Parchment, Pamphlets, and Plays: Into the Early Stuart Period (c. 1580–1641)

2019 ◽  
pp. 53-87
Author(s):  
J. Patrick Hornbeck
Keyword(s):  
Civil Wars ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
Stuart Period ◽  
The Church

Chapter 2 begins by exploring the literary fate of George Cavendish’s Life of Cardinal Wolsey from the time of its composition at the end of Queen Mary’s reign through its first appearance in print, in a highly expurgated, theologically and politically partisan edition of 1641. Both manuscripts and printed editions of the Life are analyzed in detail. But the chapter’s broader concern is the representation of Wolsey under the first two Stuart monarchs. The years leading up to the outbreak of the English civil wars witnessed the publication of numerous texts featuring the cardinal, including several pamphlets critical of the churchmanship of Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud. The chapter considers these popular publications alongside early Stuart dramas, especially William Shakespeare’s and John Fletcher’s King Henry VIII, as well as learned texts like the church histories of Francis Godwin (1630) and Edward, Lord Herbert (written 1639, published 1649).

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosamund Oates
Keyword(s):  
Civil Wars ◽  
Pivotal Role ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
James I ◽  
Protestant Church ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Turbulent Times ◽  
Stuart England ◽  
The Church

Tobie Matthew (c.1544–1628) lived through the most turbulent times of the English Church. Born during the reign of Henry VIII, he saw Edward VI introduce Protestantism, and then watched as Mary I violently reversed her brother’s changes. When Elizabeth I came to the throne in 1558, Matthew rejected his family’s Catholicism to join the fledgling Protestant regime. Over the next sixty years, he helped build a Protestant Church in England under Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I. Rising through the ranks of the Church, he was Archbishop of York in the charged decades leading up to the British Civil Wars. Here was a man who played a pivotal role in the religious politics of Tudor and Stuart England, and nurtured a powerful strain of Puritanism at the heart of the established Church....

‘Old Doting Bishop’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosamund Oates
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Religious Politics ◽  
The Church

This chapter explores how the forces holding the Jacobean Church—Matthew’s broad-based conformity—were shattered by the increasing power of Laudian clerics, while his anti-Catholicism was undermined by a pro-Catholic foreign policy. As Matthew grew older, his influence in the Church waned as did his ability to protect Puritans within it. From 1615 onwards it became apparent that Matthew was a marginal force in the Church and his brand of Elizabethan Puritanism was seen as increasingly unfashionable. However, for Matthew, there was a keener tragedy—his eldest son, also called Tobie Matthew, became a Jesuit priest. This chapter concludes by looking at Matthew’s personal struggle to convert his son and sets that in the wider context of early Stuart politics. Matthew’s story ends with a family and a country deeply divided by religious politics in the years before the English Civil Wars.

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.

Introduction: The Reformed Conformist Style of Piety

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Stephen Hampton
Keyword(s):  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Stuart Period ◽  
The Church

This Introduction opens with an account of the consecration of Exeter College Chapel in 1624 and explains why the ceremony cannot accurately be described as either ‘Laudian’ or ‘Puritan,’ since it reflects theological emphases associated with both groups. It goes on to establish that the historiography of the Early Stuart period has generally acknowledged the presence of English clergy who were committed to both an orthodox Reformed understanding of grace and the established polity of the Church, although no dedicated analysis of their religious tradition has been undertaken before the present study. The ten significant Reformed Conformist theologians who will be the focus of the study are then introduced, and the personal links between them set out.

Patronage from the Privy Chamber: Sir Anthony Denny and Religious Reform

1988 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia C. Swensen
Keyword(s):  
Effective Means ◽  
The Other ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Religious Reform ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Church ◽  
Individual Interpretation

Among the accomplished humanists who flourished in the court of Henry VIII, there were a number devoted to the promotion of the “New Faith,” which, with its emphasis on classical learning and rereading of the church fathers, also called into question certain theological truths of Rome as well as the authority of the pope. The most immediate and effective means for this promotion were the various types of patronage readily available to holders of government and household office, both high and low. There is a certain irony here as Henry had, after his split with Rome, declared that there would be no doctrinal innovation, simply that the head of the English church would be the English king rather than the pope at Rome. Yet members of his own court whose actions should have supported and carried out his expressed intentions were those who advanced the very doctrinal innovations he professed to deplore. The reason for this incongruity may be found at least in part in the actions of the king rather than in his words, as he did not develop and follow through with any consistent religious program. As a result, the signals sent to court members were at best mixed and open to individual interpretation. A remarkable latitude in personal policies resulted as members of both Protestant and Catholic factions jockeyed for power. Conservatives, believing they supported the royal wishes, opposed vigorously any further innovation in religious affairs. On the other hand, courtiers who were theologically curious quite easily could believe that, in patronizing sometimes extreme reformers, they were merely carrying out Henry's real but not clearly stated intentions.

Calvin's Influence on the Theology of the English Reformation

Ecclesiology ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-341
Author(s):  
Martin Davie
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
John Calvin ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
The Church ◽  
Westminster Assembly

AbstractThis paper traces the influence of John Calvin on the English Reformation from the time of the breach with Rome under Henry VIII until the great ejection of dissenting puritan clergy from the ministry of the Church of England in 1662. It argues that Calvin's teaching only began to have an impact on the English Reformation during the reign of Elizabeth I and that although his theology had a widespread impact on both individuals and groups within the Church of England it never shaped the Church's official doctrine, liturgy or pattern of ministry, although it seemed likely that this would be the case at the time of the Westminster Assembly in the 1640s. It also raises the question of whether Calvin sought episcopacy from the Church of England in the reign of Edward VI.

The Reformation in Anglicanism

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alec Ryrie
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
The State ◽  
Central Position ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
English National Identity ◽  
Prayer Books ◽  
The Church

The outline of the English Reformation under Henry VIII and the later Tudors is no longer heavily contested. While politically led and slow to take root, it eventually took shape as a decisively Reformed Protestant, even Calvinist, Reformation with a stress on the doctrine of predestination, even though Cranmer retained some traditional trappings in his Prayer Books. Terms such as ‘Anglican’ and ‘via media’ ought not to be applied to the Church of England before 1662. However, that church’s subjugation to the state and the central position it acquired in English national identity helped to sow the seeds of later Anglican distinctiveness. The Reformation’s legacy for modern Anglicans is divisive, and it is used dishonestly, as a weapon, by all sides. This is in part because the true extent of its popularity in its own time remains open to dispute.

The Shrine of St. Winefride and Social Control in Early Modern England and Wales

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-19
Author(s):  
Matthias Bryson
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Social Control ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
England And Wales ◽  
Alternative Concept ◽  
The Church

In 1534, Henry VIII declared himself the supreme head of the Church of England. In the years that followed, his advisors carried out an agenda to reform the Church. In 1536, the Crown condemned pilgrimages and the veneration of saints’ shrines and relics. By the end of the seventeenth century, nearly every shrine in England and Wales had been destroyed or fell into disuse except for St. Winefride’s shrine in Holywell, Wales. The shrine has continued to be a pilgrimage destination to the present day without disruption. Contemporary scholars have credited the shrine’s survival to its connections with the Tudor and Stuart regimes, to the successful negotiation for its shared use as both a sacred and secular space, and to the missionary efforts of the Jesuits. Historians have yet to conduct a detailed study of St. Winefride’s role in maintaining social order in recusant communities. This article argues that the Jesuits and pilgrims at St. Winefride’s shrine cooperated to create an alternative concept of social order to the legal and customary orders of Protestant society.

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.

Congregationalism and the Social Order: John Goodwin's Gathered Church, 1640–60

1987 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 210-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen S. More
Keyword(s):  
Civil Wars ◽  
Social Order ◽  
The Social ◽  
Church Polity ◽  
Total Separation ◽  
The Church ◽  
Civil Government ◽  
Established Church

In 1644 the Puritan lawyer and parliamentary pamphleteer, William Prynne, voiced a question much on the minds of moderate Puritans: Would not Congregationalism ‘by inevitable necessary consequence subvert…all settled…forms of civil government…and make every small congregation, family (yea person if possible), an independent church and republic exempt from all other public laws’? What made Congregationalism seem so threatening? The calling of the Long Parliament encouraged an efflorescence of Congregational churches throughout England. While differing in many other respects, their members were united in the belief that the true Church consisted of individually gathered, self-governing congregations of the godly. Such a Church was answerable to no other earthly authority. The roots of English Congregationalism extended back to Elizabethan times and beyond. Some Congregationalists, in the tradition of Robert Browne, believed in total separation from the Established Church; others, following the later ideas of Henry Jacob, subscribed to semi-separatism, believing that a godly remnant remained within the Established Church. For semi-separatists some contact with the latter was permissible, as was a loose confederation of gathered churches. During the English civil wars and Interregnum, the Church polity of most leading religious Independents actually was semi-separatist.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document