Archbishop Laud's legacy: the Laudian folkekirke vision

Today is the eve of the commemoration of the martyrdom of Archbishop Laud. Tomorrow, particular corners of Anglican social media will indulge in a long-standing Whiggish pursuit - condemning the martyred Archbishop. There are, of course, reasons to critique Laud. Indeed, post-1662 High Church opinion was often cautious about aspects of Laud's primacy, not least because of the shadow cast by the Personal Rule. Laud's character has also proven to be as unlikeable to historians as to his critics in the 1630s. That said, we are long overdue a favourable interpretation of Laud, described by the Cambridge Platonist George Rust, in his sermon at Jeremy Taylor's funeral, as "the wise Prelate". 

This post seeks to consider what I am describing as Archbishop Laud's legacy: a vision of popular Anglicanism, a national church embedded in culture through the liturgical rites and rhythms of the parish, an alternative account of the Christian life to that offered by the sectarian predestinarianism of 'the godly'. As Kevin Sharpe has stated:

For Laud the unity of the church rested not on narrowly defined dogma but on the community and uniformity of worship.  Attendance at the parish church and participation in a common prayer service conducted according to the canons and Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England were for him the hallmarks of membership of the Church of England.

This vision can, I think, be indicated by use of a phrase from the Church of Denmark, folkekirke - appropriately so, as Laudians sought a "Union of the Churches of the Northern Kingdoms". Two Laudian concerns defined this folkekirke vision: a 'beauty of holiness', decent order in external worship; and a rejection of the soteriology of what we might term Calvinistic scholasticism, as embodied in the Lambeth Articles and the Synod of Dort. 

The first of these concerns was expressed by Laud in his defence at his impeachment:

all that I laboured for in this particular was, that the external Worship of God in this Church, might be kept up in Uniformity and Decency, and in some Beauty of Holiness. And this the rather, because first I found that with the Contempt of the Outward Worship of God, the Inward fell away apace, and Profaneness began boldly to shew it self. And secondly, because I could speak with no conscientious Persons almost, that were wavering in Religion, but the great motive which wrought upon them to disaffect, or think meanly of the Church of England, was, that the external Worship of God was so lost in the Church (as they conceived it;) and the Churches themselves, and all things in them, suffered to lye in such a base and slovenly Fashion in most places of the Kingdom. These, and no other Considerations, moved me to take so much care as I did of it; which was with a single Eye, and most free from any Romish Superstition in any thing.

Laud's concern here reflects a deep wisdom that was also to be seen in the recognition by the Elizabethan Settlement of the formative significance of the Church's liturgy, rites, and ceremonies in the parish church. This found particular expression under the Elizabethan Settlement in the provision of non-preaching clergy for parishes. Hooker's defence of such ministry indicated an understanding of how the liturgy, rites, and ceremonies shaped and formed Christians:

whether a Church wherein there is not sufficient store of learned men to furnish all congregations should do better to let thousands of soules grow savage, to let them live without any publique service of God, to let theire children die unbaptised, to withhold the benefit of the other sacrament from them, to let them depart this world like Pagans without any thinge as much as red unto them concerninge the waie of life, then as it doth in this necessitie to make such presbyters as are so farre foorth sufficient although they want that habilitie of preaching which some others have (LEP V.81.5).

Divine service, the Sacraments of Baptism and Eucharist, ministering to the dying (the BCP 1559 'Visitacion of the Sicke' provided for absolution and Holy Communion) - these, says Hooker, sustain Christian faith.

Part of the critique of the Reformation, to which Laud was responding, was the allegation that it removed from ordinary Christians those practices which sustained Christians from the cradle to the grave - replacing them only with sermons in meeting houses.  Leaving aside how this critique fails to do justice to both Lutheran and continental Reformed experiences, Laud's concern that "the external Worship of God in this Church, might be kept up in Uniformity and Decency, and in some Beauty of Holiness" was intimately related to the vision of the Elizabethan Settlement. Indeed, to state the obvious, it was the Elizabethan Settlement that gave to the reformed Church of England the liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer, directed that parish clergy were decently habited in the surplice (with cathedral clergy also vested in the cope), retained the stone font, upheld the role of music in the liturgy in cathedrals and collegiate churches, and required conformity to the Prayer Book's rites and ceremonies. And so, as Laud stated in his 1637 speech to the Star Chamber, his care was to settle "the Externall Worship of God" in the Church of England according "to the Rules of its first Reformation".

In the same speech Laud challenged the charge from his opponents that this understanding of liturgy, rites, and ceremonies was 'Popish':

As if the externall decent worship of God could not bee upheld in this Kingdome, without bringing in Popery.

Laud's use of the word 'decent' is suggestive. In The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village, Eamon Duffy refers to William Shepherd, a sometime Augustinian monk who conformed to the Elizabethan Settlement, becoming vicar of a small Essex parish. He quotes Shepherd describing BCP 1559 as the "decent Rits of the church of Christ". The decent liturgy, rites, and ceremonies of the Church of England. It was this which Laud - drawing upon the wisdom and insights of the Elizabethan Settlement - sought to protect and uphold in the English parish church, as evident from his metropolitical visitation articles:

Whether doth your Parson, Vicar, or Curate, distinctly and reuerently say Diuine seruice vpon Sundayes and Holidayes, and other dayes appointed to be obserued by the booke of Common Prayer; as Wednesdayes, and Fridayes, and the Eues of euery Sunday and Holiday, at fit and vsuall times? And doth he duly obserue the Orders, Rites and Ceremonies, prescribed in the said Booke of common-Prayer, as well in reading publike prayers and the Letany, as also in administring the Sacraments, solemnization of Matrimony, visiting the sicke, burying the dead, Churching of Women, and all other like Rites and Offices of the Church, in such manner and forme, as in the said Booke of Common prayer he is inioyned, without any omission or addition. 

This was a crucial aspect of the Laudian folkekirke vision - a 'beauty of holiness' in the liturgy, rites, and ceremonies which shaped and sustained the Christian life, from cradle to grave, in a way powerfully contrasting with the meeting house sermon.  Judith Maltby has described these liturgical rhythms in her Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England:

the familiar words of the liturgy which gave shape to the day, the week, and the year, and which accompanied the rites of passage of birth, coupling, and death.

This was at the centre of the Laudian folkekirke vision.

What, then, of the Laudian rejection of the Calvinistic soteriology of the Lambeth Articles and the Synod of Dort? This rejection had deep roots in the reformed Church of England. The Lambeth Articles had been refused by both Elizabeth and James I/VI. Elizabeth's chief minister - and an architect of the Elizabethan Settlement - the deeply Protestant William Cecil was a significant voice in opposing the attempt to require clerical subscription to the Lambeth Articles, regarding a doctrinal emphasis on predestination as undermining the national - and thus comprehensive - nature of the Church of England, with obvious consequences for the peace of the realm. Indeed, as Diarmaid MacCulloch notes, Cecil was also a strong supporter of the exiled Spanish theologian Antonio del Corro, whose anti-predestinarian teaching provoked considerable controversy.

At the 1604 Hampton Court conference - where James rejected the call for the Lambeth Articles to become part of the formularies of the Church of England - Bishop Bancroft of London (who had received episcopal consecration in 1597) had the King's support for his critique of the consequences of a reliance upon a doctrine of predestination:

the Bishop of London took occasion to signifie to his Majesty, how very many in these days, neglecting Holiness of Life, presumed too much of persisting of Grace, laying all their Religion upon Predestination, if I shall be Saved, I shall be Saved; which he termed a desperate Doctrine, shewing it to be contrary to good Divinity, and the True Doctrine of Predestination, wherein, we should Reason rather ascendendo, than descendendo; thus; I Live in Obedience to God, in Love with my Neighbour, I follow my Vocation, &c. therefore I trust that God hath Elected me, and Predestinated me to Salvation: Not thus, which is the usual course of Argument; God hath Predestinated and chosen me to Life; therefore though I sin never so grievously, yet I shall not be damned: For whom he once loveth, he loveth to the End.

James reflected this in his 1622 'Directions Concerning Preachers', declaring that "the deep points of predestination, election, reprobation or of the universality, efficacity, resistibility or irresistibility of God's grace" were not appropriate for preaching in the parish church and that "no preacher of what title soever under the degree of a bishop, or dean at the least" was to address such topics in sermons. 

This approach was reiterated by Charles I in his 1628 Declaration, prefixed to the Articles of Religion:

That therefore in these both curious and unhappy differences, which have for so many hundred years, in different times and places, exercised the Church of Christ, we will, that all further curious search be laid aside, and these disputes shut up in God's promises, as they be generally set forth to us in the Holy Scriptures, and the general meaning of the Articles of the Church of England according to them.

The Declaration echoed the view expressed by bishops Buckeridge (Rochester), Howson (Oxford), and Laud (St David's) in their 1625 letter to the Duke of Buckingham, amidst the controversies surrounding Montague's writings. In the letter, the three bishops invoked Elizabeth's rejection of the Lambeth Articles because "of how little they agreed with piety and obedience to government". As for the Synod of Dort, the bishops sounded a note of ecclesial patriotism, saying that it "was a synod of that nation [i.e Holland]" and that the Church of England could not "admit a foreign synod". 

The Laudian rejection of predestinarianism, therefore, drew on a well-established stream of thought in the Elizabethan and Jacobean Church, voiced by Supreme Governors and their lay advisors, and by non-Calvinistic bishops and divines. Both Supreme Governors (and their closest political advisors) and the non-Calvinistic bishops were deeply suspicious and critical of how a doctrinal focus on predestination disturbed the peace and good order of the Church and realm of England. Both also regarded this focus of Calvinistic scholasticism as requiring a narrower, less comprehensive Church of England; less, therefore, of a national church. This was emphasised by the three bishops in their letter to Buckingham, in which they had pointed to the "moderation" of the Church of England, its Articles of Religion refusing to be "too busy with every particular school-point". 

Another well-established concern was also voiced by the Laudians. As Peter Lake notes in his On Laudianism, William Hardwick, in a 1638 visitation sermon, "the puritans were far more concerned with 'science' - the inculcation of doctrinal knowledge and right opinion - than they were with 'conscience' - the pursuit of practical obedience to the divine will and the outward forms of piety and Christian behaviour". Not only was predestination a matter for the schools rather than the parish pulpit; it was irrelevant to how ordinary Christians confessed the Creed and lived out the faith in home, parish, and realm. Parsons in the parish pulpit, therefore, were - in the words of James' 'Directions to Preachers' - to "confine themselves wholly to those two heads of faith and good life, which are all the subject of the ancient sermons and homilies". And as the Laudian Jeremy Taylor would later state to his clergy:

Let the business of your Sermons be to preach holy Life, Obedience, Peace, Love among neighbours, hearty love, to live as the old Christians did, and the new should; to do hurt to no man, to do good to every man: For in these things the honour of God consists, and the Kingdom of the Lord Jesus.

It was the case that the two convictions underpinning the Laudian folkekirke vision were intimately related. The Laudian alternative to what Lake terms "the propagation, from the popular pulpit, and the internalisation by the people, of right (predestinarian) doctrine" was the rhythms of the liturgy - over the years, and from cradle to grave - in the decently furnished parish church. A predestinarianism which identified 'the godly', abandoned common prayer for preaching filled with "unnecessary disputations", determined - in the words of Maltby - "the godly's assessment of the multitude", and denied the Sacraments and other rites of the Church to those deemed "unregenerate", grimly contrasted with the Laudian vision.

This Laudian folkenkirke vision is, I would suggest, the most attractive and enduring legacy of Archbishop Laud. Those who, from the Elizabethan Settlement until the Restoration, agitated for 'further Reformation', for a Church of England which rejected the Prayer Book and its ceremonies, imposed the narrow doctrinal concerns of the Lambeth Articles, and turned the parish church into an "undress'd" (to quote George Herbert in 'The British Church') meeting house, were, despite apparent victory on 10th January 1645, to be defeated. The Settlement of 1662 produced, on these matters, a Church of England that was desired by Laud and the Laudians. The Prayer Book's rites and ceremonies shaped and sustained the Christian life in parishes across the land, in decently furnished parish churches. The narrow, obscure focus of the Lambeth Articles - and their restrictive view of grace - was definitively rejected in favour of what Burnet described as "that Moderation which our Church hath observed in all other things". The parish pulpit, rather than indulging in "curious and unhappy differences", heeded the wise directions of James I/VI and Taylor. This was the Anglicanism of the 'long 18th century' and beyond, an Anglicanism still to be cherished, the Laudian vision of a folkekirke.