Edward Fisher and the Defence of Elizabethan Protestantism during the English Revolution

2005 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 710-729 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPHER DURSTON
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
English Revolution ◽  
The Church

During the seventeenth century several attempts were made to change fundamentally the character of the Church of England founded by Elizabeth I. The innovations introduced by Laud in the 1630s precipitated a civil war and brought to power godly governments which restructured the Church on a Presbyterian model. The amateur theologian, Edward Fisher, opposed this new godly establishment, arguing for the continued celebration of Christmas, and against sabbatarianism and sacramental examination and suspension. His tracts in support of ‘Elizabethan Protestantism’ proved popular in the 1650s and helped to cement attachment to a more inclusive vision of the English Church.

Godly Pastors and their Congregations in Mid-Seventeenth-Century London

Church Life ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 45-62
Author(s):  
Elliot Vernon
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Lord's Supper ◽  
Lay Leaders ◽  
Parish Community ◽  
Church Life ◽  
Parish Churches ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Church

This chapter examines the relationship between pastor and congregation in the London parishes during the Interregnum. It addresses how godly ministers, called on by Parliament at the outbreak of the Civil War to reform parochial discipline and prevent the ‘promiscuous multitude’ from polluting the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper in England’s parish churches, negotiated issues of authority, changes to worship and liturgy, and the already contentious issues of patronage and finance. These factors forced ministers to look to the lay leaders of the parish, whether as elders or vestrymen, making them subject to factional struggles within the church life of the parish community. This chapter assesses the establishment and operation of Presbyterianism in London’s parishes during the 1640s and 1650s, as well as the practical difficulties, economic and administrative, that godly pastors experienced at the parochial level as a result of the dismantling of the Church of England.

The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
English Revolution ◽  
Ecclesiastical Reform ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Lay Experience ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Church

The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I traces the emergence of Anglophone Protestant Dissent in the post-Reformation era between the Act of Uniformity (1559) and the Act of Toleration (1689). It reassesses the relationship between establishment and dissent, emphasizing that Presbyterians and Congregationalists were serious contenders in the struggle for religious hegemony. Under Elizabeth I and the early Stuarts, dissent was largely contained within the Church of England, as nonconformists sought to reform the national Church from within. During the English Revolution (1640–60), Puritan reformers seized control of the state but splintered into rival factions with competing programmes of ecclesiastical reform. Only after the Restoration, following the ejection of 2,000 Puritan clergy from the Church, did most Puritans become Dissenters, often with great reluctance. Dissent was not the inevitable terminus of Puritanism, but the contingent and unintended consequence of the Puritan drive for further reformation. Nevertheless, in the half-century after 1640, religious pluralism became a fact of English life, as denominations formed and toleration was widely advocated. The volume explores how Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, and Quakers began to forge distinct identities as the four major denominational traditions of English Dissent. It tracks the proliferation of Anglophone Protestant Dissent beyond England—in Wales, Scotland, Ireland, the Dutch Republic, New England, Pennsylvania, and the Caribbean. And it presents the latest research on the culture of Dissenting congregations, including their relations with the parish, their worship, preaching, gender relations, and lay experience.

‘The Good Old Way’: Prayer Book Protestantism in the 1640s and 1650s

2004 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 233-256
Author(s):  
Judith Maltby
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Prayer Book ◽  
Medieval Church ◽  
Continued Use ◽  
Common Prayer ◽  
The Church

Between 1640 and 1642 the Church of England collapsed, its leaders reviled and discredited, its structures paralysed, its practices if not yet proscribed, at least inhibited. In the years that followed, yet worse was to befall it. And yet in every year of its persecution after 1646, new shoots sprang up out of the fallen timber: bereft of episcopal leadership, lacking any power of coercion, its observances illegal, anglicanism thrived. As memories of the 1630s faded and were overlaid by the tyrannies of the 1640s … the deeper rhythms of the Kalendar and the ingrained perfections of Cranmer’s liturgies bound a growing majority together.Professor John Morrill, quoted above, has rightly identified a set of historiographical contradictions about the Stuart Church in a series of important articles. Historians have until recently paid little attention to the positive and popular elements of conformity to the national Church of England in the period before the civil war. The lack of interest in conformity has led to a seventeenth-century version of the old Whig view of the late medieval Church: the Church of England is presented as a complacent, corrupt, and clericalist institution, ‘ripe’ – as the English Church in the early sixteenth century was ‘ripe’ – to be purified by reformers. However, if this was the case, how does one account for the durable commitment to the Prayer Book demonstrated during the 1640s and 1650s and the widespread – but not universal – support for the ‘return’ of the Church of England in 1660?This paper contributes to the larger exploration of the theme of ‘the Church and the book’ by addressing in particular the continued use by clergy and laity alike of one ‘book’ – the Book of Common Prayer – after its banning by Parliament during the years of civil war and the Commonwealth.

England's Second Reformation

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Milton
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Early History ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church ◽  
Established Church

England's Second Reformation reassesses the religious upheavals of mid-seventeenth-century England, situating them within the broader history of the Church of England and its earlier Reformations. Rather than seeing the Civil War years as a destructive aberration, Anthony Milton demonstrates how they were integral to (and indeed the climax of) the Church of England's early history. All religious groups – parliamentarian and royalist alike – envisaged changes to the pre-war church, and all were forced to adapt their religious ideas and practices in response to the tumultuous events. Similarly, all saw themselves and their preferred reforms as standing in continuity with the Church's earlier history. By viewing this as a revolutionary 'second Reformation', which necessarily involved everyone and forced them to reconsider what the established church was and how its past should be understood, Milton presents a compelling case for rethinking England's religious history.

Presidential Address: Collective Mentalities in mid Seventeenth-Century England: I. The Puritan Outlook

1986 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
pp. 1-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. E. Aylmer
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church

IT may seem unwise, if not downright foolish, and hubristic too, for someone who is not a historian of religion or the Church to choose such a topic as mine today. In mitigation of my offence, religion in the seventeenth century is in truth not only too important to be left to the theologians, but likewise too protean in its ramifications to re-main the exclusive preserve of ecclesiastical historians. Not that I wish in any way to slight the achievements of those scholars (some of them present this afternoon), without whose work I should not have had the temerity to attempt such a study as this at all. The problem which I wish to address is as follows: there are several interpretations of the different factions, parties and tendencies within the Church of England before 1640. There are disagreements con-cerning both the nature and extent of the differences between these groups, and the causes and significance of such divisions. There are many studies of the ecclesiastical parties and denominations which emerged on the anti-Catholic and then the anti-episcopalian side in 1641 and after, and of their part in the general history of the Civil War and Interregnum. Moving forward in time, there are studies of the restored Church and of the Dissenters or Nonconformists after 1660–2. In spite of all that has been written about Puritans from that day to this, especially about their theology, ecclesiology, liturgical practices, their moral, social and political tenets, less attention has been paid to the question of what constituted a Puritan in the first place.

Congregationalists

2020 ◽  
pp. 88-112
Author(s):  
Tim Cooper
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
New England ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Subsequent Development ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
Third Way ◽  
Early Emergence ◽  
The Church

This chapter offers a survey of the first development of Congregationalist convictions and their subsequent development in seventeenth-century England and New England. It positions the Congregationalists as a ‘third way’ between the Separatists and the Church of England; it explores how Congregationalism tended to look uneasily in both directions at the same time, making it difficult to define and disentangle from adjacent Puritan groups that otherwise held so much in common. It follows the development of Congregationalism from its early emergence in England across to New England and back to the contexts of the English Civil War, the Interregnum, and the Restoration period. It closes with some overall reflections on the place and significance of Congregationalism within Dissent.

‘Letting a Room in London-House’

Church Life ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 63-81
Author(s):  
Kathleen Lynch
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Religious Toleration ◽  
Religious Identities ◽  
English Revolution ◽  
Church Life ◽  
The Church

This chapter considers Reasons Humbly Offered in Justification [ … ] of Letting a Room in London-House unto Certain Peaceable Christians, Called Anabaptists (?1647). Written by a Presbyterian elder, possibly Richard Coysh, this anonymous tract defends the decision to rent a room in the Bishop of London’s palace to Baptists led by Henry Jessey and William Kiffin. It signals a key moment in the formation of religious identities and allegiances during the English Revolution, when the disestablishment of the Church of England made available ‘waste’ rooms for Dissenters to occupy, even within the grounds of St. Paul’s Cathedral. This chapter brings into focus some unexpected causes and consequences for religious toleration in seventeenth-century London, and considers afresh the jurisdictions and protective authorities as well as the architectural forms and features of an urban landscape that affected Dissenting ‘church life’ and its accommodation in a time of ecclesiastical renewal, contest, experimentation, and opportunism.

A Leicestershire Recusant Family: The Nevills of Nevill Holt – I

1984 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernard Elliott
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
James I ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Charles Ii ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
The Church

At the Reformation, three possibilities faced English Catholics. They could continue to be Catholics and so suffer the penalties of the penal laws; they could conform to the Church of England; or they could adopt a middle course and become Church Papists. The Nevills of Nevill Holt, near Market Harborough in Leicestershire, went through all three phases. In the reign of Edward VI, Thomas Nevill I became a Protestant. His grandson, Thomas Nevill II, became a Church Papist under James I; and Thomas II’s son, Henry Nevill I, continued to be one at the time of the Civil War. But Henry l’s son William was definitely a Catholic and went into exile with King James II, while William’s son, Henry Nevill II, was an open Catholic under Charles II. Henry Nevill II’s descendants continued to be Catholics throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries until they left Nevill Holt in the late nineteenth century.

Interpreting Tillotson

1993 ◽  
Vol 86 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerard Reedy
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
New Model ◽  
Church Politics ◽  
The Church

As archbishop of Canterbury after 1691, John Tillotson (1630–1694) guided the Church of England in the years following the accession of William and Mary in 1688. Whether he guided the church wisely has always been a matter of contention, because Tillotson not only took the oaths to the new monarchs but also helped to fill the vacated offices and sees of those who had not. Although apparently of a genial disposition, with personal gifts of generosity and piety, Tillotson made many enemies because of his church politics. The theological importance of his writings and their place in intellectual history have also provoked controversy. I believe that he is one of the great, yet much misunderstood, writers of late seventeenth-century England; this article offers a new model for interpreting his intellectual significance.

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