CHAPTER III

PURITANISM AND LAUD

"The greatest liberty of our kingdom is religion.”—PYM.

WH

HILE the division of Church parties was as old as the Reformation itself, the outstanding fact in the seventeenth century, as far as the internal constitution of the Church was concerned in relation to the clergy and the people alike, was their distribution into two great parties-the Prelatical or Hierarchical party and the Puritan or Nonconformist party, who though within the Church of England were not at ease in it, and were eager for further reforms than the Reformation and subsequent events had given them. At the time of King James' accession (1603) the "millenary petition" makes it clear that scarcely any dissatisfaction was expressed with the essential doctrine of the Church, but only with certain rites and ceremonies as either positively sinful or inexpedient and mischievous. But this dissatisfaction did not terminate with points of Church government and ritual: by 1619 it had developed into a doctrinal antagonism. The most resolute upholders of Episcopacy and the established ritual had not, generally speaking, exhibited any hostility to the Calvinistic doctrines of their opponents: at the utmost, they rather abstained from pressing, as their opponents hotly did, the distinctive peculiarities of Calvinism. Yet after the Synod of Dort (1619) the tendency to a doctrinal divergence between the two parties became most evident. It was then perceived that there was an organic connexion between the

Calvinistic theology and the Calvinistic polity and ritual, so that the one implied the other: while it was also perceived that Calvinistic doctrine was chiefly confined to the Puritan section, and that a good many of the hierarchical party tended towards a Romish or Arminian interpretation of the Articles. The" Arminians " and " popishly inclined Doctors" were the most zealous and thoroughgoing supporters of the royal prerogative in the State and of hierarchical forms in the Church, and, as was to be expected, King James' theological prejudices were easily overcome by his partiality towards his divine right theory of Kingship, and it was a matter of complaint that Arminian divines were admitted to intimacy with the King and were favoured with preferments. The pulpits soon became the organs of the popular feeling, and the steady Calvinistic fire from one set was returned by Arminian sharpshooting from another. Abundant dissertations were heard on the "Five points "-Election, Redemption, Original Sin, Irresistible Grace, and the Perseverance of the Saints-and this was answered by abundant condemnation on the evils of nonconformity. The King resolved on a characteristic measure-to I command silence on both sides or such a moderation as was next to silence." He was helped by Buckingham and the Lord Keeper Williams, Bishop of Lincoln: but the "Directions to Preachers" (1622) forwarded to all the bishops, with instructions that every clergyman or preacher in their dioceses should receive a copy and be obliged to obey its injunctions, failed to lessen the storm. The peace of the Church was not to be preserved by abridging the liberty of preaching, which was in those days the right of free thought and a free press in one. The Puritans and Calvinists protested most loudly, and towards the end of James' reign (1622-5) a new distinction of names arose, superseding to some extent the traditional distinctions into Prelatists and Puritans. Those of the prelatic or hierarchical party, who were most easy under the recent

policy of the Court towards the Catholics, were denounced as Arminians and semi-Papists; and the new name of "Doctrinal Puritans" was invented as a term of reproach for those who held high Calvinistic views and shared in the popular alarm at the concessions to Rome and continental Popery.1 Bishop Williams was during this period the working partner of Buckingham, both in Church and State, and in State politics his aim seems to have been to bring the prerogative, if possible, into greater harmony with popular feeling, while in Church politics he was disposed towards an inclusive rather than a coercive system. In modern language, his policy was that of the Broad Church. But at this point there appeared prominently on the scene a man who was to supersede Williams in the government of the Church and whose life was to be identified in a very memorable manner for the next twenty years with the history of England. This was William Laud, who did most to kindle the blaze, and in whom the spirit of the new Anglican anti-Calvinism was incarnate "Churchmen in all ages," says Mr. Morley, "are divided into those on the one hand who think most of institutions, and those on the other who think most of the truths on which the institutions rest." Laud belongs markedly to the first of these types, and his policy was the worst possible to rule the storm or guide the whirlwind.

William Laud was born at Reading in 1573. He was the son of a well-to-do clothier, and passed from Reading free school to St. John's College, Oxford, of which four years later he became a fellow. He took his M.A. degree in 1598: "at which time," says Wood, " he was esteemed by those that knew him a very forward, confident, and zealous person." He was of very small stature, and was known to the wits of the University as "parva Laus" or "little Laud." He became deacon in 1600, priest in 1601, held a divinity lectureship in 1 Masson's Milton, vol. i. p. 312.

2 Oliver Cromwell, p. 38.

1602, and in 1604 was one of the proctors of the University of Oxford. In the same year he became chaplain to the Earl of Devonshire, and being by 1607 B.D., he became vicar of Stanford, in Northamptonshire; in 1608 he had the advowson of North Kilworth, in Leicestershire, given him; being in the same year made D.D., he became chaplain to Neile, Bishop of Rochester, and to be near him he exchanged the advowson of North Kilworth for that of West Tilbury in Essex; in 1610, on being presented by Neile to the rectory of Cuckstone in Kent, he resigned his fellowship. His connexion with Oxford was renewed in 1611 by his election to the presidency of St. John's, and in that office he remained for ten years, becoming successively Chaplain to the King, Prebendary of Bugden in Lincoln, Archdeacon of Huntingdon, Dean of Gloucester, Rector of Ibstock in Leicestershire and Prebendary of Westminster. "In some sort," says Fuller, "he had thus served in all the offices of the Church from a common soldier upwards," and had "acquired an experimental knowledge of the conditions of all such persons as were at last to be subject to his authority." And yet he "bare no great stream," but flowed on in a kind of sombre privacy, "taking more notice of the world than the world did of him." His friends do not seem to have liked him, nor to have been able to make out what he was aiming at. "His life at Oxford," says Archbishop Abbot, "was to pick quarrels with the lectures of the public readers, and to advertise them to the then Bishop of Durham (Neile) that he might fill the ears of King James with discontents against the honest men that took pains in their places, and settled the truth, which he called Puritanism, on their authors. He made it his work to see what books were in the press and to look over Epistles Dedicatory, and Prefaces to the Reader, to see what faults might be found." It was thought dangerous in Oxford to be much in his company and his habit of ferreting out the faults of his fellow-clergymen and reporting or registering them

an act incompatible with a generous nature-led to unpopularity. From his earliest days of connexion with the Church he resolved on a patient course from which he never deviated. "Of all diseases," he says, "I have ever hated a palsy in religion, well knowing that too often a dead-palsy ends that disease in the fearful forgetfulness of God and His judgments. Ever since I came in place I laboured nothing more than that the external public worship of God, too much slighted in most parts of the kingdom, might be preserved, and that with as much decency and uniformity as might be; being still of opinion that unity cannot long continue in the Church where uniformity is shut out at the church door. And I evidently saw that the public neglect of God's service in the outward face of it, and the nasty lying of many places dedicated to that service, had almost cast a damp upon the true and inward worship of God; which, while we live in the body, needs external helps, and all little enough to keep it in any vigour." Laud thus was resolved on a ceremonial worship and punctual conformity to be observed throughout the Church and to be enforced by law and canon. So far he was anti-Puritan, but his anti-Puritanism was more than a passion for uniformity and ceremonial. He believed, as he himself avers, in the "divine apostolical right of Episcopacy." "There can be no Church without diocesan bishops," he said in 1603, and in 1614, "The Presbyterians are as bad as the Papists." In the inexorable logic with which he pressed this position, he was singular even among his own prelatic contemporaries, and he also went farther than most of them in the notion of the superior value of public worship over preaching in the ordinary service of the Church. In all this he was a persistent anti-Puritan, and it was he who invented and put in circulation the term " Doctrinal Puritans " as a synonym for those in the Church of England who adhered to Calvin doctrinally, even though they had no zeal for the Genevan discipline.