'Not a presence attached to the elements themselves': Laudian rubrics, Laudian - not Puseyite - meaning

Having set before readers a choice between Laud or Keble in The Teaching of the Anglican Divines in the Time of King James I and King Charles I on the Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist (1858), Henry Charles Groves - a clergyman of the Church of Ireland - turned to Pusey's reading of three rubrics in the Prayer Book Holy Communion rite. Groves firstly quotes Pusey on the rubric requiring remaining consecrated elements to "reverently" placed upon the Holy Table and covered with "a fair linen cloth" and the rubric directing that, after the Blessings, the consecrated elements are to be "reverently" consumed. According to Pusey, these rubrics demonstrated "that the Church of England believes an abiding objective Presence of the Body and Blood of Christ in the elements, apart from the act of reception". 

Groves immediately declares that such an interpretation is not sustainable:

the views here maintained are neither the meaning of the rubric, nor such as Anglican divines maintained at the time of the insertion of the rubric.

In particular, he turns to Cosin to emphasise that "the eating of the remaining elements was not a second Communion" - a view required by Pusey's reading of these rubrics. In the words of Cosin:

And we also deny that the elements still retain the nature of Sacraments when not used according to divine institution, that is, given by Christ's ministers, and received by His people; so that Christ in the consecrated bread ought not, cannot, be kept and preserved to be carried about, because He is present only to the communicants.

The view of another Laudian, Montagu, is also invoked:

The body being sanctified by consecration, when that sacred action is ended, ceases to be the body.

Any notion, therefore, that the reverent consumption of the remaining consecrated elements entailed a belief in "an objective abiding Presence ... in the elements" cannot be seriously maintained in light of the prevailing eucharistic theology held in the Restoration Church. Likewise with the rubric directing covering with the fair linen cloth:

the covering of the elements, after all have communicated, with a fair linen cloth, instead of being pervaded by any idea of a Real Presence abiding in them after Communion, presents only an instance of that reverent care with which the Church deals with things which ... have obtained a relative holiness. The rubric was inserted in the last revision, and in no work on the Liturgy have I seen even a hint thrown out, that it was inserted with any view to a real abiding Presence apart from the act of reception.

Both rubrics, of course, had been absent from 1559. There certainly was a Laudian quality to their inclusion in 1662: this, however, reflected - rather than in any way dissented from - the broad consensus on eucharistic theology in the Restoration Church. This, as Groves ably demonstrated, was a consensus stretching back into the Elizabethan Settlement. Recognising a "relative holiness" in the consecrated elements was an entirely uncontroversial understanding, firmly within the consensus. 

The third relevant rubric was also absent from 1559 - the Black Rubric of 1552. The revision of this rubric, changing 1552's "any Real and Essential presence" to "any Corporal Presence", likewise did not at all indicate "an abiding objective Presence of the Body and Blood of Christ in the elements, apart from the act of reception". The 'Real Presence' was eagerly affirmed not only by Laudians but by the wider eucharistic consensus in the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline English Church: it was, indeed, a thoroughly Reformed affirmation, epitomised by Sir Roger Twysden. It is this, as Groves notes, which explains the meaning of the revision of the Black Rubric:

What the bishops at that time meant by Real and Essential Presence [replaced by 'any Corporal Presence' in the 1662 rubric] may be gathered fairly from the views of Laud, and Hammond, and Cosin ... All Churchmen must have looked up to Laud with respect, and though dead, his book [i.e. the Conference with Fisher] spoke for him. His friend Juxon, though from infirmities incapable of taking an active part in affairs, held the see of Canterbury till after the revision of the Prayer-book. Hammond was dead, but his three brother-chaplains, Sanderson, Sheldon, and Morley, were alive to take active parts in the re-organization of the Church. Cosin himself was present, with his views now matured by controversy, and established by his work on Transubstantiation. Wren, too, another of the Laudian school, was there to testify of the doctrine of his great leader. Sheldon, Morley, Sanderson, Cosin, and Wren, all were active in the revision of the Liturgy. They could not have in honesty retained words which directly, or by implication, denied a Real Presence; they therefore changed them into words used by English controversialists of that time to deny the doctrine, whether Lutheran or Roman, of a Presence attached to the elements themselves.

Pusey's reading of the intention of these rubrics cannot be regarded as at all convincing. It is related to the process described by Nockles: "Tractarian rhetoric entailed a certain misrepresentation of old High Church theology". Contra such Puseyite misrepresentations, Laudian rubrics have a Laudian meaning.