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.

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.

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.

Presidential Address: Collective Mentalities in mid-Seventeenth-Century England: IV. Cross Currents: Neutrals, Trimmers and Others

1989 ◽  
Vol 39 ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. E. Aylmer
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
Text Book ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Church

Among the most striking changes from the text-book generalisations of my school days is the emphasis given nowadays to those who were not committed to either side in the Civil War, those who tried and in some cases succeeded in keeping clear of the conflict altogether. Indeed so great has been the stress on neutrals and neutralism and on the general reluctance to take sides and to begin fighting at all in 1642, that we are in danger of having to explain how a mere handful of obstinate or fanatical extremists on each side contrived to drag the country down into the abyss of Civil War. I have said enough in my previous addresses in this series to make my own position clear on that. Among Royalists, including the King himself, there were enough who believed that rebellion must be put down, whether they were more concerned to defend the constitutional prerogatives of the Crown, the government and liturgy of the Church, or the whole existing fabric of society. Correspondingly there were enough Parliamentarians who believed that religion, liberty and property were in deadly peril, through the design for Popery and arbitrary government. If these beliefs had been confined to a few dozen or even score of men on each side, it is not credible that a war would have begun in 1642, where fighting broke out be it noted in Lancashire, Yorkshire and Somerset before the preparations and manoeuverings of the two main armies led up to the campaign and battle of Edgehill.

‘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.

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.

The Church of England, 1714–1783

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert G. Ingram
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Religious Violence ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
The Church

This chapter surveys the history of the Church of England between the Hanoverian succession and the American Revolution. The religio-political questions that bedevilled the English nation during the 1530s remained live ones during the eighteenth century. What sort of Church should the Church of England be? What should the relation of Church to state be? What should constitute the Church’s doctrinal orthodoxy? Whom should the Church comprehend? What were the bounds of toleration? These questions had not been solved at the Glorious Revolution, so that the story of the eighteenth-century Church of England is the concluding chapter in the story of England’s long Reformation. What ultimately brought that particular story to a close was not Enlightenment secularism but the changes catalysed by war and the fear of relapse into seventeenth-century-like religious violence.

scholarly journals Anglican Attitudes: Some Recent Writings on English Religious History, from the Reformation to the Civil War

1996 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-167 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Tyacke
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Religious Reform ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Party Line ◽  
History Of ◽  
English Politics

It remains a commonplace that what historians write bears some relation to their own time and particular angle of vision. Less often remarked, however, is the tendency for historical interpretations to acquire lives of their own, at least partly independent of the original circumstances that produced them, and to enter as it were the intellectual bloodstream of subsequent generations. A good illustration of this latter proposition is afforded by the history of the English Church. For, since at least the seventeenth century, the very radicalism of the Reformation has proved a continuing source of embarrassment to a section of Church of England opinion; rather than frankly admit their own dissent from the views of many of the Tudor founding fathers, they have regularly sought to rewrite the past in the light of the present. This conservative vision has come to be expressed in terms of a so-called via media, which is deemed to have characterized the English or “Anglican” way of religious reform.Until quite recently, the historiography was heavily influenced by these same Anglican insiders, other historians being prepared largely to take on trust their claims—especially as regards theological change. Moreover, willingness to follow what is in effect a party line has now received powerful reinforcement from certain revisionist historians, who discern a congruence between the alleged moderation of Anglicanism and their own commitment to a consensual model of English politics in the decades before the Civil War. The old idea of the English Church as epitomizing a mean between the extremes of protestantism and catholicism is once more being pressed into service.

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.

Anglican, Puritan, and Sectarian in Empirical Perspective

1989 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. John Sommerville
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Essential Difference ◽  
History Of ◽  
Empirical Perspective ◽  
The Church

One of the persisting problems in the religious history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England has been a question of taxonomy. Authors still puzzle over whether we should have a name for the moderate, conforming section of the Church of England, to distinguish it from those whom we call Puritans. Was there, in fact, an essential difference between those two groups? A second question is, How far to the “left” on the religious “continuum” can we go before Puritanism changes into something qualitatively different? This usually becomes the problem of whether the Quakers were the extreme fringe of Puritanism or something altogether different. This study will offer evidence, statistically expressed, that there were consistent and significant differences between these positions.

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