Jeremy Taylor and Caroline Casuistry

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chapter 11 Jeremy Taylor and Caroline Casuistry

1 The Laudian Period 1628–1645

The previous chapter described Reformed moral theology from 1600 to 1662. We now move to a great contrast with this. There is no one label that describes the alternative to Calvinism, or Reformed theology, but for the sake of sim- plicity, and well-knowing the shortcomings of this term, I will call the alternative ‘Arminian’. Laudianism’ referred not specifically to Arminian views, but to Laud’s promotion of ritual and ceremonial.1 Laud was tactically mod- erate and pragmatic in the 1630s, while Charles I was intolerant, duplicitous and intransigent.2 Laud had been chaplain to Bishop Neile of Durham and by 1628 was Bishop of London. In 1629 Charles I began his personal rule without Parliament, with Laud as his close adviser. Charles was married to a French Roman Catholic, Henrietta Maria, daughter of King Henri IV of France, so for the first time since 1558 Mass was said in the royal palaces. Arminianism was less about opposition to predestination as a doctrine in England, unlike its Dutch counterpart. English Arminianism was about liturgy, the reorder- ing of church buildings, episcopal governance against the Calvinist belief in the presbytery, and above all about devotional spirituality. One example is Cosin’s A Collection of Private Devotions (1627) for Protestant ladies at the court of Queen Henrietta.3 This was a marked shift from sixteenth-century devotional writings, especially those from the Puritan stable. However, many se- nior clergy, including several seventeenth-century Church of England casuists and moral theologians, remained Calvinist, and so opposed to Arminianism.

1 Milton, Anthony, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, p. 9, lists the following as the essence of the Laudian reform: ‘anti- Sabbatarianism, the placing of the communion table at the east end of the church, the freeing of the clergy, their courts and their maintenance from lay control; and a general de- emphasis on preaching and forms of voluntary religion in favour of the “beauty of holiness”, greater ceremonial and more lavish church adornment.’ 2 Davies, Julian, The Caroline Captivity of the Church, p. 303, on the character of Charles I. Davies argues that many of Charles’ faults have been awarded to Laud by historians. Milton, Catholic and Reformed, p. 533, agrees with Davies. Davies also distinguishes carefully Arminianism from Laudianism. 3 Chadwick, The Reformation, p. 227. Davies, The Caroline Captivity, pp. 87–125, on English Arminianism.

Robert Sanderson was a doctrinal Calvinist, as were Barlow and Hall.4 Stephen Hampton’s Anti-Arminians shows the persistence of the Reformed tradition within the Church of England after 1660, as an influential minority.5 This group accepted episcopacy, but was opposed to Arminian views of salvation. There were many bishops among the Calvinists, several of whom had previously held professorships at Oxford and Cambridge. However, Hampton notes the will- ingness of this minority to use Roman Catholic post-Tridentine theologians to support their cause.6 This group also ensured that Sanderson’s sermons were published after his death.7 Yet most clergy accepted the fundamental drive of the Laudian/Caroline reforms before the Civil War, whether they were Calvinist or Arminians. What were these changes in the life of the national church? Jonathan Scott lists nine aspects of the religious reform of the Laudian and Caroline Divines, which lay behind the political legislation of the seventeenth century, both before and after the Civil War and the Restoration.8 – First, a change of emphasis from doctrine to ceremony: liturgy became the outward form of religion. – Second, a belief in conformity, obedience, order and hierarchy. – Third, a dislike of religious controversy, with as far as possible an enforce- ment of peaceable relationships (the irony is of course profound).9

4 McGee, J. Sears, ‘Robert Sanderson’. Lake, Peter, ‘Serving God and the Times: The Calvinist Conformity of Robert Sanderson’. A recent study of Sanderson’s casuistry is Vallance, Edward, ‘The Kingdom’s Case: The Use of Casuistry as a Political Language 1640–1692’; also, Vallance, Edward, ‘Oaths, Casuistry and Equivocation: Anglican Responses to the Engagement Controversy’. Tyacke, N., Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism, c 1590–1640. Lake, Peter, ‘Calvinism and the English Church, 1570–1635’. Hampton, Stephen, Anti-Arminians: The Reformed Tradition from Charles II to George I, pp. 42–46 and p. 68, traces the disagreement on the nature of the covenant between Taylor and his Reformed critics, such as Sanderson, and the nature of justification. Joseph Hall was another Calvinist. Barlow wrote to Sanderson in 1656–1657, ‘and expressed his concern at the innovative teachings of Jeremy Taylor on original sin’. Spurr, John’, ‘Thomas Barlow’. Anglican casuists in the late seventeenth century were by no means all Arminian. Tanner, Michael D., Conscience, Conviction and Contention: Religious Diversity in the Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century English Church (diss.), p. 120. 5 Hampton, Anti-Arminians, p. 4: ‘the true extent and significance of Reformed theological sympathy after the Restoration have been obscured’. 6 Hampton, Anti-Arminians, Chapter 7, ‘The Reformed Defence of Thomist Theism’, on the Reformed Anglicans’ use of Aquinas, as interpreted by post-Tridentine Roman Catholic theologians. The discussion by these late-seventeenth-century theologians echoes much of the mid-sixteenth century’s Reformed scholasticism, as in Peter Martyr, but does not cite him. 7 Hampton, Anti-Arminians, p. 32. 8 Scott, Jonathan, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Stability in European Context, pp. 128–129. 9 Milton, Catholic and Reformed, p. 532, argues that ‘avant-garde conformity’ (the Laudian party) had some elements which were politically activist and aggressively anti-Puritan.