Calvinist Bishops, Church Unity, and the Rise of Arminianism

1986 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 411-427
Author(s):  
Jonathan M. Atkins
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Common Assumption ◽  
Relative Ease ◽  
Common Bond ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Church Unity ◽  
King Charles I ◽  
The Church

According to Nicholas Tyacke, the doctrine of predestination worked as a “common and ameliorating bond” between conformists and nonconformists in the late Elizabethan and Jacobean Church of England. Anglicans and Puritans both accepted Calvin's teachings on predestination as a “crucial common assumption.” Puritans were stigmatized either because of their refusal to conform to the church's rites and ceremonies or because of their rejection of the church's episcopal government, but their agreement with the episcopacy on predestinarian Calvinism imposed “important limits” on the extent of persecution. The Synod of Dort, a Dutch conference held in 1619 which included several English representatives, repudiated Arminianism and affirmed the Calvinist view of salvation, Tyacke calls “an event which has never received the emphasis it deserves from students of English religious history,” because the Synod “served to emphasize afresh the theology binding conformist and nonconformist together, and the limits which that common bond imposed on persecution.” The rise of Arminianism broke this common bond and contributed to the causes of the Civil War. To the Arminians, Puritans were those who opposed the new religious policies of King Charles I and archbishop William Laud. The Arminians' elimination of Calvinist influence in the church and at court, along with intensified persecution of Puritans, “generated a Puritan militancy” that erupted in 1640. By that date, Tyacke concludes, predestinarian Calvinism had been “transformed with relative ease into a call for ‘root and branch’ remedies”; at the same time, presbyterianism emerged as “the cure of Arminian disease.”

North America

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James B. Bell
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Western Hemisphere ◽  
Early America ◽  
Charles I ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
King Charles I ◽  
The Church

In step with the gradually unfolding imperial policies of the successive governments of King Charles I and later monarchs, the Church of England was extended to the northern part of the Western hemisphere between 1662 and 1829. Under the supervision of the Board of Trade and Plantations until 1701, and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts from that year, decade after decade an increasing number of men of differing origins and places of collegiate education in Britain came to serve missions of the Church in early America. The ranks included natives of England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and the American colonies, who were supported by the SPG or the legislatures of the provinces in which the Church was established. Development was shaped by imperial policies and administration over 160 years amid rising populations, changing political situations, and the consequences of war and diplomacy.

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.

Another Side of “Thorough”: John Cosin and Administration, Discipline, and Finance in the Church of England, 1624–1644

1981 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 347-363
Author(s):  
John G. Hoffman
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Central Authority ◽  
Charles I ◽  
The Church

The policy of “Thorough,” the effort at greater efficiency in church and state during the reign of Charles I, is usually regarded as a leading cause of the dissatisfaction that led to civil war. Lawrence Stone has described its objective as “a deferential, strictly hierarchical, socially stable, paternalist absolutism based on a close union of Church and Crown.” To G. E. Aylmer, the king's principal ministers, archbishop Laud and the earl of Strafford, were trying to achieve “more efficient government, and more effective central authority.” Both scholars agree that the methods used to accomplish these goals were of questionable legality. Aylmer credits the two leading protagonists of “Thorough” with good intentions, “cleaner as well as more efficient and absolute government”; but Stone points to the exasperating effect of the policy by noting that “Every aspect of economic life suffered from the feverish interference of bureaucracy whose sole objective seemed to be the extortion of money by the imposition of petty and irritating regulations.” Though these scholars discuss “Thorough” only in terms of its secular aspect, Christopher Hill has devoted considerable space to its ecclesiastical adherents, or to the possible impact that “Thorough” might have had at particular levels of the church bureaucracy.

Edward Gee and the Matter of Authority

1976 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Michael Smart
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Drastic Change ◽  
Adult Males ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Charles I ◽  
House Of Lords ◽  
King Charles I ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Civil Authority ◽  
The Church

Edward Gee, rector at Eccleston, near Chorley in Lancashire, from 1643 until 1660, was born in 1612 or 1613, at Banbury (Oxon.). During the years following the reorganisation of the Church in Lancashire along Presbyterian lines in 1646, he achieved recognition as a leading member of the clergy in that county. In 1650 he was said to possess the parsonage-house and glebe at Eccleston, with tithes and a water cornmill. Although he had agreed with the parliamentary cause in the Civil War, he opposed the more revolutionary changes carried out in 1648 and 1649, years in which the House of Commons was purged by the army, king Charles I executed, and the monarchy and the House of Lords abolished. The decision of the new republican Commonwealth regime to exact a promise of allegiance, known as the Engagement (first, in 1649 from a number of important Englishmen, and then in 1650 from all adult males in England) provoked a major pamphlet debate. This Engagement Controversy was the occasion of a lengdiy and detailed exchange of opinions and interpretations concerning the whole problem of how the subject should in conscience behave with respect to a drastic change of government, or, as many would have it, a usurpation of civil authority.

Serving God and the Times: The Calvinist Conformity of Robert Sanderson

1988 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 81-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter G. Lake
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Isle Of Wight ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Prayer Book ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Times ◽  
The Church ◽  
As If

Robert Sanderson was a Calvinist, indeed, he was an evangelical Calvinist anxious to impart, through pulpit and press, the central tenets of Calvinism to the laity. He also hated Puritanism and said so loud and often. During the 1630s Sanderson cooperated enthusiastically with the Laudian regime. As a Royalist during the Civil War, he was one of the divines taken by Charles I to the Isle of Wight to provide spiritual counsel as the king struggled to save the church from its Puritan enemies. Nevertheless, during the 1650s Sanderson felt able to take the engagement and to give over the use of the prayer book in order to preserve his place in the ministry. At the Restoration, however, he returned to the establishment as the bishop of Lincoln, in which role he proved himself less than sympathetic to the nonconformists. In short, Sanderson's career is difficult to accommodate within many of the received categories currently in favor in the religious history of the period. As if to prove the point, Sanderson figures prominently both in C. H. George and K. George's attempt to demonstrate the homogeneity of English Protestant opinion before 1640 and J. Sears McGee's assault on precisely that proposition. Sanderson seems to offer particular difficulties to those of us committed to the notion that the English church was dominated by Calvinism down to at least the 1620s and that thereafter the confrontation between Calvinism and Arminianism represented the crucial division in English religious opinion before the early 1640s.

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.

“The Fittest Subject for A King's Quarrel”: An Essay on the Militia Controversy 1641-1642

1971 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lois G. Schwoerer
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Military Power ◽  
Fundamental Issue ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Members Of Parliament ◽  
King Charles I

The struggle between King and Parliament in 1641-42 for command of the militia was to King Charles I “the Fittest Subject for a King's Quarrel.” As the King himself and a group of pamphleteers, preachers and members of Parliament realized, the controversy was not just a contest for control of military power. The fundamental issue was a change in England's government, a shift in sovereignty from King or King-in-Parliament to Parliament alone. As Charles explained, “Kingly Power is but a shadow” without command of the militia. His contemporaries, representing various political allegiances, also testified to the significance of the contest over the militia. They described it as the “avowed foundation” of the Civil War, “the greatest concernment” ever faced by the House of Commons, and the “great quarrel” between the King and his critics. To some men it was this dispute over military authority and the implications for government which were inherent in it, rather than disagreements about religion, taxes or foreign policy, that made civil war unavoidable.Concern about military authority first erupted in the fall of 1641 in response to a series of events – rumors of plots involving the King, the presence in London of disbanded soldiers who had returned from the war with Scotland, the “Incident” in Scotland, and above all the rebellion in Ireland which required the levying of an army to subdue those rebels.

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.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document