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Predestination and Parochial Dispute in the 1630s: The Case of the Norwich Lectureships

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 July 2008

MATTHEW REYNOLDS
MATTHEW REYNOLDS
Affiliation:
Kennet School, Thatcham, Berkshire RG19 4LL; email: mreynolds2@westberks.org
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Abstract

Recently it has been suggested that fundamental disagreements over the theology of grace had little impact upon parish life in early Stuart England. However, by considering the local circumstances and wider national repercussions of an open debate over predestination in the 1630s between two Norwich lecturers, William Bridge and John Chappell, this article will argue the contrary. It will show that the public nature of the clash between Bridge and Chappell, examined by the church courts, ensured that predestination became a politically divisive issue within Norwich's parishes on the eve of the English Civil War.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 59 , Issue 3 , July 2008 , pp. 407 - 425
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 Cambridge University Press
BL

British Library

Bodl. Lib.

Bodleian Library, Oxford

CRS

Church of England Record Society

NRO

Norfolk Record Office

ODNB

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

TNA

The National Archives

Historians of Christianity are familiar with the idea of distinctions between elite and popular, ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms of religious experience. Such dichotomy has coloured recent discussion of the religious causes of the English Civil War, with debate stemming from Nicholas Tyacke's work on Arminianism advanced more than thirty years ago. Tyacke's thesis – that the archiepiscopate of William Laud (1633–45) witnessed the triumph of an innovating Arminian faction, which by undermining a hitherto dominant Calvinist-predestinarian tradition precipitated political crisis – has been challenged from an ‘Anglican revisionist’ standpoint downplaying the extent of soteriological division before 1640.Footnote 1 Peter White, George Bernard and Kevin Sharpe, criticising the notion of a ‘Calvinist consensus’, question whether Laud and his colleagues were controversial theologians, let alone Arminians. More crucial to Bernard and Sharpe is their claim that while wrangles over the theology of grace vexed senior Stuart divines, such ivory tower disagreements had little relevance for parish worship, being of no concern to the rank and file clergy, while floating above the heads of the man and woman in the pew.Footnote 2

In short, because Charles i's subjects found soteriology bewildering, predestination was never an issue in the 1630s. Instead a bipolar model of early Stuart church life is offered, which distinguishes between academic and parochial extremes. This view dovetails with the work of Christopher Haigh, for whom the core evangelical doctrine of predestination was a stark unattractive creed for most English Christians after the Reformation.Footnote 3 Yet for Sharpe, especially, supposed grassroots indifference to controversy also reflected Charles's success in containing soteriological argument. Of importance were three royal proclamations, issued in 1626, 1628 and 1629, which each followed James i's 1622 ban on preaching the deeper points of election and reprobation as being ‘fitter for the schooles and universities than for simple auditories’. Of the three statements, arguably the most publicised was that of 1628. Affixed to the Prayer Book and formularies, this admonished ministers to avoid ‘curious points in which the present differences lie’ by adhering to the ‘literall and Gramaticall sense of the Thirty-Nine Articles’.Footnote 4

Sharpe has inferred that by this order Charles settled peace upon his Church; a testament to his ameliorating role as ‘universal bishop’, ‘Rex Carolus pacificus’. In fact, however, the injunction resolved nothing, since it was an awkward point that to maintain the ‘literall and Gramaticall sense of the Thirty-Nine Articles’ could mean reiterating the clear statement of unconditional predestination given in article 17. What was to be silenced and how was silence to be enjoined? Recently, David Como has highlighted the unbalanced way in which Laud, while bishop of London (1629–33), enforced the royal edicts, selectively harassing Calvinists who impugned Charles's prohibition, while failing to make similar examples of outspoken anti-Calvinists. By this canny move, Laud strove to frame predestinarians as subversives, depicting himself as an irenic figure: the king's good servant. Yet this strategy backfired, since such intimidation convinced many moderate Calvinists of Laud's duplicity in a plot to subvert the Protestant religion.Footnote 5

The aim of this article is two-fold. First it builds upon the insights of Tyacke and Como by restating the key place of predestinarian controversy in charging the ideologically fractious atmosphere of the Personal Rule. Secondly it seeks to reveal the ‘Anglican revisionist’ bifurcation of scholarly and parochial as disingenuous. For a test case, we will travel east of Laud's London domain to Stuart England's second city, Norwich, to consider a little-known clash over the theology of grace between two of the city's preachers, brought before the Norwich consistory court by the churchwardens of Norwich's most prestigious civic church, St Andrew's, in February 1634.Footnote 6 The first protagonist, against whom office proceedings were begun, was William Bridge. Doyen of the Norfolk godly, and a future Independent in the Westminster Assembly, Bridge had been strategically settled in several Norwich benefices in 1631 to uphold Calvinist orthodoxy.Footnote 7 The second was John Chappell. Parish chaplain and municipal lecturer at St Andrew's, Norwich, since 1626, Chappell – who was close to the emerging Laudian establishment – had maintained, against Bridge's robust Calvinism, markedly anti-predestinarian views. Managing proceedings, on Chappell's side, was the diocesan chancellor, Clement Corbet, a cousin of Samuel Harsnett (bishop of Norwich 1619–29). Corbet, who shared Harsnett's anti-Puritanism – allegedly threatening to pistol one minister who refused to read the Book of Sports – employed similar tactics to those used by Laud against vocal predestinarians among the London clergy, carefully massaging the testimonies to discredit Bridge, who was duly suspended.Footnote 8 Here is the same stacking of ecclesiastical justice to stigmatise Calvinists as Puritans repeated in a provincial setting. Moreover, besides echoing the London evidence cited by Como, the deposition statements documenting the Norwich case show how soteriological differences got out of hand as the altercation between Bridge and Chappell sucked in other city inhabitants called to give evidence, storing up resentment for the future, while revealing the ineffectiveness of Charles's decree of silence. The depositions also afford glimpses of the ways in which predestinarian debate divided communities, both intra- and inter-parochially in the 1630s, with broader repercussions for ecclesiastical policy during the Personal Rule.Footnote 9

I

Early modern Norvicians were no strangers to public exchanges over the theology of grace: for example, going back to the Henrician Reformation, in 1539 a large crowd reportedly gathered in the city drawn by a disputation on free will between the early evangelical Robert Watson and Bishop William Rugge. In 1575 a maverick chaplain of Bishop Edmund Freke revisited the topic in Norwich, infuriating the future Presbyterian, Richard Gawton. Emphasis was on mankind's ‘natural motions’ to know Christ – ‘albeit none come to Christ but those whom his father draws, yet all come not whom God doth draw’ – it being ‘in man whether he be drawn or no’ depending upon an innate ability to comprehend the Gospel. Thus ‘we have faith by nature and consequently are saved by nature’.Footnote 10 Gawton found such elevation of human agency in salvation anathema, although from the late 1570s until the 1620s, the message of unconditional predestination became ascendant in Norwich, mirrored by the personnel occupying the city's premier pulpit, at St Andrew's, during this period. Elizabethan and Jacobean St Andrew's hosted a stream of Calvinists. The most long-standing was John More, the ‘Apostle of Norwich’, parish chaplain and preacher for nearly twenty years – barring suspension twice for nonconformity – until his death in 1592. His successors included Robert Hill, editor of William Perkins's works, Thomas Newhouse – whose posthumous editor believed ‘how lawfull and meet a thing it is to preach and publish the doctrine of predestination’ – and John Yates, critic of Richard Montagu in the 1620s, who reinvented himself as a Laudian in 1637, only to regret the decision in 1642.Footnote 11

The disputes at St Andrew's in the 1630s had their roots in Norwich corporation's decision in December 1615 to augment an existing Thursday lecture paid for by the parish with two additional weekday lectureships at the church, and to fund all three. Inadvertently, this development made St Andrew's a target at a time when James i was trying to censure public preaching during the Spanish match. His efforts were translated zealously in Norwich by Bishop Harsnett, who in the summer of 1622 converted the two recent lectureships into voluntary combination exercises.Footnote 12 The events leading to Bridge and Chappell's quarrel should be seen in the context of local godly aspirations to restore civic lectures to their pre-1622 level. With the aim of filling the perceived teaching void the ‘trustees for the Religion in Norwich and Norfolk’, were formed, comprising four clerics, four Norwich aldermen and four lawyers, whose activities were betrayed to the authorities in 1631. Modelled on the London Feoffees for Impropriations, the Norfolk trustees also looked to enhance the ministry by purchasing advowsons and tithes to impropriated livings. Indeed, the two groups may have been affiliated, for £200 passed from Norfolk to ‘proto-trustees’ in the capital through ‘a young Atturney’, Henry King, son of Thomas King, Norwich's town clerk.Footnote 13

Significantly, the trustees included several veteran anti-Harsnett campaigners. Of the clerics, the most distinguished was John Yates, still championing Calvinist orthodoxy, who had presented evidence against Harsnett during the 1624 parliament, where he was also moved to condemn Richard Montagu's Arminianism at Archbishop Abbott's behest.Footnote 14 Robert Peck, rector of Hingham (Norfolk) since 1606 and a serial nonconformist – Chancellor Corbet called him ‘the oulde Fox’ – had been disciplined by Harsnett following reports of Peck's catechising in his house on Sunday nights. Harsnett smelled a conventicle, but such gathering of a remnant found its apotheosis in 1635 when members of Peck's flock founded the township of Hingham, Massachusetts, their pastor joining them a year later.Footnote 15 Also left smarting was John Ward, since 1617 rector of St Michael at Plea, Norwich, where Thomas King and his son worshipped.Footnote 16 A talent scout for his old Cambridge college, Emmanuel, his beloved ‘nursery of preachers’, Ward's teaching abilities were not universally acclaimed: he was unable to ‘turne ten lines of Englishe into tolerable Latin’ scoffed William Alanson, subsequently Bishop Wren's chaplain and agent in Norwich. One Frances Whitacres was even less complimentary. Appearing before the magistrates in 1621 she said of Ward that ‘if she should meete with him, she would spitt in his face and dischardge all her ordynance at him’, adding ‘she had as willingly receive the sacrament of a dogge as of him’; for which words the mayor, the aptly named George Birch, had her whipped and committed to the city Bridewell. As Monday lecturer at St Andrew's, Ward fell foul of Harsnett, who dismissed his preaching as ‘needlesse’ and ended the lectureship.Footnote 17

John Ward's civic patrons among the trustees shared his loss. These were headed by Alderman Robert Craske, who as mayor in 1623 had compiled his city's grievances against Harsnett which were examined by the 1624 parliament. He was joined by a fellow vestryman at St John Maddermarket, Thomas Atkin, and his brother-in-law John Tooley.Footnote 18 Augustine Scottow was allied to John Ward through mutual friends, the naturalised De Hem family, delegates to ‘stranger’ church colloquies in London, but who belonged to Ward's flock, connecting St Michael's with a pan-European Calvinist cause. These ties came into play during the minister's flight with Bridge to Rotterdam after Wren's 1636 visitation.Footnote 19 Turning to the lawyer trustees, the same evangelical purpose is to be seen, even if the religious identities of Sir Thomas Huggin, a defaulter on the forced loan, and Richard Catelyn, reticent member for Norwich during the Long Parliament, are not stated more explicitly on the historical record. John Fountain was more militant, serving as captain in Norwich's pro-Parliament volunteer company in the 1640s.Footnote 20 But the main activist was clearly Miles Corbet of Sprowston, hard by Norwich, recorder of Great Yarmouth from 1625 and a future regicide. His religious outlook was opposed to that of his uncle Chancellor Corbet, lending what follows the air of a family feud.Footnote 21 Miles Corbet was an angry voice among the trustees, whose combined goal was to advance the Reformation in Norfolk; at least this was how one unknown informant portrayed their activities. For while they sought ostensibly to patronise ‘graduates conformable to the orders of the church … it is true conformity is put in, but its only for a pretence’.

Whether the Norfolk men wished to encourage nonconformity, their only known appointment, a Fellow of Emmanuel College, William Bridge, seemingly confirmed the suspicions of this anonymous correspondent. Regarded with hostility as ‘an absurd turbulent fellow’, Bridge was clearly a predestinarian, expounding ‘You know grace is irresistible. Very good … hear an expression for it. God is like a mother, who when her child cryes puts on the cloathes thereof, whether the child will or noe.’ However, he was refractory over the surplice during his first pastoral charge as lecturer at Saffron Walden, where he preached initially without licence.Footnote 22 Bishop Laud was allegedly so incensed by a sermon delivered by Bridge at Colchester that he exclaimed ‘I'll never have him lecture in my diocese that will spew in the pulpit.’ If Laud really said this, it was ironic that he had licensed Bridge to preach in London: although in the event Bridge's ministry in Norfolk began on an upbeat note, thanks to a fortuitous vacancy at Norwich between Bishop Francis White's departure for Ely in December 1631 and Richard Corbett's translation from Oxford in May 1632.Footnote 23 For six months diocesan business was transferred to the sympathetic Archbishop Abbot. While eclipsed at court, Abbot stuck to an evangelical agenda, and did not disappoint when instituting Bridge as rector of St Peter Hungate, where Augustine Scottow sat on the vestry, upon the presentation of the trustee Robert Craske and a fellow alderman Thomas Cory on 22 December 1631. Abbot also granted the requisite preaching licence, further settling Bridge in Norwich on 12 April 1632 by permitting him to hold Hungate with the chaplaincy of St George Tombland.Footnote 24 Moreover, the issue of reviving municipal lectureships was resolved by act of the city assembly on 2 October 1632, when an annual salary of £20 was allocated to Bridge to lecture on Fridays at Tombland, where the trustee John Tooley was churchwarden. This was double the amount paid to John Chappell for the St Andrew's Thursday lecture, which conceivably rankled with Chappell, a more distinguished BD to Bridge's MA.Footnote 25 Indeed the exercise at Tombland was deliberately created to rival Chappell's established sermons at St Andrew's, and soon Bridge interpreted his role in this way.

II

Of course, the trustees' ambitions could not have been realised without episcopal sanction from Richard Corbett (no relation to Chancellor Corbet) who allowed Bridge's lectureship, albeit with one key proviso. Richard Corbett, no predestinarian, is conventionally depicted as a better satirist than an administrator. Yet despite lampooning the ‘distracted puritan’ in verse, he was also keen to encourage preaching, having previously licensed lectureships in the diocese of Oxford, including a combination exercise at Woodstock, where the bishop took turns in the pulpit. His successor John Bancroft disliked this meeting and closed it down. Arguably, by countenancing Bridge, Corbett wished to placate the Norfolk godly, even if he was bound to observe Charles's 1629 instruction to bishops that any new market town lecture was to be read by ‘a company of grave and orthodox divines near adjoining’.Footnote 26 Bridge was hamstrung from conducting his lectureship alone. Nevertheless, this did not inconvenience the minister, who was given the opportunity to showcase his confrères' talents before a Norwich audience, all the while remaining in the corporation's pay as public lecturer. If Bishop Corbett hoped to curb Bridge's influence, he miscalculated. By setting up the combination exercise at Tombland, the bishop ultimately provided a platform for Bridge and his colleagues to excite religious controversy.

Of concern to some was Bridge's choice of ‘company’. Richard Gamon, rector of St Lawrence since 1604, and subsequently wheeled in to testify against Bridge, was alarmed to find Tombland suddenly hosting ‘divers strangers not inhabiting within the citie of Norwich … heretofore … suspended for their inconformitie and some doctrines or opinions by them preached’. Gamon detested Puritans, having recently, in May 1632, been defamed by one as ‘a pharisee and an unworthy preacher’. Almost inevitably he embraced Bishop Matthew Wren's controversial Altar Reform in 1636, serving as the bishop's standing commissioner in Norwich, which made him far from an impartial witness.Footnote 27 However, a glance at the known participants in the Tombland exercise reveals several vociferous critics of Caroline ecclesiastical policy. Thirteen pastors were named as sharing Bridge's pulpit, of whom the two trustees Robert Peck and John Ward have already been encountered, while Thomas King, rector of Salle, Norfolk, was another son of his namesake, the town clerk.Footnote 28 Robert Gallard served Miles Corbet's home parish of Sprowston.Footnote 29 More radical in light of their future careers were Jeremiah Burroughs, rector of Tivetshall, Norfolk, and William Greenhill, rector of Oakley, Suffolk, both of whom later achieved celebrity as Independents, alongside Bridge, within the Westminster Assembly. Greenhill co-edited the works of Bridge and Burrough. Thomas Case, then rector of Erpingham, Norfolk, also sat on the Westminster Assembly, albeit as a Presbyterian.Footnote 30

Tombland also attracted stipendiary preachers drawn from the teaching circle around King's Lynn. Matthew Swallow, curate of St Margaret's, Lynn, since 1628, had been suspended for nonconformity, while no less outspoken was John Stalham, briefly preacher at St Nicholas, Lynn, in 1629, where he turned a few heads by preaching portentously that ‘there is pollution in the Court, pollution in the Church and commonwealth … poperie and superstition is secretly set up in the chiefest places of this kingdom … God would judge this kingdom for the sinnes of it within a twelve month’. To such impending calamity Stalham professed to stand ‘not as a prophet to judge but as a watchman to forewarn’.Footnote 31 Reflecting on these words afterwards in the convivial surroundings of a nearby tavern, one wit quipped ‘noe you stand like a foole’. The wit was Thomas Rivett, town clerk of Lynn, which may account for Stalham's truncated ministry at St Nicholas. Instead he migrated to Tombland as Bridge's assistant – vaguely described as ‘clericus’ during the 1633 episcopal visitation – a superfluous office perhaps given his appointment, in May 1632, to the vicarage of Terling, Essex, where he finally settled.Footnote 32 With such avowed ‘hotheads’ at the helm, the stage was set for Bridge's doctrinal showdown with John Chappell and Chappell's backers among his parishioners and the city clergy.

III

Knowledge of the ensuing dispute comes from an office suit against Bridge brought upon complaint from the 1633–4 churchwardens of St Andrew's, Isaac Grandorge and John Salter. Why were they compelled to ‘shop’ Bridge? On the one hand they can be seen to be fulfilling their duty under canon 53, reiterated in Bishop Corbett's visitation articles, to present ministers heard to ‘impugn or confute any doctrine delivered by any other preacher’ publicly without the Ordinary's prior consent. On the other hand they also hoped to clear Chappell's name.Footnote 33 After all, as it was alleged during the proceedings, upon besmirching Chappell's reputation, Bridge had enticed regulars at the St Andrew's lecture to his own exercise at Tombland. Parochial pride was at stake, and they may have borne Bridge some malice because of it. Regrettably, Grandorge and Salter's presentment has not survived, although from what is known of Grandorge's background his beliefs appear more attuned to Bridge's Calvinism. Isaac Grandorge had become a freeman as a confit maker, a kind of confectioner. Yet he was a godly confit maker, the son of a godly minister, Richard Grandorge, a participant in a clerical conference at Bury St Edmunds in the 1580s,Footnote 34 and in his 1634 will provided for ‘a godly preacher’ to ‘bring up my small children in the feare of God’. Confectionery perhaps seems an odd calling for a preacher's son, but Grandorge junior was raised with theological discourse and knew all about soteriological friction.

John Salter may have been more partisan when rounding on Bridge, as can be inferred from his royalist sympathies during the Civil War: he was one of twenty citizens imprisoned for refusing to pay subscription to Parliament in 1642. Such defiance did not prevent him from serving as mayor under the Commonwealth in 1655.Footnote 35 However, Francis Norris, a maltster by trade and a parishioner at St Andrew's, whose deposition against Bridge is available, was anxious to avoid civic office during the English Republic, in 1654 compounding out of the shrievalty for £50. Even so, he found £65 for a tribute to Charles ii in 1660, becoming alderman in 1662 until his death in 1667.Footnote 36 Norris's political allegiance lay with the Stuart monarchy at the Restoration, but what of his earlier perspective on the Caroline Church? He was evidently devout, leaving a pious exhortation in his will which expressed the hope that his heirs ‘may be filled according to your measures with the fullness of God’, and that God's grace may be constant ‘while we remain in the tabernacles of flesh and wilderness of danger’. Did Norris hold that grace could be lost? If so, was he recalling John Chappell's reported teaching that before grace ‘brings a man to justification, he may by some initiall act of grace and the spiritt please God in some measure, but not to salvation’?Footnote 37

When writing his will in 1666, Norris was not a rigid predestinarian. While we can speculate as to Chappell's influence upon his beliefs, Norris certainly viewed his pastor warmly, testifying to Chappell's ‘good life’ by which ‘unity and love hath bin nourished’ in contrast to Bridge's divisiveness. Maybe he underwent some anti-Calvinist conversion under Chappell's direction? In any case Norris proved a valuable witness for Chancellor Corbet, and here his rebuke of Bridge, added as a marginal note in the chancellor's recognisably scratchy hand, suggests that his statement was primed by Corbet.Footnote 38 But his sentiments were surely genuine. As a footnote, it is worth observing the Norris family's preference for Laudian eucharistic forms: later, in 1675, Francis's son Anthony, then churchwarden at St Andrew's, paid out of his pocket to restore rails before the holy table ‘to prevent doges pissing against it and other prophanations and abuses’. But Norris junior's ritualistic tastes were not shared by the entire parish, and the vestry refused to reimburse his costs.Footnote 39

Less reputable, from a godly standpoint, was Chancellor Corbet's second key witness, Thomas Ingram, a hosier, originally from Dunwich, Suffolk, and a relative newcomer to St Andrew's, having moved there four years previously. Ingram too belonged to the Chappell camp, provoking the godly of his adoptive parish. A year after giving evidence he busied himself in the consistory court again, this time to scotch rumours of adultery with his future second wife while his first wife was alive, a charge put forward by John Greenwood as churchwarden of St Andrew's in 1635. Ingram in turn wished Greenwood would ‘goe to the divell’.Footnote 40 Whether true or not, the significance of such character assassination lies with Greenwood's subsequent marked religious views while serving as alderman in the 1640s. Bishop Joseph Hall left a vivid account of Greenwood's overseeing the iconoclastic ‘furious sacrilege’ visited upon Norwich Cathedral in 1643.Footnote 41 Greenwood's antipathy towards Ingram seems to have had a confessional edge. Chancellor Corbet, on the other hand, thought Ingram ‘an honest citizen’, who although sometime ‘of that faction of assurance and undoubted salvation’ had endured insults from ‘schismaticks’, who cast him as an ‘apostate’ for opposing Bridge. This gloss on Ingram's rectitude overlooked his propensity for causing trouble. In May 1624, during Parliament's investigation of Bishop Harsnett, he propagated a libel lambasting Mayor Robert Craske, ‘howe nowe proud schismatique’. Ingram never made it in city politics. He only achieved a seat on the common council from 1656 until his death in 1658, a failing which cannot be attributed to small means as he left some £500 in bequests in his will.Footnote 42

Whether Salter, Norris and Ingram constituted a distinct anti-Calvinist faction at St Andrew's, they highlight a keen lay interest in the soteriological debate unfolding in Norwich, which was not solely a clerical matter. According to Ingram's deposition, tensions flared on 23 May 1633, when Chappell, delivering one of his Thursday lectures, concluded that ‘God doth truly intend and will the salvation of all men and that Christ died for all men according to the holy scriptures conditionally that they repent, believe and obey the terms of the gospel’. However, Bridge, who was present, found such stress on the conditional dispensation of divine grace objectionable. Having conference afterwards in the chancel – as was customary at St Andrew's on lecture days – Bridge asked Chappell to refrain from expounding such doctrines ‘for that they were new things’ and ‘that it was Arminianism, and he would preach the contrarie’. Chappell was indignant. Affording Bridge short shrift he argued against the novelty of his position, defending it as ‘scripturisme’ and snapping that because ‘the Lutheran churches held these things before Arminius’ there was ‘no reason they should have their denunciation from him’.Footnote 43

According to Francis Norris, and conveniently corroborated by the Revd Richard Gamon, the first salvo was fired the next day by John Stalham who was standing in at Tombland. Preaching pointedly on 1 Corinthians iii.11 (‘For other foundations can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ’) Stalham urged his auditory, Norris included, to beware new doctrines and adhere to those founded at St Andrew's by John More and Thomas Newhouse.Footnote 44 Perfidious John Chappell had betrayed the evangelical legacy of his predecessors. True to his word, William Bridge also refuted Chappell's ‘divers deceits’ in a run of sermons, which culminated, as various witnesses testified, in a forceful exposition at Tombland in January 1634, which restated his theological position in uncompromising terms. As Bridge assured his listeners, ‘he did not believe [that] Christ died for every particular man for that all men should be saved’ since it was unlikely ‘that Christ should lay down his life on earth for him he appears not for in heaven’. While Christ's sacrifice was sufficient for all ‘his righteousness [is] not imputed to every man’.Footnote 45

This utterance finally prompted the St Andrew's churchwardens to make their complaint. Indeed, as Thomas Ingram informed the court, in the meantime Bridge had resorted to underhand means to ensure that Chappell remained persona non grata with Norfolk's sermon-goers, asking several citizens and the wife of his patron Miles Corbet to boycott Thursday lectures at St Andrew's. Certainly, Miles Corbet was not above direct acts of sabotage. When attending services at Great Yarmouth, he and his confrères took to heckling the town's assistant chaplain, Thomas Cheshire, berating his doctrine, which presumably was anti-Calvinist in content, ‘saying that it is a lie’.Footnote 46 In Norwich, the besmirching of Chappell's name had the desired effect. As John Evered of St Martin at Palace, like Francis Norris a maltster, confirmed, he ‘heard it credibly reported’ that some opined ‘they durst not come to hear Mr Chappell because he preached Arminianism’.Footnote 47 Consequently, as Thomas Ingram claimed, the city was reluctant to pay Chappell's stipend, leaving the minister ‘somewhat sickly and grieved’ and in a mood to quit Norwich, which he did in February 1635. The spread of such malicious gossip again indicates a sizeable lay as well as clerical concern over Chappell's emerging soteriological views, which public hostility repelled the minister from Norwich's ‘godly and factious people’, as he later denigrated his former flock to Bishop Wren.Footnote 48

In undermining the reputation of the St Andrew's lecturer, Bridge and Stalham proclaimed themselves guardians of Protestant orthodoxy. But they found justification in Charles's 1629 direction to bishops to ‘countenance and encourage … grave and orthodox divines’ that ‘they may have knowledge how both lecturers and preachers behave themselves in their sermons’. Bridge, in his role as clerical watchdog, hoped to expose Chappell's errors to Bishop Corbett. This point was pressed home by Bridge's supporters during court proceedings, when two deponents – town clerk Thomas King and Timothy Scottow, brother of the trustee Augustine Scottow – coolly deferred comment on Chappell's orthodoxy to the bishop's judgement.Footnote 49 John Ward was less restrained. He tetchily recalled that, as ‘common fame’ would have it, ‘since the publication of King James his declaration [1622] … Mr Chappell hath publiquely in the pulpit commended Arminius by name … [and] cited the authority of Bertius for it, which [he] … knoweth was and is offensive to many, for [he] … heard divers persons express so much’.Footnote 50

But who was Chappell, and what of his Arminianism? How, in 1626, he came to undertake such a godly concern as St Andrew's is puzzling, although he arrived with the requisite vocational background to conduct municipal lectures, having progressed from a fellowship at Emmanuel, to serve as erstwhile ‘praedicator’ and curate at All Saints', Derby, from 1617.Footnote 51 So far there is little hint of his future departure from godly teaching circles. Undoubtedly influential upon Chappell's intellectual development was his older brother William, bishop of Cork and Ross in 1638, who emerges as a controversial theologian, especially in light of his characterisation by William Prynne as ‘the most notorious seducing Arminian in the whole University of Cambridge’. This sobriquet also stuck following William Chappell's work as provost of Trinity College, Dublin, from 1634. There he had acted as Archbishop Laud's agent in Irish church affairs, tackling the Calvinist old guard under Archbishop James Ussher to transform Trinity College into a model Laudian institution according to new statutes granted in 1637.Footnote 52

For his pains Laud helped to advance Chappell to the twin Irish bishoprics. Moreover, Laud was equally keen to promote John Chappell as ‘a deserving man’ to Lord Deputy Wentworth, and a worthy successor in January 1637 to his brother's old provostship. While nothing came of this, Chappell junior gained several Irish livings, including the deanery of Ross and the chancellorship of Dublin Cathedral.Footnote 53 But this was not the extent of the Chappells' ties to the anti-Calvinist establishment in the 1630s, since both were associated with the brothers Sterne, William and Richard, all four being Nottinghamshire men at the centre of an old boys' network stretching from Mansfield Grammar School via Cambridge to Laud's inner circle. Laud's chaplain from 1633, Richard Sterne attended his master at his execution, later helping publish Laud's scaffold address. As archbishop of York at the Restoration, Sterne also erected a monument to the Chappell brothers in Bilsthorpe church.Footnote 54

John Chappell seems to have considered departing Norwich earlier, when in December 1632 he was instituted to the Leicestershire rectory of Glooston.Footnote 55 However, he did not hold this living for long, since in June 1633 it passed to William Sterne, and Chappell returned to St Andrew's. Perhaps he never left. Yet the timing of Bridge's initial accusation on 23 May 1633 was no coincidence: perhaps derogatory things had been said about Chappell in his absence. Thanks to Andrew Cambers, it is known that William Sterne avidly annotated Arminius' writings including his replies to, or Examen of, William Perkins. This tract, deplored by English Calvinists, had been published posthumously by Arminius' disciple Petrus Bertius, with whose literary outpouring John Chappell was allegedly familiar.Footnote 56 Given such personal contacts, it might be posited, albeit fancifully, that John Chappell belonged to an Arminius readers club.

Nevertheless, such evidence does point towards John Chappell being an Arminian in the strictest sense of someone influenced by Arminius' teaching, who was moved to proselytise the message of universal salvation to a Norfolk audience. Indeed, he nailed his colours to the mast before the consistory court when he advised others not to judge ‘Arminianisme odious before they knew what Arminius his tenets were’. As for his own beliefs, he professed that ‘he was neither Arminian, nor Lutheran, nor Calvinist, nor Zwynglyan, but a Christian’. This does not sound like a ringing endorsement of the Dutch theologian. But Chappell trod cautiously, given that he was being quizzed as to his awareness that after the Synod of Dort King James had declared Arminius an ‘enemy of God’ and ‘the rest of his Scholle Hereticks’. Admittedly Chappell knew of James's condemnation. However, in a telling gesture, this part of his deposition was crossed-through in the manuscript as a result of astute expurgation by Chancellor Corbet, who countersigned the amendment, and who was anxious to prevent previous royal censure of Arminius' works from being aired in court.Footnote 57 The chancellor, like Chappell, was in denial. At the same time, by angling Chappell's testimony, Corbet hoped to portray the minister as a benign figure, whose doctrine conformed to the prescribed strictures of the Thirty-Nine Articles and the Book of Common Prayer. Several members of the city clergy were then brought forward to affirm Chappell's orthodoxy. Whereas William Bridge drew support from among the godly, Chappell was backed by future members of Bishop Wren's administration, such as Richard Gamon. Other ‘Wrenians’ included Chappell's successor at St Andrew's, George Cocke, the cathedral prebendary Edmund Porter and Charles Davill, who as minister of St Laurence's in 1643 conducted prohibited Prayer Book services, refusing to baptise without the sign of the cross.Footnote 58

IV

The upshot of Chancellor Corbet's manipulation of the case was to present Chappell as the victim of a schismatic godly smear campaign, spearheaded by Bridge, to court local popularity by breaching the royal edicts on teaching predestination. Fear of a conspiratorial popular Puritanism, a motivating factor behind Caroline policy, was once again identified with predestinarian doctrine. Instead, anti-Calvinism was subtly redefined as Protestant orthodoxy and therefore conducive to order and uniformity; a point which was reinforced in Norwich by Bridge's suspension on 8 March 1634, an act which left the godly smouldering, more so after Bishop Corbett's chaplain, Thomas Lushington, boldly preached free will in the city without similar molestation. On hearing Lushington's sermon, one citizen declared his intention to go to New England.Footnote 59

Bridge was reinstated the following September, thanks to the intercession of his patrons, Thomas Cory, Augustine Scottow and John Tooley; but the episode merely confirmed Laud's suspicion of the minister. Labelling Bridge ‘factious’ in his 1634 report to the king, Laud impressed upon Charles the need for tighter control in Norwich, which gets to the heart of the matter. With Richard Corbett's timely death in July 1635, the way was clear to promote an unfaltering disciplinarian as his successor, and the king picked Matthew Wren, who was despatched to implement Laudian ceremonialism with full force.Footnote 60 In the meantime official momentum against Norwich predestinarians continued. A second test case guided through the consistory court by Chancellor Corbet in March 1636 turned on another of Bridge's Tombland assistants, Edward Wale, for reportedly terrifying an ailing parishioner, Thomas Sergenson, with ‘strange, difficult questions concerning his salvation’. Wale was no emollient figure. Unable to gain satisfactory answer as to Sergenson's assurance of faith, he rebuked him for being ‘in damnable estate, for his sinnes were more heavie than anything in the world and worse than damnation’. Sergenson's family was shocked. But Wale's readiness to distinguish elect from reprobate was dubbed pastorally and even emotionally debilitating as well.Footnote 61

Such efforts to blacken Bridge and his clerical protégés as menacingly heterodox did little to restore the minister's confidence in the episcopal hierarchy. The final straw came with Wren's May 1636 visitation, which provided the pretext for Bridge and John Ward to move to Rotterdam, where they assumed joint charge over the English church vacated by Hugh Peter and John Davenport, dramatically renouncing their previous ordinations in the process.Footnote 62 Several Norwich citizens, including Thomas King's family, joined their pastors abroad on a journey to Congregationalism which originated in the struggle for soteriological orthodoxy.Footnote 63 Other Norvicians were not saddened by Bridge's departure, and Thomas Ingram had the last laugh by alerting Wren's visitors to Bridge's irrepressible opinion ‘contrary to the faith of Christ and holy scripture’ that ‘Christ did not die for all men’. Ingram noted Bridge's straying from the literal and grammatical sense of the Thirty-Nine Articles, but now it was personal. Preaching that ‘God loveth a man never the better for his sanctification’ for ‘if God should love for vertue and hate for vice, or love for goodness and hate for sin’, Bridge had likened God to ‘such men as chuse their wives for their beauty only, which when that failes, their love failes also’. These words had a particular resonance for Ingram, allegedly an adulterer. But Ingram had also internalised the official gloss on what constituted departure from the accepted meaning of the Church's formularies, of which Bridge was deemed guilty. King Charles agreed. Learning of Bridge's flight, he commented ‘Let him go, we are well rid of him.’Footnote 64

V

The fallout, both local and national, from Grandorge and Salter con Bridge neatly illustrates how vehemently predestination split opinion in the 1630s. In Norwich, ideological rifts surrounding the theology of grace were keenly felt at a parochial level, where clerics and laymen engaged with the Arminian controversy, despite royal efforts to halt soteriological discussion, staking their reputations in doing so. On one level the exchanges of 1634 represented another stage in the turbulent history of Puritanism in the city, defined by the fraught relationship between the godly and their enemies, especially within the church establishment. Tensions existed to enable the taking of sides in the Bridge-Chappell affair. However, antagonisms were intensified by the uncompromising nature of the Calvinist–Arminian tussle, which created fundamental questions concerning the Church of England's position in the 1630s, and the increasingly entrenched polemical stances powered by each side's belief that the opposing viewpoint had been proscribed by royal edict. Thus Bridge's obstreperous rebuttal of Chappell convinced some Norvicians, and not only Chancellor Corbet, of the need to discipline Puritanism now defined in terms of Calvinism. Reacting to the church courts' biased policing of silence to brand respected predestinarian divines and not their universalist critics as divisive and subversive, Bridge's confrères were forced into fierce opposition, becoming locked with the church establishment in a reflexive process of polarisation.

Excluded from ecclesiastical justice, the Norfolk godly belligerently closed ranks, putting some, led by Bridge, in mind to reject bishops as ‘Papall and Romish’.Footnote 65 The overwhelming sense of alienation now felt by the godly and other citizens alarmed by a perceived threat to the magisterial Reformation was expressed by Michael Metcalfe, a weaver who left Norwich for New England in 1636, but not before addressing ‘all the true professors of Christ's gospel’ in his former city. For Metcalfe, no ‘plebeian’ sermon gadder since his father and two brothers were graduate clerics, the ensuing diaspora was to be a trial ‘in the furnace of affliction’. But God's wrath was just punishment for the Church's dallying with sinful Arminian novelties, ‘those stinking fogs and infectious vapours’, which were to be banished to the Netherlands ‘from whence they were spawned, as a bastard brood of Popery’.Footnote 66

That we find angry individuals of Metcalfe's stamp in Norwich after 1634 is perhaps not surprising. Of equal interest to the historian of Caroline England is the presence of figures like Francis Norris and Thomas Ingram, seemingly receptive to universalist teaching, who accepted the Laudian argument which equated predestinarian beliefs with factious Puritanism. But they surely represented a wider body of lay opinion. Even in March 1643, with the tables turned on Laudianism, another Norfolk minister, George Downham, saw political mileage in attacking predestinarians when preaching a royalist sermon at Norwich Cathedral, published provocatively as Rex meus est deus. In a daring passage headed ‘Solifidians condemned’ Downham cast those who maintained that God's grace was operative only on the elect as inherently treacherous: ‘let them look into their own hearts … they are rebels and live in prophane and wicked courses in neglect of all holy dutie’. Instead, ‘the means of salvation are held out to all, if thou or any thou in the world will do well thou shall be accepted’ according to God's revealed will and ‘what is commanded thee in this world’. Failure to observe holy duties entailed disobedience to God's decree as defended by the prince: but was this message new to Norwich in 1643?Footnote 67

The existence of constituencies for Downham's universalism, as much as for Bridge's aggressive predestinarianism, reveals that differences over the theology of grace confronted worshippers at all levels of the early Stuart Church. Soteriological debate was not simply restricted to sterile academic enquiry. Instead arguments about predestination were central to a wider discourse which aimed to define orthodoxy, a discourse which was strained and given a pernicious political edge during Charles i's reign by the rise of Arminianism, as illustrated by the soteriological bickering within Norwich's parishes in the 1630s. That vocal anti-predestinarians were to be found in Norwich challenges the cliché that the city was uniformly Puritan.Footnote 68 While the typicality of the evidence cited here may be questioned, contemporary reactions to the Bridge–Chappell affair make it necessary to look beyond the explicit ‘localism’ of the ‘Anglican revisionist’ interpretation of parish life in the 1630s as being blissfully impervious to doctrinal controversy.Footnote 69 Only by examining the convergence of conflicting theological ideas and parochial affairs in early Stuart England can an understanding be reached of how religious dispute prepared public opinion for the English Civil War.

References

1 N. Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: the rise of English Arminianism c. 1590–1640, Oxford 1990 edn, and Aspects of English Protestantism c. 1530–1700, Manchester 2001, 132–75.

2 P. White, Predestination, policy and polemic: conflict and consensus in the English Church from the Reformation to the civil war, Cambridge 1992; Bernard, G., ‘The Church of England c. 1529–c. 1642’, History lxxv (1990), 183–206CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. pp. 195–6; K. Sharpe, The personal rule of Charles I, New Haven 1992, 284–301, esp. pp. 298–9. See also Tyacke's replies in Aspects of English Protestantism, 176–202.

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6 NRO, DN DEP/41/46, fos 567r–604r. A partial reading of the case is given in K. W. Shipps, ‘Lay patronage of East Anglian Puritan clerics in pre-revolutionary England’, unpubl. PhD diss. Yale 1971, 286–8.

7 ODNB, s.v. ‘William Bridge (1601–71)’.

8 ODNB, s.v. ‘Samuel Harsnett (1561–1631)’; W. G. Bentham, ‘Pedigree of Archbishop Samuel Harsnett’, Essex Review xl (1931), 108–9; Bodl. Lib., ms Tanner 299, fo. 159v.

9 It has been suggested that early modern Norwich was a tolerant and religiously harmonious city: M. C. McClendon, The quiet Reformation: magistrates and the emergence of Protestantism in Tudor Norwich, Stanford 1999, 13–14, 17, 28, 253–8. The evidence cited here confutes this thesis.

10 G. R. Elton, Policy and police: the enforcement of the Reformation in the age of Thomas Cromwell, Cambridge 1972, 138–9; A parte of a register, [Edinburgh/Middleburg] 1593 (RSTC 10400), 393–4.

11 St Andrew's was a donative cure held by twenty-two trustees, who appointed the parish's stipendiary chaplain and resident lecturer, two posts sometimes held jointly by one incumbent: M. Reynolds, Godly reformers and their opponents in early modern England: religion in Norwich c. 1560–1643, Woodbridge 2005, 64–8, 75, 81–3, 101; Thomas Newhouse, Certaine sermons preached by T. Newhouse set forth by R. Gallard, London 1614 (RSTC 18493), sig. A3r. John Yates's career is explored in M. Reynolds, ‘Puritanism and the emergence of Laudianism in city politics in Norwich, c. 1570–1643’, unpubl. PhD diss. Kent 2002, 72–3, 92–8, 108–12, 123–41.

12 NRO, NCR, case 16d/5, assembly book, 1613–42, fo. 40r; case 18a, chamberlains' accounts, 1603–25, fos 301r, 319v; Reynolds, Godly reformers, 117–19.

13 TNA, SP 16/531/134 names the trustees. For the Feoffees for Impropriations see Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism, 121–3. For the King family see The visitation of Norfolk, 1664, i, ed. A. Campling and A. W. H. Clark (NRS iv, 1934), 115.

14 BL, ms Add 25278, fos 138v–139r; Fincham, K., ‘Prelacy and politics: Archbishop Abbot's defence of Protestant orthodoxy’, Historical Research lxi (1988), 36–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. p. 57.

15 ms Tanner 68, fo. 171r; ms Tanner 114, fos 205, 220–1; J. Browne, History of Congregationalism and memorials of the churches in Norfolk and Suffolk, London 1877, 103–5.

16 NRO, DN VSC/2/3b, fo. 3v; The Norwich rate book from Easter 1633 to Easter 1634, ed. W. Rye, Norwich 1903, 52. In 1627 Thomas King was presented at St Michael's for not standing at the Gospel: DN VIS/5/3/2.

17 BL, ms Harleian 3783, fo. 38r; ms Tanner 68, fo. 155r; NRO, NCR, case 16a/15, mayor's court book, 1615–24, fo. 358r; BL, ms Add 18597, fo. 168v.

18 NRO, NCR, case 16a/15, mayor's court book, 1615–24, fo. 508v; Norwich rate book, 36. Prosopographical details are supplied by B. Cozens-Hardy and E. A. Kent, The mayors of Norwich, 1403–1835, Norwich 1938, 75–6, 80.

19 TNA, PROB 11/143, fo. 481r, will of Tobias De Hem, proved 1629; Esser, R., ‘News across the channel: contact and communication between the Dutch and Walloon refugees in Norwich and their families in Flanders, 1565–1640’, Immigrants and Minorities xiv (1995), 149Google Scholar.

20 SP 16/70/73; M. F. Keeler, The Long Parliament, 1640–1641: a biographical study of its members, Philadelphia 1954, 128; BL, ms Add. 22619, fo. 33r.

21 ODNB, s.v. ‘Miles Corbet (1594/5–1662)’, which confuses Corbet's parentage; B. Levack, The civil lawyers in England, 1603–1641: a political study, Oxford 1971, 220; NRO, MC 46/4, Miles Corbet's apology.

22 SP 16/531/134; Essex Record Office, D/AC/A47, fos 70v, 161v.

23 T. Webster, Godly clergy in early Stuart England: the Caroline Puritan movement c. 1620–1643, Cambridge 1997, 41; London Metropolitan Archives, DL/C/343, fo. 102r. Bridge was licensed on 5 Feb, 1630/1.

24 Lambeth Palace Library, Register Abbot, iii, fos 153r–159v; NRO, DN VSC/2/3a, 2, 7; Norwich rate book, 54. The living of St George Tombland was appropriated to the bishop of Ely, who as rector provided a stipendiary chaplain: DN VAL/2.

25 NRO, NCR, case 16d/5, assembly book, 1613–42, fo. 286r; Norwich rate book, 58; NCR, case 18a, chamberlains' accounts, 1625–48, fos 182r, 183r; J. Venn and J. A. Venn, Alumni cantabrigienses … part 1, Cambridge 1922–7, i. 324.

26 The poems of Richard Corbett, ed. J. A. W. Bennet and H. R. Trevor-Roper, Oxford 1955, pp. xxxii–xli, 56–7; K. Fincham, ‘Episcopal government, 1603–1640’, in K. Fincham (ed.), The early Stuart Church, 1603–1642, Basingstoke 1993, 85. The 1629 directions are printed in William Laud, Works, ed. J. Bliss and W. Scott, Oxford 1847–69, v. 308.

27 NRO, DN REG/16/22, fo. 3r; DN DEP/41/46, fos 581v, 583v. For Gamon's career see DN DEP/40/45, fo. 97v; ms Tanner 68, fos 220r.

28 NRO, DN DEP/41/46, fos 580v, 591r–v lists the preachers.

29 Ibid fo. 580v. Gallard had been presented to Sprowston in February 1614/15 by Miles Corbet's father Thomas: DN REG/16/22, consignation book, 1627.

30 See the articles for these divines in ODNB.

31 BL, ms Add 24346, extracts from King's Lynn assembly books, entries for 8 Dec, 1628, 24 July, 11 Oct, 1629; NRO, DN DEP/38/43, fos 389r–v.

32 NRO, DN DEP/38/43, fos 389v, 391r; Norfolk official lists, comp. H. Le Strange, Norwich 1890, 203; DN VIS/6/4; R. Newcourt, Repertorium … or an ecclesiastical parochial history of the diocese of London, London 1710, ii. 578. For John Stalham's subsequent career see K. Wrightson and D. Levine, Poverty and piety in an English village: Terling, 1525–1700, Oxford 1995 edn, 160–4.

33 NRO, DN DEP/41/46, fo. 567r; The Anglican canons, 1529–1947, ed. G. Bray (CRS vi, 1998), 341; Visitation articles and injunctions, i.163.

34 The register of the freemen of Norwich, 1548–1713, ed. P. Millican, Norwich 1934, 38; PROB 11/168, fo. 350r; NRO, NCC 55 Hudd, will of Richard Grandorge, proved 1621; Conferences and combination lectures in the Elizabethan Church, 1582–1590, ed. P. Collinson, J. Craig and B. Usher (CRS x, 2003), 214–15.

35 Journals of the House of Commons, ii. 896; Mayors of Norwich, 88.

36 NRO, DN DEP/41/46, fo. 567r; An index to Norwich city officers, 1453–1835, comp. T. Hawes (Norfolk Record Society lii, 1986), 113; J. T. Evans, Seventeenth-century Norwich: politics, religion and government, 1620–1690, Oxford 1979, 227.

37 PROB 11/323, fo. 122r; NRO, DN DEP 41/46, fo. 604r.

38 NRO, DN DEP/41/46, fo. 568r.

39 NRO, MC 992/1, St Andrew's overseers accounts, 1623–81; ANW 4/38. Significantly, Anthony Norris's concerns over canine intrusion echo Bishop Wren's 1636 orders for railing in communion tables; ms Tanner 68, fo. 33r. For the replacing of altar rails in the 1670s see K. Fincham, ‘“According to ancient custom”: the return of altars in the Restoration Church of England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6th ser. xiii (2003), 29–54.

40 NRO, DN DEP/41/46, fo. 568v; DN DEP/43/47, fos 500r–505v, Ingram con Greenwood; ms Tanner 68, fo. 271r.

41 Index to Norwich city officers, 72; Joseph Hall, ‘Hard measure’, in The works of Joseph Hall, ed. P. Hall, Oxford 1837, i, p. lv.

42 ms Tanner 68, fo. 271r; NRO, NCR, case 16a/15, mayor's court book, 1615–24, fo. 532r; Index to Norwich city officers, 87; PROB 11/285, fo. 105r.

43 NRO, DN DEP/41/46, fos 569r–v, 586r–v.

44 Ibid fos 568r, 583v.

45 Ibid fos 567r–v, 577r.

46 Ibid fo. 585v; Cust, R., ‘Anti-Puritanism and urban politics: Charles i and Great Yarmouth’, HJ xxxv (1992), 18Google Scholar.

47 NRO, DN DEP/41/46, fos 592v, 593v.

48 Ibid fos 585v, 592r; NCR, case 16d/5, assembly book, 1613–42, fo. 312r records Chappell's departure; BL, ms Egerton 2716, fo. 436.

49 Laud, Works, v. 308; NRO, DN DEP/41/46, fos 589v–590r, 600r; Register of the freemen of Norwich, 70, 76.

50 NRO, DN DEP/41/46, fo. 581r. Petrus Bertius was a follower of Arminius.

51 NRO, NCR, case 16d/5, assembly book, 1613–42, fo. 232v; Alumni cantabrigienses, i. 324; Lichfield Record Office, B/V/1//37; J. C. Cox and W. H. S. St John-Hope, The chronicles of the … Free Chapel of All Saints' Derby, London 1891, 25.

52 William Prynne, Canterburies doome, London 1646 (Wing P.3917), 178; ODNB, s.v. ‘William Chappell (1582–1649)’; Thomas Hill, ‘To the Christian reader’, in William Fenner, Willful impenitency, the grossest self-murder, London 1648 (Wing F.712).

53 For Laud's emphatic letters on John Chappell's behalf see Laud, Works, vi. 514, 518; vii. 398, 418, 439, 464, 471, 522, 543.

54 ODNB, s.v. ‘Richard Sterne (1595/6–1683)’; R. Thoroton, The antiquities of Nottinghamshire, Nottingham 1790–6, iii. 94.

55 Alumni cantabrigienses, i. 324, states that another contemporary, John Chappell, held Glooston, which is plausible since this Chappell held other livings in the diocese of Lincoln and, like William Sterne, had attended Trinity College. However, he achieved MA, while John Chappell BD was instituted to Glooston: TNA, E 331/Lincoln/8.

56 Cambers, A., ‘Pastoral Laudianism? Religious politics in the 1630s: a Leicestershire rector's annotations’, Midland History xxvii (2002), 39–40Google Scholar, 42; Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism, 223.

57 NRO, DN DEP/41/46, fos 587v, 599v.

58 Ibid fos 572r–v, 574r, 591v–592r, 595r–597r; DN VSC/2/4, fo. 1v. Both Cocke and Porter served as Bishop Wren's standing commissioners: ms Tanner 68, fos 220r, 240r. For charges against Davill see BL, ms Add 15903, fo. 75.

59 R. Cust, ‘Charles i and popularity’, in T. Cogswell, R. Cust and P. Lake (eds), Politics, religion and popularity in early Stuart Britain, Cambridge 2002, 247–55; NRO, DN ACT/63/15, fo. 30r. For complaints against Lushington see ms Tanner 220, fo. 136.

60 NRO, NCR, case 16a/20, mayor's court book, 1634–46, fo. 21r; Laud, Works, v. 328, 340. Wren's visitation is discussed in Reynolds, Godly reformers, 187–94

61 NRO, DN CON/16, articles against Edward Wale, clerk, loose file. Depositions for this case survive in DN DEP/42/47a, fos 543r–547v.

62 Jewson, C. B., ‘The English church at Rotterdam and its Norfolk connections’, Norfolk Archaeology xxx (1952), 324–37Google Scholar; Thomas Edwards, Antapologia, London 1644 (Wing E.222), 17–18.

63 Reynolds, Godly reformers, 228–30. Thomas King and his wife Rebecca settled in Rotterdam in 1639, and became co-founders of Bridge's Congregationalist Church at Great Yarmouth in 1643: ms Tanner 68, fos 8v, 10r, 338v; NRO, FC 31/1, fo.1r.

64 ms Tanner 68, fo. 79r; Laud, Works, v. 340.

65 Edwards, Antapologia, 45, citing a letter from Bridge to other Norwich citizens encouraging them to join the Rotterdam congregation.

66 ms Tanner 68, fo. 338r. Metcalfe hailed from Tatterford where his father Leonard was rector, and where in 1614 the living passed to another son, Richard. Nicholas Metcalfe, also baptised at Tatterford, was ordained priest in 1612: Michael Metcalfe, ‘To all the true professors of Christ's Gospel within the city of Norwich, 13 Jan 1637’, New England Historical and Genealogical Register xvi (1862), 279–84, esp. pp. 281–2.

67 George Downham, Rex meus est deus: or a sermon preached in … Christ Church in … Norwich, London 1643 (Wing D.2096A), 3, 8–9.

68 P. Collinson, The religion of Protestants: the Church in English society, 1559–1625, Oxford 1982, 141–4, 149.

69 However the Norwich case contrasts with similar provincial clashes over predestination such as that between Thomas Jackson and Robert Jenison in Newcastle, and Peter Studley's troubling the godly of Shrewsbury: R. Howell, Newcastle upon Tyne and the Puritan revolution, Oxford 1967, 85–9; Lake, P., ‘Puritanism, Arminianism and a Shropshire axe-murder’, Midland History xv (1990), 37–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.