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In this article we address the topic of intra-Puritan doctrinal debate and, by examining the mechanisms whereby the godly in the capital tried, if not to conclude then at least to control and ameliorate their in-house doctrinal disputes, to reconstruct some of the mechanisms—social, political, and ideological—whereby doctrinal “consensus” or “orthodoxy” was constructed, policed, and reproduced among the godly. Thus we hope to penetrate the shadowy world of what one might term the London Puritan underground. What emerges from this scrutiny is a world of interministerial dispute and rivalry, of lay activism, based on an urgent word and sermon-centered piety, that found its natural expression as much in the conventicle and the godly discussion group as in the public congregation and clerically delivered sermon or lecture. Here operated an overlapping series of networks of orally transmitted rumors and stories, of manuscript tracts and sermon notes, of conferences, conversations, and arbitrations both formal and informal. Here the reputations of the Puritan clergy were made and maintained, and the nature of orthodoxy debated and defined through mechanisms and exchanges that remain, for the most part, closed to us. This obscurity is not an accident. Only rarely did the interventions of authority or the anxiety or outraged amour propre of some wronged participant combine to leave traces, either in court records or the fulminations of the pamphlet press, of what appears to have been a very active underworld of dispute, discussion, and display.

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A B S T R A C T. This article examines the policy pursued by William Laud during his tenure as bishop of London, focusing specifically on the way in which he enforced the various royal edicts against discussion of predestination. It is argued that Laud enforced Charles I's decrees in an unbalanced manner, attacking Calvinists while apparently leaving their anti-Calvinist opponents untouched. It is likewise argued, however, that this strategy was accomplished not through a policy of overt judicial persecution, but through a more subtle regime of quiet threat and harassment. Such a policy was necessary because, at least in London, the question of predestination had by 1629 become a serious and explosive issue, one that was inextricably linked in the minds of many observers to more explicitly 'secular ' matters of government and policy. In the process of examining Laud's strategy, the article seeks to untangle the question of why both the Caroline authorities and their enemies saw the seemingly scholastic question of predestination as a matter of such crucial political significance. Ultimately, the article helps to revise our understanding of the political atmosphere that prevailed in England at the outset of the personal rule, while likewise contributing to a deeper understanding of the political breakdown that led to civil war and revolution in the 1640s.Nearly three decades have passed since Nicholas Tyacke first presented his pathbreaking research on Arminianism in the English church, yet the controversy he ignited continues to smoulder. A number of scholars, working from a variety of perspectives, have come to challenge his central claim -that the ascendancy of William Laud marked the triumph of a militant 'Arminian ' faction, committed to an anti-predestinarian theology of grace and bent on repressing the Calvinism that had previously dominated the English church. Kevin Sharpe, for instance, has argued that Laud was himself concerned not with the minutiae of theological dispute, but with order and discipline ; he was merely seeking to roll back the dangerous liturgical and doctrinal laxity that had crept into the church during the reign of James I so as to promote ' unity and peace, rather than division and discord '. In this, Laud was in most respects simply mirroring a broader