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By Root 1079 0

The best hopes for salvation lay in the educated ministry, acting under episcopal authority. Doctrinal Arminians shared a taste for more ceremony and order in the visible church with a wider group – the link between the theology and the liturgical preferences was not exact, but it all looked like popery to hotter Protestants. A number of these ceremonialists were also identified with a defence of the aggressive use of the prerogative and the apparently casual attitude of Charles and his advisers towards the authority of parliaments and the common law. For example, Roger Maynwaring, a royal chaplain, and Robert Sibthorpe, rector of Brackley, caused a storm during the Forced Loan controversy by preaching that the monarch did not need the consent of his subjects in order to raise financial supply.31 This kind of argument seemed to threaten property rights – what could an Englishman call his own if the monarch could make financial levies without securing consent? In the 1629 parliament heated rhetoric about the popery of Arminians was closely tied to threats to liberty, the threat of the introduction of a ‘Spanish monarchy’.32

Richard Montague, Bishop of Chichester, had gone further than most anti-Calvinists in his New Gagg for an Old Goose (1625), arguing that double predestination was a false doctrine and attacking the view that the Pope was the Antichrist. In 1626 Buckingham had hosted a meeting convened to discuss this, the most inflammatory anti-Calvinist publication of the period, and the meeting had failed to condemn it.33 Those who defended or failed to condemn Montague’s views, or those like them, enjoyed increasingly powerful patronage under Buckingham, William Laud and Charles, fostering considerable anxiety among the godly. The increasing prominence of this strand of opinion reinvigorated the longstanding debate about the identity of English Protestantism, a debate which was almost as old as English Protestantism itself.

This debate had often been very public and fractious. On the Puritan side the language of anti-popery was very prominent and often associated with accusations about plots to undermine law and religion. Hostility to popery was set against the background of a view of English history in which God had intervened repeatedly to deliver His chosen people from these dangers. John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs made this case in numerous editions, and it drew further strength from the defeat of the Spanish Armada and the thwarting of the Gunpowder Plot.34 Inevitably, this view of English history intersected with a view of England’s place in the world, with its foreign policy. In 1623 Charles had travelled in secret to Madrid, accompanied only by Buckingham, in the hope of securing the hand in marriage of the Spanish infanta. His mission failed – the Spanish had been stringing the English along for diplomatic reasons, hoping to prevent their entry into the European war on the wrong side, and were embarrassed by the arrival in town of the English sucker. Charles’s return to London was triumphant, rather than sheepish, however, as bonfires were lit and the bells rung out to celebrate another delivery from the clutches of the Antichrist, harbinger of a ‘blessed revolution’ in foreign policy.35

Zealous opponents of popery, those offended by ceremonialism and medieval survivals, were on the other hand branded in conversation, pamphlets and on the stage as Puritans – their hypocrisy and sanctimoniousness were pilloried in stereotypes such as ‘Zeal of the Land Busy’. The term ‘Puritan’ really described a relationship to current orthodoxy rather than a fixed body of ideas. It was a label (often used with hostile intent) for those pushing for further reform, or offended by some aspect of the current settlement: those labelled Puritans in the later sixteenth century were people agitated by different aspects of church practice than those labelled Puritans in the 1630s.36 As Francis Rous put it, the word ‘Puritan’ was an ‘essential engine’ of the attempt to push English religion towards conformity with Rome, a word consisting