Vincent Alsop and the Emancipation of Restoration Dissent

1973 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. A. Beddard
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Present Purpose ◽  
Stuart Period ◽  
New Generation ◽  
The Church

The Presbyterian congregation which used to meet in Tothill Street, Westminster, during the later Stuart period is now chiefly remembered for its succession of distinguished pastors. There were three of them, each a figure of importance in the dissenting community of London: first Thomas Cawton, a Bartholomean, under whose direction the congregation was formed and held together in the precarious years following the enactment of religious Uniformity; then Vincent Alsop, an accomplished controversialist who took issue with the doctors of the Church of England, and who, for a quarter of a century, faithfully tended his flock in good times and bad; finally there was Dr. Edmund Calamy, the learned historian of Caroline nonconformity, one of a new generation of Presbyterian divines, during whose early ministry the meeting removed from Tothill Street to other and more spacious premises in the nearby Princes Street. Our present purpose is to take a closer look at one of these ministers, the middle one—Vincent Alsop, ‘a man of great worth and piety’, who superintended his Westminster congregation from 1677 to 1703, the year of his death. His ministry, as we shall show, was to make an important contribution to the emancipation of Old Dissent, especially in the 1680s.

ARMINIANISM, CATHOLICISM, AND PURITANISM IN ENGLAND DURING THE 1630S

2006 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL QUESTIER
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Stuart Period ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Church

The relationship between Arminianism and Roman Catholicism in the early Stuart period has long been a source of historiographical controversy. Many contemporaries were in no doubt that such an affinity did exist and that it was politically significant. This article will consider how far there was ideological sympathy and even rhetorical collaboration between Caroline Catholics and those members of the Church of England whom both contemporaries and modern scholars have tended to describe as Arminians and Laudians. It will suggest that certain members of the English Catholic community actively tried to use the changes which they claimed to observe in the government of the Church of England in order to establish a rapport with the Caroline regime. In particular they enthused about what they perceived as a strongly anti-puritan trend in royal policy. Some of them argued that a similar style of governance should be exercised by a bishop over Catholics in England. This was something which they believed would correct the factional divisions within their community and align it more effectively with the Stuart dynasty.

LICENSING, CENSORSHIP, AND RELIGIOUS ORTHODOXY IN EARLY STUART ENGLAND

1998 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 625-651 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANTHONY MILTON
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Middle Ground ◽  
Government Control ◽  
Stuart Period ◽  
Important Means ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Government ◽  
Stuart England ◽  
The Church

This article engages with recent work on the nature of religious censorship in the early Stuart period that has emphasized that the government possessed neither the power nor the will to control systematically what was written. It is argued here, instead, that there is evidence of attempts to control the presses' output of religious materials during the Laudian period and earlier, by all parties within the Church of England. Nevertheless, the intention here is not to revive a simplistic view of government ‘control’, but rather to study the means by which licensers could exert an influence over what would be printed with an aura of mainstream legitimacy. Texts were often interfered with by official licensers with a variety of motives. Interference might sometimes be essentially ‘benign’, conferring legitimacy on marginal works by massaging their contents, or texts might be modified in order to make their authors appear to endorse the views of their opponents. The issue of whether it was practically possible to publish work clandestinely is here seen to be something of a red herring, since by publishing in this illicit fashion authors were effectively resigning their right to be considered as spokesmen of the orthodox mainstream. It is the control and manipulation of the licensing process which emerges as one important means by which the religious middle ground was defined and controlled in the early Stuart period.

English Puritans, Dissenters, Quakers, and Recusants

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Covington
Keyword(s):  
Max Weber ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
State Institution ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Atlantic History ◽  
Modern Capitalism ◽  
Church And Society ◽  
New Generation ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
The Church

The Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 formally reestablished the Church of England as a state institution defined by standardized forms of worship and obedience to the Queen as its supreme governor. A vocal opposition almost immediately emerged, however, with responses to the settlement ranging from wary conformity or assertive nonconformity on the part of Puritans to Catholic refusal to attend church (a decision known as recusancy) to the emergence of more extreme separatist groups which would give rise to dissenters in the next century. The conflicting intentions and social identities of these groups, in addition to their connection to larger political developments, have made this one of the more tangled areas of English historiography, with the Puritanism bearing most of the burden. In the 19th century, for example, historians such as S. R. Gardiner equated puritanism with liberty and freedom; in the early 20th century, the sociologist Max Weber famously argued that modern capitalism was directly related to a Calvinist (and particularly English Calvinist) form of Christianity, with the Puritan divine Richard Baxter one of its foremost exponents. Such a view was criticized by, among others, Marxist historians such as Christopher Hill and Katherine George, who, nevertheless, imposed their own somewhat reified concepts onto nonmainstream groups. Recent years have witnessed such scholars as Patrick Collinson and Peter Lake exploring puritanism’s relation to the Elizabethan and early Stuart church and society, while David Como represents a new generation of historians, in this case focused on radicalism within the movement’s underground. This article attempts to encapsulate these trends, though its emphasis on English nonconformity admittedly excludes the new transatlantic focus promoted by historians such as Francis Bremer, or in the case of recusants, transcontinental perspectives. For such a perspective, see the Oxford Bibliographies in Atlantic History article on Protestantism by Carla Gardina Pestana.

‘The Basilica after the Primitive Christians’: Liturgy, Architecture and Anglican Identity in the Building of the Fifty New Churches

2016 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-57
Author(s):  
Christopher Moody
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Political Context ◽  
Christian Church ◽  
Denominational Identity ◽  
Stuart Period ◽  
New Churches ◽  
Modern Orthodox ◽  
The Church

AbstractThe London churches built by Nicholas Hawksmoor – the architect required by the Commission for the Fifty New Churches to provide a template for the new churches according to the principles laid down in 1712 – are often regarded as the idiosyncratic creations of the architect’s individual genius. They were, however, as much the creation of the particular intellectual, theological and political context of the late Stuart period, an expression of a high church attempt to reconnect the Church of England with the early centuries of the Christian Church, particularly the great basilicas built under Constantine and Justinian. Conservative in intent, they were at the same time fed by the new spirit of intellectual enquiry led by the Royal Society and the expansion of global trade at the start of the eighteenth century. These express a new Anglican denominational identity as the inheritor of the ‘purest’ traditions of the ‘primitive’ church, ancient yet modern, orthodox and, at the same time, reformed: one that still influences discussion across the Communion today.

Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, Toronto, 11th July 1982

Moreana ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 41 (Number 157- (1-2) ◽  
pp. 58-71
Author(s):  
John McConica
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Historical Review ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
International Commission ◽  
Medieval Studies ◽  
John Paul Ii ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Catholic Church

During the period in which these papers were given, there were great achievements on the ecumenical scene, as the quest to restore the Church’s unity was pursued enthusiastically by all the major Christiandenominations. The Papal visit of John Paul II to England in 1982 witnessed a warmth in relationships between the Church of England and the Catholic Church that had not been experienced since the early 16th century Reformation in England to which More fell victim. The Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission was achieving considerable doctrinal consensus and revisionist scholarship was encouraging an historical review by which the faithful Catholic and the confessing Protestant could look upon each other respectfully and appreciatively. It is to this ecumenical theme that James McConica turns in his contribution.

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