laudable Practice

'Everybody agrees that is the worst in Christendom.' This was the somewhat startling judgment of Mary II, when considering the decayed state of the Church of Ireland shortly after the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. These are the words with which Patrick Little (editor) opens the volume of essays that is The Church of Ireland Under the Stuarts (2025). The essays, covering a wide range of subjects - from the role Trinity College Dublin to cathedral music, from the devotional life of the episcopalian second Earl of Cork during the Interregnum to the role of the bishops in the Irish House of Lords - might be considered as something of a revisionist response to the words of Queen Mary. The Church of Ireland which emerges from these essays has greater spiritual, intellectual, and cultural vibrancy than recognised in Old Hat accounts and enduring populist mythology. The intellectual and cultural vibrancy owed much to Trinity College Dublin, driving the "distinctiveness" of th...

In a number of posts on Peter Lake's On Laudianism: Piety, Polemic and Politics During the Personal Rule of Charles I (2023), I have been deeply critical of Lake's depiction of the pre-Caroline Church of England , his failure to account for the continuities in Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline ceremonial conformity , and his entirely unconvincing depiction of 'Laudianism' as an 'Arminian' movement.  All this said, I do have to credit Lake's book with deeply influencing my thought about the Church of England in the 1630s. Having read and reflected upon Lake's 600 pages, I am now convinced that 'Laudianism' should cease to be used as a meaningful term. Put bluntly, Lakes's work - contrary, of course, to his intention - has led me to the view that 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 'Laudi...

The False and Erroneous doctrine of the Calvinists On Predestination and the Providence of God. 1] That Christ did not die for all men, but only for the elect. 2] That God created the greater part of mankind for eternal damnation, and wills not that the greater part should be converted and live. 3] That the elected and regenerated can not lose faith and the Holy Spirit, or be damned, though they commit great sins and crimes of every kind. 4] That those who are not elect are necessarily damned, and can not arrive at salvation, though they be baptized a thousand times, and receive the Eucharist every day, and lead as blameless a life as ever can be led. Reading Peter Lake's On Laudianism (2024), we might assume that these are words from a Laudian publication of the 1630s, for "Arminian assumptions were absolutely central to the Laudians' own position" (p.425). 'Laudianism', after all, was "an attempt gradually to Arminianise the culture, to disseminate  .....

Having previously indicated how unconvincing I find Lake's assessment of the general characteristics of the Elizabethan and Jacobean - that is, pre-Laudian Church of England - I now turn to his account of Laudian "ceremonial conformity", "the ceremonial and liturgical aspects of divine worship" (p.139). What is particularly striking about Lake's analysis is its incoherence and inconsistency. On the one hand, we are informed that the Laudian view of cathedrals as the ideal of their ceremonial agenda "has been refuted": the claim that something like the Laudian style had been preserved in the cathedrals since the reformation was entirely untrue (p.136). This rather explicit statement, however, sits rather uneasily - to say the least - alongside an account from James' reign, provided only a few pages later: a cognate story from the start of James' reign about the French ambassador's 'viewing of our church orders, first at the cathed...

Peter Lake's On Laudianism: Piety, Polemic and Politics During the Personal Rule of Charles I (2023) has been sitting on my desk for some months. I began reading it on 2nd January and am now one-third of the way through the book. As I had realized from reviews I had previously read, I am in fundamental disagreement with his understanding of Laudianism. Over the next few weeks, there will be a series of posts as I make my way through the book, explaining my disagreements. Let me begin, however, by stating some agreements. Lake states, "Laudianism was one of a number of ways of being protestant, just one of the modes of reformation available in and to the English post-reformation church" (p.19f). As Laud himself declared in his conference with Fisher, "And the Church of England is Protestant too". Those contemporary critics who accused Laudianism of rejecting the Reformation, and those historians who repeat this claim, entirely miss a fundamental aspect of Laudia...