extremes of the Scottish revolution and rally local support for his dealings with the Long Parliament. Tense negotiations with Archibald Johnston, Alexander Henderson, the Earl of Argyll, and others ended with the king agreeing to approve what had been voted by the Parliament of 1640 and to exclude opponents of the National Covenant from offices of state. He did so only after his hand was weakened by a plot to remove Argyll and James Hamilton, whose daughter had married Argyll, from the scene.
The good news for Scottish moderates was the willingness of the Covenanter regime to include some of them on the Committee of Estates, an instrument devised by the insurgents to replace the Privy Council and run things between parliaments. In December 1642 the moderates (or, as characterized by a historian of the parliaments of this period, its “pragmatic and conservative” members) actually outvoted the Covenanter faction on a matter relating to the king, only to find that theirs was a short-lived victory once Argyll mobilized his allies and regained control. So matters stood until the summer of 1643, when Parliament reconvened and the government had to decide which side to favor in the English Civil War. By this time, the structure of Parliament had evolved from the days of James VI and I. With bishops eliminated and their place taken by burgesses, the two nonnoble groups (gentry and burgesses) could outvote a divided nobility, some of them jealous of Argyll’s prominence or half-hearted Covenanters or, like the current Earl of Huntly who led Clan Gordon, committed to Catholicism. The apparatus for governing the state church also changed when the General Assembly of 1642 authorized a “Commission for the Public Affairs of the Kirk” to serve as an executive committee (to use modern parlance) between sessions of the assembly itself.113
Entry into civil war tested every aspect of Covenanter politics and ideology. Initially, this decision seemed the surest means of guaranteeing the revolution of 1638. Monarchy would persist, but Presbyterian-style worship, doctrine, and church government would replace episcopacy in England. In August 1643, enthusiasm for the Solemn League and Covenant blinded the Covenanter party to the possibility that the Long Parliament might not live up to its side of the alliance. Nor did anyone sense the consequences of becoming entangled in the politics of religion in England, a politics that was becoming irretrievably divisive by 1644. At rare moments, as when Robert Baillie returned from London in January 1645 to report to the General Assembly on the workings of the Westminster Assembly, optimism about the alliance overtook what was happening in London, for Baillie told his colleagues that, after long delays, the assembly had approved the directory of worship and a plan of church government. He also reported that “all” of the ministers in London were bestirring themselves on behalf of Presbyterianism. On the other hand, Baillie acknowledged that debate was persisting on a confession of faith. And, as noted above (sec. 2), the Long Parliament was on the verge of unwinding a fundamental premise of the Scottish system: the close relationship between church discipline and ministry-led presbyteries.114
A year later, Baillie and his fellow delegates were singing a different tune.115 The project of uniformity between the two state churches was collapsing, done in by its enemies in the Long Parliament, the politics of the New Model Army, and the king’s intransigence. Twice (in 1644 and 1646), the Scots insisted on offering fresh proposals on religious and constitutional issues to the king, the second time after his armies had been defeated. On each of these occasions, the king refused to repudiate episcopacy. The breakdown of these negotiations was bad news for the Covenanters, who had to ask themselves if the advent of peace had turned the Solemn League and Covenant into a meaningless document. All this was happening at a moment when an “ideological revolution” was unfolding under the influence of English apocalypticism. Instead of being perceived as the cutting edge of reformation, Presbyterian Scotland was becoming known as a “Babylonish Beast.”116
The bad news also included civil war in Scotland itself. In the aftermath of the Solemn League and Covenant, Charles I authorized the Earl of Montrose to organize a royalist counterattack in his homeland. Gathering together Catholic clansmen and Irish Catholics brought over from their home country, Montrose invaded the Highlands in mid-1644. Professing himself a loyal son of the Church of Scotland, he blamed the Covenanter alliance with the Long Parliament for tying Scottish Protestantism to “Brownists and Independents” who rejected Scottish-style Presbyterianism, or what he termed “the middle way of our reformed religion.” Soon, his ragtag army, which eventually included some of the Gordons, was defeating every Covenanter force it encountered, and continued to do so after Montrose led it into the Lowlands, where its victories included the capture of Glasgow, the largest town in the southwest. There, he used his newfound authority as the King’s Commissioner in Scotland to summon a parliament as a step toward restoring royal rule. Suddenly the wheel turned. Facing Scottish troops withdrawn from England at a moment when his own army was weakened by desertion, he was defeated at the battle of Philiphaugh in September 1645. Montrose escaped, but not most of the Irish, who were butchered by the Covenanters. Fighting continued in the Highlands and elsewhere for another two years before Covenanter forces finally suppressed royalist-tilting clans and stray groups of Irish. Montrose was permitted to live by himself, though he eventually left the country, returning again in 1649 on behalf of Charles II. This time he was quickly defeated and, despite his social rank, hanged in Edinburgh in 1650.117
Civil war on Scottish soil and severe episodes of the bubonic plague did immense damage to the fabric of clans, churches, and moral discipline. Wherever Montrose’s army looted and those loyal to the Covenanter regime fled, as happened to the Highland Campbells, the state church fell into disarray. Now, for hardliners such as Archibald Johnston, the challenges were twofold: summoning the Scottish people to renew the country’s covenant with God and deciding how to punish the “delinquents” who sided with Montrose, a process that began in 1644 and accelerated in 1645. In a “remonstrance” to the Committee of Estates, the Commissioners of the Kirk warned against any overtures of “peace” to the rebels or any slacking of fervor for the Covenant of 1643. Johnston was unyielding when it came to those who had broken with that covenant. When Parliament met in November 1645, he called for a “serious searche and inquiery after suche as wer eares and eyes to the enimies of the commonwealthe.” Two months later (January 1646), Parliament approved an “Act of Classes” spelling out the penalties for three different levels of those deemed “malignant.” The blood was up; in his absence, Montrose was condemned as a traitor, four of the nobility who had been captured at Philip-haugh were executed; others were fined, banished, or excommunicated; and ministers who had temporized or gone over to the rebels were deprived of their pulpits. Slowly but surely, the revolution in Scotland began to devour itself.118
By mid-1646, a deeper crisis was emerging in the wake of the Long Parliament’s tempered endorsement of the Westminster Assembly. A theological problem lay at the heart of this crisis, the unwillingness of that Parliament to enforce a covenant that the Covenanters regarded as akin to divine law. With their alliance in doubt, the Covenanter government had few alternatives in 1646 other than to hope for a breakthrough in negotiations with Charles I.119 In May 1646, when the king voluntarily entrusted himself to the Scottish army after fleeing Oxford, face-to-face debate with him unfolded in Newcastle. To that city came the ministers Robert Blair, Robert Douglass, Andrew Cant, and an ailing Alexander Henderson (who died in August), each of them hoping to persuade Charles to sign the Covenant of 1643 and commit himself to Presbyterianism as the true apostolic system. Charles teased them with the possibility that, if “Episcopacy is unlawful, I doubt not but God will so enlighten mine Eyes.” In letters the king exchanged with Henderson, Charles borrowed from his father and the anti-presbyterians of circa 1590–1620 the argument that, because it began from beneath in opposition to the reigning monarch, Presbyterianism was inherently anti-monarchical. Henderson did his best to reassure Charles by citing what James VI had said at the time of the Golden Acts. His main point in these exchanges was to represent Presbyterianism as what Christ had intended for the church and episcopacy as a much later intrusion if not invention, an argument the king deflected by citing the Church Fathers. Neither really listened to the other, for Charles was tone-deaf to the power of the myth that sustained the Covenanters and continued to insist that monarchy was untenable without bishops.120
Lacking common ground with Charles and unable to agree with the Long Parliament on the conditions of peace, the government struck a bargain: it would hand over the king and the Scottish army would return to Scotland once the English government initiated the payment of 400,000 pounds to cover its expenses. In November 1646, the Commissioners of the General Assembly tried anew to shame the English government into supporting the alliance and did so again in 1647, citing the many “dangerous errours in England” and the willingness of some in that country to betray the Covenant of 1643. “Hold fast” to your “profession,” the assembly pleaded in 1647, and put “Presbyteriall Government” into practice. Only if this happened would true religion be rescued from its plight.121
Mindful of what was at stake theologically, Samuel Rutherford, Archibald Johnston, George Gillespie, and others hastened to spell out the underlying issues. As early as May 1644, Rutherford had sensed that reformation along Scottish lines was not going to happen in an England still attached to “the remnants of Babylon’s pollutions.” A vigorous advocate of Presbyterianism within the Westminster Assembly, Rutherford poured his politico-theological militancy into Lex, Rex, or the Law and the Prince (1644) and A Free Disputation Against Pretended Liberty of Conscience (1649).For him as for Johnston, who articulated his vision of religious politics in addresses in late 1646 to the Long Parliament and the Westminster Assembly, the church possessed an authority in matters of religion greater than that of any civil institution. Both were subject to divine law, but only the church was exclusively governed by principles “established by Christ, the Head and King of his Church.” Knowing that this argument had been repudiated by English erastians and that the Long Parliament was tilting toward “conveniency and humane constitutions,” Rutherford insisted that “Church Government was “jure divino,” that is, “established by Christ” and embedded in “conscience.” He warned, too, of the tendency in English negotiations with Charles I to diminish his authority to the point of introducing “confusion.” The state was also of God’s doing, charged by Him to implement divine law and preserve uniformity of religion and, crucially, to “defend true religion for the salvation of all.” Old Testament texts were the basis of this argument, texts that validated the model of a nation in covenant with God and a single state church. Hence the superiority of Presbyterianism vis-à-vis the schismatic consequences of Independency.122
For Johnston, the disputes about authority that fractured the Long Parliament and New Model Army were essentially irrelevant. “Christs kingdom” was superior to civil authority: “There is no authority to be balanced with this, nor post to be set up against his post.” The conclusion was inevitable. As a sacred text, the Covenant of 1643 remained invulnerable to “civile rights.” Only when this argument was recognized would peace and unity return to Britain and a purified Church of Scotland be protected against its enemies. For George Gillespie, writing in Aarons Rod Blossoming (1646), the immediate enemy was the Erastianism voiced by William Prynne and others. Insisting on the identity of Christ as the rightful king of the church and, in an aside, disputing the tagline of “Arbitrary” that its enemies had attached to Presbyterianism, he drew on Martin Bucer’s De Regno Christi and various Reformed confessions to validate an essentially Christendom model of church and state that looked back to the Old Testament.123
These high claims for divine law as the framework for state policy resonated with the Commissioners of the kirk, who also reiterated the tried- and-true theme of repentance: at the root of the adversities befalling Scotland was the country’s unfaithfulness to the National Covenant and, at a deeper level, its unfaithfulness to the myth of a church shorn of all imperfections and therefore the church most favored by God. In 1637–38, this myth had triumphed over every alternative. Now, however, a weariness with the financial and military burdens of the war was overtaking the drama of doing battle with the Antichrist. This weariness worked to the advantage of James Hamilton, who returned to his homeland in 1646 and patched together a coalition of disaffected nobility, the moderate wing of the Covenanter party, and those who, like Hamilton himself, wanted to come to the aid of the king at a moment when, in their words, he was “in apparent Danger, and environed with Sectaries,” a reference to the New Model Army. Politicking in late 1647 was intense, the key issue for some being the king’s willingness to take the Covenant of 1643. Had he done so, the hard-core covenanters might have rallied to his side. Instead, the outcome was victory for Hamilton’s coalition, which offered the king an alliance against the likes of Cromwell and the sectaries, an “Engagement” that did not commit the king to endorsing Presbyterianism. As his side of this bargain, Charles I promised to implement this system and the Directory for Worship in England for three years but refused to sign the covenant and exempted his practice from worship as defined by the Assembly. As a sop to the more forcefully Presbyterian, he agreed to more “free debate and consultation” with a reconstituted Westminster Assembly that would include twenty persons of his own choosing.124
For Hamilton’s coalition, it was crucial that the king undertake to suppress the “opinions and practices” of a wide array of sectaries that included “Independents.” Nonetheless, hardliners in the kirk, or “Protestors,” immediately accused Hamilton of betraying the cause of 1643, the proof being that the new alliance did not provide for the “safety and security of Religion.” In July, the General Assembly characterized the Engagement as unlawful.125 Weakened by divisions of this kind, in July 1648 an “Engager” army crossed the border into Lancashire. Few English royalists came north to reinforce it, for local uprisings had been crushed by parliamentary forces. A month later, the New Model Army and the Engagers clashed in the battle of Preston. The outcome was total defeat for the Scots and, for the Commissioners of the kirk who had objected to the Engagement, another opportunity to run the country.
Even, for a moment, run it in cooperation with Cromwell, who, in the aftermath of his victory, met with Argyll and others to discuss certain common concerns, chief among them ensuring that the remnants of an Engager army would not endanger the new government or threaten the parliamentary regime in England, an event celebrated in A true Account of the great expressions of Love from the Noblemen . . . of the Kingdom of Scotland (October 1648). Back in power, the Commissioners of the kirk demanded a far-reaching purge of Engagers and “malignants.” In January 1649, a new Parliament dominated by burgesses and gentry reaffirmed the Covenant of 1643 and endorsed a second “Act of Classes” that defined a range of punishment for those who had sided with Hamilton and the king—fines or exile for some, excommunication for a great many others, a sprinkling of executions, and a ban on “Engager” officers or nobility from participating in political life. In March, a Parliament radicalized by the exclusion of so many of the nobility listened to Johnston (who, after being knighted by Charles I in 1641, became known as Johnston of Wariston) and others insist that it abolish the system of patronage that, for decades, had enabled the nobility to play an outsized role in the appointment of ministers. At long last, this stone rolled over the hill.126
By this time, the Argyll government had responded to the execution of Charles I by recognizing his eldest son as Charles II, a step that immediately ended any possibility of collaborating with the Rump in England. The envoys sent to negotiate with the new king in the Netherlands, where he was receiving advice from people of various persuasions, were blunt. Relying on what the Parliament in Edinburgh had laid out as the basis for an alliance, they offered military support aimed at restoring him to the throne provided he took the Covenant of 1643, acknowledged “all parliamentary legislation securing the National Covenant,” and agreed to establish “Presbyterian church government in all three kingdoms.” He would also have to sustain the immunity of general assemblies from royal control, reject the Book of Common Prayer, and acknowledge the “idolatrie of his Mother.” Charles demurred, in part because he was counting on an alliance of supporters in Ireland to come to his aid. This possibility vanished once Cromwell took the New Model Army to Ireland (August 1649) and suppressed the royalist and Catholic forces in that country. With no other options, the young king accepted the invitation to come to Scotland.127
Nothing was simple about the new alliance.128 The story of how Charles II was treated and, in turn, treated the Scottish leaders does little credit to either side, with Charles dissembling as he took the covenant and, some months later, was crowned, and Argyll’s government keeping up the pretense of unity. Awaiting word of his intentions, Parliament proscribed a group of Scottish nobility from having any contact with the king and, after he arrived, insisted that he exclude some of the supporters he brought with him. Beforehand, the Commissioners of the kirk demanded that anyone associated with the Engagement be dismissed from the army. Not until August 1650 did Charles finally sign the covenant, although he indicated privately that he did not believe in it. He also added his name to a statement lamenting “the idolatry of his mother” and “his fathers opposition to the worke of God, and to the solemne league and covenant.”129
Now, the challenge was to assemble a fresh army, for the king’s presence made it inevitable that the New Model Army would come north. At the battle of Dunbar (September 1650), Cromwell’s troops overwhelmed the Scots, a defeat the Commissioners of the kirk blamed on those in Scotland who remained unrepentant—the “malignants” who had accompanied Charles II and, contrary to the advice of the kirk, not been purged, and possibly Charles II, who was asked “to consider if he hes come to the covenant . . . upon politicke interest, for gaining a crowne to himselfe, rather then to advance religioune and righteousness.”130 In early October, Charles slipped the reins placed on him and fled, only to return and reaffirm his commitment to the Covenanter program, which was struggling to survive in midland and highland Scotland in the face of more fractures, one of them the emergence of a group in southwestern Scotland favoring something closer to free-form worship and congregational-style structure, a possibility the kirk had tried to forestall in 1647 by prohibiting the publication of books on behalf of that system.131
With another battle looming, royalists and moderates regained a voice in the government and demanded that “Engagers” and “malignants” be included in the government and the army. In June 1651, Parliament agreed to this argument and rescinded the Acts of Classes of 1646 and 1649. Pushed aside, hard-line Covenanters turned their fire on Cromwell. Well before this, they had been characterizing him as a “blasphemer” and lamenting his refusal to acknowledge the “perfect” reformation accomplished in Scotland. When he turned up in Glasgow in the spring of 1651, the “lawfulness” of his campaign against the Scottish government was disputed by ministers who told him to his face that he had committed a “breach of covenant” (that is, broken the oath he took in 1643) and was engaging in “sinfull rebellion and murder.” Equipped with this rhetoric but enfeebled by the purges it had suffered, a Scottish army entered England, where it was defeated at the battle of Worcester (August 1651). Once again, a Stuart king escaped in disguise, leaving behind a near-decade of agitation by scattered groups of royalists in England, Scotland, and Ireland who fantasized about overthrowing Cromwell’s government.132
Now all of Scotland came under the sway of English troops. No longer independent, the country was incorporated into a confederation based in London, with toleration as state policy. The final, ineffective General Assembly met in 1653. Ministers continued to preach, spasms of moral discipline erupted, and Independency cropped up here and there, as did a few Baptists. Meanwhile, the quarrels that disrupted the kirk between 1641 and the early 1650s and divided Scottish society—quarrels too many to incorporate into this narrative—were making it difficult for parishes to agree on who should serve as minister or be admitted to the Lord’s Supper. On the other hand, the Cromwellian settlement ensured that Scotland had no bishops or prayer book until the wheel turned anew after the Restoration of Charles II, whereupon the tandem of monarchy and episcopacy returned, to be discarded a third time in the aftermath of the “Glorious Revolution” that overthrew James II.133
What Charles I had failed to accomplish became a reality in 1651, unity among the three kingdoms in how religion should be practiced. Now, however, unity was more about excluding than including, for the Cromwellian settlement—to give it a name—took for granted that the two alternatives of circa 1640, Presbyterianism and episcopacy, were rejected, as was Catholicism, of course. Nor did England, Scotland, and Ireland have a state church. In retrospect, the pace of change seems astonishing. In the course of several years (c. 1648–52), magisterial religion in Scotland, England, and Ireland had been dismantled, most of the accomplishments of the Westminster Assembly deprived of support, and long-standing ties with the Reformed international effectively broken. In civil society, the constitutional arrangement of circa 1640 had given way to a commonwealth, followed (mid-1653) by the Protectorate.
Of the ironies embedded in this sequence of events, the greatest may be that a Puritan was now the head of state, although only until Cromwell died in 1658. What kind of Puritan was Cromwell? As had become clear by the mid-1640s, he did not share the agenda that John Knox, Walter Travers, and Thomas Cartwright had inherited from the Reformed tradition, which took for granted an inclusive, ministry-centered state church and state-enforced uniformity. On the other hand, his mental world had been shaped by the fervent anti-Catholicism of John Foxe, whose sympathy for the faithful few was among the sources of Cromwell’s admiration for “the poor Godly People” who suffered from the oppression of worldly powers. “To love the Lord and His poor despised people, to do for them, and to be ready to suffer with them” was how Cromwell vowed to use his authority as an officer in the New Model Army and subsequently as head of state. From Foxe and many others, including his schoolmaster Thomas Beard, he also acquired a strongly personal understanding of divine providence. Not by his own capacities but by God acting through him was why he and his soldiers were victorious in so many battles, a conviction he retained in the closing moments of his life when he daily “rehearsed the 71 Psalm of David, which hath so near a relation to his Fortune and to his Affairs, as that one would believe it had been a Prophesie purposely dictated by the holy Ghost for him.”134 He owed a good deal, as well, to the practical divinity and its emphasis on an inward experience of divine grace and a reformation of manners. More unusually, he was a “millenarian.” Aware of what a long line of commentators on biblical prophecy had said about the conversion of the Jews as a sign of Christ’s impending return, he authorized a debate in 1655 about their status and, although never taking official action, his government pursued a de facto toleration of Jews who worshipped openly.135
A hypocrite in the eyes of many but a saint-like figure to others,136 Cromwell’s larger goal was to transform religious factionalism into a new version of unity. The alternative to a national covenant based on Old Testament precedents was a spiritual unity among the “saints,” a unity he discerned beneath the many differences of opinion about infant baptism, church structure, and matters of doctrine. In a letter of September 1645 celebrating the retaking of Bristol, he commended the “same spirit of faith” in soldiers who were variously Presbyterian and Independent; “they agree here [in the army], and have no names of difference: pity it is it should be otherwise anywhere.” In the same letter, he affirmed the principle that “All that believe, have the real unity, which is most glorious; because inward, and spiritual, in the Body, and to the Head” and, in the next sentence, spoke dismissively of “forms, commonly called Uniformity” as meaningless until and unless “conscience” accepted them. As head of state, he attempted an experimental exercise in “light and reason” (light being the Holy Spirit), the Nominated Parliament (1653) of men whose religious sincerity had been validated by certain congregations or churches. Expecting it to agree on an agenda of reform, Cromwell watched in dismay as factionalism thwarted any real progress. Nor was he satisfied with the two elected parliaments that followed, neither of which satisfied his hopes for a fusion of nationhood with godliness.137
Nonetheless, Cromwell was willing to use the coercive authority of the state to preserve some aspects of unity, as in being willing to regulate who could enter the ministry. On the other hand, he refused to use his authority as Lord Protector to uphold—or possibly impose—the kind of rules that made sense to the godly in New England and historically had made sense to the Reformed international. That his second Parliament tried to strengthen the barriers against heterodoxy and attempted to punish the Socinian John Biddle was not his doing. Wanting unity but not uniformity, he endorsed religious liberty for almost everyone except Catholics but “connived” at allowing them and prayer-book Protestants a certain freedom. When James Naylor crossed a line by representing himself as Christ when he entered Bristol, pressure from the more moderate or conservative members of his government pushed Cromwell into accepting a response in keeping with the Blasphemy Act of 1650. In the main, however, Cromwell clung to the assumption that unity should not coerced.138
The underlying problem was not his doing; an unsettling of authority that accompanied the Protestant Reformation and became more intense once the Puritan movement turned against the Elizabethan Settlement. As historians before me have pointed out, the legitimacy of a Protestant Church of England was denied by English Catholics and, during the reign of Elizabeth I, by more daring Protestants such as John Udall and Robert Browne (see chap. 2). Moreover, the compromises of the Elizabethan Settlement and the crackdown on nonconformity empowered some in the House of Commons to question the integrity of the bishops and assert a voice for Parliament in religious affairs. Thanks to the looseness of social and political authority and ongoing conflict with Catholic Spain, no real crisis occurred until the policies of James I and Charles I alienated some of the nobility and gentry in Scotland and England and revitalized Puritan objections to episcopacy, the Book of Common Prayer, and the royal supremacy.
What no one realized in 1640 was the inability of the Puritan movement to agree on principles of doctrine and church governance. To be sure, Thomas Edwards and others like him grasped that a Separatist-like disdain for an inclusive state church was being reborn in the “Congregational Way” of the colonists and similar experiments in the Netherlands in the late 1630s. Even so, the clergy and laymen who gathered at Westminster Hall in mid-1643 were expecting consensus on doctrine, worship, and governance and achieved the first and second of these. Where agreement became impossible after toleration began to divide the movement was on the role of the state. Once its authority was called into question and someone of Cromwell’s temperament began to govern, building a new Sion aligned with Reformed principles became impossible.
The fast-sermons preached before the Long Parliament took for granted that prophetic testimony and the ritual exercise of a fast day would unite the English people around a national covenant founded on divine law. This, too, was what the Covenanters in Scotland believed and, for a year or two, secured. But authority of the kind Johnston and Rutherford outlined in treatises and statements of the mid-1640s did not reappear. Indeed, the two great moments of covenanting—Scotland’s in 1638 and Scotland and England’s in 1643—fell short of being genuinely popular moments and became divisive. As Lord Protector, Cromwell had to rely on his generals to suppress or exclude Catholics, Royalists, Fifth Monarchists, Quakers, ardent Presbyterians, and the like. On the other hand, his son Henry, the head of the Irish government, turned to local Presbyterians out of dismay with the “many-head monster” of a “popular Protestantism” that in Dublin was undermining orthodoxy and the apparatus of discipline. This Cromwell recognized that the key to stability was to broaden the “social basis for his administration” beyond small cells of “visible saints.”139
In a thoughtful letter to John Winthrop (March 1648), his friend George Downing, who had returned to England from New England, reflected on the “ruine” that succeeded victory in the first Civil War, “the maine ground” of this ruine being “the great divisions among us.” One after another, Downing ticked off the goals of the groups that came together to oppose the king, goals so different as to make agreement impossible once the king had been defeated: some opposing “oppression in general” and therefore any form of “Church government” that curtailed liberty of conscience, others content with eliminating the king’s “evill counsellors,” still others wanting Presbyterianism to replace episcopacy, a handful of republicans questioning the institution of monarchy. Now, with unity no longer imperative in the aftermath of the king’s defeat, Downing underscored the reality of unending conflict.140
My narrative of the quest for a “thorough” reformation teaches the same lesson from a more theological and biblical perspective. In the 1560s, master words such as idolatry and purity had signified the difference between Catholic practice and Word-centered, Reformed-style worship. Already, however, the scenario in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs of the few versus the many and the mantra of edification implied that an inclusive state church would never be able to eliminate the unworthy. Apparent in Field and Wilcox, this train of thought became central to the alternative fashioned by Browne, Barrow, Penry, and Robinson and, in the 1630s and 1640s, to the schemes (however defined) of Independents, congregationalists, and Baptists on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1643, the Long Parliament and the Scots who supported the Solemn League and Covenant did not grasp the implications of this scheme, some because they dismissed it out of hand and others because they relied on the traditional ethics of obedience to prevail.
Civil wars have unexpected consequences, as do efforts to mobilize popular resistance. The most telling consequence of 1642–46 was the emergence of arguments on behalf of toleration or liberty of conscience. The more puzzling may be the mobilizing of public opinion in 1641–43 on behalf of “root and branch” reform. As was also true of the Covenanter insurgency in late 1630s Scotland, situations of this kind lured godly ministers and lay leaders into assuming that their program had broad support. This may have been true of a few aspects of that program, but not of those at its core. As a parliamentary military officer posted to Nottingham, John Hutchinson discovered when he undertook to defend the town against local Royalists that the townspeople wanted to sit out the war and did everything they could to thwart his mandate. Or, as happened in Parliament and the wider reaches of agitation about true religion, the lesson taught by civil war was that compromise would give way to more extreme outcomes—the abolishment of episcopacy, outbursts of iconoclasm, elimination of a Christendom understanding of the church, execution of Charles I, emergence of sects centered on the immediacy of the Holy Spirit, and eruptions of significant theological dissent (see chap. 9). In the absence of broad-based consensus, infighting among the godly undermined any semblance of uniformity tied to agreement on the contours of orthodoxy and the figure of a Christian prince who had near-absolute authority.
As in the Greek legend of the dragon’s teeth that sprang into life as armed men who began to kill each other, so in mid-century Britain the great themes of the Puritan movement mutated into weapons the godly used to identify and turn against each other and, in spasms of witch-hunting, turn on others.141 Only in New England were these tensions contained. How this happened after 1640 is described in chapter 9, where we also revisit theological argument and religious practice during the 1640s and 1650s.