Rival claims to orthodoxy: how different were the 'Reformed Conformists' and the 'Laudians'?

As I continue to read Stephen Hampton's Grace and Conformity: The Reformed Conformist Tradition and the Early Stuart Church of England (2021), I am struck by the assumption throughout that Reformed Conformity straightforwardly represented 'orthodoxy' in the ecclesia Anglicana.  This seems - at best - rather difficult to reconcile with the debates of the Jacobean and Caroline Church.

For example, the English delegation's contribution to the Synod of Dort is described by Hampton as "the most authoritative statement of English Reformed Orthodoxy since the Lambeth Articles".  Not referenced is the fact that the Supreme Governor of the Church of England refused authority to publish the Lambeth Articles.  No minister of the Church of England had to subscribe to them.  What is more, Overall's opposition to the Lambeth Articles did not prevent his advancement:  Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge 1596, Dean of St. Paul's 1601, Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield 1614, Bishop of Norwich 1618.

Donne, the epitome of Jacobean Conformity, defended those who "love[d] the ancient forms, and doctrines, and disciplines of the church, and retains, and delights in the reverend names of priest, and altar, and sacrifice". To say of such a person "he is a papist", Donne warned, was a "hasty conclusion" and a "misinterpretation". And this, of course, was precisely the allegation levelled by Reformed Conformists against the avant-garde and the Laudians.

Buckeridge's sermon at the 1626 funeral of Lancelot Andrewes represents a confident assertion of a doctrine of Eucharistic sacrifice, with its use of the controversial text Hebrews 13:16 and opening with the affirmation, "And so it is externum altare, not only a spiritual altar in the heart of every Christian ... but 'We have an altar,' that is, all Christians have; and it must be external, else all Christians cannot have it". And thus Buckeridge declared of the Sacrament, "Here is a representative, or commemorative, and participated sacrifice of the passion of Christ". In other words, the funeral of the leading light of the Jacobean Church was marked by a sermon that clearly indicated that there was more than one 'orthodoxy' when it came to the 'altar wars'.

There is also the 1626 York House Conference, in which those defending Montagu against the Reformed Conformist claims of heterodoxy were not outsiders but those who had been promoted and favoured within the Jacobean Church: Buckeridge had been consecrated bishop in 1611; James I had used Francis White to debate Papalist apologists; and Cosin was a chaplain to Neile of Durham. Montagu himself had also been appointed a royal chaplain in 1615. Either 'orthodoxy' was a contested spectrum or the Jacobean Church was routinely - and very improbably - promoting and favouring heterodox divines. In light of this, the assumption that the Reformed Conformists alone at the Conference were representing 'orthodoxy' is surely difficult to maintain. 

All of this is to suggest that, contrary to Hampton in Grace and Conformity, 'orthodoxy' was a contested term in the early Stuart Church of England.  Which was orthodox: the rejection of the Lambeth Articles or the conclusions of Dort?; altars or opposition to altars?; Montagu and his supporters or his critics? The debate was not between orthodox and heterodox: it was between competing understandings and articulations of orthodoxy in the ecclesia Anglicana.

One way of illustrating this is by pointing to Laudian use of 'orthodox'.  Bramhall, writing to Laud in 1633 about the state of the Irish Church, provided a good summary of the Laudian vision of orthodoxy:

I doubt much whether the clergy be very orthodox, and could wish both the Articles and Canons of the Church of England were establish'd here by Act of Parliament, or State ; that as we live all under one king, so we might both in doctrine and discipline observe an uniformity.

Wren, in his 1636 Visitation Articles for the diocese of Norwich, addressed the Laudian concern to check and bring to order disaffected clergy gathering for 'lectures':

Haue you any Lecture of Combination set up in your Parish? And if so, is it read by a companie of graue and orthodox Diuines?

In a 1637 speech to the Star Council, Laud explicitly claimed the mantle of 'orthodoxy':

I have done nothing, as a Prelate, to the uttermost of what I am conscious, but with a single heart, and with a sincere intention for the good Government and Honour of the Church; and the maintenance of the Orthodox Truth and Religion of Christ professed, established, and maintained in this Church of England.

Over a decade previously, Cosin had noted the response of the Duke of Buckingham at the York House Conference:

Mr. Mountague hath delivered nothing but the true, orthodox, and established doctrine of the Church of England, or what is agreeable thereunto.

Amidst the ejections and prohibitions of the 1640s, Peter Heylyn wrote of the Loyalist episcopalian clergy:

And you may see that the Divine Providence is still awake over that poor Remnant of the Regular and Orthodox Clergy, which have not yet bowed their knees to the Golden Calves of late erected.

Having started with Bramhall, it is fitting to also end with him.  As Archbishop-elect of Armagh, having been appointed at the Restoration, he wrote to the King in December 1660, referring to the clergy of the Church of Ireland:

Your orthodox Clergy throughout Ireland ...

The Laudian use of 'orthodox', therefore, is well-attested.  There is little reason to doubt that it was any less sincere, any less considered than the Reformed Conformist claim to 'orthodoxy'.  As a result a much more interesting, dynamic, and challenging picture of the Jacobean and Caroline Church emerges, in which the nature orthodoxy - and conformity - were contested. This requires a revision of terminology.  'Laudian', for example, fails to acknowledge that Laudianism had deep pre-Laud roots in the Jacobean Church.  Avant-garde wrongly implies a new revolutionary minority rather than a well-established stream of thought whose advocates found no barrier to advancement. Even 'Reformed Conformist' can be taken to suggest frankly silly notions that 'Laudians' were not explicitly Protestant and committed to the reformed nature of the Church of England. Likewise, Maltby's 'Prayer Book Protestant' does not help matters: those on both sides of these debates were Prayer Book Protestants.

We might also suggest that amidst the obvious and intense debates between 'Reformed Conformists' and 'Laudians', they shared a key, fundamental conviction. Hampton describes how the British delegation's defence of episcopacy at Dort "was also a moment when the English Church asserted its distinctiveness from, and superiority to, the other European Reformed churches, in virtue of its episcopal structure".  Jeremy Taylor, at Bramhall's funeral in 1663, would articulate the Laudian conviction that the Church of England was "the best Reformed Church in the world".  Perhaps, then, the intensity of the debates between 'Reformed Conformists' and 'Laudians' in the 1630s reflects not the differences between the two trends but, rather, their profound similarities: episcopal, liturgical, Protestant, attentive to patristic thought, offering rich sacrament theologies, and profoundly committed to the ecclesia Anglicana under the Royal Supremacy. They were, in other words, siblings, birthed by the same mother, sharing the same household, shaped by the same allegiances, bitterly arguing over the same property, the same bequest.