"Where it is in error, direct it": Laudianism, Conformity, and the Roman See
John Bramhall’s Christchurch sermon of August 1633 declared Rome ‘merely’ schismatical and the pope a patriarch. However shocking this may have been to his Dublin auditory, his words were part of a wider process of displacement of the Roman Antichrist.
The orthodoxy of papacy as anti-Christ was, so it seems, replaced by a "lowering of the theological temperature", a "significant switch from eschatology to institutional history".
We might, however, wonder if the Laudian understanding of Rome as a garden requiring weeding, rather than the synagogue of Satan, was actually an innovation. There was significant precedent in Conformist thought for such an approach. Hooker, after all, had declared in his Laws:
To say that in nothing they may be followed which are of the Church of Rome were violent and extreme. Some things they do in that they are men, in that they are wise men and Christian men some things, some things in that they are men misled and blinded with error ... Where Rome keepeth that which is ancienter and better ... we have rather follow the perfections of them whom we like not, than in defects resemble them whom we love [i.e. "the other reformed Churches"] (V.28.1).
It is surely difficult to portray the Laudian attitude towards Rome as innovation when a very similar attitude is explicit in Hooker. Perhaps even more significantly, at the outset of reign in March 1603, James VI/I had clearly declared his recognition of the Roman communion as a Christian church, his desire for "Christian Union", and - while obviously rejecting the "arrogant and ambitious supremacy" of the pope - his willingness to recognise the ecclesiastical honour given by antiquity to that See:
I could wish from my heart that it would please God to make me one of the Members of such a Christian Union in Religion; as laying wilfulness aside on both Hands, we might meet in the midst, which is the Centre and Perfection of all things; for if they would leave, and be ashamed of such New and Gross Corruptions of theirs, as themselves cannot maintain, nor deny to be worthy of Reformation; I would for my own part, be contented to meet them in the mid way, so that all Novelties might be removed on either side; for as my Faith is the true Ancient and Catholick, and Apostolick Faith, grounded upon the Scriptures, and express Word of God, so will I ever yield all Reverence to Antiquity in the points of Ecclesiastical policy.
The Laudian critique of Rome as a church in error rather than anti-Christ stood in clear continuity with the words of James as Supreme Governor (and, indeed, Article 19). In his Two dialogues, or conferences Concerning kneeling in the very act of receiving the sacramental bread and wine, in the Supper of the Lord (1608), Thomas Rogers indicates how this approach became part of conventional Conformist thought, long before Laudianism:
... had you marked what followeth (proceeding from the soundness, and profoundness of his most excellent judgement,) you might have seen that his Highness utterly condemneth not all the doctrine, and ceremonies in the Church of Rome taught, and used, but those ceremonies only, and doctrines, which are corrupt, savouring of error, and superstition, not of the purity and verity of the primitive Christians. There should you read and perceive his constant and resolute opinion to be, that no Church ought further to separate itself from the church of Rome either in doctrine, or ceremony, than she hath departed from herself, when she was in her flourishing and best estate, and from Christ, her Lord and head.
Among which corruptions his Majesty never counted either the surplice, by you mentioned; or the Kneeling between us controverted, to be.
But whatsoever corruptions have been either in Kneeling, or the surplice: yet the said corruptions being taken away, and these appointed, now reformed to the service of God: with what face can you call either our practice in kneeling to be corrupt.
It is another example of how Laudianism, rather than being a rupture, was deeply rooted in Conformist thought and understanding.
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