Predestination and Political Conflict in Laud's London

Abstract

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

Review of periodical literature published in 2003

“…Coulton offers an extremely dense narrative of conflict in early Stuart Shrewsbury, a town in which the application for a new charter proved extraordinarily controversial, not least because the Caroline government, and Archbishop Laud in particular, was suspicious of its ‘puritan sponsors’. Laud's policy towards the Calvinists in London in the 1630s is reconstructed by Como, who emphasizes the partiality of his enforcement of Charles I's decrees against discussing predestination. He suggests that the policy was all the more effective for being enforced less through overt judicial persecution than through quiet threat and harassment.…”

Thomas Willis, the Restoration and the First Works of Neurology

“…The church Laud helped to create was also uprooted by the Long Parliament's abolition of episcopacy and their implementation of new liturgical standards that were advertised as more perfectly representing the primitive church. 20 In a nation that was supposedly reformed, Laud's insistence on ceremonial uniformity, which entailed kneeling at various times during a service and the wearing of the surplice, were frequently and correctly perceived to have no precedent in the earliest Christian communities. The Church of England was certainly transformed by the abolition of bishops, but the same reverence for local customs that had thwarted previous attempts to impose liturgical conformity endured, much to the frustration of reformers in the 1640s and 1650s.…”

ECCLESIOLOGY AND POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND, 1580–c. 1630

“…As a recent article by David Como reveals, Nicholas Tyacke's account of an Arminian attack on the Calvinist bedrock of the church remains central to explanations of the political breakdown of the early 1640s. 6 Tyacke's debut came in a collection edited by Conrad Russell, and where the political historians of the 1970s -the so-called ' revisionists ' -were interested in challenging the Whig explanation of an inevitable revolution driven by principle, Tyacke was concerned to dismantle the notion of a 'puritan revolution ', itself based on a distinctly Whiggish pattern. 7 While historians of religion tended to disagree sharply on Tyacke's claim that Arminianism was the dominant issue in Caroline ecclesiology, political historians -with some exceptions -took the analysis 'as read'.…”