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Guildhall Library, London

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Past & Present

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The National Archives

For most of his adult life John Harper, a citizen and fishmonger of London, living in the small parish of St Margaret Moses, made notes on the sermons that he had attended, and at some point – probably between 1656 and 1657 – he created a further fair copy of his notes (or some of them) in a volume of almost 600 pages.Footnote ¹ Harper included pedantic details on the sources for the notes: on two occasions he wrote a short paragraph, explaining, ‘This I sett downe as my memory served mee when I came home’; but more common were longer versions, endorsed ‘Written this sermon from my note books from the mouth of him when he preached the same. Per me John Harper’, indicating a prior short-hand record.Footnote ² The sermons were delivered between 1626 and 1665; they include thirty-four preached on special occasions, such as high-profile fast-days at St Paul's Cathedral (as Harper continued to describe it) in the 1640s and 1650s, but most of Harper's notes are extended versions of series of sermons preached in his own parish on the fundamentals of the Christian faith (and eight of the ‘occasional’ sermons were also preached in the parish). Despite the ample opportunities that London afforded – perhaps a hundred sermons preached each week in the 1620s – Harper was no gadder to strange or fashionable preachers, unlike the clothier Robert Saxby whose notes are almost contemporary with Harper's early sections.Footnote ³ Almost half the volume is taken up with notes of sermon-series preached between March 1626 and the early 1630s by Richard Culverwell, minister of St Margaret Moses, on the Lord's Prayer, the Sacraments, and the Creed, while another long section has notes on the sermons of Culverwell's son-in-law and eventual successor Benjamin Needler. Although described as ‘Briefe notes taken from the Sermons of Mr Richard Culverwell’, these notes are in fact particularly full, with extensive marginal headings, references and quotations from Greek and Latin patristic and philosophical works as well as the Scriptures. They have a slightly different endorsement: ‘Gathered these noates from Mr Rich Culverwell o'r minister sermones which he then preached in or Parish Church of St Margrett Moses Fryday streete in London. Per me John Harper Junior.’ The Harpers were the most prosperous family in this small parish and close to their minister; John Harper, Sr, was godfather to Culverwell's son and remembered the minister in his will. Thus our John Harper probably had access to the minister's own texts, perhaps circulated to conscientious parishioners as part of the process of repetition or reenactment of sermons, characteristic of Puritan sociability.Footnote ⁴

The notes on the Culverwell sermons were most likely the product of cooperation between Culverwell himself, a dedicated preacher, and Harper, a serious and obviously well-educated hearer. They represent the highest quality of hearer's notes, more complex and sophisticated than many of the examples discussed recently by Arnold Hunt. There is no evidence that Harper had been to university, but he excelled at the listening, note-taking and memorising that was at the heart of an advanced grammar school education, and his accounts of many sermons follow very closely the guidelines set down by the schoolmaster John Brinsley.Footnote ⁵ The Culverwell material amounts to 260 pages on the fundamentals of the Christian faith, presumably close to what was actually preached at a crucial period in England's religious history.Footnote ⁶ This article uses the richly detailed account of Culverwell's preaching to address two issues, one broad, and one more specific. What do Culverwell's sermons suggest about the nature of the divinity preached in early Stuart London; was a Calvinist message muted by pastoral concerns as Christopher Haigh has argued?Footnote ⁷ Furthermore, Culverwell's sermons as noted by Harper – the series on the Lords Prayer preached between March 1626 and October 1627; another on the Sacraments from April 1628 to November 1629, and on the Creed from March 1630 – exactly fit the chronology in which debates about the impact of Charles i's religious attitudes and the policies of Archbishop William Laud are located. For Nicholas Tyacke, Laud's appointment as bishop of London in 1628 (after two decades of Calvinist or easy-going bishops) confirmed a decisive shift in what passed as orthodox in the English Church, with the predestinarian tenets of the godly condemned as subversive and disruptive Puritanism.Footnote ⁸ Other scholars, including Peter Lake, Kenneth Fincham, David Como and, most recently and subtly, Arnold Hunt, have worked, critically, within Tyacke's framework, while Peter White and Julian Davies, on the other hand, have challenged the argument that a broad Calvinist consensus was shattered by a novel and aggressive Arminian faction.Footnote ⁹ Harper's notes thus enable us to chart how Richard Culverwell fared as Laud took over in London.

This is not a dramatic story. The sermons are not obviously polemical or controversial; and the preacher, Richard Culverwell, kinsman of the more famous Ezekiel, was not a front-line figure; always a conformist, he remained untroubled by the ecclesiastical authorities during a quarter of a century at Margaret Moses. He was none the less involved in godly networks in the city, and a participant, somewhat tangentially, in intra-Puritan disputes. He was amongst the ill-assorted group of Laudians and both moderate and radical Puritans who gave evidence against the minister Peter Shaw, accused of ‘Antinomian’ preaching in late 1628 and early 1629; and he supported Stephen Denison and George Walker, two of the more aggressive policemen of Puritan orthodoxy in the 1630s, when their conformity was questioned by the ecclesiastical authorities.Footnote ¹⁰ The note-taker, John Harper, like his father before him, was a conscientious servant of his company, his parish and his ward, but no unruly Puritan or parliamentarian zealot. He described St Paul's as a cathedral throughout the 1640s and 1650s and refused to serve the republican regime as an alderman in 1650, although he acted as a Common Councillor for Bread Street Ward from 1658 until his death in 1667. Harper was loyal to his parish church throughout the upheavals of the mid-seventeenth century, noting in succession and without comment the farewell sermon of the Presbyterian Needler, ejected from the living in 1662, and the first sermon of his successor, Charles Burke.Footnote ¹¹ Although the conscientious note-taking in itself suggests that these sermons mattered to Harper, he included no personal reflections on the preachers or their message, in contrast to contemporary London note-takers such as Saxby, Nehemiah Wallington or Walter Boothby. Harper's aim was not, apparently, to create a manuscript that could be circulated, sold or offered for print publication, and he provided no adversarial or polemical readings; his note-taking practices seem rather to have attempted a re-creation of the experience of the sermon as an oral event, including the asides, and the preacher's use of the first person.Footnote ¹² Where there are printed versions of the sermons noted by Harper (on occasion in the 1650s) the notes give a recognisable account of the sermon as printed, although of course a full account of any sermon as preached is lost to us. Preachers increasingly stressed how crucial note-taking was to true apprehension, the godly minister John Rogers advising a parishioner, ‘so manie sermons thou hast well hard as thou hast thy notes to shew in thy bookes’. A sermon in the notebook from St Margaret Moses in February 1650 perhaps hints at Harper's motivation. The preacher, William Jaggard, minister of Botolph Church, is reported as saying:

Harper's notes seem then to have served as aids to his memory at the time, and as the basis for private, sustained reflection thereafter, in this case for years to come.Footnote ¹³

These are thus the notes of a respectable, pious, introspective and conventional layman, devoted to the routine preaching of a very moderate conformist Puritan in a small and apparently quiescent parish of modest tradesmen. On the evidence of the church courts and visitation records, only the very occasional fornicator or Sabbath breaker disturbed the peace of St Margaret Moses in the 1620s and 1630s.Footnote ¹⁴ One obvious contrast is with the adventurous, populist and divisive career of Stephen Denison in St Katherine Cree, recently discussed by Peter Lake. However, the least controversial or provocative end of Puritan practical divinity offers an excellent testing ground for the impact of Laudianism. As Anthony Milton has pointed out in relation to licensing for the press, more radical figures might risk overt defiance or go abroad, but ‘discreet and cautious middle men’ like Culverwell, who regarded themselves as orthodox and loyal parish ministers, faced more complex dilemmas.Footnote ¹⁵ If, as Arnold Hunt has recently suggested, Laudians were seeking to construct a new orthodoxy that incorporated moderate Calvinists, a cautious, conformist Puritan like Culverwell might seem a promising target.Footnote ¹⁶ Culverwell's sermons have a conventional, if elaborate, doctrine and use structure; they are concerned with the fundamentals of the faith and the pastoral implications of Christian teaching; they do not seem to have been intended for wider publication. Unlike other London preachers, Culverwell seems to have made no comments on English politics or foreign policy in the 1620s, or if he did, Harper did not bother to record them. On all counts then the material avoids Ian Green's strictures against focusing on printed sermons and/or seeing the sermon ‘as a weapon of public confrontation’ in which partisan cases were made.Footnote ¹⁷ If even here we can discern signs of strain from the later 1620s, this has important implications for the nature and success of Laudian initiatives.

Harper did not give specific dates for individual Culverwell sermons, but those on the Creed were definitely preached on Sunday afternoons, and those on the Lord's Prayer probably were. Such series were common in provincial as well as city pulpits, and were often linked to afternoon catechising. The sermons on the Sacrament, another popular genre, may have been preached at monthly intervals as part of preparations for the sacrament of the Lord's supper.Footnote ¹⁸ To some extent, they look as if Culverwell was ostentatiously following the guidance of James i's August 1622 Directions to Preachers, which laid down that afternoon sermons should be on a part of the catechism, a text from the Creed, the Ten Commandments or the Lord's Prayer, but they certainly did not obey the injunction that no preacher below a bishop or dean ‘presume to preach in any popular auditory, the deep points of predestination, election, reprobation or of the universality, efficacy, resistibility or irresistibility of God's grace’. Such ostentatious obedience in itself highlights the constraints felt by a preacher and we shall see it used again by Culverwell. It is also a moot point whether Culverwell followed the advice in the Directions to avoid ‘bitter invectives and indecent railing speeches against the persons of either Papists or Puritans’ or to ‘modestly and gravely (when they are occasioned thereunto by the text of scripture) free both the doctrine and discipline of the Church of England from the aspersions of either adversary’.Footnote ¹⁹ Culverwell's sermons were resolutely and consistently Calvinist and anti-popish, and although he was passionate in his exhortations to conformity to the public ordinances as practised in the visible Church of England, his sermons hint at anxieties about the discipline, if not the doctrine of that Church.

Culverwell's first series of sermons on the Lord’s Prayer straddled Charles i's Proclamation of June 1626 ‘for the establishing of the peace and quiet of the Church of England’ forbidding the promulgation of ‘new inventions or opinions’ contrary to the doctrine and discipline of the Church of England.Footnote ²⁰ In his earlier work Tyacke argued that this was a crucial move to prevent the preaching of Calvinist doctrine, but the Culverwell sermons support the arguments of Peter Lake, Thomas Cogswell and Richard Cust that the exigencies of a Protestant foreign policy and attempts to win support in parliament ensured that the proclamation was not consistently enforced.Footnote ²¹ Indeed throughout the later 1620s Culverwell's sermons delivered an uncompromisingly Calvinist, and sometimes overtly anti-Arminian message, stressing predestination of the elect to salvation through God's grace. In his exposition on ‘Thy kingdom come’ during the sermons on the Lord's Prayer, Culverwell explained that God had two kingdoms: his universal kingdom, ‘whereby he ruleth over all the world over all creatures … in restraining all, in preserving and destroying all, doing whatsoever he will’ but also his ‘speciall kingdome, which is that wherby God raigneth in his Church over Angels and Saints in heaven, and men wayfaring one earth’; this was the kingdom of grace in this world and the kingdom of glory in the world to come.Footnote ²² Salvation, through God's grace, was contrasted with the popish stress on human effort promulgated by ‘our adversaries’ of the Church of Rome with their ‘abominable doctrine of merit and humaine satisfaction’.Footnote ²³ On the other hand, Culverwell, like Stephen Denison, Obadiah Sedgwick and other London ministers, who worried about antinomian tendencies within London Puritan circles, was concerned to avoid any over-enthusiastic stress on the impact of God's free grace. Rather, he emphasised that repentance and sanctification inevitably followed predestination and justification. Sanctification was ‘necessarily joined to justification, these two goe together, are inseperable companions’. The elect were not freed from the constraints of the moral law: ‘the doctrine of free justification is not a doctrine of licentiousness’; it does not open the way to sin ‘as the Papists say we doe’ – ‘where God pardons sinnes he gives an endeavor to forsake sinnes, to strive against them’.Footnote ²⁴ On the crucial question separating strict Calvinists from English Arminians – whether the elect chosen by God could ever fall from grace – Culverwell was uncompromising. He showed no inclination to move with more moderate Calvinists to a more equivocal or open-minded stance, but was certain ‘no temptation shalbe able totally and finally to seperate the chosen and Saints from God’. The doctrine of never totally and finally falling into temptation was a comfort to the godly, to be contrasted with ‘that uncomfortable doctrine of the Papists and Arminians, that teach the Saints may holy [wholly] and finally fall away from God’.Footnote ²⁵

Repeated references to ‘our adversaries the Papists’ structured Culverwell's sermons. They were attacked for worship of saints, for ‘the greate Idoll of Rome, transubstantiation’, and for their approach to the sacraments:Footnote ²⁶

Just as his discussions of salvation negotiated between an appeal to human effort, associated with popery and Arminianism, and an ‘antinomian’ stress on free grace, so Culverwell's preaching on the sacraments steered a conventionally godly course between the errors of popery and those of Anabaptism.Footnote ²⁷ Sacraments were signs of grace, but did not confer it: ‘A sacrament is a holy signe and seale of the covenant of grace’; sacraments were ‘not efficient causes of salvation, but are onely instruments as signes and seales of the righteousnes of fayth’, so that in baptism we are not saved by any power ‘inherent’ in the ceremony, nor by ‘workes of righteousness which we have done’, but by ‘God's mercy, by the blood of Christ, sprinkled one our hearts and consciences by fayth’. But neither were the sacraments ‘as the Anabaptists sayes naked pictures and signes of a Christians profession. No: marke what the Church of England sayes in the 25th Article … [they are] wittnesses and effectuall signes of Grace and Gods good will’. The Lord's supper, for example, encouraged ‘our piety, our thankfulness and our dew obedience to God’; it promoted Christian unity, ‘for we that are many are one bread and one body because we are pertakers of one bread’, and led Christians to reflect on Christ's death and on their own sinfulness.Footnote ²⁸

Culverwell persevered with his predestinarian framework into the early 1630s. In the final sermon series on the Creed, begun in March 1630, Culverwell maintained his sharp distinction between the godly and the wicked, and stressed the special comforts that the spirit wrought ‘in the hearts of the elect’: ‘God from everlasting hath chosen a number from all eternitie to salvation to the prayse of his grace, which is called election, which is Gods foreapoynting of certaine Angels and men unto life, to the praise of his glorious grace’.Footnote ²⁹ He consistently attacked the ‘abominable doctrine of merritt and human satisfaction which our adversaries of the Church of Rome teaches’, and, most significantly, he continued to defend the most controversial Calvinist position for which other ministers were questioned, and which many moderate Calvinists rejected: that the elect could not finally fall from grace. The sermons on the Creed use language very similar to that already quoted from the earliest sermons on the Lord's Prayer: ‘the common gifts of the spirit maybe lost and extinguished and the special gifts of the spirit in the elect may be diminished … but they cannot finally or totally be lost’.Footnote ³⁰

Harper's notes thus support the emerging scholarly consensus that strenuous Calvinist preaching was acceptable to many congregations. The work of Peter Lake on London and Arnold Hunt's wide-ranging account of early modern preaching have demonstrated a hunger for learned sermons and shown that the preaching of limited atonement was compatible with offering pastoral reassurance. Culverwell's sermons are intellectually demanding for a small parish, even a London one, but they none the less prompted an equally intense programme of recording and reflection from Harper.Footnote ³¹ Culverwell did not shirk difficult issues such as the question of whether God could be the author of sin, explaining that papists had modified the ‘lead us not into temptation’ passage in the Lord's Prayer to avoid the ‘foule error of Maniches whoe made God the author of evill’. He flattered his audience with references to a range of authorities, as in another sermon on the Lord's Prayer: ‘Another thing I must acquaint yow of, is this, most of the Latine fathers doe leave out this thanksgiving and have it not, but all the Greeke fathers have both the prayer and the thanksgiving’. There were frequent references to the Fathers; discussions of the Greek origins of words like baptism or heresy; alternative readings of biblical texts; detailed comparisons of ancient heresies such as Arianism and Pelagianism; and careful delineations of the ‘errors of the Lutherans’ as well as the ‘infection of the Papists’.Footnote ³² In contrast Obadiah Sedgwick, preaching in the adjacent parish of St Mildred Bread Street, adopted the opposite technique of explaining that he was avoiding difficult issues (although this might be a roundabout way of bringing them to hearers’ attention): ‘I had a purpose to refute that error of the Papists concerning the making of workes to be the cause of salvation, but this Auditory is not fit for controversie.’Footnote ³³ The contrast may be more apparent than real, however, for many of Sedgwick's sermons were preached on a weekday, where the audience might be predominantly female and the focus pastoral, whereas Culverwell's Sunday afternoon sermons envisaged an audience beyond his small band of parishioners, including fellow ministers, to whom specific ‘uses’ were directed.Footnote ³⁴

We cannot tell for certain whether Culverwell operated in a similar fashion to Robert Hill, one of his predecessors at St Margaret Moses, and, on Julia Merritt's account, an equally cautious, politically quiescent and ‘emollient’ figure. Hill achieved a balance between ‘exclusive and inclusive views of the Christian community’, offering a clearly predestinarian message to the godly, while blurring or simplifying his vision in his approach to catechising and his broader relationships with his parishioners.Footnote ³⁵ Culverwell was of course alert to the pastoral implications of Calvinist theology; like many of his contemporaries he tended to focus on the comforts for the godly rather than on the torments of the damned, a tendency reinforced by his stress on sanctification. God was an ‘irefull Judge to the wicked’, but a ‘bountifull Lord’ and a ‘mercifull father to his children’, and those truly baptised were ‘ingrafted as lively members into the misticall body of Christ, separated from the rest of the world that lyeth in wickedness’. Like Richard Sibbes and Obadiah Sedgwick, Culverwell urged his congregation to avoid both ‘despayer and presumption, these are as Sylla and Caribdis’ and provided biblical texts to aid his hearers in self-examination of their spiritual state. Harper dutifully copied out all these texts. Optimistically, Culverwell explained that faith could be found through introspection as a ‘smale sparke of cole under a great deale of greene wood’.Footnote ³⁶

Moving from the general to the chronologically more specific implications of these Culverwell sermons, it is obvious that the minister was not prevented from preaching a broadly Calvinist message by Charles's 1626 Declaration nor by the later measures of 1628–9 forbidding disputes about predestination.Footnote ³⁷ If there was ‘a systematic (if careful and delicate) policy to shut down Calvinist discourse in the capital’, in Como's words, it did not work in this case. Perhaps Culverwell's career offers support for Julian Davies's argument that Laud was a more flexible and moderate figure than the one portrayed by Tyacke and those scholars influenced by him, and for Christopher Haigh's contention that by the later 1630s ‘only a few critics of the Church had been seriously harassed’.Footnote ³⁸ This, however, would be a premature conclusion. The rest of this article will discuss the signs of strain in Culverwell's sermons and reveal his subtle accommodations to the changing contexts of the later 1620s.

Mary Morrissey has demonstrated the absence of overt hostility to Arminianism in Paul's Cross sermons after 1628, and Culverwell too ceased his open attacks on Arminianism (unlike the more confrontational Stephen Denison). In the 1626 sermons on the Lords’ Prayer, Arminians and papists go together. The commonplace that Arminians ‘are cozen germans’ to the papists is demonstrated by their shared blasphemous stress on human will: ‘Away therefore with that doctrine of Popery and Arminianisme that attributes to the will of man being now corrupt’; ‘This is horrible blasphemy in both.’Footnote ³⁹ Arminians are not mentioned by name after 1628, although they may be the target of more muted comments on semi-Pelagians, or on

This sounds like a coded reference to the suspicion that Richard Montagu and other notorious Arminians were promoting closer links with the Roman Catholic Church.Footnote ⁴⁰

Furthermore, in the last series of sermons recorded by Harper, Culverwell paraded his outward obedience to the December 1629 instructions forbidding afternoon sermons:

The meaning of these instructions was ambiguous and their impact is disputed. General afternoon sermons were not allowed but it is not clear whether preachers were confined to formal catechising and narrow discussions on specific aspects of the catechism, or whether broader pastoral preaching could be justified. Series of sermons connected to the catechism were a normal element in a preacher's repertoire, and the creed was part of the catechism. Julian Davies has pointed to practices such as Culverwell's as evidence for the flexibility of Laud and his successor as bishop of London, William Juxon. Davies argues that the December 1629 measures were interpreted leniently so that sermons connected to the catechism were allowed as long as catechising as such was also performed. Davies claims that only nonconformists (and Culverwell was never a nonconformist) were banned from afternoon preaching.Footnote ⁴¹ But Culverwell's repeated insistence on obedience can be interpreted very differently: as an explanation to his audience that his submission to authority had required an unwelcome constraint on his preaching. As Anthony Milton has explained, in discussing publication through print, many moderate Puritans, ‘eager to show their loyalty’ in the 1630s, were none the less concerned to demonstrate to their congregations that ‘they were acting under duress, in order to maintain their reputation and credibility in godly circles’. As some moderate anti-Laudians preferred not to publish in defiance of the licensors, so Culverwell qualified his preaching in order to maintain his status as an orthodox preacher in the visible Church.Footnote ⁴² And, of course, this sense of constraint was forced on Culverwell's hearers (including fellow ministers), as he repeatedly emphasised the point: ‘This article of Christ coming to judgment is a Cathetheticall point as you may see Hebrews 6.2., and this is that as yow have heard, we are commanded to preach and to teach unto you.’ Thus Culverwell's own cautious distance from official ecclesiastical policy was signaled to his hearers.Footnote ⁴³

Arnold Hunt has suggested that competing versions of orthodoxy were at stake in the ‘fluid and unstable situation’ of the 1630s, while Peter Lake has cautioned against seeing a ‘static, monolithic, indeed, conservative puritan Calvinism’ cracking under pressure from an increasingly powerful Laudian regime. We need to understand the variety of godly reactions including, as Lake and Como have emphasised, the increasing sensitivity to the tensions within their own circles, often prompted by ‘antinomian’ challenges to an assurance-based legalistic Calvinist divinity.Footnote ⁴⁴ In this light, Culverwell's commitment to sanctification, his frequent discussions of the implications of division and his unwavering opposition to separatism or ceremonial nonconformity, suggest that he was contending with opinions that were gaining ground amongst the London godly. Culverwell's 1628–9 condemnations of schism and division as ‘great blemishes and foul stains’ provide context for his role in the intra-Puritan disputes over salvation and sanctification, chronicled by Como and Lake: ‘if there bee divisions, in yor parish meetings, which yow call the vestary, yow doe no good in yor assembling, even so is it when yee come together in the Church’. Nourishing divisions hindered the communion of the saints and should be kept private; it was disastrous if schisms and divisions ‘appeare in the face of the congregation and shall gett sides’. Culverwell did appear publicly in some of the struggles over antinomian views in London but in a limited and reluctant role. Again, the troubles amongst the godly, as well as the ominous and growing impact of the new bishop of London, must lie behind Culverwell's anxious insistence that divisions and disputes did not fatally damage a visible Church: against ‘our adversaries the Papists, that make unitie and agreement to be one of the marks of the trewe Church’, Culverwell explained that ‘where Satan possesses the house, all things are at peace; but we may conclude one the contrary, where thers scismes and divisions, theres the trew church of God’. Indeed, heresies should be a comfort to the godly, for any visible Church was ‘a mixt company of sound and unsound, of approved and unapproved … of good corne and tares’, and it was through combating heresy that the sound were made manifest. In a rather contradictory and over-optimistic move, given the growing strength of anti-Calvinist opinion, Culverwell concluded that divisions in the English Church were confined to ‘mater of disipline … but in matters of doctrine theres no disagreement amongst us’.Footnote ⁴⁵ His unease on these matters is suggested in the convoluted negatives of his insistence that while adequate discipline in a Church was desirable, if it was lacking it made ‘not no true vissible Church’.Footnote ⁴⁶

More positively Culverwell was uncompromising in his support for obedience to the public ordinances of the English Church. The focus on ceremonial conformity suggests – and indeed Culverwell almost says as much – that along with other city ministers he was responding to controversies within his congregation.Footnote ⁴⁷ Culverwell entreated his hearers to treat God's house with reverence, without agreeing with ‘superstitious Papists [who] thinke there is a kinde of holiness in the walls’, a remark that must have prompted hearers to ponder Laudian policies for church interiors. Then towards the end of a sermon on the sacraments he turned, with apparent reluctance, to practical matters:

This last phrase suggests that he was not confident of winning over the more scrupulous amongst his congregation, but Culverwell pointed to variations in administration of the Lord's supper, so that the Dutch sat to receive communion while French Protestants stood, and the English knelt. Culverwell's position was that of a typical conformist Puritan who held that kneeling was a matter of decency and obedience in ‘things indifferent’. As Culverwell said, God ‘hath left it indifferent to the Church to order this way or thatt way’; but these were not thereby matters for Christian liberty: ‘for where rules are laid down by the Church which are according to piety, decency and charitie, there Christians liberty is not abridged but confusion and disorder is abridged’. Culverwell then answered objections to kneeling that had presumably been raised directly with him, and concluded that it was ‘a gesture that makes most for pietie and is most agreable to the action and tends to edification, and therfore is a fitt gesture to be used at the Lords table’. It might be a practice shared with papists, but it was also one that Calvin himself had endorsed, while sitting was preferred by Arians and Socinians. The argument that kneeling scandalised weak Christians was ‘the poorest of all’; offence to a private man was a small matter compared to giving scandal to the governors of the Church.Footnote ⁴⁹ Culverwell's balancing act became more sensitive in the 1620s as a low-key conformist stress on obedience was increasingly overshadowed by a more ceremonial (and often anti-Calvinist) divinity associated with Lancelot Andrews and later with the Laudians, that endowed the sacraments with an inherent value that Culverwell, as we have seen, resisted. James i had condemned those who sat ‘Jack-fellow like with Christ’ at the Lord's supper, and refusal to kneel was increasingly associated by Laud and his allies with a disruptive Puritanism. Culverwell's defence of due respect for the Lord's supper had to be careful to avoid endorsing popish superstition, and he offered no support for ceremony in itself.Footnote ⁵⁰

Culverwell clearly favoured kneeling at communion, but he urged participation in the public ordinances even where he acknowledged problems in their administration. He knew that sometimes through the

Ideally, the unclean and ignorant should be excluded, and the Church gave the ministry ‘authority and warrant to keepe such back’, but Culverwell rejected the views of separatist ‘Brownists who sayes that the communicating with unworthy receavers make them that communicate with them to be likewise unworthy receavers’. On the contrary, the godly ‘needst not, nay thou oughtst not forbeare to come to the Lords [supper], because some wicked persons partake thereof with thee’.Footnote ⁵¹

This then was how a cautious and conformist London Puritan responded to the rise of William Laud, and of course he got away with it. His experience has to be set against the harassment charted by other scholars.Footnote ⁵² Culverwell was not personally combative like Stephen Denison, politically provocative like Thomas SalisburyFootnote ⁵³ or a Nonconformist like John Davenport or Henry Roborough.Footnote ⁵⁴ Unlike most of the ministers who attracted Laud's attention, he had given no hostages to fortune, and could thus ‘fly under the Laudian radar’ (to quote Arnold Hunt). None the less Culverwell's subtle, sullen response is an important factor in the increasingly polarised religious atmosphere of the 1630s, and in the long run it may have been as fatal to the authority of the Caroline Church as the more high-profile confrontations and punishments.Footnote ⁵⁵ The potential for some rapprochement between Laudians and very moderate Calvinists who were not committed to the doctrine that the elect could not finally fall from grace, has been recently suggested by Arnold Hunt, but Culverwell's moderation did not take him that far. If Laudians often ‘forced open the cracks’ between moderate Calvinists and more ‘extreme’ Puritans, as Anthony Milton has convincingly argued, it was still possible for a cautious man like Culverwell to avoid commitment to either wing. Como has shown that Laud sought in the early 1630s to outlaw Calvinist preaching through indirect intimidation rather than risk public controversy or the formal trials that might arouse popular hostility. This was none the less a policy ‘designed to intimidate and silence the fraternity of London ministers’ and it does not require us to accept Laud's self-evaluation as a man of compromise and moderation. Laud rarely questioned ministers on Calvinist theology alone; the corollary of this was that Culverwell could continue his public ministry and his predestinarian preaching.Footnote ⁵⁶ But his thoughtful hearers, like Harper, would have had no doubt that he was acting under constraint. Indeed Culverwell's conviction that he was acting under command was thrust in their faces. In a ‘common-placing’ and biblical culture, the significance of subtle variations in tone was easy to discern.Footnote ⁵⁷ Furthermore, even in apparently uncontroversial sermons, Culverwell and like-minded divines trained their hearers in dialectical modes of thought, as ministers constructed their moderation and orthodoxy in opposition to the enemies of the truth on either side. In discussions of the ceremonies and the sacraments, Culverwell raised (in order to refute) the arguments of adversaries, of Brownists and Anabaptists, as well as papists and Arminians; all this encouraged an active response and a capacity to read between the lines. Culverwell's silence on Arminianism after 1628 was deafening; this made it more, not less threatening than in 1626–7.

The experiences of the 1630s reinforced a sense that it was to parliament that moderate Puritans had to look for the defence of the true religion. The only single sermon of Culverwell's that Harper noted was a typically low-key but resolute sermon on 30 May 1641, when the parishioners of St Margaret Moses took the parliamentary Protestation to defend the king, the parliament and the true Protestant religion. Culverwell's text, Joshua xxiv.15, offered a stark choice between serving the Lord or the false Gods of ‘the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell’. The aging Culverwell, like the dying Joshua, declared, ‘as for me and my house, we will serve the lord’. He concluded with praise for God and the House of Commons: ‘Lastly we have cause to blesse God, who hath put it into the hearts of the house of Comons now assembled in Parlament to make this Protestation, and by their practise in taking it to give example and incouragement to the whole kingdome to enter into the same with them.’Footnote ⁵⁸ The prompt response that this small parish made to the House of Commons’ appeal in 1641 is a significant legacy of Culverwell's apparently undramatic ministry.

This article has used Harper's notes to interpret Culverwell's preaching during crucial years of religious strain, but we should return finally to the hearer himself. The structure of the notebook suggests that Culverwell's sermons had an enduring relevance for Harper, enabling him to recollect and reinforce his moderate Puritan formation when parish unity and doctrinal orthodoxy were more starkly threatened than in the later 1620s. In August 1655 Culverwell's successor and son-in-law Benjamin Needler commenced a long sermon series on ‘severall heads of Divinity’ on which Harper again made ‘Breife notes’ (amounting to some eighty-two pages) until Needler's ejection in 1662. Every act of recording and copying involves a choice and a commitment, and it was probably Needler's preaching that prompted Harper to copy out the Culverwell material and his other ‘brief notes’ into a single book.Footnote ⁵⁹ Needler echoed Culverwell's rigorous predestinarianism, and his hostility to papists, Arminians and Antinomians, but he also highlighted new enemies of the orthodox in the ‘blasphemers of these days’. There are repeated references to Socinians, while old and new threats are combined in the remark that ‘an Antinomian is a Ranter dignified’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Setting Needler and Culverwell side by side in the same volume was a textual construction of parochial continuity in tumultuous times, confirming for Harper the enduring relevance of early Stuart moderate, parochially-focused Puritanism.