Laudian and Royalist polemic in seventeenth-century England

The career and writings of Peter Heylyn

Anthony Milton

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780719064456
• eBook ISBN: 9781847795687
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

Looks at one of the most prolific and controversial polemical authors of the seventeenth century, whose writings lie at the heart of the rule of Charles I, the Civil War, and the restoration of Charles II. In the process, the author presents an important new interpretation of the origins and nature of Anglicanism and royalism.

Chapter 1

The making of a Laudian polemicist?

Where do Laudians come from? The origins of puritans seem relatively easy to grasp. There is an established typology of the conversion experience, whereby previously ungodly individuals were spiritually reborn, which is replayed in a whole series of contemporary puritan biographies, culminating in Samuel Clarke’s enormous compilations of godly lives.¹ By contrast, there appears to be no simple model of where a committed Laudian should spring from. There is sometimes an assumption that, given the antagonistic relationship between Laudian policies and the predominant religious culture of the age, a future Laudian enthusiast should have been evident in their early years, in pursuing the ‘beauty of holiness’ and opposing puritanism. However, it is becoming increasingly apparent that some prominent figures in the movement may have gone through an earlier ‘Calvinist’ phase.² Peter Heylyn’s case may seem to fit this latter model. As we will see, there is little early sign of the preoccupations of his Laudian writings. Nor can we find a simple Laudian equivalent of a puritan conversion experience. For him, and perhaps for some of the other Laudians of the 1630s, these were convictions that emerged only gradually during the 1620s, and were bound up with their experiences and career development.³

HEYLYN’S BACKGROUND

Peter Heylyn was born into a reasonably prosperous provincial family. His biographers have little to say of his father, Henry Heylyn. He was descended from an ancient Welsh family from Montgomeryshire, whose ancestral seat of Pentre Heylyn remained with the family until 1637, and which Peter Heylyn apparently intended to repurchase shortly before his death.⁴ Whatever his ancestral background, however, Henry Heylyn would appear to have been the archetypal self-made man, whose will instructed his children to join him in thanking God ‘who of his blessings to me and them hath from a weak beginning and thorough my harde labores inabled me to breede them to what they now are’.⁵ Described as a gentleman in his will, Henry Heylyn had played a prominent role in local affairs in the town of Burford.⁶ Peter’s mother came from a prosperous local family who owned the manor of Lechlade in Gloucestershire, worth £1,400 per annum, which was eventually settled on Peter Heylyn’s uncle, Robert Bathurst.⁷ Bathurst acted as Peter’s godfather and gave him a greater sum in his will than any of Heylyn’s siblings. Heylyn would appear to have kept up his connection with the Bathursts throughout his life: Robert’s grandson would be the dedicatee of one of Heylyn’s later works. As we will see, the family link to the Bathurst family may also have involved Heylyn in curious connections with Robert Bathurst’s second wife, Lady Elizabeth Lawrence, and her son from her first marriage, Henry Lawrence, who would later serve on Oliver Cromwell’s council of state.⁸ Heylyn’s immediate family owned land and advowsons in the area around Lechlade, and he always had close connections with the area. His parents were both buried in the chancel of Lechlade church, rather than in Burford.⁹ Much of Heylyn’s personal life, connections and property were focused in a small area bounded by Burford (where he grew up) and Lechlade, including the manor of Minster Lovell (where he would shelter in the late 1640s with his nephew) and Abingdon (where he lived in the 1650s).

Searching for the origins of a Laudian world view in the early life of Peter Heylyn, we can find occasional hints of his future predilections. It is often suggested that Laudianism had a natural affinity with traditional festive culture, and here Heylyn would seem to have the proper qualifications. His birthplace of Burford was a town whose local festive culture was still very dynamic in this period. Certainly in Heylyn’s childhood the town’s inhabitants still had a parade with a giant and dragon through the streets at midsummer.¹⁰ His early poems include one imaginary game of stoolball with his beloved (although Professor Underdown would warn us that such games represented a more individualistic focus than the communal game of football), and Heylyn’s attachment to his local area regularly resurfaces in his writings.¹¹

Heylyn also later insisted that his father ‘very well understood the constitution of the Church of England, and was a diligent observer of all publick duties which were required of him in his place and station’. Heylyn claimed that he ‘suckt in as it were with my mothers milk’ the basic principles of the established church.¹² His father would certainly appear to have been strikingly well read in religion. His study was well supplied with books, which included an eight-volume set of Augustine’s works, six volumes of Nicholas de Lyra and a volume of ‘the Counsells generall and provinciall’ – a remarkable collection of patristic literature for a layman, all of which he gave to his son Peter in his will.¹³ Heylyn also seems to have spent a brief period of time at Merchant Taylors’ School – a seedbed of later Laudians – although the brevity of his sojourn there and his failure to follow the established route from that school to Laud’s college of St John’s in Oxford would not seem to indicate any decisive influence.¹⁴

In fact, much of Heylyn’s background suggests more puritan connections, and his later insistence on the conformist principles of his parents occurred when he was trying to explain away the more obviously puritan aspects of his education. One of his father’s kinsmen was Rowland Heylyn, an alderman and sheriff of London who was a leading light of the puritan Feoffees for Impropriations and a dedicated supporter of a puritan lectureship in Shrewsbury some years before.¹⁵ Henry Heylyn clearly knew Rowland well. He entrusted him with a number of tasks in his will, and also asked him to assign over a cottage to Peter’s use. Peter Heylyn himself admitted that his education had had a puritan bent. His tutor at Hart Hall, Walter Newberry, was ‘a verie zealous and pragmaticall Puritan’ and Heylyn was ‘very young and capable of any impression which he might think fit to stamp upon me’.¹⁶ He moved from thence to Magdalen College, which was not one of the more notably ‘Laudian’ colleges – indeed, it had been dubbed ‘a nest of puritans’ in the early Jacobean period.¹⁷ One of his friends among the fellows – Thomas Buckner – would become a chaplain to Archbishop Abbot. It was his time at Magdalen College that enabled Heylyn to make contact with his first major lay patron, the earl of Danby, who was a benefactor of the college. Danby had been involved in Protestant military campaigns, and was not a notable patron of conformist divines. While a royalist himself, his brother was to be a regicide.¹⁸ It was Danby, however, who was Heylyn’s most important early promoter. Heylyn wrote verses to Danby in the 1620s in which he stressed ‘that world of dutie which I owe/Unto your noble bounties’. It was Danby who secured for Heylyn the opportunity to present his first book, Microcosmus, to its dedicatee, Prince Charles, at Theobalds in 1621, and in the late 1620s Heylyn would accompany Danby, as his chaplain in all but name, on a trip to the Channel Islands.¹⁹

Heylyn’s ecclesiastical contacts were initially on the moderate Calvinist side of the English church. He was confirmed by Bishop Arthur Lake at Wells Cathedral in 1622, and it was Lake’s colleague and friend John Young, dean of Winchester, who helped to present the second edition of Microcosmus to King James at court in 1625, and then acted as intermediary when James took offence at a passage in it.²⁰ Indeed, it was Thomas Buckner – soon to be the Calvinist Abbot’s chaplain – who (according to Vernon) persuaded Heylyn in 1624 that he should devote himself to theology.²¹

It would be misleading, however, to seek to typecast Heylyn’s religion in his early life. For it is clear that religion was not his most obvious or immediate interest. His autobiographical notes, which he wrote up in the 1640s, do not even mention when he was ordained, but instead retell every occasion when he wrote poems and plays. In his forties he still recorded with pleasure the description of a local football match that he had written in the manner of the history of the destruction of Troy when he was ten years old, and described a series of other poems, songs, comedies and tragedies that he wrote as a student.²² It was not unusual for budding clergymen to dabble as poets, from Joseph Hall and John Donne to lesser contemporaries of Heylyn such as Peter Hausted, Thomas Pestel, Barten Holyday and Jasper Mayne.²³ Students at university were of course required to develop their literary skills. Typical of a drab but worthy academic exercise is Heylyn’s English translation of a recent Latin tribute to the founder of Magdalen College, William Waynflete, which Heylyn dedicated to Langton, the college’s president.²⁴ However, Heylyn’s other early poems could not be further removed in style and content from his memorial to Waynflete. There are poems of unrequited love, satirical verses describing events, parodies, memorial poems, doggerel, anagrams and chronograms, and a series of verses addressed to or written about college friends and characters. The most notable absence is devotional verse. Instead, Heylyn was most obviously drawn to satire, doubtless encouraged by college life, but also perhaps inspired by his elder brother’s residence at the Inns of Court.²⁵ Targets for his satire were various. His satirical poems include a mock-heroic account of the behaviour of local people seized by false fears of a Spanish invasion as the local militia marched to Minster Lovell bridge.²⁶ Another mock-heroic poem presents a vision of the ‘late Scullion’ of Magdalen College, ‘Sir’ Kit Strunte, as a knight arrayed with kitchen utensils, doing battle in the fields of Germany in the Thirty Years War. Not surprisingly, Heylyn appears to have had a fascination with the story of Don Quixote, which had recently been translated into English and to which he frequently alludes.²⁷ He also seems to have been particularly drawn to the Roman satirist Martial. Martial finds his way into poems addressed to Heylyn’s alma mater, to his friends, to his enemies, and even to Prince Charles. While he regularly quotes fragments of Martial in his other poems, Heylyn also tried his hand at translating some of Martial’s epigrams himself, and headed unerringly for the most lewd and tasteless.²⁸ He would later comment on how ‘our late Criticks’ marked ‘all the wanton and obscene Epigrams in Martial with a Hand or Asterism, to the intent that young Scholars when they read that Author, might be fore-warn’d to pass them over’, and yet it was found ‘that too many young fellows … did ordinarily skip over the rest, and pitch on those which were so mark’t and set out unto them’. Perhaps he had his younger self in mind.²⁹

Heylyn’s taste for satire infuses the account of France that he wrote in the mid-1620s, while as late as 1631 he wrote a satirical poem in m...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The making of a Laudian polemicist?
• 2 ‘Civill warres amongst the Clergy’, 1632–1640
• 3 The voice of Laudianism? Polemic and ideology in Heylyn’s 1630s writings
• 4 Prosecution, royalism and newsbooks: Heylyn and the Civil War
• 5 Dealing with the Interregnum
• 6 Ecclesia Restaurata? Heylyn and the Restoration church, 1660–1688
• 7 Conclusion: religion and politics in Heylyn’s career and writings
• Bibliography of Selected Primary Sources
• Index