The Laudians and the Elizabethan Church

History, Conformity and Religious Identity in Post-Reformation England

Calvin Lane

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317320555
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Notions of religious conformity in England were redefined during the mid-seventeenth century; for many it was as though the previous century's reformation was being reversed. Lane considers how a select group of churchmen – the Laudians – reshaped the meaning of church conformity during a period of religious and political turmoil.

1 PETER SMART AND OLD STYLE CONFORMITY

‘A Most Froward, Fierce, and Unpeaceable Spirit’¹

Mounting the pulpit of Durham Cathedral in July 1628, Peter Smart let loose a blistering critique of the changes he had witnessed in his cathedral church in recent years. Smart was incensed that since the arrival of Bishop Richard Neile, a cadre of clergy had reoriented devotional patterns and thus the theological position of the established Church of England at Durham. Smart questioned the legality of this newly instituted ceremonialist programme: the dean had erected a stone altar, the clergy were wearing copes with images and the quire was surfeited with candles and statues. History, for the most part, has recorded Peter Smart as a puritan when in reality he was nothing of the sort. About a generation ago John Hoffman and Michael Tillbrook, in separate articles, demonstrated that this Durham prebend was, until the 1640s, a prayer book conformist and a loyal episcopalian.² In fact, his was the churchmanship that flourished in the reign of Elizabeth Tudor. Far from unique, this man and his argument clarify sharply the thesis advanced by scholars like Nicholas Tyacke, Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake: the Laudians were not run-of-the-mill conformists perhaps a bit overzealous in pressing prayer book rituals, but rather a cluster (even a party) with an agenda for serious change. No puritan, Smart pointed a damning finger at the new altar, at the carved cherubs, at the copes with images, at the dizzying number of candles, and declared a verdict: ‘innovation’, one of the worst crimes in the early modern world. Of course men like William Laud and John Cosin, one of Smart’s fellow Durham prebends, would in turn have a response to this historical critique: they maligned such old style conformists as puritans, disobedient schismatics bent on the fall of the Church of England. It is the presence of this debate – a conflict within conformism – that exposes the Laudian project for what it really was: a new vision for the Church of England, one increasingly less Reformed and more focused on ceremonial patterns not found in the Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer. By examining Smart’s critique we can see through the Laudians’ self-promotion as conservative reasserters of an established tradition.

Peter Smart was born in 1569, the son of William Smart, vicar of Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. Educated first at Westminster School and then Broadgates Hall, Smart won a studentship at Christ Church, Oxford. There Smart met William James, the college dean and his future patron. Advancing to the BA in 1592 and then the MA in 1595, Smart followed his teacher north in the following year when James took the deanery of Durham. Smart was made master of the grammar school and was thus able to exhibit his reputed brilliance in classical languages. When James rose to the episcopate in 1606, Smart at last took holy orders, a chaplaincy, the vicarage of Aycliffe, County Durham, and a prebendal stall in the cathedral all from the generous hands of his old teacher.³

When Bishop James died in 1617, he was replaced by Richard Neile, a clergyman at the centre of the emerging circle of ceremonialists.⁴ That year, even before Neile’s enthronement at Durham, the prebend Francis Burgoyne ordered the communion table to be set altar-wise. Such a move did not go unnoticed by Burgoyne’s colleagues at the cathedral, particularly Smart and Robert Hutton. Time was not on their side, though. Within a few years a good number of the prebends had died and the bishop was able to place like-minded clergy in the open cathedral stalls. These included Augustine Lindsell, Eleazor Duncon, Gabriel Clarke and, most notably, John Cosin. Nicholas Tyacke has noted that at around the same time that Burgoyne had the table moved at Durham, William Laud, then dean of Gloucester, ordered a similar arrangement at his cathedral. While it is hazardous to see this as evidence of a clear party position in that decade, as Tyacke cautions, it is nevertheless difficult to ignore the twin facts that these two men both had a connection to Neile and both rearranged their communion tables to the east end at roughly the same time. Wherever certain men were, certain things were happening. And, again, these activities did not go unnoticed. When Neile was translated to the diocese of Winchester in early 1628, George Montaigne succeeded him, but only for three months.⁵ That summer, just as John Howson was tapped to move north to Durham to fill the episcopal vacancy, Smart took the opportunity presented by the transition to preach an acerbic sermon on 27 July. Using as his text Psalm 31:7, ‘I hate them that hold of superstitious vanities’, the prebend opened his mind and let loose all those opinions that he had held back during Neile’s tenure at Durham. The flashpoint of course was liturgy: Smart observed that his cathedral was now swollen with ‘humane traditions, superstitious Ceremonies, which vndermine and ouerthrow both the Law and the Gospell’.⁶ It was Bishop Neile, according to Smart, who initiated this new ceremonial programme by packing the cathedral with ‘a Schismaticall crew of upstart reformers’.⁷ As a result, the cathedral’s worship patterns were marked not by established prayer book norms but by ‘theatrical stage play’. Smart christened such rituals ‘foolish, hereticall, Papisticall, Paganicall, and Magicall’. The frustrated canon even advised the congregation to avoid the cathedral altogether ‘till things bee amended’.⁸ The most offensive change of course was the fashioning of a new marble altar, fixed to the floor with black polished pillars, set against the eastern wall and adorned with white gold cherubs. Although at this point Smart mentioned no violator by name, the sermon hit its target. Richard Hunt, the cathedral’s dean, called a chapter meeting that very afternoon to address this serious challenge.⁹

Along with prebends John Cosin, Marmaduke Blakeston (Smart’s father-in-law) and William James (son of Smart’s old patron Bishop James), Hunt convened the provincial High Commission. The morning sermon was declared seditious and its preacher was called to account. With a copy of the homily in hand to offer up for inspection, Smart dutifully appeared and announced that he was able to defend his every word. The offender was dismissed but notified that he would have to reappear at a later date.¹⁰ After consultation with the chapter, Hunt contacted Laud, then bishop of London. The dean accused Smart of attacking their work as well as the rituals of the chapel royal and asked the de facto leader of the Anti-Calvinist/ceremonialist movement for his support.¹¹ Two months elapsed before the case progressed to the stage of having official articles against Smart. In that time, however, he lobbed four indictments against Hunt and his fellow prebends at the August assizes. Consistent with his sermon, Smart accused them of violating the Act of Uniformity. Not surprisingly, nothing came of this case. Moreover, the judge, Sir James Whitelock, accused Smart of disgracing the church with such acrimony. With his counter-accusations rebuffed, another hit came on 21 August 1628: Smart lost the income from his cathedral prebendary.¹² Without other recourse, the wounded cleric turned to parliament for help. Smart lashed out by attempting to get a bill in motion against his Durham colleagues. In October, however, the High Commission finally had articles prepared. Smart was able to manoeuvre skillfully until January 1629, when he wound up in a London jail. At his request, Smart was transferred to a cell in York – whereupon, adding insult to injury, the slow-moving High Commission penalized him with a censure. In 1630, although he suffered degradation and was moved yet again, this time to the King’s Bench, his supporters began raising money – £400 a year – to support his family.¹³

Smart languished in jail for the next decade until an opportunity to press his case came in 1640. Parliament, for the first time in eleven years, was again in session. As the war with Scotland required funding, Charles had to call parliament and thus the king’s so-called ‘Personal Rule’ came to an end. And with the calling ofparliament, the Laudian ascendency began to derail. That spring, in April, John Pym and John Hampden mounted Smart’s case. While the Commons decided in November that Smart should be released, bureaucratic procedures protracted matters and he was not freed until January 1641. His wounds still unhealed, the angry prebend made sure to testify in the trial of his old colleague John Cosin.¹⁴ The tables were turned: the Long Parliament deprived Cosin, citing his contravention of the ‘Religion established’.¹⁵ Parliament, likewise, returned Smart’s lost cathedral stall. Time had taken its toll, however. Like many others, Smart ended up signing the Solemn League and Covenant in the 1640s. Spending the remainder of his life trying to recover the income from his prebendal stall in arrears, he died in County Durham in 1652.

Smart’s Argument

When Peter Smart rose to preach at Durham Cathedral in the summer of 1628, it was the first time he had done so in seven years.¹⁶ After outlining the Christian attitude to sin, condemning vice and calling sinners to repentance, Smart described how Christ had left liberty to his church to devise worship that is orderly and conformable to sacred scripture. Then the prebend made his pivotal turn. Superfluous ceremonies, he railed, are only to awe simple people. Moreover, a fascination with ritual – and with stone altars – leads such folk to see again the Temple priesthood who made sacrifices to God before Christ came as the consummation of all sacrifices, or to use the language of the prayer book, as ‘a full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world’.¹⁷ To indulge in ‘Jewish types and figures long since dead and buried’, Smart preached, is to rob ‘Christ of his honour, and us of our salvation’.¹⁸ To build altars and rely on mass-priests instead of following the lead of ministers who serve at tables and who preach the pure word is a denial of the central soteriological ethic of the reformation – and indeed, as Smart would understand it, the central soteriological ethic of Christianity.

Smart preached that the whole notion of an altar disrupted and distorted the Gospel.

For if it be an altar there must needes be a sacrifice offered by a priest to God; but in communion nothing is offered to God but prayers, but praise and thanksgiving, which the hearts and lips of all the faithfull communicants offer to God by their Mediator Christ. They lay them not on a Table, they lay not their thanks, they lay not their prayers vpon an altar, either of wood or stone; as the Aaronicall Priests, laid their burnt offerings and incense¹⁹

As Smart here delineates, what one does liturgically speaks directly to one’s doctrinal commitments. Intangible ideas were connected to tangible objects; a stone altar was linked to the work of mass-priests long banished from godly England. Yet Smart recounts clergy ‘ducking’ to the new altar, his fellow prebends who ‘make a low legge’.²⁰ This bowing, according to Smart, is nothing short of idolatry. These are theological arguments – arguments many readers might consider primary. Indeed, the presenting discourse is about the particulars of devotion and the theology that undergirds different conceptions of right worship. Of equal importance in Smart’s presentation, however, are historical precedents. Those precedents energized his arguments and rooted his claims in the language of legitimacy, making his position appear normative and conservative almost without regard to the theology.

Peter Smart saw himself as a loyal son of the church rightly established in the sixteenth century. When he was ordered to appear before the consistory court on Thursday, 19 August 1630, Smart wrote in his own papers (with no small measure of sarcasm) that he was being asked to renounce ‘the faith of his mother, the Church of England’. Clearly feeling persecuted, Smart wrote that his opponents wanted him to admit ‘his great error in adhering so long to the Church of England’.²¹ From the late 1620s on, Smart consistently argued that he was upholding the true conformist position, while his opponents were mangling that tradition. Despite his explosive language, Smart’s ire about the situation at Durham has to be set in this context of tradition, conformity and historical identity. ‘The ministers of this sacrament in the cathedral church of Durham’, Smart wrote, ‘have presumed latly to alter in many things the administration thereof, not only from the practice of the primitive church, and the institution of the author Christ, but also from the Rubricks and Canons of the Church and the ancient and usual customs of the same’. He noted in his papers that the prayer book and Injunction 23 ‘forbids the decking of tables with costly coverings and crosses’. Considering the music and singing at Durham, Smart believed that the Elizabethan prayer book tradition required the service to be audible and distinct, not complicated by ostentatious melodies and harmonies. The rubrics, the injunctions and the Book of Homilies, he argued, were at odds with the pattern lately found in his cathedral. The liturgies might as well be ‘in Hebrew or Irish’.²²

One of the most consistent features of Peter Smart’s argument was his invocation of legal precedents and the conformist mantle of the established church. Smart argued that his incendiary 1628 sermon was an ‘antidote, against the poison of malicious innovators’ men like Cosin, Burgoyne, Lindsell and Neile – those who had ‘scandalized the reformation of our church by calling it a deformation’. Insisting on his conformity and their non-conformity, Smart stressed that he was not challenging the lawful liturgies of the church. He wanted to be clear and leave no doubt: he was not a puritan. Smart specified that ‘no part of divine service set down in the Book of Common Prayer or any other church order which is established by law, and confirmed by custom and use is spoken against in the sermon, only superstitious innovations and unlawful alterations’ To be transparent, he wrote in his papers that he did not speak against ‘the service used in former times in Durham church, according to that which is prescribed in the Book of Common Prayer’.²³ Smart tried his best to do three things simultaneously: own and showcase his conformity with recognized paradigms, localize the problem with Neile, Cosin and the ceremonialists, and distance them from the accepted prayer book tradition. Arguing that the Laudian movement was distinct from the established Church of England, Smart wrote that ‘the church is not charged with bringing them [i.e. innovations] in, but certain irregular and presumptuous canons bring idols into the church, and popish ceremonies, whereby way is made for the bringing in of the mass’.²⁴

Regarding his own efforts as a conformist, Smart wrote in his papers, ‘there is not a word in the sermon against decent vestments allowed by the Church of England, but all such which it forbids, as being defiled with superstition’. These, he continued, ‘are not church ornaments but church disgracements’. For good measure, he wrote, ‘I think the church of Rome would scorn some of them’. Even papists, Smart pressed, would find these vestments comical and perhaps blasphemous. The prayer book tradition clearly did not tolerate such copes. He invoked the homilies, the injunctions and the ‘can...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Laudianism, Prayer Book Conformity and the Idea of History in Early Modern England
• 1 Peter Smart and Old Style Conformity
• 2 Semper Eadem: The Laudian Clergy and Historical Polemic during the Personal Rule
• 3 Articles, Speeches and Fallen Bishops: Historical Arguments in the 1630s and 1640s
• 4 ‘Our Reformation’: Laudian Uses of History during the Interregnum and Restoration
• 5 Peter Heylyn and the Politics of History in Restoration England
• Conclusion: History, Polemic and the Laudian Redefinition of Conformity
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index