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piety. A corollary of this was a campaign to enhance the dignity and authority of the clergy. Vestments worn by the clergy were regarded by opponents as ‘rags of popery’ but had previously been defended as adiaphora – ‘things indifferent’ which were not necessary but which were demanded by the civil authority. They were now defended as signs of the special and elevated status of the clergy, an argument that smacked of popery to many hot Protestants. Ceremonial changes, and changes to the decoration and architecture of the church, were intended to set a clearer boundary between the sacred and the profane, and to concentrate the mind of the worshipper on the presence of the former.102

Once he became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633 Laud used his powers of visitation – to send questions to the lower clergy and churchwardens demanding reports about conformity and standards of practice – to promote the new ceremonialism. These initiatives were not universally disliked, nor were they only grudgingly enforced in every parish. Anti-Puritanism was an established strand of opinion, just as anti-popery, and these reforms might give comfort to ordinary worshippers. They drew on ceremonial traditions which can be identified much earlier in English Protestantism than the rise of anti-predestinarian divines, and owed something at least to Charles (who was not an Arminian): it was not simply an expression of the theological preferences of William Laud. Nonetheless, it was the use of the metropolitan visitation in the mid-1630s – enquiry into parochial practice in response to the archbishop, not the diocesan bishop – that caused friction in many places.103

Clearly, to many Protestants this campaign smacked of idolatry and superstition, rather than edification.104 And although this was the more immediate experience of Laudianism, shifts in theological taste were manifest in what preaching was available – both who was licensed and who was not. Thus, to opponents of these policies, the church was simultaneously promoting idolatry and suppressing the preaching of the Word: substituting popery for the edifying exposition of scripture. As in Scotland, the boundary between what edified and what was idolatrous could be marked out polemically in terms of popery. On the wrong side of the line stood the whorish allurements of Babylon, ensnaring the unwary believer into an anti-Christian captivity. Any parish church might become an arena for the battle against popery; far more than was the case with the secular complaints, these policies lent themselves to simple sloganeering.

Laudianism was made to look worse by the presence of actual Catholics at the royal court. Charles’s wife, Henrietta Maria, was allowed to practise her religion freely by the marriage treaty: her faith was a matter of state. It was also very devout, and public. Inigo Jones designed a beautiful chapel for her at Somerset House, decorated in a style very offensive to many Calvinist sensibilities. The dedication service attracted hundreds of observers and at its consecration in 1635 papal mass was sung amidst festivities lasting three days. A dozen Capuchins – the vanguard of Catholic reform in France – were sent to minister to her. She also protected other Catholics at the court and from 1636 George Con, a papal representative, was permanently resident at Henrietta Maria’s court. Ironically, Laud was resentful of the influence of both Henrietta Maria and Con, but the association of Laudianism with Arminianism, and of both with a court friendly to Catholicism, produced a heady mix of provocations to the godly. At the same time, a shift in foreign policy towards neutrality in the Thirty Years War, which was effectively a shift to a pro-Spanish policy, fuelled the suspicion that the King was being influenced by a Catholic conspiracy: the Spanish monarchy was routinely assumed to be a secular arm of papal ambitions. ‘Court Catholicism became associated with papal meddling, Spanish intrigue, and repressive domestic policies, and the king with all of these’. Rumours of the King’s imminent