Introduction: The Reformed Conformist Style of Piety
‘My
House Is the House of Prayer’
On 5 October 1624, at 8 o’clock in the morning, the resident doctors of Oxford University gathered in the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, ‘clad in their scarlet robes’.1 The assembled academics then accompanied John Howson, Bishop of Oxford, in a solemn procession to Exeter College. They were met at the gate by the Rector, fellows, and scholars of the College, dressed in their surplices, with the rest of the College’s students in their academic gowns. To the sound of choral and instrumental music, the expanded procession then walked round the Quad to the recently completed College Chapel.
The construction of this new building had been overseen by George Hakewill, Archdeacon of Surrey, the wealthy clergyman who paid for it. Two years previously, Hakewill had lost his place at Court and been briefly imprisoned for presenting the young Prince of Wales (later King Charles I), to whom he was then a Chaplain, with an unauthorized tract denouncing the Prince’s proposed marriage to the King of Spain’s daughter, the Infanta Maria Anna. In the interim, Prince Charles, accompanied by his father’s favourite, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, had travelled to Spain in an unsuccessful attempt to woo the Spanish Princess. So Hakewill’s insistence that his new Chapel be consecrated on 5 October, the anniversary of the Prince’s return to England, may have held some savour of vindication.2
Hakewill’s new chapel was undoubtedly a remarkable building. Unique among the chapels of Oxford and Cambridge, it was almost square, with two parallel aisles separated by a line of Perpendicular arches.3 The Chapel was distinguished by its broad, traceried windows, its delicate Mannerist woodwork, an ornamental plaster ceiling in the gothic style, and a great trompe l’oeil window painted on the east wall.4 Across every otherwise clear-glazed light were inscribed the words ‘Domus Mea, Domus Orationis’: ‘My house is the house of prayer’.5
Grace and Conformity. Stephen Hampton, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190084332.003.0001
Perhaps the Chapel’s crowning glory, though, was its striking pulpit, whose ornate, pinnacled canopy was held up by a pair of distinctive Solomonic columns.6 Legend had it that the Emperor Constantine had taken such pillars from the ruined Temple in Jerusalem and installed them in front of the altar of St Peter’s Basilica, in Rome. Raphael had consequently incorporated columns of that design in a tapestry cartoon depicting the healing of the lame man at the Beautiful Gate, a cartoon which entered the English royal collection in 1623. Their use in Hakewill’s chapel antedates their better known use in the porch of Oxford’s University Church by over a decade.7 Incorporating such pillars into a pulpit dramatically underlined the significance of preaching as the locus for a Christian’s encounter with God.8 The effect would have been particularly powerful when the Exeter pulpit was moved, as intended, to the centre of the main aisle.
On entering the new chapel, Bishop Howson received an oration of welcome from a member of the College, before being led to his seat beneath the pulpit and close to the carpeted communion table.9 After formally enquiring whether it was the will of the College ‘to have this house dedicated to God and consecrated to his divine service,’ the Bishop knelt and began the rite with a prayer of dedication.10 The whole service, which included the ordinary Prayer Book office for the day and was again accompanied by elaborate choral and instrumental music, lasted nearly four hours.11 The sermon was preached by the Rector of Exeter, John Prideaux. Prideaux had been Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford since 1615 and was an internationally renowned exponent of Reformed orthodoxy. In 1624, he was already serving for the second time as Vice-Chancellor to his powerful patron, the University’s Chancellor, William Herbert, Third Earl of Pembroke. Prideaux took as his text the words inscribed on the Chapel windows: Luke 19:46, ‘My house is the house of prayer’.
Bishop Howson had published two sermons on the equivalent text from Matthew’s gospel in 1597 and 1598, and he cannot have missed the fact that, at significant points, Prideaux took a rather different line from his own. Both men certainly exhibited a profound reverence for sacred space. Prideaux began by underlining the anger that Christ had expressed in the Temple against the sacrilege perpetrated there.12 He then applied that dominical example to the proper use of church buildings in his own day:
God will have a house; this house must appear to be his peculiar; this peculiar must not be made common, as an [gu]ild hall for plays or pleadings; or a
shop for merchandise; or a cloister for idle walkers; or a gallery for pleasure; or a banqueting house for riot; much less a brothel for wantonness, or a cage for idolatrous superstitions but reserved as a sacred congregationhouse, where penitent & submissive supplicants may learn their duty by preaching; assure their good proceedings by sacraments, obtain their graces by prayer 13
Howson had quoted Chrysostom to much the same effect, twenty-five years earlier.14 Admittedly, Prideaux’s reference to the particular dangers of ‘idolatrous superstitions’ lent his idea of reverence for sacred space an antiCatholic edge, which Howson’s remarks had not conveyed.15
Prideaux underlined that Christ and the Apostles had never spoken against the ‘Cathedral Temple’ or the ‘parochial synagogues’ of the Jews. On the contrary, they had set Christians an example, by using them for their proper purpose in preaching, prayer, catechizing, and disputation. Prideaux commended the generosity with which Christians of earlier ages had established their churches. He remarked, however, ‘That which true devotion first grounded, necessity urged, conveniency furthered, holy ability perfected, and God blessed: opinion of merit, false miracles, apish imitation of Paynims, superstition toward relics and saints departed; and perchance in some, an itching ambition to get a name; through Devil’s stratagems, and man’s vanity, quickly perverted and abused’.16 True religion was consequently reduced to a mere show; ‘And no marvel, for God’s word and preaching once laid aside, and reconciliation by faith in Christ little sought after, or mistaken; what May-game and outward pomp, which best contented the sense, might not easily pass for the best religion’.17 For Prideaux, in other words, the neglect of preaching and a heterodox theology of salvation had led directly to a corruption of the medieval Church’s attitude to church buildings and liturgy. Howson had passed over such issues in silence, merely criticizing the medieval Church’s worldliness and excess.18
Even in the Patristic era, Prideaux pointed out, the Fathers had begun to express concern about the dangers of excessive devotion to church buildings. That said, Prideaux did not hide their appreciation of appropriate splendour, so long as it was combined with a sound theology of grace:
Not that these good men . . . misliked decency, cost, or state, proportional to situations, assemblies, and founders, and the abilities of such houses for Gods worship; but desired to restrain excess, curb ostentation,
stop superstition, which at length began to be intolerable in images and relics: but especially to beat men off from the conceit of merit, and rectify their good minds, where circumstances so required in divers cases, to more charitable employments.19
Where such problems were not in evidence, Prideaux remarked, the Fathers had applauded investment in church buildings. As a result, he went on, ‘they are not worthy therefore to be confuted, (or scarce deserve to be mentioned) who in hatred of a nation, or religion, or in heat of faction, overthrow God’s houses’.20 Prideaux lamented the fact that a proper regard for church buildings was lacking among the Christians of his own day. ‘It were to be wished . . . ’ he remarked, ‘that in building, repairing, and adorning such religious houses, our devotion were as forward as our warrant is uncontrollable. The very Turks may shame us in this behalf, who neglect their private mansions, to beautify their profane mosques. Surely God hath need of no such Houses, but the benefit of them redoundeth to ourselves’.21 Howson had said much the same, though at considerably greater length.22
Prideaux had no truck, however, with the superstitious opinions about church construction prevailing within the Church of Rome. He ridiculed Bellarmine’s discussion of the subject in the De Controversiis Christianae Fidei, taking particular exception to the Cardinal’s specious reasons that churches should point east.23 Prideaux underlined that he was perfectly happy for church buildings to point east, but not on such preposterous grounds: ‘These are the great Cardinal’s reasons for church architecture:’ he wrote, ‘which I refute not, but leave, for their conversion, who affect to direct their prayers by the rhumbs in the compass. The thing we disallow not, as in itself merely indifferent; yet embrace it not, on such Jesuitical inducements, but in regard of a commendable conformity’.24
Prideaux then turned to the question of consecration.25 Under the Old Covenant, he pointed out, God had instituted special ceremonies to dedicate certain objects, persons, and places to his service, ‘the consideration whereof might breed a reverence in his worshippers that should use them; and vindicate them from miscreants that should employ them otherwise’.26 This practice had continued in the Early Church, and all the relevant Patristic authorities agreed that the consecration of church buildings was ‘an ancient and necessary Church-constitution’. All agreed, too, Prideaux pointed out, ‘that no minister inferior to a bishop, might canonically consecrate it’.27 So there was therefore an episcopalian edge to his sermon, too.
Originally, church consecrations had simply involved prayer and preaching, and Prideaux cited approvingly the Second Helvetic Confession’s stipulation that ‘on account of God’s Word and sacred use places dedicated to God and his worship are not profane’.28 Prideaux’s positive reference to the Second Helvetic Confession was a rejoinder to Howson, who had criticized the Confession in his 1598 sermon. It also served to anchor the Exeter rite of consecration firmly within the wider Reformed tradition.
Prideaux complained that these innocent ceremonies had become unnecessarily elaborate over time and also been embroidered with specious legends. Prideaux offered several examples of these, ‘to acquaint the younger sort with these Romish mysteries; the notice whereof may give you a taste, how inclinable the Italian humours are always to play the mountebanks; and how blessed our case is, who so fairly are freed from them’. For, as Prideaux underlined, with yet another reference to the need for an orthodox soteriology, ‘As our Founders disclaim all merit, so our Reverend Bishops (as you see) pretend no miracles to credit their consecrations’.29
Prideaux believed that the consecration of church buildings had ample scriptural warrant. ‘Have we not this ground from the Apostle himself,’ he asked, ‘ “That every creature is sanctified by the word of God and prayer?” 1. Timothy 3.5. And what is sanctification, but that in general which consecration is in special, a severing of places, persons, and things, from common use, by deputing them through convenient rites, to Gods peculiar worship and service’.30 Such ceremonies, Prideaux pointed out, had ‘procured heretofore respect to the things, reverence to the persons, and an awful regard in men’s behaviours, as often as they entered into such sanctified places’.31 Sadly, this reverence for the sacred was much decayed: ‘In the looseness of these latter times: impudency pleads prescription for greater presumption, more commonly in such houses and assemblies, than would be tolerated before a Chair of State, or a common Court of Justice: nay, that pupil or servant, who in a College quadrangle will honour his Master, at least with a cap, in a Church at sermon time will make bold to affront him covered, howsoever he stand bare to deliver God’s message’.
Prideaux encouraged his congregation to a different course: ‘Take heed therefore . . . not only to thy foot, but to thy head, hands, and heart, when thou enterest into the House of God. . . . Not for the inherent sanctity of the place (which our adversaries press too far) but through the objective holiness, adherent to it, by Christ’s promises, sacred meetings, united devotion, joint participating of the Word and Sacraments, lively incitements
through others examples’.32 For Prideaux, in other words, although a church building was not holy, in and of itself; it certainly was holy in a derivative sense, by virtue of its connection with holy things.33 As a result, it was a Christian duty to express suitable reverence in church buildings, both inwardly and outwardly.
If any question was raised about whether church buildings should be dedicated, as Hakewill’s Chapel was, to departed saints; Prideaux’s response was clear: ‘We affirm, they may; not for their relics contained in them, or invocation directed to them, or graces expected from them; as the Papists contend to have, and the Puritans fondly cavil we give: but for certain notes of difference, the better to discern one church or chapel from another; and a religious retaining of those in memory, by whom God is honoured, and good men excited to imitation’.34 The printed version of the sermon included a marginal reference, at this point, to Richard Hooker’s discussion of the dedication of churches in the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity 35 Prideaux’s explicit condemnation of Puritanism here was significant: Puritanism was clearly one of the ‘others’ against which he was defining his own ecclesiastical identity.
A second ‘other’ emerged, when Prideaux defined the main purpose of all church buildings. As he put it,
these houses are not here Christened by the names of Concionatoria, or Sacramentaria; houses of preaching and administering the sacraments; (though preaching and sacraments be the ordinary and blessed means, for the begetting and confirming true faith in us, whereby our prayers may be effectual) but of . . . Oratoria, places of prayers, and Courts of Requests to the Great King of Heaven, as both the Greeks and Latins style them from the primary action; prayer . . . including, by a notable synecdoche, all other religious duties, which are ordered to it, and receive a blessing by it. And surely (beloved) public prayers and sermons, (for ought I find) never trespassed one upon another, till the itching humours of some men of late, would needs set them together by the ears. For what? must sermons needs be long to shorten prayers? or prayers be protracted or multiplied of purpose to exclude preaching? I pray God there be not a fault of both sides; of laziness in the one, and vain glory in the other: When those would excuse their slackness, or insufficiency, by a pretended devotion; and the other draw all devotion to attend on their discourses. Let preaching therefore so possess the pulpit, that prayer may name the church, as here it doth.36
With these words, Prideaux pointedly distanced himself from Howson’s sermon on the same dominical words; because setting public prayers and sermons together by the ears was precisely what the Bishop of Oxford had done twenty years earlier.
In 1598, Howson had taken exception to the injunction in the Second Helvetic Confession that ‘The greater part of meetings for worship is . . . to be given to evangelical teaching, and care is to be taken lest the congregation is wearied by too lengthy prayers’.37 Howson complained that ‘Though the Church of England hath no such constitution, yet the people entertain the practise of it, many of them condemning common prayer, but a greater part neglecting them, and holding it the only exercise of the service of God to hear a sermon’.38 ‘I complain not that our Churches are auditories,’ Howson underlined, ‘but that they are not oratories: not that you come to sermons, but that you refuse or neglect common prayer’.39 Prideaux’s words were therefore a public criticism of the man consecrating Exeter’s new chapel.
That said, they also represented a distinct qualification of the liturgical attitudes of the Second Helvetic Confession; an attitude which many Puritans shared. One of the Puritan complaints against the Prayer Book expressed in the 1605 Abridgment was that ‘It appointeth a liturgy which by the length thereof, doth in many congregations oft times necessarily shut out preaching’.40 The Abridgment had been republished in 1617 and would be again in 1638. Prideaux was therefore carefully locating his view of sacred space, and of orthodox Conformist devotion, in contradistinction to the likes of Howson, on the one hand, and the Puritans, on the other. He was also passing over, in discreet silence, the fact that the tension which both Howson and the Puritans perceived to lie between preaching and praying was a tension acknowledged by the Second Helvetic Confession, of which Prideaux had earlier approved. Here was, in other words, an appropriation of Reformed theological reflection on sacred space, but nuanced by the particular polemical situation of a Conformist working within the English Church.
The Consecration of Exeter Chapel was a memorable ceremony. It also presents a conundrum to historians of the Early Stuart Church, because it combines religious elements that have often been taken to be incompatible. Here was a stately liturgical ceremony, incorporating fine choral and instrumental music, taking place in a richly and symbolically decorated building, but a sustained hostility to the Church of Rome was also present. Here was a sermon extolling the spiritual significance of sacred space, the need for bodily reverence, and the legitimacy of costly church architecture
and furnishings, but also a sermon promoting orthodox Reformed soteriology, preached by one of Europe’s most celebrated Reformed divines. Above all, the event was an expression of Conformist devotion that was evidently as opposed to the more avant-garde expressions of Conformity as it was to Puritanism. The Consecration of Exeter College Chapel therefore stands as an eloquent testimony to what Peter McCullough has referred to as ‘a peculiarly Jacobean ecclesiastical culture which seemed increasingly comfortable with church beautification, both architectural and musical—as long as that did not threaten the inherited Elizabethan commitment to the ministry of the Word through preaching’.41 The purpose of this book is to explore the religious tradition within which this distinctive combination of religious impulses made sense.
Neither Puritan nor Laudian
In Scandal and Religious Identity in Early Stuart England (2015), Peter Lake and Isaac Stephens have forcefully reiterated the case that the Early Stuart Church was shaped by the interaction between a number of distinct, identifiable, and self-conscious religious identities. The identities around which Lake and Stephens primarily focussed their analysis were Puritanism and Laudianism. Their central contention, based on a close, intertextual reading of public and private sources, was that these two identities were not ‘the product of ideology and false consciousness, merely factitious constructs, generated by contemporaries in self-interested pursuit of polemical and political advantage’. Rather, ‘Founded on positions, both publicly canvassed and privately held, these terms effectively encode and characterize what a considerable number of centrally placed and influential groups and individuals were doing throughout the 1620s and 1630s’.
But Lake and Stephens also underlined that ‘we cannot simply accept the mutually reinforcing, bi-polar vision of the Laudians and Puritans as anything like an adequate account of the contemporary religious scene’. 42 In their study, they pointed to a 1637 sermon by the moderate Puritan Edward Reynolds and to Elizabeth Isham’s Book of Remembrance as evidence for a much richer spectrum of religious cultures.43 The consecration of Exeter College Chapel, and Prideaux’s sermon at it, is another case in point: a prominent religious ceremony that was neither Puritan nor Laudian, but explicitly and self-consciously distinct from both.
Lake and Stephens are certainly not the only historians who have tried to move beyond the binary opposition of Puritan and Laudian, in their analyses of the Early Stuart Church. As long ago as 1973, Nicholas Tyacke identified a ‘mainstream of Calvinist episcopalianism,’ in which he placed John Davenant.44 In The Early Stuart Church (1993), Kenneth Fincham underlined the significance of the conformist Calvinists within the Church of James I and Charles I, arguing that ‘we urgently need more studies of such conforming Calvinists, who are usually lost sight of between the more visible extremes of Puritan and Arminian’.45 In Catholic and Reformed (1995), Anthony Milton extensively discussed the views of those ‘Calvinist Conformists,’ among whom he numbered Prideaux.46 In Conforming to the Word (1997), Daniel Doerksen celebrated the fact that ‘Historians are at long last studying the Calvinist conformists,’ among whom he located John Donne and George Herbert.47 In Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (1998), Judith Maltby established a significant bedrock of popular Conformity that was staunchly Protestant, attached to the Book of Common Prayer, and yet neither Puritan nor Laudian in sympathy.48 In other words, the use of ‘Calvinist Conformist’ as a category and the recognition that ‘Calvinist Conformity’ was a distinct and significant expression of English Protestantism during the Early Stuart period are well established in the literature. That said, scholarly interest in the tradition has generally been confined to studies of individual ‘Calvinist Conformists,’ rather than attempting to engage with the tradition as a whole.49 This is in marked contrast to the way historians have approached both Puritanism and Laudianism. The study of Puritanism is so well established as to be virtually a subdiscipline in its own right. Laudianism has also attracted a number of dedicated studies.50 Calvinist Conformity has not.
Doerksen is arguably an exception here. His book sets out to answer the question ‘What kind of conformity characterized the Jacobean Church?’51 However, he does not engage in depth with the theology that was deployed to defend conformity or with the writers who deployed it. His aim was rather to contextualize the writings of George Herbert and, to a lesser extent, John Donne, by reference to a broadly drawn conformist hinterland. Fincham is another scholar who engages with Calvinist conformity as a distinctive tradition. In Prelate as Pastor (1990), he made the case that a number of Jacobean bishops whom he describes as ‘evangelical Calvinists,’ or simply ‘evangelicals,’ embraced a practical theology of episcopacy—a ‘churchmanship’ as Fincham
calls it—that was demonstrably distinct from that of their Arminian and Laudian contemporaries and yet cannot meaningfully be described as puritan.52 Fincham’s study certainly engages with the theology of ministry that underlay the pastoral approach of these men. He does not, however, seek to engage with contemporary discussions about the doctrine of grace or with the theological underpinnings of liturgical conformity. His primary focus is also on the reign of James I, when such evangelical Calvinists were clearly on the front foot, rather than on the reign of Charles I, when their religious tradition came under pressure.
Debora Shuger accounts for the relative neglect of Calvinist Conformity by ‘the extent to which the historiography of belief still depends on the arma virumque model, in which the primary task is to identify the two sides and then trace their conflict through its various stages’.53 Certainly, if an adversarial model of ecclesiastical history is assumed, the opposition between Puritanism and Laudinism is more obvious, and more thoroughgoing, than the opposition between either and Calvinist conformity. Another factor may be the assumption that Laudianism and Puritanism had an afterlife in the Restoration Church, in High Churchmanship and Nonconformity, respectively, whereas Calvinist conformity did not. That is an assumption which I have sought to challenge elsewhere.54 The phenomenon of post-Restoration Reformed Conformity only reinforces the need to understand its Early Stuart antecedent.
The result of this relative neglect is that the only work offering an indepth analysis of the theology of Calvinist conformity remains Peter Lake’s Anglicans and Puritans? (1988), which was a study of its Elizabethan, rather than its Stuart expression. There, Lake drew a sharp distinction between the conformity exhibited by John Whitgift and that exhibited by Richard Hooker. ‘Whitgift,’ Lake wrote, ‘certainly made no attempt to develop a positively and distinctively conformist style of piety’. ‘He never claimed that the ceremonies in question had any religious significance at all,’55 rather, ‘They were proffered as aids to order and uniformity, their value derived from the authority of the prince who enjoined them’.56 ‘Nor is there any sign in his thought of a sacrament— rather than a word-centred style of piety . . . . The word read, but particularly preached, remained the only way to edify the flock of Christ’.57 As a result, Lake suggested,
Whitgift’s religion or style of piety remained a pallid, one-dimensional version of the puritan one. Centred on . . . an impoverished understanding
of edification as the mere transfer of knowledge, it was backed up by a rather wintry and fatalist Calvinism. Those who wanted a religious or emotionally compelling alternative to puritan divinity were not going to find it in Whitgift’s works. The search to fill the resulting vacuum at the heart of the conformist position was to occupy anti-puritan polemicists for the remainder of the reign.58
Lake contrasted Whitgift’s uninspiring, Erastian style of conformity with Hooker’s much richer offering. For Hooker, religion was fundamentally a matter of worship, and worship involved more than the preaching of the word. It involved church ceremonies, prayer, and, above all, the sacraments. ‘Church ceremonies, [Hooker] claimed (in direct disagreement with previous conformists) could and should edify’. As a result, Hooker’s style of conformity entailed ‘little short of the reclamation of the whole realm of symbolic action and ritual practice from the status of popish superstition to that of a necessary, indeed essential means of communication and edification; a means, moreover, in many ways more effective than the unvarnished word’.59 Furthermore, ‘Prayer, for Hooker, was of at least equal importance with preaching in the life of the church. Indeed the two activities perfectly complemented each other.’60 Church ceremonies and prayer provided the proper context for what Hooker conceived as the most important element of worship—the sacraments. For Hooker, Lake underlined, ‘The sacraments were the major instruments through which we are incorporated into Christ’s mystical body’.61 As a result, he argued, Hooker’s agenda was effectively to replace a word-centred view of Christian ministry, which Whitgift shared with the Puritans, with a sacrament-centred one. In this, he was emulated by a number of ‘Arminian or proto-Arminian divines,’ including Lancelot Andrewes, John Overall and John Buckeridge.62
Lake’s analysis of conformist thought, in which the two poles are the Erastian, word-centred Calvinism of Whitgift, and the ceremonious, sacrament-centred piety fostered by Hooker and embraced by the antiCalvinists, continues to shape perceptions of English conformity.63 That may be why, in Altars Restored (2007), Kenneth Fincham and Nicholas Tyacke include Prideaux’s Consecration sermon among a range of sermons that they suggest illustrate ‘just how far the ecclesiological views of Richard Hooker and John Howson still were from winning general acceptance’ at the end of James I’s reign.64 Yet as has been indicated, Prideaux’s concerns actually echoed Howson’s on a number of points, and the marginal reference to
Hooker’s discussion of the dedication of church buildings, that appears in the printed version of the sermon ‘Vid. Hookerum l.5 sect. 12, 13, 16’ suggests a more positive engagement with Hooker’s style of conformity than Fincham and Tyacke seem to allow.
This is not entirely surprising because, as Michael Brydon has shown in The Evolving Reputation of Richard Hooker (Oxford, 2006), there was a concerted effort amongst conforming Calvinists to redeem Hooker from the suspicion of crypto-Catholicism raised by his early detractors65 and to reclaim him as a sound Reformed authority for conformity.66 As a result, it became possible for orthodox Reformed theologians to quote Hooker in defence of the established Church and so to absorb, selectively and critically, Hooker’s style of conformist piety.67 In the Early Stuart period, in other words, conforming Calvinists were in a position to move beyond the Erastian conformity of Whitgift and offer a richer articulation of conformist practice, without thereby abandoning their Reformed doctrinal credentials.68 It follows that Lake’s analysis of conformist thought under Elizabeth I, in which doctrinal Calvinism and an appreciation for ceremony and symbolism were alternatives, is less well-adapted to the situation under the Early Stuarts. By then, a richer mode of Calvinist conformity had become possible. Prideaux was one exponent: this study will show that there were others.
As a result, this study will raise a question mark over a key contention of Alec Ryrie’s Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (2013). There, Ryrie attempted to demonstrate that Early Modern British Protestantism was a ‘broad-based’ religious culture, in which ‘the division between puritan and conformist Protestants, which has been so important in English historiography, almost fades from view when examined through the lens of devotion and lived experience’.69 In order to display this homogeneity, Ryrie focussed exclusively on works that he defined as devotional, rather than ‘works of doctrinal definition and controversy’.70 He also excluded works by separatist Protestants and, more controversially, those written by ‘Laudians, and other 17th-century prophets of ceremonial revival’.71
Lake and Stephens have decisively rebutted Ryrie’s argument, at least with regard to Puritans and Laudians. However, since Ryrie explicitly excluded the Laudians from his discussion, a full response to his thesis requires the discussion, not of the anti-Calvinist conformists, who populate Lake and Stephens’s study, but of Calvinist conformists such as Prideaux. Lake and Stephens were, of course, restricted by the range of religious identities documented in relation to the 1637 case that was their centrepiece. Their discussion
consequently lacks the Calvinist conformist voice, which is as necessary as the Puritan voice, if Ryrie’s thesis of a broad-based Protestant consensus is to be challenged. The present study allows that voice to be heard.
Thus far, the terms ‘Calvinist Conformity’ and ‘Calvinist conformists’ have been used, since they are the terms most widely adopted by most scholars of the British Church. However, as Philip Benedict explained, in Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed (2002), ‘Reformed is . . . for several reasons a more historically accurate and less potentially misleading label than Calvinist to apply to these churches and to the larger tradition to which they attached themselves’. This study will follow his lead, and refer rather to ‘Reformed Conformity’ and ‘Reformed conformists’.72
It will also embrace the scholarly approach articulated by Richard Muller, in ‘Directions in the Study of Early Modern Reformed Thought’ (2016). There, Muller underlined that ‘The study of early modern Reformed thought has altered dramatically in the last several decades’. In particular, ‘The once dominant picture of Calvin as the prime mover of the Reformed tradition and sole index to its theological integrity has largely disappeared from view, as has the coordinate view of ‘Calvinism’ as a monolithic theology’.73 This development has prompted a significant shift of emphasis within Reformed studies. ‘Given what can be called the demotion of Calvin from the place of founder and norm for the whole Reformed tradition,’ Muller has pointed out, ‘studies of later sixteenth and seventeenth-century Reformed writers have examined their thought in its own right as representing forms of contextually located theology, or, indeed, theologies’.74 As Muller has pointed out, however, the field is far from exhausted: quite the contrary: ‘Further study . . . is called for—particularly with a view to uncovering further the diversity of the tradition and the nature of its debates’.75 The Reformed Conformity of the Early Stuart English Church is precisely the kind of distinct and contextually located expression of Reformed theology that students of the Reformed tradition need to explore. As a result, the present study will make a significant contribution to Reformed studies as a whole, not simply to the historiography of the English Church.
Of course, ‘Calvinist’ is not the only adjective that has been problematized in the scholarship, ‘conformist’ has as well. In Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church (2000), Peter Lake and Michael Questier argued that both conformity and orthodoxy should be understood not as ‘stable quantities, but rather . . . the sites of conflict and contest’.76 This point is well made. In his Consecration sermon, Prideaux was evidently making the
case for a particular vision of conformity, one that excluded both Puritans and Laudians and was evidently rooted in the theological instincts of the Protestant Reformation. The same is true for the other figures that are the focus of this study. Their conformity was an argued and evolving case, defined against, and in tension with the various constructions of conformity being advanced by their moderate Puritan or Laudian colleagues, and indeed by those Reformed Conformists who still adhered to something closer to Whitgift’s model of conformity.77 This becomes particularly clear in their discussions of English Church polity.
It is worth making a final point about the sources that inform this study. Lake and Stephens took exception to Ryrie’s decision to exclude academic and controversial texts from his study of the period. ‘It is never a good idea,’ they pointedly remarked, ‘on the basis of some a priori value judgement about the appropriate hierarchy of sources or about what real Christianity is all about, to decide, in advance, what really mattered and what did not, what was really central or ‘mainstream’, and what merely peripheral’.78 Quite the contrary: an examination of private texts ‘almost perfectly replicates and confirms the contents and purport of the public polemical sources’.79 What is more, the doctrinal issues that divided the Arminians from the Reformed were clearly central to the contemporary interpretation of this case.80
The need to attend more to academic and controversial theology, rather than sidelining it as irrelevant to the majority of the population, has been a growing theme in the historiography. Julia Merritt has observed that the sharp dichotomy between the worlds of university and parish, which is assumed in much of the scholarship, needs to be overcome.81 Martin Bac has underlined that ‘recent interest in Puritanism is focussed on its piety apart from its theology . . . and therefore loses sight of its fundamental structures’.82 Arnold Hunt has noted that historians often find excuses for avoiding a detailed discussion of academic theology, particularly in relation to the debates about predestination, suggesting that the questions it raised were too rarefied to have been of great interest to the wider lay population.83 Hunt forcefully challenges the idea that these academic debates were not of interest to people outside the theological academy. As he puts it, ‘A survey of English sermon manuscripts . . . warns us against drawing too sharp a contrast between academic theology and popular religion,’84 for, as he underlines, ‘even the academic debates on predestination were of interest to many people outside the universities’.85 Indeed, ‘lay people in the parishes were surprisingly well informed about debates in the universities’.86 Leif Dixon has recently explored
how preachers from various ends of the Reformed spectrum worked hard to ensure that the doctrine of predestination became a source of comfort for their parishioners, rather than anxiety, and has demonstrated how pastoral purpose was by no means incompatible with the search for theological precision.87
By suggesting that pastoral theology can be distinguished from, and should be preferred to, academic and controversial theology, Ryrie is therefore swimming against a powerful tide, and this study will not follow him. Instead, it will focus on the very academic and controversial texts that Ryrie passes by; using them to illustrate that, for the English Reformed Conformists, as for most other seventeenth century theologians, neither academic nor polemical theology was uninformed by practical and pastoral concerns.
Representative Voices
John Prideaux offers an excellent way in to an important network of prominent Reformed Conformists working within the Early Stuart Church. As indicated above, Prideaux was Rector of Exeter College, Oxford, from 1612, and Regius Professor of Divinity from 1615; a position he did not relinquish until he became Bishop of Worcester in 1641. His was consequently the leading voice of the Oxford Divinity Faculty for most of the Early Stuart period. A Reformed theologian of international reputation, who narrowly missed being appointed to the British Delegation at Dort,88 Prideaux was a magnet for foreign scholars and well-connected pupils alike. As Anthony a Wood later remarked, these who knew him reckoned him ‘so profound a divine, that they have been pleased to entitle him columna fidei orthodoxae [pillar of the orthodox faith], and malleus heresecus (sic) [hammer of heresy], Patrum pater [father of the Fathers], and ingens scholae & academiae oraculum [the prodigious oracle of the school and university]’.89
It was Prideaux’s eminence as an exponent of Reformed orthodoxy that led Joseph Hall to request his support, shortly after Hall’s appointment as Bishop of Exeter, in 1627. Hall was a former member of the British Delegation at Dort, though illness forced him to leave the Synod early. He was accused of Popery for suggesting, in The Old Religion (1628), that the Church of Rome might be considered a true Church; so he turned to a number of impeccable Reformed authorities for their endorsement, among them the Regius Professor at Oxford. ‘Worthy Master Doctor Prideaux:’ Hall wrote, ‘All our
little world here, takes notice of your worth, and eminency; who have long furnished the Divinity Chair in that famous University, with mutual grace and honour. Let me entreat you . . . to impart yourself freely to me, in your censure; and to express to me your clear judgement, concerning the true being, and visibility of the Roman Church’90
Hall may well have known Prideaux from their time as chaplains to the late Prince Henry of Wales,91 and they both enjoyed the patronage of William Herbert;92 but Hall’s appointment to Exeter had made him ex officio Visitor of Exeter College, bringing them into more regular contact. Prideaux’s reply was everything that Hall could have wanted: ‘As often as this hath come in question in our public disputes, we determine here no otherwise, then your Lordship hath stated it. And yet we trust to give as little vantage to Popery, as those that do detest it; and are as circumspect to maintain our received doctrine and discipline without the least scandal to the weakest, as those that would seem most forward’.93 The pillar of the orthodox faith therefore gave Hall a welcome imprimatur, and it was not long before the Bishop of Exeter’s sons began making their way to Exeter College for their education.94
As Regius Professor, one of Prideaux’s duties was to determine the academic disputations offered by doctoral candidates in divinity. Anthony a Wood records that, in 1617, one such candidate, Daniel Featley, who had recently been appointed as domestic chaplain to Archbishop Abbot, ‘puzzled Prideaux the King’s professor so much with his learned arguments, that a quarrel thereupon being raised, the Archbishop was in a manner forced to compose it for his Chaplain’s sake’.95 Abbot’s intervention was clearly successful. Featley and Prideaux worked together closely during the controversy surrounding Richard Montagu, and Featley became a good enough friend to be imparting both gossip and advice to Prideaux in the late 1620’s.96 In one letter, Featley spoke of ‘my love to you my most honoured father’ and signed himself ‘your affectionate son’.97 Featley’s appointment as chaplain to the Archbishop came to a sudden end in 1625 and he spent the rest of Charles I’s reign as an incumbent of three churches in the diocese of London, publishing his sermons and revising his celebrated devotional work, Ancilla Pietatis (1626).
Featley was himself close to another Reformed Conformist grandee, Thomas Morton. Morton was a distinguished Cambridge scholar, who became successively Dean of Gloucester in 1607, Dean of Winchester in 1609, Bishop of Chester in 1616, Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield in 1619, and Bishop of Durham in 1632. Morton first met Featley when Morton
incorporated his Cambridge degrees in Oxford in 1606. Morton’s biographer recorded that Featley had performed his academic exercises ‘with such applause as made Dr Morton carry a great friendship towards him ever after, which was answered with a proportionable reverence on the other side’.98 Morton commissioned Featley to produce an abridged biography to John Jewel, to preface Jewel’s republished works, in 1609,99 and the two men became regular correspondents.100 Like Prideaux, Morton was one of the Reformed authorities to whom Hall turned during the Old Religion controversy, and Hall clearly believed that they were theological fellow travellers. ‘I suffer,’ he wrote, ‘for that wherein yourself, amongst many renowned orthodox doctors of the Church, are my partner . . . . I beseech your Lordship, say, once more, what you think of the true being, and visibility of the Roman Church, your excellent and zealous writings have justly won you a constant reputation of great learning, and no less sincerity, and have placed you out of the reach of suspicion’.101 Morton responded to Hall’s letter with evident warmth: ‘Right Reverend, and as dearly beloved brother . . . . In that your Lordship’s tractate, I could not but observe the lively image of yourself; that is (according to the general interpretation of all sound professors of the Gospel of Christ) of a most orthodox divine’.102 So Morton and Prideaux both recognized Hall as a theological fellow-traveller.
Morton corresponded regularly with Samuel Ward, Master of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge from 1610, and Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity from 1623. Morton sought Ward’s advice on various theological matters,103 and they were sufficiently close for Morton to invite Ward to stay with him, when he was Bishop of Durham.104 Ward had been one of the translators of the Authorized Version, and a Chaplain to the King from 1611. James Montagu, then Bishop of Bath and Wells, made Ward first a Prebend of Yatton in Wells in 1610, and then Archdeacon of Taunton in 1615.105 Like Hall, Ward was a member of the British Delegation at Dort. Like Prideaux, his long tenure of the Lady Margaret Chair in Cambridge ensured that he shaped the flavour of university divinity for much of the Early Stuart period. Another Cambridge Conformist who benefited from the patronage of James Montagu was George Downame. Downame had actually preached the sermon at Montague’s consecration in 1608. This went down so well with King James I, that Downame was made a Royal Chaplain; soon to be joined in that position, of course, by Ward and Prideaux. When Ward was made Archdeacon of Taunton in 1615, and acquired a different prebendal stall, it was to Downame that Montagu gave Ward’s Prebend of Yatton. Downame
had to resign it a few months later, when he was made Bishop of Derry. He continued to publish theological works from his Irish See, until his death in 1634; works that Ward commended in his lectures.106
Ward’s predecessor as Lady Margaret Professor was John Davenant, and the two men were close friends, regular correspondents, and editorial collaborators throughout their lives. Like Ward, Davenant was a member of the British Delegation at Dort; indeed the two travelled out together.107 Prideaux clearly took an interest in Davenant’s theological views, since he had acquired a manuscript copy of Davenant’s opinions on the issues to be debated at Dort, which George Hakewill asked to see, around the time the Synod was meeting.108 Shortly after returning from Dort, in 1621, Davenant was made Bishop of Salisbury. Like Prideaux and Morton, Davenant received a request for support from Hall over The Old Religion, a request reinforced by the remembrance of their brief time together at Dort 109 Once again, the tone is evidently familiar: Hall signed himself ‘Your much devoted and faithful brother’110 and Davenant responded with equal warmth, ending his letter with encouragement and solicitude: ‘be no more troubled with other men’s groundless suspicions, then you would be in like case, with their idle dreams. Thus I have enlarged myself beyond my first intent. But my love to yourself, and the assurance of your constant love unto the truth, enforced me thereunto’. Alongside Morton and Hall, Davenant was one of the Reformed bishops, to whom John Dury turned for support in his efforts towards Protestant unity, following the Leipzig Colloquy of 1631.111
Ward and Davenant both knew George Carleton well, since he had been their leader in the British Delegation at Dort. Admittedly, they and Carleton had not always seen eye to eye;112 but they were united in their defence of the Synod when it later came under attack.113 Carleton lobbied for the Synod’s canons to be endorsed by Convocation.114 He also collaborated with Ward and Davenant over the publication of the British Delegates’ defence of their conduct at the Synod in 1626, and of Carleton’s reply to their attacker, Richard Montagu. Carleton was already Bishop of Llandaff when he went to Dort, and he was promoted to the bishopric of Chichester on his return to England, in 1619. He died in 1628.
Ward and Davenant were also familiar with another member of this Reformed Conformist connexion, John Williams. Educated in Cambridge, Williams became Dean of Salisbury in 1619, Dean of Westminster in 1620, and Bishop of Lincoln in 1621, In 1621, he was also became the last clergyman to hold the Great Seal of England, serving as Lord Keeper from 1621 until 1625.
Davenant knew Williams from his time as Lady Margaret Professor. When the Elector Palatine, Frederick V, visited Cambridge in 1613, he was entertained with a display disputation, which Davenant moderated, and for which Williams was specially summoned back to Cambridge to be the primary opponent.115 Williams’s performance was apparently so impressive that it brought him the lasting admiration of Ward and Downame’s patron, James Montagu, ‘who from henceforth was the truest friend to Mr. Williams of all that did wear a rochet to his last day’.116 Montagu later secured Williams a royal chaplaincy. Williams’s biographer suggests that it was actually Williams who ‘spake and sped for Dr Davenant to be made Bishop of Salisbury’.117 The relationship between the two men was sufficiently enduring that, mere days before he lost his position as Lord Keeper, Williams was expected at Davenant’s house.118 Thereafter, Davenant is said to have become one of Williams’s episcopal rolemodels, as he engaged more fully with his duties as Bishop of Lincoln.119 Williams’s episcopal palace was at Buckden, which was close to Cambridge, and he was regularly visited there by members of the University, not least by Samuel Ward. Indeed, as Williams’s biographer recorded, ‘when Dr. Ward and Dr. Brownrigg . . . came to do him honour with their observance, it was an high feast with him. These were Saints of the red letter in the calendar of his acquaintance’.120 Williams’s contacts were not limited to Cambridge, however. He was in close enough contact with Prideaux to join with him in an attempt to prevent William Laud becoming Chancellor of Oxford, in 1630. All the Colleges of which Williams was Visitor supported Prideaux’s candidate, Philip Herbert, Fourth Earl of Pembroke. Williams had been a good friend of Prideaux’s patron, the Third Earl;121 and following Williams’s demonstration of his ongoing loyalty to the Herbert family during the chancellorship election, the Fourth Earl sent his sons to be educated at Williams’s palace at Buckden.122 Three sons of Philip Herbert subsequently moved from Williams’s household to study under Prideaux, at Exeter College; reinforcing the link between Buckden Palace and Exeter College.
As Bishop of Lincoln, Williams’s patronage was extensive. Among those Reformed Conformists who benefited from it was Richard Holdsworth. Holdsworth was a celebrated London preacher and also Professor of Divinity at London’s Gresham College from 1629. Williams made Holdsworth Prebend of Buckden in 1633123 and Archdeacon of Huntingdon in 1634.124 These appointments were significant, not merely because they placed Holdsworth close to William’s palace, but also because, in 1633, Holdsworth
had been elected Master by the Governing Body of Williams’s old College, St John’s; only for the election to be overruled, and a prominent anti-Calvinist, William Beale, imposed by royal mandate instead. Samuel Ward had actively supported Holdsworth’s candidature for St John’s,125 and was deeply suspicious of Beale.126 By promoting Holdsworth, Williams was making very clear where his own loyalties lay. Holdsworth was eventually elected Master of Emmanuel, in 1637, and proved an ally of Ward within the University thereafter.127 It was later alleged that Holdsworth had corrected Williams’s Holy Table, Name and Thing for the press.128
These ten clergymen, Prideaux, Hall, Featley, Morton, Ward, Downame, Davenant, Carleton, Williams and Holdsworth were not the only prominent Reformed Conformists working with in the Early Stuart Church. Indeed, the very fact that they were not, is part of what makes this study interesting. However eminent they may have been, they were merely the tip of the iceberg.129
Furthermore, the relationships which have been noted between them were not invariably the strongest relationships which they had with other Reformed Conformist colleagues. Ward’s relationship with Davenant and Prideaux’s relationship with Featley were undeniably strong. But Prideaux was at least equally close to George Hakewill, and Ward was equally close to James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh. Williams has relationships with Ralph Brownrigg and John Hacket, just as warm as those he had with Ward or Holdsworth Mutatis mutandis, the same is true of the other members of this network.
The reason for selecting these ten theologians as representatives of Reformed Conformity is not, therefore, that the connexions that linked them were the most conspicuous or close-knit within the Early Stuart Church; although it is significant, in terms of their coherence as a group, that they were all connected. The reason for selecting them as representative Reformed Conformists is rather that they all made important contributions to the articulation and defence of Reformed Conformity within the Early Stuart Church, contributions which enable us to examine the Reformed Conformist agenda across a range of theological issues, in a variety of polemical circumstances. This study will be shaped by those contributions.
The Distinctiveness of the Tradition
This study will argue that the ten writers at its heart were united by more than bonds of friendship, correspondence and collaboration. It will argue that
