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Blown by the Spirit

Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in PreCivil-War England

Stanford University Press

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Through the centuries, puritans have been made to wear many historical masks. The godly have sometimes been cast as self-righteous and hypocritical busybodies—intolerant, small-minded and repressive; at other points, they have appeared as champions of liberty, the heroic founding figures of a triumphant Whig-liberal narrative of progress and human freedom; in this century, they have not infrequently graced the scholarly stage as the insurgents of a new bourgeois order, the standard-bearers of a proto-capitalistic ethic destined to cut the shackles of feudal bondage. In part because of this seemingly boundless malleability, a number of modern commentators have come to regard the admittedly amorphous categories of "puritan" and "puritanism" with a certain suspicion, some even going so far as to reject them as vague and misleading vestiges of seventeenth-century polemical battles. Yet in spite of such well-intentioned skepticism, the godly have continued to exercise a powerful hold over scholars of early modern England, who remain plagued by a nagging intuition that without "puritanism" (or some synonymous category), we cannot begin to explain the tumultuous political and cultural world of Tudor-Stuart England.

The staying power of puritanism is in part a product of historiographical fashion. The drive to destabilize, or even to banish, the category was pushed forward by the first wave of "revisionism" that swept through the field of early modern English history beginning in the late 1960s. One of the central features of the revisionist assault on Whig orthodoxy was an attempt to downplay the existence of ideological conflict in the century or so before the English civil war. Where Gardiner, Notestein, Neale, and others had posited an escalating conflict over constitutional principles progressing hand-in-hand with a battle between a puritan "opposition" and an establishment Anglicanism, revisionists sought to lay down a picture of relative ideological homogeneity, stability and consensus. Crucial to this revisionist picture was the research of Nicholas Tyacke, whose seminal work on Arminianism suggested that the Church of England prior to the reign of Charles I—far from representing an ideological via media between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism—had in fact been dominated by a strain of evangelical Calvinism, a state of affairs that was disrupted only by the rise of an aggressive anti-Calvinist movement in the 1620s. His work had a double effect: it simultaneously undermined the notion of a freestanding Anglican tradition, while likewise implying that "puritanism," if it existed at all, was merely the most fastidious or aggressive manifestation of a broader, consensual Calvinism that was shared by the vast majority of early Stuart churchmen. Tyacke's conclusions were rapidly assimilated into the revisionist synthesis, most notably by Conrad Russell, who used Tyacke's arguments to downplay the existence of ideological conflict prior to the late 1620s, when Arminianism and fiscal breakdown were taken to have produced ruptures that had not previously existed. So, too, in the wake of Tyacke's work, a number of scholars—including Michael Finlayson, Paul Christianson, J. C. Davis and, at certain moments, Patrick Collinson—teased out the implications of his thesis, arguing that the category of "puritanism" was at best overused, and at worst entirely incoherent, a fiction created by a combination of seventeenth-century polemicists and later historians. 3 In recent years, however, "puritanism" as a concept has experienced something of a historiographical renaissance, owing in no small part to what might be termed the "second generation" of revisionist scholarship. Having overturned the conflictual model of the Whigs, revisionist scholars found themselves at length forced to provide a positive explanation for the extraordinary events of the mid-century, leading many of them, including Kevin Sharpe, John Morrill, Peter White, and even Russell himself to seize upon religion, and more specifically upon a godly or puritanical movement to reform the church, as perhaps the central ideological precipitant of the English civil wars. In this, revisionists appear to be joining hands with their "post-revisionist" critics, most of whom have never doubted the existence of significant religious friction in the early modern period. Thus, although large differences remain over details of interpretation, scholars appear to be converging upon a major re-evaluation of the early Stuart period, one in which religious factors, and above all puritanism, will play a very substantial role.

Yet if this felicitous convergence can be explained partly by examining the fortunes of revisionism as a historiographical trend, it also owes much to the seemingly undeniable and inordinate role assumed by militant Protestants in the cataclysmic events of the 1640s and 1650s. Beginning with Clarendon and Hobbes in the seventeenth century, historians who have sought to come to grips with the massive upheaval of the English Revolution have returned again and again to puritans for insight and explanation. This is hardly mysterious. From the apocalyptic fast sermons of the Long Parliament, to the Root and Branch attack on episcopacy, to the iconoclasm of grassroots parliamentary supporters, to the famed psalm-singing roundheads of the New Model Army, the upswell of resistance that led to the civil war had from the outset borne the hallmarks of a rigorous and unyielding form of Protestantism. So, too, the Revolution is rightly linked in our minds with the strange and dizzying proliferation of sectarian groupings that emerged from the wreckage of episcopacy. Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists, Fifth Monarchists, Levellers, and Quakers all appear at least to have evolved out of what might be termed the leftwing of English Protestantism—the world of conventicles, scrupulous nonconformity, and committed, logocentric religiosity that contemporaries often branded with the label "puritan." Indeed, it is in large measure because these sectarian movements are so close to the center of the English Revolution—so crucial to what made the events of mid-century politically, religiously, and intellectually radical and unique—that the concept of puritanism has proved so difficult to bury.

For all this, however, there has been surprisingly little substantive scholarship devoted to the process whereby these striking forms of social and religious radicalism emerged from the bosom of pre–civil war puritanism. To put it another way, although scholars now seem to agree as to the centrality of the godly for our understanding of the civil war and revolution, we remain quite ignorant as to how, why, and under what circumstances the English puritan community splintered into numerous competing factions, many of them bearing ideas of seemingly unprecedented social, political, or theological radicalism. The following book represents a first attempt to map out this complex and obscure process.

Two Puritanisms?

To more fully understand how and why such a gaping historiographical void exists, we must turn to the work of the two greatest postwar scholars of puritanism, Christopher Hill and Patrick Collinson. Working from very different perspectives, these two historians in many ways set the tone for the study of English puritanism in the second half of the twentieth century. At the same time, however, an examination of their scholarship helps to illustrate many of the puzzles and contradictions that have beset the field in recent years.

Hill, of course, is perhaps best known for the interpretation of puritanism elaborated in his seminal collection of essays, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (1964). Building on the insights of R. H. Tawney and other socioeconomic historians, but offering his own decidedly Marxian gloss on the matter, Hill argued that puritanism represented the ideology of a newly emergent bourgeois class. This ideology of "the industrious sort of people" stressed the virtues of work, excoriated the wickedness of the idle and able-bodied poor, and waged war on the irrational and festive habits of the English countryside. It was thus very much a vehicle through which the "middling sort" sought to discipline a recalcitrant, increasingly impoverished, and reluctant lower class, so as to create both a pliable workforce and an orderly society at a time of great economic stress. Even as it worked to control the unruly and disenfranchised poor, however, puritanism also looked "upward" in that it sought to disassemble the increasingly precarious feudal structures that still dominated the English church and state. Hence, puritanism was simultaneously a force of repression (of the lower orders) and of revolution (against feudal landowners, monarchy and church). Armed with this multilayered schema, Hill went on to interpret the mid-century upheavals as a bourgeois revolution, carried forward by a vanguard of musket-wielding puritans.

This picture, however, presented certain logical problems, for as Hill was always aware, the violent events of the revolutionary decades saw the emergence not merely of a repressive, "bourgeois" puritanism, but also of a phenomenon that might be termed "plebeian" puritanism. Neither the radical demands of the Levellers (whose ranks were swollen with sectaries of many different persuasions), nor the profoundly disturbing and transgressive egalitarianism of the Ranters, nor the Christian communism of the Diggers could easily be explained away as manifestations of an ascendant bourgeois ideology. And in fact, far from seeking to explain away such figures, Hill embraced and celebrated them, holding them up as founders of an ongoing, continuous tradition of British radicalism stretching from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth. This project reached its high point in his famed study, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (1972). Here, Hill sought to provide a comprehensive survey of mid-century sectarianism, in all its colorful and outrageous splendor. In the same pages, however, he tacitly revealed that he was himself aware of the potential contradiction implicit in his own work. For if the disciplinary rigor of puritanism embodied the revolutionary aspirations of the "middling sort," how had the same puritanism produced the equally revolutionary, but scarcely bourgeois, ideology of the lower orders?

Even in his early work, Hill appears to have been cognizant of this tension, leading him to suggest at times that during the course of the revolution, the disenfranchised and the poor had seized upon certain aspects of puritan thought and deployed them for their own, counter-bourgeois ideological purposes. By the time of the publication of The World Turned Upside Down, however, Hill appears to have adopted a rather different approach to the problem. While still clinging to the notion that the lower orders had appropriated and molded certain aspects of the puritan heritage, he now hinted that the radicalism of the 1640s and 1650s had grown in large part out of ongoing traditions of sectarian religiosity that had subsisted at the edges of English society since the Reformation (or earlier), surviving especially among the masterless and poor men of the highlands, the forests, the fens, and other culturally and economically marginal regions of the country. This argument, muted in the book, would be elaborated more explicitly and forcefully in his 1978 article "From Lollards to Levellers." Drawing upon the apparent persistence of various forms of rural dissent in these specific regions, Hill now hypothesized that there might have been a genealogy of plebeian heresy and rebelliousness that began with pre-Reformation Lollardy, mutated into much persecuted forms of heterodox Protestantism—the Marian Free-willers, Familists, Grindletonians, and various flavors of separatist—only to flower again during the Revolution. Such an account preserved Hill's "bourgeois puritanism" while explaining the existence of an apparently separate and distinctive "radical puritanism," which represented the interests of the lower orders of society. Despite its bold scope, Hill's sweeping hypothesis found no champions and few critics, primarily because such claims are profoundly difficult to test against the historical record. The consequence, perversely, was that the most illustrious scholar of English radical religion had provided a daring but speculative account of the origins of that radicalism that was not obviously verifiable.

Understandably, then, both Hill and his would-be interlocutors were reluctant to pursue the matter much further, helping to ensure that the question of the origins of radical puritanism has remained largely unexplored over the past three decades. At a more subtle level, since Hill's account tended to accentuate the chasm between the repressive puritanism of the "middling sort" and the liberatory puritanism of the lower orders, neither he nor subsequent scholars have been inclined to investigate the connections between the two. The putative radicalism of the sectaries has been, as it were, sealed off from the main body of puritanism, thus leaving the precise relationship between the two largely unexamined. As a consequence, although a handful of scholars have followed Hill in devoting time and energy to the study of the civil-war sects, his work has in certain respects had the paradoxical effect of closing down some of the most intriguing questions surrounding the very radicalism he sought to elucidate. This stands in stark contrast to his work on the bourgeois "industrious sort of people," which gave rise, directly or indirectly, to many of the most important and creative works of Tudor-Stuart social history written over the past four decades.

If Hill's research has thus left enormous unanswered questions about the nature of "puritanism," Collinson's work has probably done more than anyone else's to problematize the concept itself. A historian of a very different methodological temperament, one might say that Collinson has played fox to Hill's hedgehog, combining the skills of a political historian and social historian of religion with a keen anthropological eye to provide a vision of the godly that is at once more multifaceted and less amenable to straightforward description than that of Hill. Where Hill consistently privileged the social underpinnings of puritan religion, Collinson has been rather more inclined to take puritans at their own word, accentuating the autonomous power of theological or religious concerns in shaping the behavior of the godly. Where Hill used his puritans to construct a totalizing theoretical model that explained the entire period, Collinson's puritans have come to life in a piecemeal, almost fragmented, fashion, through a series of narratives, detailed case studies and thematic essays that have incrementally, and not always straightforwardly, painted a rich, textured portrait of the godly community as it changed over time. For Hill, class was always the preeminent analytical tool; Collinson, by contrast, tended to ground his puritans in the ebb and flow of politics, as is most evident in his masterpiece The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (1967). This unparalleled piece of narrative history traced the origins and development of an impulse within English Protestantism for the further reform of the church, culminating with the story of the rise and demise of a full-blown presbyterian movement. Although not easily reduced to a potted summary, it could be said that The Elizabethan Puritan Movement tended, in general, to emphasize the distinctive and disruptive aspects of puritanism as a political and social force. In this respect, it dovetailed with the then-regnant Whig interpretation of Elizabethan and Stuart political history (and perhaps, somewhat more obliquely, with Hill's newly promulgated Marxist interpretation).

Yet from another perspective, Collinson's meticulous researches tended quietly to undermine those interpretations. As Peter Lake has put it, a close reading of The Elizabethan Puritan Movement "revealed the myriad ways in which the Elizabethan establishment was shot through with Puritan attitudes and personnel." As Collinson demonstrated, even troublesome nonconformists and presbyterians could count on patrons and protectors in the highest echelons of Elizabethan government, including but not limited to luminaries such as Leicester, Warwick, Walsingham, Mildmay, Knollys, Beale, and on many occasions, Burghley himself. Similarly, and perhaps more surprisingly, Collinson found that many of Elizabeth's earliest bishops and churchmen—Parkhurst of Norwich and Grindal of Canterbury to name two of the more interesting cases—were themselves in sympathy with many of the basic aims of the so-called puritans. This suggested that the relationship between puritanism and the political and ecclesiastical establishments was in fact far more complex than previous expositors had supposed.
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Excerpted from Blown by the Spirit by David R. Como. Copyright © 2004 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press.
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