The Caroline coalition of the Personal Rule; or, why there was no such thing as 'Laudianism'
To begin with, Lake offers a profoundly weak case for describing those who supported the ecclesiastical policies of the Personal Rule as 'Laudians'. It begins with his admission that "the great ideologist of what I am calling Laudianism was, in fact, not Laud, but Lancelot Andrewes" (p.41). This itself should give us pause for thought. If this is the case, why call this movement 'Laudianism'? Lake gives three reasons. We are told that "none of them is, in itself, wholly satisfying" but that "cumulatively they make a decent case" (ibid.). Do they?
"The first reason", we are told, "is convenience" (ibid.). Why on earth this is meant to be even partially convincing is unclear. No attempt is made to convince us that "convenience" is anything more than merely accepting prevailing assumptions.
The second reason given is the role of Laud himself, "the presiding figure behind the ecclesiastical policies of the Personal Rule" (ibid.). This is a rather odd description in a book which declares that 'Laudianism' was "an attempt gradually to Arminianise the culture, to disseminate ... Arminian assumptions ... an official espousal of Arminianism" (p.429) - while also admitting that Laud himself had little interest in 'Arminianism':
When Samuel Brooke, the Master of Trinity, sent Laud an Arminian treatment of predestination for his perusal, and presumably approval, Laud replied that, if 'the tract be not too long', he would look at it, but added that 'I am yet where I was, that something about those controversies is unmasterable in this life. Neither can I think any expression be so happy as to settle all these difficulties. And however I do much doubt that the king will take any man's judgement so far as to have these controversires any further stirred, which now, God be thanked, begin to be more at peace' (p.360).
If, as Lake unconvincingly but repeatedly states, 'Laudianism' was a thoroughly 'Arminian' movement, how can Laud possibly be its "presiding figure" when he had little to no interest in 'Arminianism'? What is more, Lake points to Laud's 1637 Star Chamber speech as "a brief but pungent endorsement of all the central features of Laudianism as it will emerge in this book" (p.41, emphasis added). All? The book tells us - indeed has a whole section (Part IV, pp.353-430) dedicated to this - that "Arminian assumptions were absolutely central to the Laudians' own position" (p.425). When we look at Laud's 1637 speech, however, it contains nothing - absolutely nothing - on the theology of grace, predestination, or reprobation. Its critique of Calvin concerns the "new-fangled device" of lay eldership. Nothing in the speech addresses the 'Arminian' debate. This being so, claiming that the 1637 speech contains "all the central features" of an 'Arminian' movement is, frankly, nonsense.
The third reason for use of the term 'Laudianism' is that it "already exists" (yes, you read that correctly - p.42). One might have thought that very many terms which 'already exist' are, rightly, subjects of historical debate and contention: 'Counter-Reformation', 'Glorious Revolution', 'the Enlightenment', 'Industrial Revolution'. When it comes to the history of the Church of England in the 1630s, however, it seems it is best not to ask serious questions about how that history is being framed. Nor is it clear how "it already exists" is at all different to "convenience".
From the outset, therefore, Lake provides an incredibly weak, unconvincing case for the use of 'Laudianism' to describe those who supported the ecclesiastical policies of the Personal Rule.
Then there are the contradictions evident in Lake's portrayal of 'Laudianism' - in addition, that is, to being an 'Arminian' movement with a "presiding figure" who had little interest in 'Arminianism'. We are told that 'Laudianism' had "unity and coherence" (p.584) - but 'Laudianism' was characterised by "internal tensions and contradictions" (p.582). 'Laudianism' had "a solid ideological core" (p.13) - but was riven by "inconsistencies, uneven developments, sometimes jarring juxtapositions and clashes of tone, promiscuous and sometimes apparently incongruous mixtures of materials taken from both the maximum and minimum positions" (p.585f). "Arminian assumptions were absolutely central to the Laudians' own position" (p.425) - but amongst the 'Laudians' "was a certain sort of Calvinist conformist or Calvinist episcopalian" (p.444). Included in the latter were Humphrey Sydenham, whose published sermons were "a statement of Calvinist orthodoxy" (p.448) and Robert Sanderson who held to "Calvinist treatments of the central doctrines" (p.455). 'Minimalist Laudianism' "looked back to the Elizabethan settlement" (p.349), even if it was "a largely spurious version of the Elizabethan church" (p.589) - but 'maximalist Laudianism', appealing to antiquity over the Reformation, "was not a simple return to a stable status quo ante, but rather a dynamic, open-ended pursuit of catholicity and purity" (p.350).
It is neither unity nor coherence which emerges from Lake's description of 'Laudianism' but, rather, a disparate, incoherent, inconsistent grouping, with little in common except two crucial commitments - neither of which was about altars or 'Arminianism'.
One of these defining commitments was anti-puritanism. As Lake himself states, "anti-puritanism acted as the glue that held the Laudian coalition together" (p.583). Without this 'glue', the "internal tensions and contradictions" (p.582) would have overwhelmed the coalition. It was a 'glue' which drew on a very well-established stream of thought within the Church of England, including "professional anti-puritan ideologues like Bancroft" (p.22) - who was, of course, Archbishop of Canterbury 1604-10.
The great theorist of anti-puritanism, however, was Richard Hooker. This brings us to Lake's very odd reading of Hooker as "the originator of the avant-garde conformist position" (p.40), in contrast to the convincing portrayal of Hooker which has emerged in recent decades as a theologian within the mainstream of the Reformed tradition. As Diarmaid MacCulloch has put it:
Hooker's emphatic affirmation of the place of the civil magistrate in the Church, his relativistic discussion of episcopacy and his maintenance of a Reformed view of the Eucharist, still firmly distanced from Lutherans - even his turning away from Calvinistic harshness on predestination would not raise eyebrows in Bullinger's Zurich. The Ecclesiastical Polity was much more in the spirit of the Decades than has often been realized.
It is this which explains why Hooker's anti-puritanism could act as 'glue' for a diverse, disparate, incoherent coalition, which stretched from committed anti-Calvinists to those Lake describes as "Calvinist conformists". Hooker, precisely because he was not an avant-garde Conformist ideologue but, rather, the theorist - political as much as theological - of anti-puritan Conformity, was the originator of one of the two key commitments of this coalition of the 1630s.
The second defining commitment of the coalition was the Personal Rule. Lake admits that what he terms 'Laudianism' was "the ecclesiastical policies of the Personal Rule ... the signature policies of the Personal Rule" (p.41f). It was integral to "the political project of the Personal Rule" (p.586). Just how much this was so is seen in a key ecclesiastical policy of the Personal Rule was intertwined with a political act:
The decision to enter into full-on controversy about the altar paralleled that to allow the legality of ship money finally to be tested in the courts. In both case, the choices to go public, which were made within months of each other in 1637, had been self-consciously delayed for some years (p.7).
1637, however, was the fatal year which brought an end to the coalition gathered around the ecclesiastical policies of the Personal Rule. In that year, Charles' experiment in the government of the kingdoms and churches of the Three Kingdoms collapsed:
No sooner had it reached its apogee, over the summer of 1637, then it was almost immediately dissipated, blown away by the disastrous effects of the attempt to impose a new prayer book on Scotland (p.545).
With the collapse of the Personal Rule, the ecclesiastical coalition of the 1630s broke. Now facing rebellious Scots Covenanters and needing to negotiate with the parliament of England, Charles opted for an alternative ecclesiastical vision:
the authorities were employing veterans of the old Calvinist conformist establishment to make the royalist case. 'The large declaration' of 1639, Charles' ghostwritten confutation of everything the covenanters claimed to stand for, while undoubtedly suffused with Laudian sensibilities, was nothing like a full-on Laudian text. Rabidly anti-puritan and anti-populist, and densely documented, after the manner of Richard Bancroft, it avoided overt statements of Laudian principle, and sought to align the king with the defence of 'the reformed religion' (p.545).
Mindful that 'Calvinist conformist' is a phrase that Stephen Hampton has rightly and wisely counselled against as a phrase to describe those in the Jacobean and Caroline church who adhered to a broad Reformed orthodoxy, we might instead suggest that the collapse of the Personal Rule witnessed Charles at least partially discovering the wisdom of his father's management of the three national Churches of his kingdoms.
This highlights the defining characteristic of the ecclesiastical policies of the Personal Rule. Charles rejected his father's approach to managing of the Churches of the Three Kingdoms. James - with considerable skill and cunning - created what Charles Prior has described as "the model of a Jacobean ecclesiological consensus". His handling of the Synod of Dort demonstrates just how adept James was in managing the Church of England. The Church of England, on James' direction, participated in Dort with the other Reformed churches. He gave directions to the Church of England participants to moderate the debate and seek to maintain relationships with the Lutherans, reflecting his eirenic ambitions. The Canons of Dort, however, did not become part of the Church of England's confession, as James maintained his opposition to the Lambeth Articles becoming part of the formularies. And 'non-Calvinists' continued to flourish and be promoted in the Church of England: Laud, for example, became Bishop of St Davids in 1621. This, of course, was all rather untidy and ambiguous. But, as Elizabeth had known, these were virtues, not vices, in governing a national Church.
It was this Jacobean vision of "ecclesiological consensus" which Charles rejected. Rather than James' carefully managed, eirenic balance, the Personal Rule sought to ensure that the non-Calvinist stream of opinion in the Church of England became hegemonic and that Charles' preferences became the standard of Conformity. What is more, whereas James had worked through ecclesiastical and political institutions, sometimes negotiating, sometimes threatening royal displeasure, sometimes compromising (e.g. the decision not to introduce a new liturgy for the Church of Scotland), Charles used the device of the Personal Rule to bypass such need for negotiation, arm-twisting, and compromise.
The diverse coalition gathered around the ecclesiastical policies of the Personal Rule was a motely group, held together by anti-puritanism and a sense that the Personal Rule was necessary to uphold Conformity in face of the perceived puritan threat. When the Personal Rule collapsed, the coalition disappeared. It had no presence, for example, in the Prayer Book petitions of the early 1640s. Such petitions were, as Judith Maltby has shown, driven by 'Prayer Book Protestants', who "looked back favourably to the 'church of Elizabeth and James'".
The embodiment of this ethos for Maltby was the Yorkshire gentleman Sir Thomas Aston. A critic of the Personal Rule and its ecclesiastical policies, he was a committed lay apologist and campaigner for episcopacy and Prayer Book. He died of wounds inflicted on the battlefield in 1646, in defence of Church and King. Aston, in other words, exemplified how the Personal Rule condemned the ecclesiastical policies of the 1630s as divisive and incapable of winning significant from many who were Episcopalians and Conformists, and who would themselves take up arms for the King.
The issue was not, for such Conformists, the content of the ecclesiastical policies of the 1630s: the issue was the Personal Rule itself. As Sir Edward Dering declared amidst the ecclesiastical debates of 1642, Laud's "intent on uniformity was a good purpose" but "in the way of his pursuit thereof he was extremely faulty". This, by the way, explains why liturgical conformity and altar rails were uncontroversial in the post-1662 Church of England: the Act of Uniformity was the work of Parliament, altar rails of laity and local elites, neither of bishops invoking jure divino over and against established conventions.
All of which brings us back to how we describe the coalition gathered around the ecclesiastical policies of the 1630s. Laud was not at the centre of this coalition. Charles I was at its centre. Without Laud, the Personal Rule and its ecclesiastical policies would still have occurred because they were driven by Charles. This is why Julian Davies describes the policies as "Carolinism". This is also seen in Kevin Sharpe's superb interpretation in The Personal Rule of Charles I (1992):
The evidence of the king's own hand on proclamations, episcopal reports and declarations, the range of signet letters dealing with religious matters support the view of Davenant's biographer that Charles I assumed the role of 'universal bishop', and that the history of the church in the 1630s was written around the king's own preferences and concerns.
Such a view is only further emphasised when we consider Charles' relationship with the national Churches in his other two kingdoms, Ireland and Scotland. In his study of royal ecclesiastical policies in the Kingdom of Ireland in the1630s, John McCafferty describes a vision "centred on a royal, not Canterburian, supremacy". 'Laudianism' utterly fails as a description of both those ecclesiastical policies and the coalition which supported them. 'Carolinism' is a much more accurate, meaningful term.
For Lake, however, 'Carolinism' is to be dismissed because (a) it "failed to catch on" and (b) it is "nonsense" to shift blame from Laud to Charles. With regard to (a), perhaps 'Carolinism' has "failed to catch on" because of entrenched Old Hat orthodoxies. As for (b) it is Lake himself who has presented Laud as an archbishop almost entirely uninterested in 'Arminianism' while leading a supposedly ideological 'Arminian' movement. Added to which, as Lake notes, it is Laud who continues as Archbishop of Canterbury after 1637 - after, that is, 'Laudianism' has collapsed - and who was active in deploying the older Jacobean approach, not least in choosing "no Laudian but rather the notoriously 'moderate' Calvinist conformist Joseph Hall to make the case for iure divino episcopacy" (p.546). (Not mentioned by Lake is that a jure divino discourse regarding episcopacy was no 'Laudian' innovation but had long been deployed - in Hookerian fashion - by 'Calvinist conformists'. This was seen, for example, in a 1608 sermon by George Downame, later Bishop of Derry and, as a colleague of Ussher, proponent of the Irish Articles of 1615.)
To call the coalition which supported the ecclesiastical policies of the Personal Rule 'Laudian' is to fail to acknowledge that it was not Laud's primacy but the Personal Rule of Charles that was absolutely fundamental to the ecclesiastical policies of the 1630s. The purpose of Lake's study, of course, is to attempt to convince us otherwise. It has failed with this reader, not least due to its - to use words Lake himself employs to describe 'Laudianism' - "internal tensions and contradictions". Perhaps it is fitting that a work entitled On Laudianism shares this characteristic of the movement it studies and thereby makes a significant contribution to others recognising that there was no such thing as 'Laudianism'.
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