Susan Hardman Moore, Crawford Gribben, and R. Scott Spurlock add three probing works on religion to the recent surge in historical work on Britain's mid-seventeenth-century crisis and the continuing effort to define what it was. Migration, invasion, the quests for reformation and settlement, theological instability, and the emergence of new denominations all come out in these three works to form a picture of a world where religion was in flux. Orthodox and heterodox became the shifting battle lines as various groups fought for ownership of older traditions, sought to define new identities, and tried to enact a godly and settled reformation. Together these books challenge our interpretation of that search for reformation and the religious crisis that ensued. Together they complicate the categories we normally use to describe the period.

Susan Hardman Moore's Pilgrims: New World settlers and the call of home is a fresh exploration of the age-old subject of the relationship between Old and New England during the seventeenth century. In attempting to unpack the religious inheritance of New England settlers during the Great Migration, Hardman Moore reinterprets the early New England story through an analysis of the many settlers who returned to their homeland during England's Civil Wars and Interregnum. As many as one in four returned, she proposes, and their transatlantic lives suggest that the New England experiment was more a temporary sojourn in the quest for purity of worship than the establishment of a permanent ‘city on a hill’.

Hardman Moore's book starts with a thick and imaginative recreation of the lives of Susanna and Thomas Bell, London merchants who travelled to New England in 1634, only to live transatlantic lives after the opening of the Long Parliament until finally settling for good back in London in 1647. Hardman Moore's story of the Bells impressively weaves together archival biographic research, an extant autobiography (of Susanna's), and the historical vicissitudes of the period to create an account with as much historical relevance as readability. Though the book's writing is anything but anecdotal, its approach is to layer a kaleidoscope of stories and lives on top of arguments about causation and explanation – if every detail provided for each story is not immediately relevant to the task at hand, over the course of the book they bind together a picture of the diversity of human experience that is just as valuable as the specific historical debates they tackle. The result is a beautifully written book that can be read by scholars and lay people with equal interest and value. Yale University Press seems to specialize in this brand of academic, yet still popularly consumable, historical writing.

Beginning with the Great Migration, Hardman Moore returns to the motivations for emigrating by associating patterns of migration with patterns of Laudian persecution. Of the seventy-six ministers she studies, twenty-two left after being suspended from their parish, sixteen after being called before the Court of High Commission, and many of the rest, she argues, left as pressure on them increased. Migration was not a sign of closet separatism, but was undertaken with reluctance as the Caroline regime forced practices that cut against consciences. For both ministers and lay people, godly conference and hesitation marked their thoughts of emigration. Within these discussions, ‘Providence had a knack of presenting the same truth in different guises’, thus overlaying religious, economic, familial and political motivations (p. 28). New England was not so much an ‘errand into the wilderness’ as ‘a search for primitive piety’. In the creation of the ‘New England Way’ of congregational church fellowship, godly convictions carried over from Old England combined with the tough New World environment to produce a search for purity based on the necessity for God's protection. Early New Englanders were ‘radical conservatives’ looking backwards, not forwards (p. 30).

With the opening of the Long Parliament and the beginnings of hope for the reformation of the English Church, the necessity of the New England sojourn suddenly came into question. According to Hardman Moore's calculations, as many as one in four resolved that question with their feet – or, rather, their sea legs. Perhaps ironically, though, it is not the calculation of this surprising figure that convinces the reader, but the wealth of surrounding evidence that Hardman Moore uses to contextualize it. Though she gives a range of possible figures, the specific ratio in question derives from her location of 600 known returnees (catalogued in a useful appendix), a remark by Massachusetts governor John Winthrop noting that on one ship in 1641 forty passengers set sail for England, of which only seven can now be identified, and the lowest current estimation of the population of New England at the nadir of the Great Migration (13,000). As the author herself admits, these calculations from these figures are not particularly convincing by themselves. But what is convincing is their plausibility when visualized through the stories and experiences of those 600 returnees on whom she bases her study. Whether for jobs, war, family ties, or frustrations with the New England Way, the detailed accounts of these transatlantic lives leaves the reader with a belief that a changed Old England must have been a real temptation to most New Englanders.

For those who made the decision to return, peaks of reverse migration came just after the first Civil War and the early years of the new English republic. But even then, ‘the sheer variety of those who went back before the English Civil War shows how stresses in England had sent a broad spectrum of zealous Protestants to New England in the 1630s’ (pp. 72–3). Similarly, the histories of returnees after they arrived back home ‘show neither simple dissent against the New England Way, nor a wish to broadcast it as gospel’ (p. 87). In the complex story that emerges, some patterns become clear. Most returnees either settled back where they or their families had come from or they used old ties to gain positions elsewhere. Many who returned kept property in, and maintained ties with, New England. But most surprisingly, sixty out of seventy-nine returning ministers went into parish pulpits rather than into non-parish ‘New England styled’ gathered churches. Some, like John Phillip of Wrentham, Suffolk, took years to convince his parish of the congregational way. Others, like Thomas and George Larkham, combined parish ministry with a congregational one. And still others, like Giles Firmin, struggled to find a model of parish reformation that borrowed from the positive programmes developed in New England but ultimately acknowledged English realities. Whatever the case, few returning ministers became strict apologists for the ‘New England Way’ and some of those apologists, like Samuel Eaton, complicate the picture still further by attending parish services after the Restoration.

Bringing these themes together, Hardman Moore argues that the non-separating rhetoric of New Englanders during the 1630s was not simply rhetoric, but part of a continuing desire for godly reformation of the English Church that colonists maintained even after their return home. It is the 600 post-New England lives that allow for a more confident stance on the historiographical debates that surround the Great Migration and the establishment of the New England Way. The New Englanders described throughout the book are situated firmly within Patrick Collinson's account of puritanism, in their reasons for migrating, their ecclesiastical developments in the New World, and their religious practices after their return. This is the enduring contribution of the book and it will probably stand as one of the more successful attempts to link New England religion with its early Stuart inheritance. Thankfully, she does not stop there, but follows the New England inheritance back into an England in Revolution, giving a fuller picture of the continuing attempts to reform a godly English Church.

Crawford Gribben's God's Irishmen: theological debates in Cromwellian Ireland sets intra-Protestant disputes as the backdrop for explaining the failure of the Cromwellian reformation in Ireland. He begins by noting that the eschatological stringency and anti-Catholic rhetoric that dominate our understanding of the Cromwellian military invasion of Ireland are largely absent from Ireland's printed treatises of the 1650s. ‘Antichrist’, he suggests, was a term more often aimed at other Cromwellian Protestants than at Irish Catholics. In this they may have followed the example of Cromwell himself. Unpacking this phenomenon leads Gribben to discover a ‘haphazard, unprogrammed, and … inherently fissiparous’ religious settlement that underpinned a consequently unstable religious environment (p. 177). The debates that ensued crippled the Irish Cromwellian experiment.

Like Hardman Moore's Pilgrims, readers will find God's Irishmen wonderfully written in its flow, structure, and literary command. Gribben also utilizes the power of storytelling to good effect, but while Hardman Moore layers the many and varied experiences of her transatlantic travellers onto the patterns of her argument, Gribben contextualizes various centrepiece stories within wider social, political, and theological trends. Most of the chapters, and the book as a whole, use captivating but problematizing episodes as avenues into broader, more probing analyses of the period in general. His chapter on baptism debates is typical in this respect. Beginning with an account of a debate on Christian baptism that spiralled out of control in Cork, Gribben explores the existing Irish traditions of baptism, the rise of Baptists in England up to the Irish invasion and the course of Baptist growth following the invasion. He then turns to the theological debates that shattered John Rogers's Dublin ‘pan-denominational’ congregational experiment, Thomas Patient's ‘revolution’ in covenant theology, and the attempts of paedobaptists to pick up the pieces and restore an ‘orthodox’ centre to Cromwellian religion. The erudition of each stage of Gribben's argument is impressive, and together they represent historical theology at its best.

In keeping with this historicizing method, the book opens with a consideration of ‘The religious dynamic of the Cromwellian invasion’. The invading army brought with it the diversity of religious opinion held by its soldiers. Nonetheless, ‘Irish radicals were actually quite conservative’ – ranters, Muggletonians, or witchcraft play little part in the Cromwellian story presented here (p. 47). In government policy, ecclesiastical conformity of any sense was not a requirement of the regime's Civil List of preaching ministers and an intentionally ecumenical panel of Triers conducted ministerial examinations. The lack of theological or ecclesiological clarity created an environment perfectly built for internal religious conflict. Within this fractious atmosphere Gribben sees an emerging denominationalism where religious debate percolated down into more stable groups that solidified after the period. It is exactly at this period of percolation that he would have us understand Protestant religion in Cromwellian Ireland. These theological debates were paradoxically fuelled by the regime's attempts to promote godly unity by allowing a myriad of orthodox persuasions to preach the Gospel through the state-funded Civil List.

Gribben next explores five major theological themes: conversion, baptism, church government, ‘charismatic manifestations’, and the ecclesiastical role of women. Conversion became the centre of a debate between the Fifth Monarchist Congregationalist John Rogers and the Presbyterian Zachary Crofton about the ability to recognize salvation, the millennium, the proper role of church membership, and the possibility of extraordinary revelation. Divisions festered to the point where Crofton questioned the very Christian conversions being offered by Rogers. Next, as mentioned above, Thomas Patient's ‘theological revolution’ set out to reformulate the basics of Reformed covenant theology. Disconnecting the normal links between Old Testament circumcision and New Testament baptism, Patient situates baptism as the sign and seal of grace instituted by Christ for believers only, rather than the sign and seal of an inherited promise for believers and their children. It was Patient's rigid insistence on believer's baptism as Christ's specific command that split the fragile pan-denominational experiment by Rogers to unite saints as saints, through their common salvation, and essentially destroyed the wider attempt to unite the gathered churches. In church government, Gribben finds that the regime's attempt to promote unity beyond diversity also failed partly because diverging ecclesiastical groups clashed over local jurisdictions of social control. The ministerial associations that developed over the decade created regional power blocks that sought to disenfranchise non-associated ministers, pushed for more defined local and national ecclesiastical requirements, and vied for the patronage of Henry Cromwell, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.

In the last two chapters, neat and tidy religious categories get obliterated by the complex sets of beliefs held by the Congregationalist and Provost of Trinity College, Samuel Winter, and the ‘recovering radical’ Elizabeth Avery. In the hands of Gribben, Winter, who has normally been understood as a scholastic and orthodox Congregationalist, can be found maintaining the older ecclesiastical traditions of ‘christening’ children (many of whom were probably not members of his, or any other, Congregational church) while at the same time claiming a prophetic ability to predict the life, and eventual death, of the wife of one of the Parliamentary Commissioners for Ireland. Avery, like Winter, seems to defy categories, shifting from ‘the combination of antinomianism, prophetic aspiration, disdain for ordinances, and separation from church fellowship’ in the late 1640s, to a moderated orthodoxy by the early 1650s when she joins Rogers's congregation. By 1653 she was having her child ‘christened’ by Winter (pp. 170, 172). Theological and ecclesiastical lines form a complex matrix that rarely united in categorical coherence.

Overall, Gribben's God's Irishmen reminds us that the 1650s was a period where writers and preachers spent their time ‘hammering out denominational distinctions on the anvil of theological controversy’ (p. 14), but that the mixing of this process within the political ascendancy of the Cromwellian regime was inherently destabilizing. If Ireland provided the Cromwellian religious programme with its cleanest palette (most of these Protestants seem disinterested in converting native Catholics), then the dramatic imploding of Irish Protestantism has much to say about the failure of the godly cause in the two other British kingdoms. Gribben's book also stands as the most challenging new addition to our understanding of denominationalism in the seventeenth century. He plots a healthy via media between the pitfalls of the older genealogical Victorian denominational histories and the damagingly over-ecumenical histories that have emerged in the last four decades. He spends much of the book complicating the usual categorizations of well-known figures while still effectively demonstrating how the process of polemic forced theological and ecclesiastical definition.

The third book, R. Scott Spurlock's Cromwell and Scotland: conquest and religion, 1650–1660, provides the Scottish example of a Cromwellian invasion. Spurlock separates his investigation into two main parts: the propaganda war between Cromwell's army and the Scottish Kirk leading up to, and just after, the invasion, and the legacy of the Cromwellian religious presence in Scotland. The invasion is presented as largely a religious conflict, feeding off Scotland's use of their national covenants to justify the second Civil War and their support for the Stuart monarchy. The religious battle continued after the swords were laid down and the course of the 1650s saw the Kirk struggling to combat dissent from within and heresy from without in an environment of forced Cromwellian toleration. The dynamic of Scotland's fight to maintain its religious identity and shifting views of toleration by the English occupiers are used to explain the ultimate survival of the Kirk and Quakers into the Restoration, when Baptists and Congregationalists faded away. Though not as fluently written as the other works, Spurlock's book does delve deeply into its topic and uncovers a wealth of information about the religious turmoil in the Kirk and the beginning of Scottish dissent, and constitutes a valuable addition to our understanding of the Cromwellian religious programme in the three kingdoms.

In part one, Spurlock sets out the framework with which to understand the propaganda war: while the Scots viewed their religious and military clash with the English in terms of obligations to their national covenants, the English approached their Scottish campaign through the guidance of providence and God's retribution for Scottish involvement in the second Civil War and the English Church. In contrast to Gribben's account of Ireland, Spurlock argues that the Scottish religious debates, at least early on, were an extension of the ecclesiastical clashes begun in the Westminster Assembly. Before the battle of Dunbar, both sides carried out a propaganda battle for the souls and support of the Scottish people. Scottish propaganda mimicked the techniques of Thomas Edwards during the mid-1640s, lambasting the English army as heretical, sectarian, and a threat to true religion. The English addressed the ‘godly’ of Scotland specifically and almost exclusively, invoking God's providential judgement on the national covenants and the Scottish house of Stuart. Following Dunbar and Worcester, the English occupation forced the Kirk into a defensive position, faced for the first time with public debates and printed texts that not only dissented from the Kirk, but also spread the theological innovations plaguing the rest of Britain and Ireland. Strict control over the Scottish presses until late 1652 gave the English leverage to challenge publicly the Kirk's monopoly of religious authority.

But the 1650s were not simply a struggle between the Kirk and the invading English sectarians. Besides these external challenges, the Kirk also faced dissention from within that accelerated after Dunbar and Worcester. As Spurlock explains, ‘divisions within the Kirk and harsh party persecutions created fissures in the Presbyterian disposition of Scotland, like small crevices in a monolithic granite crag, where sectarian seeds found just enough soil to grow. As these new religious ideas took root they forced the fractures ever wider, further eroding the uniformity of the Kirk and securing themselves more space to mature’ (p. 105). Of the three major religious groups examined by Spurlock (Congregationalists, Baptists, and Quakers), it was Congregationalism that was evidently a reaction from within the Kirk. Feeding off Cromwellian propaganda, some from within the Protestors faction questioned the extreme rigid adherence to the covenants and pressed an already developing understanding of the need to ‘localize’ discipline. Much of the Congregational separation from, and subsequent reintegration back into, the Kirk centred round the purity of local churches and took advantage of the opportunities provided by the Cromwellian occupation. Baptists saw early successes in Scotland, but native Scots proved stony soil for Baptist roots, which hardly extended beyond the army. Without substantial social integration, the movement withered away in the face of Baptist involvement in the Overton Plot and a cascade of print reminding the Scots of the Münster Anabaptist rebellion of 1535. The only enduring ‘sect’ to enter Scotland, perhaps counter-intuitively, was the Quakers. Their civilian base, sense of non-hierarchical community, and culture of martyrology facilitated their growth up to, and beyond, the Restoration. They were neither reliant on the army or clerical oversight, nor had they based their initial growth on a period of tolerance.

The fact that the Quakers remained as the only religious group to survive the Restoration in Scotland suggests that the Kirk was largely able to maintain the support of broadly orthodox Scots, despite an initial backlash towards the policies of the 1640s. It also points towards the Kirk's ability to regain its position after its stumblings during the first years of the decade. The failure of the Cromwellian religious programme in Scotland was largely due to the ability of the Kirk to quell indigenous religious heresy while moving to placate, over the course of the decade, dissent from within. One of Spurlock's most startling finds is a plea for toleration in 1659 signed by Baptists, Congregationalists, and Quakers. How and why these three often-conflicting groups came together in Edinburgh in 1659 for a single purpose is one of his best reminders that the Scottish circumstances had their own unique and important dynamic.

Nonetheless, despite the overall excellent contribution that these three books add to our understanding of the seventeenth-century crisis, there are points in each work where it is worth applying a bit of pressure. Hardman Moore's belief that New England Congregationalists after their return were different in their approach to the parish from those Congregationalists who stayed at home is open to question. She argues that men like John Phillip, who favoured the gathered church as much as preaching to the whole parish, were a rare breed and often former New Englanders (p. 128). But such men were surely less rare than she would have it. Geoffrey Nuttall questioned the accuracy of our understanding English Congregationalism as ‘anti-parochial gathered churches’ over half a century ago by highlighting ‘Congregational incumbents’ in the Interregnum Church.Footnote ¹ The very high percentage of Congregational churches that met in parish churches under the leadership of parish ministers without New England experience argues against her account. This becomes problematic elsewhere. Hardman Moore's characterization of revolutionary English Congregationalism as ‘anti-parochial gathered churches’, combined with the ambiguous relationship she finds among returning colonists with that vision of Congregationalism, leads her to conclude that ‘print, not people, brought the New England Way to England’ (p. 147). If our picture of English Congregationalism becomes as complicated as that of returning colonists, then perhaps we can view Congregationalism less as the ‘New England Way’ and more as one of the natural trajectories of early Stuart English puritanism, as part of the story of godly reformation. Spurlock's account of the Aberdeen Congregationalists is instructive on this point. Though they gathered churches outside the Kirk's jurisdiction, they maintained a public ministry and a broad community basis and then reintegrated into the Kirk by the Restoration. Just as Hardman Moore argues for New England, the issue for the Aberdeen Congregationalists was, as Spurlock suggests, not strict separation from the national Kirk but separation from a church that lacked sufficient, ‘conscionable’ purity. Through reformation, this withdrawal could be reconciled. Perhaps the ‘New England Way’ was something more indigenous to puritanism and less specific to just New England.

Gribben's emphasis on Protestant divisions skirts around the possibility that the Cromwellian government thought unity could be achieved through the propagation of the gospel. The glimpses of pan-denominational unity in God's Irishmen are often seen as disparate, almost individual or regional movements. Whatever the Cromwellian regime was attempting with their religious policy clearly failed, and Gribben's book is probably the best new addition we have to understanding that failure, but it is quite different to say their attempt at religious settlement was ‘unprogrammed’ than to say that the programme they did propose failed. This is a book about dissent and division, not about the battle between unity and disunity. Similarly, Quakers are not necessarily written out of Gribben's plot as much as marginalized. For example, they make up barely over two pages of a twenty-plus page chapter on women's ecclesiastical roles (pp. 156–8). They come to the fore slightly more in ‘The possibility of the extraordinary’, getting about five pages out of twenty (pp. 139–44). Surely Quakers had more to say to Ireland's Cromwellians about women's religious participation and pneumatology than this! Surely they incited more debate than Gribben has presented here. Prospective readers should be warned that this is a book mostly about theological debates within Gribben's confessional mainstream Protestants, not a sustained engagement with debates against those outside that mainstream, whatever their demographic proportions. Finally, his dispositional use of the terms ‘radical’ and ‘conservative’ probably serves his purpose of complicating our understandings of many Irish theologians of the 1650s, but labelling figures at times radical and at times conservative may be more misleading than helpful. Such value-laden terms often assume a location of ‘the orthodox’ that is counter-productive to a book that presents the orthodox as fundamentally under question. J. C. Davis, Conal Condren, and Glenn Burgess have all questioned the use of these terms and Gribben does not answer their claims.Footnote ²

Spurlock's work, at times, suffers from some inconsistencies. At one point he accepts the arguments of Robert Baillie, Samuel Rutherford, and Thomas Edwards that ‘Independency proved to be a springboard into other ‘errors’ rather than a static ending point for those questioning the Presbyterian Kirk' (p. 156). The integrity of these sources aside, this sits very uncomfortably with the bulk of the Independents he analyses, who ‘drift’ back into the Kirk rather than away from it. A more loose interpretation of ecclesiastical allegiances might have prevented such paradoxes. Elsewhere he claims that Scots who attended religious disputes ‘did so out of curiosity rather than out of a yearning for religious liberation or change’ (p. 69). That is a large assumption. He also suggests that questions over the proper administration of infant baptism, possibly similar to those experienced in New England over the Half-Way Covenant or over the ‘re-baptism’ of children already baptized by the Kirk, led to accusations of ‘anabaptism’ against many Congregationalists like Thomas Chateris. Surely Chateris was accused of anabaptism because his church probably allowed mixed communion of paedobaptist and anti-paedobaptists within a Congregational polity, along the lines of Henry Jessey, John Tombes, or John Rogers (a number of Chateris's congregation later become Baptists, he notes). A letter by Edmund Hickeringill to the church at Hexham, Northumberland (recorded in a source he consults by a figure he discusses), speaks exactly of this type of communion in a Baptist church in Leith, but the phenomenon makes no appearance in the book.Footnote ³ These types of assumptions and oversights unfortunately loosen up an otherwise fascinating, thoughtful, and valuable book.

Taken together these three works highlight how healthy and vibrant the current historiography of mid-seventeenth-century religion is. Though all three works try to integrate a three kingdoms and transatlantic approach with varying degrees of success, it is only together that they offer a fresh, in-depth analysis of the seventeenth-century crisis in Britain, Ireland, and New England. This ‘extra-English’ analysis interestingly often leads back to the crucial role played by the English themselves in the shaping and transmission of religious diversity. The religious histories of early New England, or of Ireland and Scotland during the 1650s, are in large part a history of English puritans abroad and the problems they often caused. The destabilization of the Church of England during the 1630s extended its troubled hand far and wide. These works also force us to ask new questions about the failure of Cromwellian godly rule. Each work weights differently the importance of print and oral disputations in the transmission of theological and ecclesiological debates. Gribben and Spurlock also present divergent views of the Cromwellian religious programme as it existed in Ireland and Scotland. These divergent views consequently affect their conclusions about the success and failure of that experiment. Did the regime offer separate settlements to each nation, and, either way, do we need to clarify further the fundamentals of the Cromwellian religious programme in the crucial period just after the Regicide? But perhaps most excitingly, all these works point towards a need to continue and extend Ann Hughes's recent work on the basic structure of religious disputation, possibly by re-evaluating the meanings of key terms and developing an understanding of polemical intention.Footnote ⁴ Could a minister argue against the views of another and still hold communion with them? Gribben and Spurlock seem to assume the answer to this is no, but there are enough examples of Cromwellians who preach for particular forms of baptism or ecclesiastical formats while still maintaining fellowship with those of the opposite persuasion to argue that this phenomenon needs further study. It is probably a part of the movement for godly unity in the early 1650s that both these authors fail to capitalize on and also might help further reveal the story of Congregationalists who tried to work within parish realities. Moreover, defining what polemicists mean by such fundamental terms as ‘national church’ and ‘the gospel way’ (such phrases appear to mean different things to different writers at different times in all three of these works) may be the next stage in more accurately positioning theological and ecclesiological debate and understanding writers' polemical intention. Perhaps a new understanding of intentions can help us gauge who was attempting to reform the reformation and who was after religious revolution. Whatever emerges in the historiography of religion in the seventeenth century, these three books will surely play a large part.