The last four enormously productive decades of the study of pre-Civil War puritanism have been driven by the discovery that, contrary to previous assumptions, puritanism was neither particularly consistent nor easy to distinguish from other tendencies within the penumbra of the Church of England. Indeed, a few scholars even tried to claim that it did not exist. Their efforts stumbled over the undoubted existence of those against whom the epithet ‘puritan’ was most often hurled. These were the self-styled ‘godly’, overlapping groups of people who had various degrees of hostility to the existing official arrangements of the Church of England, or were at least comfortable with people who did, and whose overlapping pietistic ambitions were, to a lesser or greater extent, inadequately fulfilled by the official forms of the church. The agendas and even the makeup of these groups were always sensitive to other political and religious developments, and efforts to give puritanism a precise definition, then and now, create an artificial coherence. Puritanism was more a problem generated by the structure of the Church of England than it was a free-standing entity.Footnote 1 As Patrick Collinson puts it, ‘Puritanism was not a thing definable in itself but only one half of a stressful relationship’.Footnote 2 Recent scholarship has emphasized that puritanism was defined not only by its external, stressful relationship with hostile elements within the Church of England, but also by stressful internal relationships and by relationships that cut across its malleable borders.
Historians have not given Restoration religion nearly the same amount of scholarly attention as the religion of the earlier part of the century. Yet the term ‘puritan’ continued in sporadic use throughout this period, sometimes as an insult, sometimes as a way to describe the pre-Civil War godly, and sometimes in its original sense as a synonym for Calvinist nonconformity, past or present.Footnote 3 Nonetheless, when Restoration scholars use the term ‘puritan’, they tend to employ it in a static, offhand, even perfunctory way, which has little resemblance to the self-conscious, fluid approach of historians of earlier puritanism.
That difference of scholarly approaches can largely be ascribed to the different circumstances of the periods. The Restoration appears to offer a previously missing clarity of identification, with the boundaries of the eighteenth-century non-puritan Church of England laid out in a series of statutes in the 1660s. Thus the large-scale legal ejection in 1662 of ministers who refused new terms of subscription offers one way to identify puritans. The subsequent punitive Clarendon Code, directed against Protestants who attempted to worship outside the Church of England, offers another. Puritans were nonconformists, ministers who lost their pulpits in 1662, along with anyone else who risked arrest under the Clarendon Code's terms, or at least those who risked arrest who were not also Quakers, Muggletonians, or otherwise obviously on the sectarian fringe. With puritans so easy to recognize, there is no need to obsess about the term itself. But why use the term ‘puritan’ at all? The Restoration was a period of proto-denominationalism, one in which it is easy to talk in terms such as Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Baptists, without any apparent need for a larger covering term besides ‘nonconformist’. Caught between the expansive, if deceptive clarity of ‘nonconformity’ on the one side and the equal clarity of proto-denominationalism on the other, puritanism literally is, and can be, little more than the sum of whatever its parts are decided to be. If the term ‘puritan’ is used, a person ‘was’ a puritan because he or she had such and such characteristics.Footnote 4 It becomes a term conceived of as descriptive and static, rather than analytical, dynamic, and ‘indicative’, as Collinson says, ‘of theological, moral and social tensions which should be the prime object of our investigations’.Footnote 5
That Restoration terminological consensus has been vigorously challenged recently by Mark Goldie. Goldie claims that historians have been wrong to take it for granted that 1662 ‘marked a fundamental divide in the history of English Protestantism’. Just as before the Civil War, the legal boundary between conformity and nonconformity was an artificial one which did not align with aspirations on either side of it. For the Restoration Presbyterians, nonconformity meant ‘the conscientious objection of a member of the Church [of England] to some parts of its requirements’. These moderate puritans were self-consciously carrying on in the tradition of the ‘old Puritans’ from before the Civil War, who were ‘fiercely insistent that they were at the heart of the state Church’. Working with the Presbyterians were a group of politicians whom Goldie calls the ‘Puritan whigs’ and whom their enemies called Presbyterians. Despite that label, most of the puritan whigs were conformists. Nonetheless, they had ‘strong affinities with Puritan religious attitudes and Puritan clergy’, and they worked for a comprehension that would allow the noncomformist ministers to return to their pulpits. Using Ernst Troeltsch's terminology, Goldie claims the Presbyterians should not be confused with groups like the Quakers and Baptists; ‘the Presbyterian vision was “church-type” and not “sect-type”’. The nonconformist practice of occasional conformity, attending parish church services in the morning and dissenting services in the afternoon, and even serving as parish church officers while doing so, was not proto-denominationalism in action, but a continuation of the longstanding efforts of puritan nonconformists to create satisfactory worship without separating from the Church of England.Footnote 6
Who is right? Should Restoration puritanism be viewed through the lens of a denominational future or should it be viewed through the lens of a dynamic and unsettled national church past, as recovered by historians in the last half of the twentieth century? One way to get a handle on that issue would be to analyse the extended explanations a group of moderate Restoration puritans gave of their movement at a particularly tense and pregnant time, when the would-be boundaries between the Church of England and puritanism were under sustained pressure. The puritans published in the aftermath of a blistering conformist attack on puritan piety, Simon Patrick's A friendly debate betwixt two neighbours, the one a conformist, the other a non-conformist, appearing in 1669.Footnote 7 Revealing though their explanations were, they have received little scholarly attention. Was this the old and dynamic puritanism that scholars have been delineating so fruitfully in recent decades, or was it the sectarian/denominational future?
I
By autumn 1667, court corruption and ineptly conducted war with the Dutch had wilted public enthusiasm for Charles II's reign. As that enthusiasm wilted, so did the wave of popular revulsion against nonconformists. Clarendon was banished, and Charles surrounded himself with a new and more religiously tolerant ministry. The intermittently fierce prosecutions of people who refused in whole or part to participate in the revived Church of England tapered off. If the prominent moderate puritan Richard Baxter is to be believed, in the late 1660s, half of London's population attended nonconformist services on Sunday.Footnote 8 Plans started circulating to ‘comprehend’ the majority of nonconformists within the Church of England by modifying that church's government and/or ceremonies and perhaps to provide toleration in some form for non-amenable Protestant nonconformists who were clearly Christian, meaning Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Baptists. Whether or not Quakers were really Christian was still an open question, so it was unclear whether they were part of this discussion.Footnote 9
One of the irritants for Presbyterians about toleration was that most of the very limited appeal of comprehension to Anglicans lay in the prospect of bringing a large number of nonconformists back into the church. The less of them it brought back, due to toleration, the less appealing it became. The intransigence of uncompromising nonconformists threatened the goals of moderate ones. For the determined nonconformists, on the other hand, safety lay in numbers, and the fewer nonconformists who were willing to conform, the better off the rest were. Initial parliamentary efforts at comprehension and/or toleration had failed by the end of February 1668. At least some Presbyterians felt that the push for comprehension got dragged down by being coupled with toleration.Footnote 10
Richard Baxter had been one of the most important negotiators in that push. Baxter, just old enough to have been a nonconformist before the Civil War, turned down a bishopric at the Restoration, and he was one of the Presbyterian leaders in the abortive Worcester House negotiations in 1660, intended to introduce some form of ‘reduced episcopacy’ and modified ceremonialism in the Church of England. After the 1667–8 campaign for comprehension failed, around the same time that Patrick may have started conceiving A friendly debate, Baxter set out to write a general treatise intended to foster ‘unity, love and peace’ among Christians. To that end, the main focus of what would appear as The cure of church-divisions was analysing why what Baxter called the ‘religious party’ in England broke up into factions.Footnote 11 ‘Religious party’ to Baxter functioned as a synonym for ‘puritanism’; he took the insult of ‘puritan’ to be confirmation that its recipients were England's most godly people.Footnote 12
Baxter did not chop up puritanism into a variety of denominations, as one strand of historiography might anticipate, nor did he restrict it to within the contested boundaries of the national church, as Goldie's argument might predict. For Baxter, the riddle of puritanism was that it extended far past the boundaries of Presbyterianism. It generated not only commendable people like him, moderate puritans who sought comprehension, but others like the Congregationalists, who insisted on ‘peevish singularity and schism’.Footnote 13 He devoted most of Cure to explaining this apparent paradox, without ever suggesting that the Congregationalists were any less puritan because of their peevish singularity.
Puritanism created that paradox, according to Baxter, precisely because it was so powerful. New converts could easily find the experience of God's spirit extremely disorienting. A convert ‘that was formerly in darkness’ could be dazzled by his ‘new-come light’ and by his discovery that ‘he knoweth much more than he did before’. A number of grievous mishaps might result as byproducts of this dazzlement. The first was a mistake of logic. New converts might assume that all of their new ideas about religion must be caused by the spirit and must all be equally valid. They had no such thoughts while they ‘lived in wickedness’ and ‘therefore they think that the same light which shewed them their sinful state, doth shew them also all these principles’.Footnote 14
Out of these mistaken perceptions grew the second mishap of dazzlement, misguided emotionalism. New converts ‘find themselves as deeply affected with these misapprehensions, as with other which are sound and right; therefore they are confident that they come from the same spirit’. New Christians were especially liable to misguided emotionalism ‘when these thoughts come in upon the reading of the Scripture, or in meditation, or after earnest prayer to God’. The confusion of emotionalism with the unquestionable and unexpected power of the spirit, Baxter complained, made the unwary fresh convert ‘value an affectionate tone of speech, above a judicious opening of the Gospel’. Baxter himself, ‘when God first brought me from among the more ignorant sort of people’ in the late 1630s, fell into this trap. When he ‘first heard religious people pray without forms, and speak affectionately and seriously of spiritual and heavenly things’, he thought ‘they were all undoubted Saints’. Two disillusioning decades of watching alleged saints become ‘overturners of all Government; and resisters of ministry and holy order in the Churches and the most railing Quakers, and the most filthy and blaspheming Ranters’ had taught him otherwise.Footnote 15
The intellectual and emotional Christian immaturity of converts not only led them to follow false prophets, it easily led them into spiritual pride. Spiritual pride took two forms. The first was pride of knowledge. Ignorant Christians could easily slip into a ‘carnal and corrupt estimation’ of their understanding. Driven by this ‘pride of knowledge’, the convert, his mind filled with new spiritual insights, ‘looketh about him on the ignorant sort of people, who know not what he knoweth, and seeth how far they are below him. And he thinketh with himself, what a difference hath God made between Me and Them.’ Pride of knowledge generated inordinate zeal. Christians infected with it rejected all the customs and practices of the ungodly, ‘but especially any way of worshipping God, or any controvertible opinion in Religion, which is owned by bad men, they flye as far from as they can’. These deluded new converts not only made a blanket rejection of everything associated with the ungodly. They even thought, Baxter complained, that they could interpret scripture better than university trained ministers.Footnote 16
This censorious, ill-grounded pride of knowledge could be paired with an even more subtle and more dangerous pride, that of goodness, ‘being yet worse than the former, as the thing abused is much better’. Pride of goodness operated secretly beneath a veneer of humility. It could even ‘exist with many complaints and confessions of sinfulness, weakness and unworthyness, but even with doubts of sincerity and so much dejectedness as seemeth to draw near to desperation’. Pride of goodness would express itself as ‘Thankfullness to God for his grace, and Zeal for Holyness’. But unlike true gratitude and holiness, ‘it always tendeth to lift us up’.Footnote 17
The combination of spiritual weakness and ignorance with the pride of goodness and knowledge had dire social and political consequences. It resulted in a destabilizing backbiting, in ‘the diminishing of Love to others, and to the contempt of the weak, and the censuring of our brethren, and the division and disturbance of the Church of God’. Spiritual weakness and ignorance led those people infected by them into a dangerous contempt of hierarchy. ‘In all companies’, Baxter lamented, ‘how forward are they to talk of the sins of Princes and Parliaments? of Courtiers and Nobility, and Gentry? especially of Ministers … But how seldome do you hear them tell any how bad they are themselves?’ Most insidiously for the peace of the church, this propensity to censure, growing out of an inflated sense of self-righteousness, placed a heavy pressure on nonconformist ministers. To avoid that censure, ministers might follow their auditors into ‘exorbitancies’ and ‘comply with the violent to escape their censures and contempt’.Footnote 18
Pride and weakness fed on each other to magnify another fault to which new converts were particularly prone, overscrupulousness, which led the godly to see sin in themselves where it did not exist. Most dangerously, they convinced themselves that they could become sinners by association in worship; they would be guilty both for the sins of a minister who preached, prayed, and conducted church services erroneously and for the sins of the ungodly laity who wrongly participated in the sacraments. Pride of knowledge and goodness magnified overscupulousness, and the result was a mass exodus of puritans from the parish churches.Footnote 19
According to Baxter, Congregationalism was little more than the institutionalization of the pride and weakness of spiritually immature puritans. Overscrupulousness expressed itself in the Congregationalists' refusal to attend the parish churches; devaluing of ministerial expertise resulted in Congregationalism's ‘popular’ government; while an emphasis on emotionalism and spontaneity resulted in the Congregationalists' absolute insistence on spontaneous prayer. Baxter listed a total of twenty ‘superstitions’ associated with Congregationalism and indicated that he could come up with more. Where the Congregationalists moved well beyond superstition into sin itself was in their refusal to accept anyone as a church member who could not give a testimony of his or her conversion. This practice was a flagrant manifestation of the sin of spiritual pride. More than that, it was a form of persecution, a manifestation, Baxter breathtakingly insisted, of the same spirit that led to the harassment, fining, and jailing of the nonconformists themselves.Footnote 20
Having compared the Congregationalists to Anglican persecutors, Baxter took the logical next step and stirred up recent intra-puritan bad blood. The Congregationalist admissions practices, he insisted, were all of a piece with the persecution against moderate puritans practised during England's experiment in Congregational and sectarian kingless rule: the penalties for those who refused to take the Rump Parliament's Engagement Oath and the demand that all ministers pray for the success of parliaments' armies in Scotland – ‘publick counterfeit thanks for blood-shed; yea for the blood of thousands; and the blood of confessed godly men’. Yet the Congregationalists could insist on toleration for themselves while blithely denying that there was any connection between religion and politics, as their leader John Owen did in 1667. It is no stretch to imagine that Baxter had Owen, his long-time opponent, in mind when he warned,
if you are of the mind, either that Gods justice should not be observed or justified; or that you should not be called to repentance; or that you should be suffered quietly to forget your sin, and die impenitently; or that the nation should forget the effects of religious pride and faction … for fear of offending the ears of the guilty; I am in all this as far from your minds, as I was in the acting of these crimes.
Left out of Baxter's catalogue of sins was the refusal of the Scots and moderate puritans like himself two decades previously to tolerate Congregationalism in England, a refusal that helped precipitate both the Rump Parliament and the invasion of Scotland.Footnote 21
II
Baxter's publisher could not get his manuscript licensed until 1670. This failure meant that The cure was preceded in print by Patrick's A friendly debate. The two tracts had much in common. Like Baxter, Patrick agreed that there was such a thing as puritanism, an overarching piety that linked together Congregationalists and Presbyterians. Like Baxter, he bemoaned the drifting of puritanism into faction and rebellion; the reluctance of nonconformist ministers to confront their more divisive congregants; the cheap emotionalism of godly preachers; and the tendency of the godly to indulge in censoriousness, boasting, and contempt. But unlike Baxter, Patrick was a conformist, a dedicated London preacher, one of the few who had not deserted his post when the plague terrorized the city in 1665. The purpose of his tract was not to hasten comprehension, but to defeat it, to beat puritanism out of the Church of England, and to strike down the nonconformists' ‘pride and insolence’.Footnote 22
Where Patrick's analysis parted from Baxter's was its refusal to separate good from bad puritan piety. For him, that piety in toto was the problem. It was not the manifestation of genuine religiosity, it was nothing more than an empty show designed to generate pride and overscrupulousness. Puritan ministers, rather than preach the great truths of morality and obedience to superiors, spoke of gospel mysteries, of God's withdrawings, desertings, illuminations, and comforts, and they continually intimated that they themselves were guided by the spirit in their preaching and prayers. By inculcating in their listeners a hothouse fervency, ridiculous scrupulousness, and overfamiliarity with the divine, all of which was to be worked out and reinforced in a tight circle of exclusive social groups, they encouraged those auditors to believe that they alone were the ‘godly’, and thus superior to everyone else in England. Guided by Calvinism, which was functionally antinomian, the ministers did not preach to their listeners the great truths of morality and obedience to superiors; they taught that piety lay in factional behaviour. ‘Truly’, says Patrick's temporarily contrite fictional nonconformist, ‘I thought once that the Power of Godliness had consisted in keeping the Sabbath, in repeating Sermons, having a Gift of Prayer, and using it in our Families, treasuring up and communicating Experiences, and meeting together to exercise our Gifts.’Footnote 23 Patrick attacked specific contemporary Presbyterians and Congregationalists, although he was particularly indignant about the warning of the Congregationalist, William Bridge, that God was leaving England. Presbyterian-led rebellion had been, and would be, the predictable outcome of puritan piety, Patrick warned. Fifteen years later, he regarded the Rye House Plot as a vindication of Friendly debate.Footnote 24
Friendly debate was a huge success, going through eight editions in a year. Substance aside, it was lively, and its fictional conformist and nonconformist were convincingly hostile to each other in between the intervals where the latter collapsed under the former's superior reasoning. Even Patrick's opponents grudgingly admired his ear for nonconformist language. Patrick had a follow-up out the next spring. It covered much of the same territory, but it included lengthy excursions into the history of English puritanism. Patrick charged that the old nonconformists would have condemned the separatist practices of the present nonconformists.Footnote 25 An attack covering much the same ground as Patrick, but far more vituperatively, Samuel Parker, A discourse of ecclesiastical politie, came out the following year.
III
In early 1670 Baxter received the news from his publisher that The cure of church- divisions had received its licence. However that tract might have been read when Baxter wrote it, after Patrick's and Parker's books, it would be read as a de facto response to them. Baxter was well aware of the changed interpretive context, and he welcomed it. Patrick's and Parker's books, he later claimed, made the nonconformists look ‘ridiculous and odious, as men of erroneous, uncharitable, and ungovernable principles and spirits’. Baxter wanted The cure to ‘leave a testimony to the generations to come, by which they might know whether we were truly accused, and whether our principles were not as much for Love and Peace as theirs, and as consistent with order and government’. Next time an ‘accuser’ like Patrick or Parker intended to write a book accusing all nonconformists as men of ungovernable and uncharitable spirits, he would learn from The cure to direct his fire to where those men of erroneous, uncharitable, and ungovernable principles truly assembled.Footnote 26The cure would function as the sober puritan mainstream's response to Patrick and Parker, locating and explaining the aberrant fringe that they had misidentified as puritanism in its entirety.
Lest readers of The cure manage to have any doubts about which puritans were uncharitable and ungovernable, Baxter spelled their identity out clearly in the preface for The cure that he wrote in early 1670. In the two years since finishing the body of the book, Baxter had been given no reason to mellow in his attitude to the Congregationalists. John Owen had sabotaged another attempt at comprehension; he had drawn more Presbyterians to favour toleration for themselves, not comprehension, and he had left Baxter hanging after appearing to be willing to work out a common platform of church government with him.Footnote 27
Baxter explained in his preface that his book was written ‘to save the darker sort of honest Christians’, burdened under ‘prejudice, weakness and incapacity’, from ‘the sin and misery of Church divisions’. A principal cause of church divisions was excessive strictness in church order and worship. Satan stirred that strictness up, and the impulse behind it was the same one that led to persecution. This excessive strictness led to the multiplication of sects, to Quakers, Ranters, and Seekers, to the effort in the ‘little Parliament’ to end tithes, and to the killing of the king. And yet the purveyors of this excessive strictness had not repented for their sins. Lest any reader still manage not to notice that Baxter had Congregationalists in his sights, he concluded by emphasizing ‘two separating dividing principles’ that would ‘never give peace to the Church where they prevail’. One was confusing the claim to church membership with the claim to having been saved, the other was creating new standards of church membership beyond what Christ required.Footnote 28
Even while attacking the Congregationalists so adamantly, Baxter was aware that he was in a family quarrel. He acknowledged in his preface that four groups of objectors might find his puritan-on-puritan rhetorical violence ill advised. ‘It is an unseasonable time, when so much anger is breaking forth against those that we account Dividers, to mention their faults, and so to stir up more’, Baxter pictured one set of objectors saying. He referred them to the last part of his book, which urged pastors to deal with the laity's church-dividing weaknesses and sins discreetly and charitably. Other objectors, he said, would argue that if the people started following Baxter's advice and occasionally attended parish church services, there would be little compassion left for the nonconformist ministers who could not attend out of conscience. But this, Baxter replied, was ‘selfish wisdome’, and there was not much danger of it being realized, given that the people were more averse to ‘Concord with the Parish-Churches’ than their ministers. Another group of objectors, ‘wise and sober Ministers’, might argue that although what Baxter was saying was true, it was ‘unseasonable, and may give advantage to such as love not Reformation’. Baxter's revealing answer was that if he waited for a more seasonable time to oppose this sin of church-dividing, it ‘may be multiplied and rooted past all hope’. It was now or never, in other words, during this time of persecution for puritanism, with its commitment to national reformation and a national church establishment, to avoid flipping entirely into separatism. Should ministers fail to heed Baxter's advice and fail to preach against these evils, ‘let them remember that they were warned, if they find themselves overwhelmed in the ruines’.Footnote 29
There would be a final group of objectors, Baxter predicted, those ‘most guilty of the Love-killing principles here detected’ and ‘most eminent in self-conceited ignorance’ – a long-winded way to describe hostile Congregationalists. These self-conceited objectors would argue that Baxter had ‘sought to make them odious by bringing them under the reproach of Separation, and of censuring and avoiding the ungodly’. They would charge that Baxter, ‘being lukewarm my self, and a complyer with sin … would have all others do so too’. ‘Reconcilers’ like Baxter, they would say, ‘are neither flesh nor fish, and attempt impossibilities, even to reconcile Light and darkness, Christ and Belial.’ Baxter did not regard their objections as worthy of answering.Footnote 30
In view of the increased ferocity of Baxter's attack on Congregationalists in his new preface, it is important to note a topic Baxter could have raised, but did not. Patrick and Parker repeatedly linked Calvinism and antinomianism. This link was near and dear to Baxter's heart; the theological modifications he made to Calvinism in order to rescue predestination from antinomianism generated intense controversy among the godly. Patrick in a follow-up to Friendly debate had even laid out honey for Baxter by singling out his modifications of Calvinism for praise. Yet Baxter let the opportunity pass by entirely. His quarrel with Calvinism itself was part of a family dispute, and when his spiritual family itself was under attack from the outside, Baxter rallied to its defence. Patrick, in attacking puritan divinity, Baxter wrote in his autobiography, was blaming the physician for the disease. Had Patrick first told the reader ‘where we might find a better sort of Men than these faulty Christians … he had done something’.Footnote 31
IV
Baxter's arguments against the Congregationalists, for all their topicality, were very much in an old puritan vein. Since the Elizabethan period, moderate puritan ministers had complained about the excessive censoriousness, overscrupulosity, schismatical leanings, and pressure upon ministers of some of their godly auditors. Puritan piety, with its intense concern to identify and separate out the saved from the damned, had always had a tendency to break out as a populist spiritual elitism that undermined the efforts of puritan ministers to serve as the evangelical cutting edge of an inclusive national church, and ministers had always insisted that neither they nor their piety, rightly understood, bore responsibility for that lamentable, if predictable outcome.Footnote 32 Sect-type outcomes, in other words, were an enduring element of the Presbyterians' professedly church-type vision.
Baxter himself was well aware that in The cure he was working within a longstanding puritan tradition. The cure prompted a blistering attack from a Congregationalist minister, Edward Bagshaw. Bagshaw, frequently imprisoned for his convictions, was appalled that in a time of persecution a puritan would publically attack his brethren rather than the persecutors – ‘one from our own bowels doth thus seek our lives’. Congregationalists could not be guilty of separating from a church to which they did not belong, Bagshaw insisted, nor could they commune with a church that imposed unlawful conditions for that communion. Inadvertently reinforcing Patrick's point about the negative unity of puritanism, Bagshaw discovered in Baxter many of the same spiritual sins Baxter found in Congregationalists.Footnote 33
In the first of a number of increasingly vitriolic responses to Bagshaw, Baxter wrapped himself in a long tradition of nonconformist puritans, including proto-Congregationalists, whom he venerated and who wrote against separation – ‘Cartwright, Egerton, Hildersham, Dod, Amesius, Parker, Baines, Brightman, Ball, Bradshaw, Paget, Langley, Nichols, Hering, and many other such’, he explained, ‘that I shall not think they knew not why they chose this subject, and wrote more against separation than the Conformists’. As a reproach against Congregationalist exclusivity, Baxter then rattled off a long list of more or less conforming early Stuart puritans with whom he would gladly have enjoyed communion, ‘men as Mr. Bolton, Mr. Whateley, Mr. Fenner, Mr. Dent, Mr. Crook, Mr. Dike, Mr. Stocke, Mr. Smith, Dr. Preston, Dr. Sibbes, Dr. Stoughton, Dr. Taylor, and abundance other such’. For good measure, Baxter threw in the names of godly bishops, conformists, and early Church of England martyrs whose piety he gladly acknowledged: ‘Bishop Jewel, Bishop Grindal, Bishop Hall, Bishop Potter, Bishop Davenant, Bishop Carlton, &c. Dr. Field, Dr. Smith, Dr. Iohn White, Dr. Willet, &c. yea and the Martyrs too, as Cranmer, Ridley, Hooper himself, Farrar, Bradford, Philpot, Sanders, &c.’Footnote 34
It was this old moderate Church of England puritanism, an alliance often perhaps centred in moderate nonconformists, but prepared to embrace godly conforming ministers and even some bishops, that Baxter saw himself as keeping alive. Baxter argued that ‘many hundred’ parish ministers (out of over 9,000 parishes) were not persecutors and preached and lived holiness. This total was not much, compared to the 1,800 godly ministers, by Baxter's calculation, who were ejected, but it was something, and enough not to reject conformists from the communion of the ‘religious party’ entirely.Footnote 35
Baxter's numbers were not simply wishful thinking. Puritanism and sympathy for puritanism had not been entirely extinguished in the institutional Church of England, despite the severe new ministerial subscription requirement. Some ministers still identified with puritan piety. They might attempt to pick and choose their way around the church's ceremonial requirements with varying degrees of success, or they were at least prepared to be flexible about using the ceremonies out of respect for parishioners who disapproved of them. Puritan gentry did their best to choose such clergy for churches where they had the right of presentation. Even a few bishops were sympathetic to nonconformists.Footnote 36
V
But locating Baxter simply as a traditional, albeit theologically quirky, nonconformist seeking to keep the old moderate puritan alliance alive runs into serious complications. Baxter did not stay only on the offensive when dealing with Congregational critics like Bagshaw, attacking them with their own superstition and ignorance and with the puritan Great Tradition. Another of Baxter's responses was to hold out an olive branch. He did so in Defence by rattling off an impressive list of positions he had not taken in The cure of church divisions. He pointed out that he had not argued that the godly should have communion with parish church ministers who were persecutors, nor that they should have communion with the parish churches insofar as these churches were subordinate units of diocesan churches; nor did he argue that the godly should have communion only with the parish churches. He had not argued that the godly were obliged to commune with every parish church, regardless of the quality of its pastor, nor did he argue that it was necessary to have communion with a worse church than a better one on a regular basis. He had not argued that it was impermissible to move in order to find a better church. Baxter also pointed out, in a critical passage, that he had asserted that a ‘local separation’ was permissible if a person's ‘lawful pastor’ had been turned out and a ‘usurper’ put in his place. He drew attention to another passage in which he had condemned people who ‘causlesly separate[d]’ from their lawful pastor. ‘Where the Pastor is, there the Church is, in whatever place they do assemble’, claimed Baxter. Baxter was extremely terse about these points, both in Cure and in Defence, as he needed to be. Had he been any franker, his manuscripts would not have cleared the censor.Footnote 37
Baxter's later writing shows that if he had been free to be more explicit, he would have followed the same line as his friend the west country nonconformist Joseph Alleine in 1664. Alleine was the very picture of a moderate puritan; like Baxter, he was dubious about strict Calvinism, and although expelled from his pulpit in 1662, he attended parish services and encouraged others to do likewise. Alleine died in jail in 1668, yet his often-reprinted posthumous biography came with the encomiums of conformist ministers as well as with a glowing preface from Baxter. In 1664, Alleine anonymously published an impassioned tract, A call to Archippus, calling for the ministers ejected from their pulpits to start preaching again. The tract was, as its subtitle put it, ‘an humble and earnest motion to some ejected ministers, (by way of letter), to take heed to their ministry, that they fulfil it’.Footnote 38 Alleine had no intention of running A call by the censor.
Alleine's demand to the ministers that they fulfil their ministry was an about turn from earlier puritanism. Earlier nonconformists, when taunted by separatists, stoutly defended their willingness to step down from their ministries when legally required to.Footnote 39 Alleine challenged this willingness head on. ‘If none but Christ did, nor could Commissionate you’, he asked the ministers, ‘can any but He discharge you? or can the Relation between the Church and you (if Divine and Spiritual) cease upon the interposition of a Power meerly Political, which is toto genere distinct?’ ‘You are the Churches’, Alleine told his ejected ministers, and he meant exactly what he said.Footnote 40
Alleine felt so strongly on that point that he turned on its head the conformist charge against the nonconformists of separatism and schism. He raised the charge himself: ‘This will be a great occasion of Separation, if Ministers set up in private, and draw away a great part of the People from the Service of God in Publick’. ‘The Separation be upon others’, Alleine retorted, ‘who when we were quietly setled in the administration of Church-Ordinances, in a more pure and reformed sort, are come in upon us, and have possessed our Places and Pulpits, and thrust us by the places of publick Convention’. The legally sanctioned ministers who replaced the nonconformists were thus the real separatists, Alleine concluded, for ‘we continue still but in the same station, and the same work, watching over our Flocks, and administring according to our Office, with no other difference, but only that the place is altered’.Footnote 41
Freed from the censor's oversight at the turn of the 1680s, Baxter repeated that argument. Moderate puritans like him and Alleine were not schismatics, as Anglicans routinely charged. It was those clergy and magistrates who silenced a faithful, able minister and who commanded his people to desert him who were the schismatics. The ejected ministers' relationship to their flocks could not be made null by acts of the bishops or by the magistrates' orders.Footnote 42 While Baxter himself never went so far in exercising his ministerial powers as to deliver the sacraments, he did not condemn those ejected ministers who did so. Alleine himself participated in the first known Restoration Presbyterian ordinations, in 1665 or 1666, to insure the continuation of preaching and the Lord's Supper among Exeter nonconformists when the Oxford Act drove the ejected ministers out of the city. The early Stuart radical puritan William Bradshaw, by contrast, disputing with separatists, regarded such magistrate-defying arguments and behaviour as ‘plainly tending to sedition’.Footnote 43 Where earlier puritans had restrained themselves to stay within the legal boundaries of the Church of England, Alleine and other moderate puritans were perfectly prepared to run a parallel ministry.
Yet sedition and separatism were the exact opposites of this parallel ministry's purpose. Moderate puritanism had always been generated by the political and personal dilemma of trying to determine how much compromise was acceptable with the ceremonies and government of the Church of England. That dilemma disappeared with the toppling of the bishops in the early 1640s, but it returned on 24 August 1662, Black Bartholomew's Day, when parish ministers had to decide whether or not they would subscribe to the terms of unprecedentedly severe articles or give up their pulpits. Those expelled on Black Bartholomew's Day were almost all moderate puritans; Congregationalists and Baptists had been weeded out already.
The ministers being ejected were committed to national evangelism and national reformation through a national church, and for them, the greatest tragedy of their unprecedented mass expulsion was that it represented a potentially fatal blow to those goals. Religion in England, as Alleine put it when exhorting his fellow ministers to continue to preach, was ‘sinking, falling, dying away’, while too many of the ministers who replaced the ejected nonconformists hated the ‘power of godliness’. Alleine warned the ejected ministers that the ‘people’ would never ‘sit down under’ the ‘formal Pharisees’. If the ejected ministers were not willing to step in, the people would turn to ‘Seducers, and despisers of Government’.Footnote 44 Moderate puritans, Alleine argued, in effect, had to act like separatists, not in order to nourish a little separated band of saints, however, but to fulfil the conventional moderate puritan mission of national reform.
Baxter was not as forceful as Alleine, but he agreed with his fundamental assumptions and goals. The ejected ministers had been removed by usurpers and their ministry was still an active one. That assumption provides critical context for Baxter's oft-expressed willingness, which was widely shared among moderate ejected clergymen, outwardly to subordinate his ministry to the well-being of the parish churches. It was a strategic move, in line with the moderate puritan commitment to parish evangelism. What it was not, however, was recognition of the fundamental premise of the 1662 Act of Uniformity; the ejected minister's pulpit was to be considered vacant as if ‘the person so offending was dead’.Footnote 45 The consequence of an unprecedentedly severe form of Anglican aggression was an unprecedentedly aggressive form of moderate puritanism.
For Baxter, as for Alleine, that aggression was driven by a larger assumption about the Church of England. When Baxter produced his long genealogical lists ranging from nonconformists to godly bishops, he was not just outlining his conception of puritanism, he was making an argument about the Church of England itself. His most fundamental criticism of the Congregationalists was that their narrow conception of godly communion meant that they were abandoning puritanism's central role as the evangelical cutting edge of national reformation. The nonconformists and the godly conformists had far more in common with each other, he argued, than they did with Quakers, Seekers, and Familists, and they must stay united to maintain what Baxter called ‘the interest of the Protestant Religion’. In his final response to Bagshaw, Baxter laid out what he saw as the dire consequences of the Congregationalist position of shunning the parish churches and their preachers. The nonconformists on their own were not enough to ‘keep up the Christian and Protestant Religion in the Land’. Should the larger unity of the godly that Baxter was promoting fail and the nonconformist godly retreat to their private meetings, the consequences would be disastrous. The rest of the nation would be unable to distinguish them from the sects, and they would despise genuine Christianity the more for it. Those who most needed to hear evangelical preaching, the young, the ignorant, and the licentious, would not attend the nonconformist meetings. They would be attending the parish churches. And if the nonconformists were not willing to prop up the parish churches by their presence and by their encouragement of the best conforming ministers, the land would slide into ignorance and the papists would take over. Therefore, all the true churches in England should recognize the inevitable centrality of the parish churches in maintaining conversion, sound doctrine, and antipopery, and do their best to prop up and support the cause of the gospel in those churches, even while labouring for their reformation.Footnote 46
VI
Were Baxter and Alleine representative of moderate puritanism? Baxter was not the only moderate puritan to respond to A friendly debate. Before The cure of church-divisions appeared, two other puritans answered Patrick with extended, unlicensed explanations of what moderate puritanism was about. One author has not been identified, but from internal evidence, he was a Presbyterian minister of long standing whose adult memories went back to before 1642. Like many Presbyterian ministers, he would have been perfectly content with reduced episcopacy and also like many Presbyterian ministers, he was a royalist who had never accepted the legitimacy of the army's 1648 coup.Footnote 47
The other author, Samuel Rolle, took up his parish ministry only five months before the return of Charles II. Although he had been ejected in 1662, he was hardly a committed nonconformist. He had taken the controversial Oxford Oath, was reading from the Book of Common Prayer, and was intending to receive episcopal ordination in order to take up a chaplaincy at Bridewell. That conformist trajectory made his response to Patrick an act of passion rather than prudence. Although Baxter asserted that Rolle lost his post because of it, Rolle claimed that he did not proceed to holy orders because his ill nonconformist wife told him that if he went ahead, God's anger would kill her.Footnote 48
Both authors had much in common with Baxter. Like him, they both wanted comprehension. They spent much space discussing the nonconformists' loyalty and beneficence and the reasonableness of their nonconformity; both were willing to take a live-and-let-live attitude to their disagreement with conformists about the use of ceremonies; they both disapproved of the intransigence of more radical puritans, and both were quite happy to praise godly bishops like Ussher and Hall. Like Baxter, they disassociated Presbyterianism from the regicides of 1649, although, unlike him, they felt no need to blast Congregationalists in order to exonerate Presbyterianism. The anonymous author played down the extent of Congregationalist separatism, and while Rolle praised Baxter for fighting antinomianism, he passed silently over the theological innovations that Baxter employed to do so.Footnote 49
Like Baxter, Patrick's responders identified strongly with earlier puritans, but that identification could be more complex than Goldie's scheme suggests. The anonymous author took head on Patrick's charge that the current Presbyterian meetings amounted to separatism, a charge intended to sting, given the conventional Presbyterian loathing of separatism. But the anonymous author, far from denying the charge, embraced it. Presbyterian separatism was temporary and it was not total, he claimed. Presbyterians, he insisted, were for ‘Reformation, not Separation’. What they were practising, he acknowledged, was, nonetheless, separatism. He vigorously denied that this separation from a true church like the Church of England made the Presbyterians guilty of the heinous sin of schism. The Presbyterian conventicles were themselves true churches. He pointed out, in a jab at the continuing decline of the Church of England's old doctrines, that many prelatical ‘learned Doctors’ now considered the Catholic church a true church, yet did not regard themselves as schismatics for breaking away from it because of its sins of practice and doctrine.Footnote 50
After accepting the label of separatism, the anonymous author used that label to mould his puritan heritage into a more usable form. Patrick, in his Continuation of the friendly debate, invoked the anti-separatism of the old nonconformists to condemn current nonconformist meetings. The anonymous author, in response, challenged the validity of that invocation. The respective situations, he argued, were extremely different. Far fewer ministers had been silenced in the past, and when they had been, unlike present-day nonconformists, they did not lack all means of ameliorating their plight. Earlier puritan ministers like Arthur Hildersham, John Cotton, Thomas Cartwright, William Bradshaw, and John Dod were deprived of their pulpits only for a time, or else they could find preaching posts in other dioceses. If all else failed, they could work as school teachers, like the man who taught the author. Lay nonconformists, hungry for the word of God, had also been far fewer in the past. If present-day nonconformist ministers were not prepared to preach to them, the author, like Alleine and Baxter, warned, they would turn to the Quakers.Footnote 51 Having denied the relevance of earlier puritan history, this author then turned around and reinterpreted it. Perhaps the earlier nonconformists were not so distant from current Presbyterian separatism as Patrick claimed. They preached, prayed, and held fasts in private houses, all of which seemed like churchly behaviour to the author, regardless of how earlier nonconformists might have glossed it. One, ‘Mr. W.’, told the author that he had been privately ordained by Dod and others, which, if true, might have been the only pre-Civil War Presbyterian ordination on English soil.Footnote 52 In other words, the old puritans, just like the present ejected ministers, continued their ministries when they lost their pulpits, even if they did not articulate what they were doing as separatism. This minister was preserving his connection to the anti-separatist puritan past by reconceiving it in light of the semi-separatist present.
Nonetheless, the author did not regard his semi-separatism as lessening his claim to be part of the Church of England. He wrote as one of ‘those that are for Moderation, that still hold themselves Members of the Church of England, though not admitted to be Teachers in it’. It was as a concerned Church of England member that the author criticized Patrick. The traditions of that church were Calvinist, he claimed, citing Archbishop Whitgift's campaign against the free-willer Peter Baro. The nonconforming ministers were faithful to the Articles of the Church of England, unlike Patrick and some other new conformists. The ‘greatest Enemies to the Church of England, and to Religion it self’ were not the nonconformists, who only had quarrels about its ceremonies, but ‘those who bring in new and strange Doctrines … those ought to be reputed the greatest Nonconformists … those who change substantials, not detail’. While the author disapproved of Patrick's theology, far worse was the high conformist wing of the Church of England. This wing preferred the Catholic church above the Reformed churches, looked upon former archbishops like Grindal, Whitgift, and Abbot as puritans, and would ‘unbishop’ some of the present bishops as Presbyterians if they could. The author suggested that Patrick could better direct his talent for abuse at this neo-Catholic wing of the Church of England.Footnote 53
The anonymous author, however, for the most part, avoided going on the attack, not wishing, he explained, to imitate Patrick's ‘angry and provoking’ tone. He even rebuked nonconformists who compared their piety favourably to conformists'. Rolle, with a great deal more to lose, showed no such restraint. He accused Patrick of a multifaceted effort to destroy ‘practical holinesse’ in England. Rolle noted ominously that ‘a grave Bookseller told me not long since, that the Rational Divines [like Patrick] … had brought all our [old puritan] Practicall Divines, such as Scudder, Culverwell, Rogers, &c., quite out of request, that now a dayes there was no enquiring after those kind of bookes’. Just as the books by Patrick and his ilk were silencing the old puritan books, Patrick was trying to silence the present-day nonconformists by crushing comprehension and encouraging the people to mistrust them. Patrick was prepared to ‘pull down the whole fabrick of Religion, that you might destroy the N[on]C[onformists]’.Footnote 54
Rolle himself, he insisted, certainly did not deserve ill of the Church of England for ‘writing on the behalf of true Religion’. True religion, he claimed, flourished among the nonconformists. They were as godly as the conformists, and perhaps more so, and their preachers produced more converts. Rolle did agree with Patrick that it was unwary of the Congregationalist William Bridge to say that God was leaving England. On the other hand, given the number of parishes devoid of decent preaching as a result of the purge of nonconformists, in a sense, Bridge was literally right. Remove the good puritan books, preaching, the fasting, the spiritual conferences and sharing of experiences, as Patrick was trying to do, and religion would die in England. Rolle suggested that the reason Patrick attacked religious experiences was because his preaching did not produce them.Footnote 55
Rolle acknowledged the argument made by Baxter, Alleine, and the anonymous author that the ejected ministers were still true ministers. Showing a rare moment of sensible caution, given that he was seeking episcopal ordination, he did not specifically endorse that claim. However, he strongly defended the nonconformists' exercise of their ministry. It was not schismatic to leave a church for fear of offending God, he claimed, especially given the failure of many conforming ministers to teach the great truths of the gospel. The nonconformist ministers' people would not listen to them if they tried to get them to conform. Rolle knew ‘as worthy and famous a N.C. Minister as almost any this day in England’ (probably Baxter), who tried to encourage nonconformists to follow his example and attend Church of England services, to no avail. ‘The people of these days think it favour enough, if they pardon such a Minister the use of his own liberty … and be willing to retain good thoughts of him’. If ministers like Baxter pushed their arguments for lay communion too hard, he warned Patrick, they would accomplish nothing except drive their listeners to the Quakers and Baptists and ‘farther away from you and from what you call the Church of England’.Footnote 56
VII
‘What you call the Church of England’ – Rolle could not have put it more plainly; a debate about puritanism was ultimately a debate about who could claim possession of the Church of England, as had been the case for a century. On that point, the conformists Rolle and Patrick and the nonconformists Baxter and the anonymous author could agree. Contrary to current scholarly labelling practices, nonconformity and the Church of England were not two clearly separated entities. As Goldie argues, the Clarendon Code set boundaries neither to the Church of England nor to puritanism. It was aspirational, not descriptive. It represented nothing more than a fragile statutory coup accomplished by the ‘prelatical party’ within the Church of England as a result of that party's unprecedented and temporary dominance in the House of Commons. The tendency of scholars to treat puritanism as either identical to nonconformity or at most as a subset of nonconformity, or as a subset of nonconformity sliced into denominational pieces is clearly anachronistic.
And if puritanism cannot be crammed into the box of nonconformity, its expansiveness requires a rethinking of how the Church of England itself is conceptualized. John Spurr, in his magisterial survey of the Restoration Church of England, for example, amply demonstrates the flexibility of that church's boundaries on the parish level, documenting not only the ministers with puritan sympathies, but the significant number of laity who did as Baxter urged and divided their time, to varying degrees, between the parish churches and nonconformist conventicles. Nonetheless, Spurr consistently uses the term ‘Church of England’ as a synonym for those who defended and maintained its present legal arrangements. He writes, to give only one instance, that ‘moderate Nonconformists … indignantly blamed the Church of England for dividing English Protestants’. Those nonconformists, however, blamed not the Church of England, but a ‘prelatical party’ within the church, and the most famous attacks on that prelatical party came not from moderate nonconformists, but from the conformist Andrew Marvell. Had Charles II not been so determined in the face of the Whig onslaught in 1680, or had a number of circumstances in 1689 played out slightly differently, Richard Baxter and moderate puritan divines like him would have resumed public ministries in the Church of England, and their previous writings would have been absorbed into that church's history, rather than being part of the history of nonconformity.Footnote 57
Rolle's later forays into print further illustrate the complexities of this struggle for the soul of the Church of England. Five years after confronting Patrick, he challenged another anti-puritan conformist, William Sherlock, whom he knew personally. Sherlock had recently attacked Presbyterian and Congregational theologians and Calvinism itself while arguing an extremist version of the recent Anglican tendency to collapse grace into virtue. Rolle attacked Sherlock for attacking the nonconformists and, with them, the old theological positions of the Church of England. He compared Sherlock's attack on John Owen to a dog tiring itself by barking at the moon. ‘Old Puritans’ like John Dod and Arthur Hildersham would have spat out Sherlock's book after one taste of it, Rolle claimed, and the world had seen no worthier men than the old puritans since those recorded in the Bible. To the charge that Rolle was but a ‘lamish Conformist’, Rolle retorted that ‘a sound Semi-Conformist, is worth two whole Conformists, that are rotten at the Core’. Rolle would rather die than betray the doctrinal articles of the Church of England. It was true that he was not ‘very fond’ of the ‘New-Conformity’. But ‘greater men than I’ agreed with him, as witnessed by the efforts in parliament to relax it.Footnote 58 The nature of the Church of England was still unsettled, Rolle was arguing, and Rolle had a better claim to being its faithful son than men like Sherlock. The ‘old puritans’ would have said the same about themselves.
By the time of his last publication in 1678, Rolle's status within the Church of England had changed. His zealously nonconformist wife died in 1676, and her death removed the last inhibition against Rolle taking holy orders. Rolle was ordained by the bishop of London in 1677. He proved his conformist bona fides in 1678 by publishing a blistering 30 January sermon denouncing the regicides and extolling monarchy as the best form of government in the world. Inevitably, Rolle attacked the parliamentary perpetrators of the Civil War. What notably distinguished Rolle's sermon from those of committed anti-puritans, however, was the careful way in which Rolle avoided implicating moderate puritanism in his attacks. The Civil War was not about religion, Rolle insisted; it was the consequence of designing ‘popular’ men who lusted after the fruits of high state office. Religion was just their front. A few ‘classical men’ (members of Presbyterian classes) got caught up with these schemers, but they did so unwillingly. Presbyterians had nothing to do with the death of Charles I. It was papists, Fifth Monarchy Men, and the ‘Ecclesiastical Democracy’ men (Congregationalists) who were responsible for that. Moreover, Rolle, while extolling Charles II as defender of the faith, insisted that it was faith that was important, not the ‘little airy vehicles’ of church government and ceremonies. ‘Good men’ of any Protestant persuasion could get to heaven. Those who did not choose to follow the ‘King's high way’ of episcopacy, could also be ‘tolerated and protected’. Rolle did not go so far in these sermons as to praise the ‘old puritans’ or lament the dire effect that silencing of the noncoformists had on religion in England, but nothing he said contradicted those earlier positions. Even while Rolle was demonstrating his Anglican bona fides, he was signalling that he remained a puritan.Footnote 59
Yet it is not sufficient simply to stand previous Restoration scholarly formulae on their heads and assert a puritan long sixteenth century within the Church of England. John Owen and other Congregationalists featured prominently on Rolle's honour list of godly divines, as they did on the anonymous author's. Yet for Restoration Congregationalists, the internal struggles of the Church of England were not their struggles, except insofar as they might lead to an outcome that would leave the Congregationalists in peace. Departing from earlier practice, most Congregationalists would not even listen to Church of England ministers preach because of their sinful affiliation with a persecuting church so far degenerated from Reformation principles that, as Owen warned, it risked an apostasy worse than Rome's. It is very difficult to make ‘puritan’ work as a Restoration term if the term leaves out the functionally separatist Congregationalists and the overtly separatist moderate Baptists, as Baxter's efforts to call them to what he saw as their duty demonstrate, but these committed Protestant pluralists do not fit straightforwardly into a pre-Civil War puritan paradigm.Footnote 60
While moderate puritans had not abandoned what they still perceived as their internal struggle over the national church, neither were they unaffected by the siren call of Protestant pluralism. Although Baxter cared passionately about the parish churches, he acknowledged that some of them were not true churches, and he was equally clear that the dissenting congregations were. Baxter claimed that the terms of communion he desired ‘should neither exclude, Episcopal, Independent, nor Anabaptist’. The anonymous author presented himself as a loyal son of the Church of England. His loyalty, however, was something other than the old puritan variety, as witnessed by his reconceptualization both of the old puritans and of separatism itself. That one-foot-out-the-door ambiguity even infiltrated his discussion of comprehension. He spent a great deal of time on comprehension's advantages, but in one critical passage, he wrote that the Presbyterians wanted union and communion with the Church of England on ‘friendly Terms’, giving as examples the ‘Liberty and toleration’ he claimed that the Presbyterians were prepared (eventually) to offer the Congregationalists and even the episcopalians (de facto) during the time of puritan rule. In other words, while the anonymous author wanted comprehension, he was quite prepared to live with networks of mutually communing episcopalian and puritan churches scattered across England.Footnote 61
The English government anticipated armed resistance on Black Bartholomew's Day in 1662. What it got in response to this unprecedentedly severe effort to create uniformity was more interesting, because more novel. The ejected clergymen had very little experience of ministering in the Laudian church; their average age in 1662 was 41·9. For almost twenty years they had been the torchbearers for a national church in England, and at the start of the 1660s episcopal control over their pastorates was at most a distant memory. Consequently, their positions as ministers had, at most, only a very distant dependency on episcopal validation. Alleine himself had been ordained by a Presbyterian classis in 1655. These ejected ministers were, in short, the first largely episcopally uncontaminated generation of moderate puritans. They were, in their own eyes, as Patrick Collinson said of moderate puritans fifty years previously, ‘the mainstream, ongoing thrust of the Protestant Reformation’, but unlike those earlier puritans, they were used to religious pluralism, however reluctantly, and a great deal of autonomy. When episcopal control was reasserted, it received neither the kind nor extent of deference it would have been given before the Civil War. Any intrusive effort to remove the ‘mainstream ongoing thrust of the Protestant Reformation’ from the pulpit, no matter what legal authority that effort claimed for itself, was itself the real act of separation. As such, it carried no spiritual force.Footnote 62 The bishops were little more than another Protestant interest group. In other words, Goldie is right that ‘puritanism’ in the Restoration period, just as before the Civil War, points to an underlying dynamic, unsettled state of religion. But Restoration puritanism itself encompasses an unsettled state not only within the Church of England, but well past it altogether, a state that is easy to overlook by the use of more limiting labels like conformist, nonconformist, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, or Church of England.
VIII
This moderate puritan quasi-separatism, or Protestant pluralism, of the 1660s has been insufficiently noticed in the modest amount of historiography on Restoration puritanism. That historiography does portray a Presbyterian drift to quasi-separatism, but only among those hard-line Presbyterians seeking toleration for themselves, not, like Baxter, comprehension within the national church. This drift is said to have started among younger Presbyterians in the late 1660s, the ‘ducklings’ against the older ‘dons’ like Baxter, and it reached a critical turning point with the Indulgence of 1672, when Presbyterians had to decide if they wanted to set up their own legally sanctioned meetings. The longer comprehension was deferred, this argument goes, the easier it was for Presbyterians to start thinking of themselves as a ‘denomination’ and not as would-be reformers of a flawed national church. The history of Restoration puritanism, as N. H. Keeble puts it, is ‘thus largely the history of the frustration of the aspirations of the moderate Presbyterians and the increasing identification of nonconformity with this separatist position’.Footnote 63 That reading has merit; there was a vast difference between the situational separatism and pluralism of some moderate Presbyterians and the principled rejection of communion with the Church of England of more radical puritans. But that situational separatism of even moderate puritans, the refusal to accept the power of the bishops and parliament to set the limits of the functioning true churches in England, was an integral part of the puritanism of this period, and a critical reason for the failure of the Clarendon Code. Baxter in the 1660s hardly qualifies in any straightforward way as a representative of ‘the archaic ethos of Anglo-puritanism’, much as he might have fantasized that he did.Footnote 64
IX
There can be no dispute that the aggressive return of Anglicanism after twenty years without an episcopal hierarchy or much of a national church structure at all had drastically altered the parameters of puritanism. Its centre of gravity, which had arguably slid to conforming puritans in the early seventeenth century, had decisively moved back to the nonconformists. No Restoration conforming clergyman assumed a position among the godly comparable to that of Sibbes or Preston in the early seventeenth century. The position occupied by a few Familists and religious eccentrics had been taken by the highly visible Quakers and other sects. What had been minor tinkering with and disputes over the details of Calvinism among puritans before the Civil Wars had turned into sometimes vitriolic exchanges between Baxter and his supporters and critics, while in the rest of the Church of England, Calvinism was a beleaguered minority position.Footnote 65 What had been a marginal separatist underground before the wars was now spearheaded by the well-connected Congregationalists, while even moderate puritans felt the gravitational pull of pluralism. The political turmoil of the mid-century had created a rich new set of intra-puritan grievances.
Since the term ‘puritanism’ for scholarly purposes functions as a heuristic tool, not an ‘objective’ thing, one could argue that all these differences mean that ‘puritanism’, as the term is used for investigating the pre-Civil War period, did not survive the Civil War; that it had broken irrevocably into its component parts; and that the parts themselves and their contexts had all mutated significantly from their pre-Civil War equivalents. But such an argument would not resolve the issue of what to do with or even how to hear this medley of interrelated, if sometimes violently disputatious Restoration voices, all presupposing a common, historically rooted theopolitical identity for the ‘godly’, while coming to no resolution about what that theopolitical identity was or should be, and all still locked, by choice or otherwise, in stressful, historicized relationships among themselves and with the unsettled Church of England. If this fiercely disputed but deeply felt theopolitical identity is not to be represented and investigated via the term ‘puritanism’, we still have no other adequate word to do the equivalent work for conveying Restoration religious reality and aspiration.Footnote 66
