Many Anglican parishes and even cathedrals have abandoned formal liturgy and experimented with freer forms of worship, often with considerable controversy and some heartache among congregations. So it may be worth re-examining past disputes about worship, especially those which considered the benefits and disadvantages of a relatively fixed liturgy. The arguments between conformists and those often called ‘puritans’ in the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I are well known, and mainly concerned the specific defects of Book of Common Prayer rather than the practice of liturgical prayer in general. William Perkins specifically defended liturgical prayer as ‘God's ordinance’, and moderate puritans often defended set forms against the separatists. The attacks on the Prayer Book in the early 1640s are also well known, and set forms in general were sometimes condemned – but except for Bishop Hall's publications there were very few defences and so there was not much debate. After Parliament replaced the Book of Common Prayer with the loose liturgy of the Directory for Public Worship in 1645, vindications of set forms were more common – and there were notable works by Henry Hammond and Jeremy Taylor. But these were often in the form of condemnations of extempore prayer rather than considered endorsements of liturgy.Footnote ³ The debate surrounding the reintroduction of the Prayer Book in 1660 and its statutory enforcement in 1662 is less often discussed, but it ranged widely and brought forth over a hundred publications in less than three years.

The collapse of republican government and the restoration of the monarchy early in 1660 were sudden and unexpected, and no-one was ready for them. Almost everyone recognized that a national Church would replace the religious free-for-all of the past 18 years, but what kind of Church would it be? – and would it have a prescribed liturgy? The debates about the future focused on three main issues, the Book of Common Prayer, episcopacy, and what tolerance would there be for those who did not like either. Here we examine the most extensive of them. The Prayer Book controversy began slowly and the early contributions were mostly reprints and revisions. Probably first was the Congregationalist Philip Nye's Beames of Former Light, which had been written in 1658–59 as an attack on a proposal for an official catechism, but was now adapted into an attack on an official liturgy. Nye argued that only forms of service with specific ‘Scripture warrant’ could be used – ‘This was one of the great truths our brethren the nonconformists asserted in their age against human oppositions and sealed it by their sore and great sufferings’. After all that had gone before, Nye did not believe England would now return to an imposed form of worship – ‘Can it be imagined that a people, after an age of praying and suffering, after part of an age in hazarding their estates and lives, and for so considerable a time now enjoying the fruit of it, can with an easier and quiet mind dwell in a house of bondage again?’Footnote ⁴ The first serious contribution from the episcopalian side was a reprint of John Prideaux's Doctrine of Practical Praying, written for his daughters in 1648 and first published in 1655. Prideaux had commended the Prayer Book for private devotions, and defended a prescribed liturgy:

Though neither book had been written for this debate, Nye and Prideaux had set out the key themes of the controversy to come: biblical warrant and the freedom of the spirit on one side, the common practice of established Churches and congregational participation on the other.

Giles Calfine's The Book of Common Prayer Confirmed was a reprint of a rollicking 1642 tract entitled A Messe of Pottage, abusing those who allegedly called the Church of England's venerable prayers ‘porridge’: ‘For do ye not know they were godly men that made them, they were not made extempore but with deliberation, not hand over head as many do in these days but seriously considered and premeditated, and do you not know that these good men laid down their lives for this and the truth?’Footnote ⁶ The first new work in the debate was Sir Edmund Pierce's The English Episcopacy and Liturgy Asserted, published in July 1660, a more sober text, but it too attacked ‘the rashness and folly of such persons who would needs thrust out the unwearied labours, piety and wisdom of so many glorious martyrs, and instead thereof bring in only extempore volatile expressions of particular persons, how able soever, into the public worship and service of Almighty God’.Footnote ⁷ Pierce quoted European reformers and the martyred King Charles I in support of the Prayer Book, and six weeks later The Judgement of Foreign Divines again cited the ministers of reformed Churches abroad. The campaign to re-establish the credentials of the Prayer Book was also supported by the republication of Sir Thomas Aston's A collection of sundry petitions in favour of the liturgy from 1642.

A Modest Discourse concerning the ceremonies heretofore used again set out themes which were to be common through the whole controversy – arguing that crossing at baptism, kneeling at communion and wearing a surplice were unlawful, since the Church could not command anything not specified in Scripture: ‘The authority which the Church hath received from Christ is not judicial, to make laws and canons of such things which he hath left free, but ministerial only, to declare his laws and statutes unto the people.’ The last argument of this text was also to be repeated many times: ‘the offence which is given by the using of these ceremonies’ – ‘offence I call that whereby the conscience of a weak brother is edified to sin… whether it be by emboldening him to do evil or by discouraging and hindering him from doing what is good’. Although some argue that ‘things otherwise indifferent [i.e. neither commanded nor forbidden by the Bible] do in some sort alter their natures when they are commanded by lawful authority, and may not then be omitted contrary to law’, however, ‘A magistrate can no more lawfully make an offence given to a weak brother no offence, than the murder of an innocent no murder.’Footnote ⁸

In these early months of the controversy, the texts had been quite particular in focus – on the credentials of the Prayer Book or the lawfulness of imposing it. From August 1660 the issues were much broader. Reasons showing the Necessity of Reformation, by ‘divers ministers of sundry counties in England’ – mainly the work of the moderate Presbyterian Cornelius Burges – was a comprehensive attack on the Church and the Prayer Book, with very specific criticisms: for example, the minister was called ‘priest – ‘a mere superstitious and antichristian name, no way warranted by the word of God in the pontifical sense, yet it is used above fifty times in our liturgy’; the baptismal service was theologically unsound; there were recitations and responses by the congregation; and the Book was offensive to the godly. The authors were not, however, ‘against all liturgies but only against that which is liable to such material exceptions as necessitate us to desire a new form’. There were immediate replies, by the conforming Master of Balliol, Henry Savage, Reasons showing that there is no need of such a Reformation, and the anonymous A Defence of the Liturgy of the Church of England: they responded point by point to the criticisms, though Savage complained ‘Your design appears to be not a reducing so much as a new moulding of the whole, a thing which I must confess I like not of, lest we should seem thereby rather to set up a new religion than reform the old: between reformation and innovation there's a great deal of odds’. Cornelius Burges had insisted that as ceremonies were things indifferent, ‘they ought not to be imposed on those who cannot be fully persuaded in their own minds and consciences that they are lawful and must sin if they use them’: Savage replied ‘that if they are granted to be indifferent, then they are made necessary by the intervention of human authority’ – the view A Modest Discourse had already rejected.Footnote ⁹

At this point, the debate descended into near-farce, with the millenarian Henry Jessey's The Lord's Loud Call to England, which listed the providential disasters that had befallen those who used or supported the Prayer Book – ‘by earthquake, lightning, whirlwind, great multitudes of toads and flies, and also the striking of divers persons with sudden death in several places’. Jessey's story of the marching frogs and toads testifying against Anglicans was taken from Strange and true newes from Glocester, which was then refuted by Robert Clark's The Lying-Wonders, or rather the wonderful-lyes – the tale was ‘As true as our former days under the usurped government were times of Reformation, and that some in Oxford were cut off for reading the Book of Common Prayer’.Footnote ¹⁰An Anti-Brekekekex-Coax-Coax (the title, from Aristophanes, mimicked the croaking of frogs) responded with tongue-in-cheek tales of God's favour to supporters of the Prayer Book and punishment of its critics – ‘But the truth is, by all these things ‘tis hard to judge of good or evil; ‘tis Turkish or Cromwellian divinity to judge the right of a religion by the lives or events of those that profess it. Let holy writ, as it is interpreted by the ancient Church and Fathers who were nearest the fountain, be our guide, and never go to the episkies of enthusiasms and misapplied providences which must needs mislead us.’Footnote ¹¹ The text went on to argue vigorously for the utility of set forms and the lawfulness of the Book of Common Prayer.

The next lively round of controversy came in September 1660 with The Common Prayer Book Unmasked. This was a reprint of The Anatomy of the Service Book, first published in 1641. This text slammed the Prayer Book service as simply an English version of the Roman Catholic mass – ‘That which is word for word out of the popish mass-book is not to be offered to God as worship, but to be abolished as an abomination to him’. The particular criticisms of the Prayer Book were: against ceremonies (especially kneeling at communion, which implied adoration of ‘the breaden god’); the use of Coverdale's translation from the Great Bible of 1540 rather than the King James version of 1611; the participation of the congregation in worship – ‘the tossing or driving the service between the priest and people, for either the people pray with the priest or they repeat his prayer or they add some responses or answer, all unsuitable to God's service … we are to take notice that God will not be mocked’. Lastly, and crucially, a set liturgy was a negation of a minister's gift of prayer:

Episcopalians obviously thought this was a dangerous book, and it was answered by Meric Casaubon, A Vindication of the Lord's Prayer as a Formal Prayer; by Thomas Hicks, A Sharp Rebuke, or a Rod for the Enemies of Common Prayer; by Edmund Elis, Admonition to Dr Burges and to those who composed or caused to be reprinted that seditious pamphlet; and by Samuel Wotton, A View of the Face Unmasked, or an answer to a scandalous pamphlet. Thomas Hicks, a writer with a particular horror of anything that to him smacked of enthusiasm and Quakerism, was enraged: ‘Common Prayers are pure prayers taken out of the word of God, they are no popish mass, nor idolatrous, nor superstitious worship of God, as these lying men say that writ this book which they call Common Prayer Unmasked’.Footnote ¹³ Edmund Elis, a Devon clergyman, accused the authors of sedition – ‘Ah Sirs, you have done wickedly! What, cause a multitude to fancy themselves to deserve the name of the godly because, forsooth, they are not for the use of the surplice and the Book of Common Prayer?’Footnote ¹⁴ Elis was himself answered by the London Quaker Isaac Pennington in The Consideration of a Position Concerning the Book of Common Prayer: ‘Now the breathing of this child [of God] to the Father, from the sense of those wants for his supply, that's prayer, nay though it be a groan or sigh which cannot be uttered or expressed, yet that's prayer, true prayer, which hath an acceptance with the Lord.’Footnote ¹⁵ Samuel Wotton, a Cambridge DD, was much more thoughtful than the irate Hicks and Elis: ‘If every word in ours were in the mass book, yet as long as all that is evil in the mass book is left out in ours, what is that which is good in ours the worse for being in the mass book?’ Wotton not only refuted criticisms of the Prayer Book, but asserted its benefits for the congregation: ‘For the answering of the people, it is such an especial means to keep them from drowsiness, dullness, and to rouse up their spirits and affections to be wholly occupied in those sacred duties they are about.’ In sum, ‘the Common Prayer Book, if well-observed and used, hath enough in it to show any man the way to everlasting life, by the Scriptures read and such confessions of faith as are necessary to salvation, and such prayers as, if faithfully prayed and mercifully granted, we shall be happy enough in this world for a time and perfectly happy in the world to come’.Footnote ¹⁶

Also published in September 1660 was Edward Bagshaw's The Great Question concerning things indifferent in religious worship, in which it was argued, ‘in short, that none can impose what our Saviour in his infinite wisdom did not think necessary and therefore left free’. Bagshaw, a Congregationalist, was less concerned with the rights and wrongs of the Prayer Book itself than whether a ruler could impose a form of worship that God had not determined. In The Second Part of the Great Question, published in 1661, he rejected the episcopalian assertion that an order from the ruler made an indifferent thing necessary. ‘For no man can lawfully do anything in the worship of God but what he is satisfied he might do whether it were by men commanded or not, therefore he that hath no other warrant for his doing anything than the command of the magistrate, when it is clear the magistrate hath no power to command him, must needs sin in what he does.’Footnote ¹⁷

The latter part of 1660 saw the republication of a series of nonconformist texts from before the Civil War. They included Several Treatises of Worship and Ceremonies by William Bradshaw from 1604–1605, a version of the apology of the Lincolnshire ministers from 1605, Some Treatises fetched out of rubbish by John Cotton, two tracts by Henry Burton from 1640–41 against bowing at the name of Jesus, and Smectymnuus Redivivus. The last was a new edition of An Answer to a Book Entituled An Humble Remonstrance – written in 1641 against Bishop Hall by Stephen Marshall and four other puritan ministers – whose initials made SMECTYMNUUS – but actually reprinted from the 1654 edition with its preface by the Presbyterian Thomas Manton. Most of the book is about episcopacy, but it also set out two objections that were becoming central to the anti-Prayer Book position – against congregational participation in the service, and for ‘liberty in prayer’ – ‘why any minister that hath the gift of prayer in an abundant measure…should be hindered from exercising his gift well because another use it ill is a new divinity never heard of in God's Church’.Footnote ¹⁸Common Prayer Book No Divine Service by the Welsh Baptist Vavasor Powell drew from both Smectymnuus Redivivus and The Common Prayer Book Unmasked, and the second edition set out 68 objections to the Prayer Book and 27 reasons why imposed liturgies were unlawful – the key points were: that ‘all prayers are to be made in the spirit’; and ‘That which God doth not require is unlawful, but the forming of such liturgies and imposing of them God doth not require, therefore the making and imposing of a liturgy is not lawful: if He doth require, show when, where, and by whom, and the controversy is ended’Footnote ¹⁹ – which, of course, it wasn't.

The most sophisticated stage of the controversy was that surrounding Bishop John Gauden's Considerations Touching the Liturgy of the Church of England, printed in November 1660. He argued that an authorized liturgy was needed in place of extempore prayer to restrain the clergy, ‘to set bounds of discretion, decency, charity and piety to their extravagancies, even in public, solemn devotion and sacramental celebrations, which sometimes to my knowledge are such as are no way becoming the public worship of God, or the sanctity of true religion or the venerable majesty of God’. In contrast, ‘The established and uniform use … of a well-composed liturgy hath many great and good influences upon true religion and every Church’ – these included ‘the solemn, complete, august and reverent worship of the divine majesty’; preserving ‘the truth of Christian and reformed doctrine by the consonancy of public devotions’; ‘the holy harmony and sweet communion of all Christians’; ‘the holy and humble composure of their spirits’; ‘But above all, a constant and complete liturgy mightily conduceth to the edification and salvation as well as unanimity and peace of the meaner sort of people’. ‘In sum,’ wrote Gauden,

There were well-argued and effective responses to Gauden by Thomas Bolde, in Rhetorick Restrained, or Dr John Gauden, Lord Bishop Elect of Exeter, his Considerations of the Liturgy of the Church of England considered and clouded; by Giles Firmin, The Liturgical Considerator Considered and by H.D., A Sober and Temperate Discourse concerning the interest of words in prayer. Thomas Bolde mocked Gauden's rhetorical style and his title page, with ‘Lord Bishop Elect of Exeter’ – a bishopric was not lordship, he said, but ministry. (And Gauden dropped the ‘lord’ in the second edition of his Considerations, and described himself simply as ‘bishop of Exeter’.) Bolde argued that the primitive Church and reformed Churches did not have restrictive forms of prescribed prayer; that ministers’ freedom in prayer should not be restrained, and that the Prayer Book was full of errors – ‘these trifles tend unto serious evils, corruptions of God's worship, stumbling of the weak and strength of the wicked, who may well place all religion in reading and regarding the service book and rely thereon for salvation’.Footnote ²¹ The Presbyterian Giles Firmin stressed the minister's ‘gift of prayer’, and claimed he would lay down his ministry if he needed a liturgy to help him.Footnote ²²

It is a pity we do not know who H.D. was, as his book against Gauden is one of the most intelligent contributions to this whole debate – but he certainly wrote like a Congregationalist, and objected to the state interfering in religion. He criticized the Prayer Book as popish, divisive and an offence to the godly, and succinctly posed a key problem in the whole controversy: ‘This is the question, whether it be the will of God that the Church should regulate and determine all things which the word of God hath left indifferent as to his worship, or whether God, by leaving them indifferent, hath not declared his will that the Church should leave them too?’ For H.D. the freedom to pray as the heart dictated was paramount: ‘it is far from being clear that the restraining of Christians, especially of ministers, in the exercise of the noble gift of prayer in the public assemblies of the Church is a lawful means in order to any end, it looking like the quenching of the spirit’.Footnote ²³ H.D. was in turn answered in Ireneus Freeman's The Reasonableness of Divine Service, which took on the argument for ‘the gift of prayer’: ‘whatever advantages extempore prayers have to fix and inflame the spirit of the minister, that which he should most aim at in public is to affect his hearers. Therefore the main thing to be considered is not the minister's own experience of what alterations he finds in himself by these two ways of praying, but which is best for the people.’Footnote ²⁴

Henry Hammond's A View of the New Directorie and a Vindication of the Ancient Liturgie had been published anonymously in 1645 and reprinted four times by 1648. But in 1660 it was republished as if it were a new work as A Vindication of the Ancient Liturgie, ‘written by himself before his death’: it had indeed been written before his death – 15 years before. Hammond had set out many of the arguments that defenders of the Prayer Book would use thereafter: that extempore prayer was undisciplined and led to schism and faction, that set forms were easier for uneducated parishioners, and that the universal Church had always used liturgies. The republication led to an attack by Henry Jeanes on Hammond's use of the biblical text 1 Cor. 14.40, ‘Let all things be done decently and in order’ – which Hammond had interpreted as meaning that in worship ‘‘tis necessary to observe the custom of the place wherein we live’. Jeanes responded with the standard nonconformist assertion that Scripture was the only rule, not the habits or prescriptions of men.Footnote ²⁵

Nonconformists sometimes appealed to the authority of respected anti-Laudian clergy, and in August 1660 had republished A Copie of the proceedings of some worthy and learned divines from 1641 – the work of a committee of leading clergy appointed by the House of Lords and led by Bishop Williams, which had suggested 35 modifications of the Prayer Book. The magic name in such appeals was James Ussher, the revered Calvinist archbishop of Armagh – and in 1660 there appeared The Bishop of Armaghe's Direction, concerning the Lyturgy and Episcopall Government. This had begun life in 1641 as Directions propounded and humbly presented to the High Court of Parliament, also proposing revisions to the Prayer Book and reform of episcopacy, but in 1642 it had been reissued under Ussher's name. Ussher had protested to the House of Commons and the book had been suppressed, but with Ussher's name it was a useful weapon in 1660 and was reprinted three times. This drove Nicholas Bernard, who had been Ussher's chaplain, to try to recover Ussher's reputation as a good Anglican, and publish Clavi Trabales, or Nailes Fastened by some great masters of assemblyes – with a lengthy preface on liturgical ceremonies by Bishop Sanderson. Bernard demonstrated Ussher's devotion to the Prayer Book and his disapproval of extempore prayer with its ‘unmethodical impertinencies and other indiscreet extravagancies both for measure and matter’.Footnote ²⁶

Almost all the anti-Prayer Book works were by Presbyterians or Congregationalists, who objected to a compulsory set liturgy but accepted that worship should be conducted by a professional minister on behalf of the congregation. However, in Something in answer to the old Common-Prayer-Book, the Quaker George Fox contested any constraint of the holy spirit working in the Christian heart. ‘We need not your Common Prayer to teach us, for the spirit that gave forth the Scripture teacheth us how to pray, sin, fast and give thanks, and praise and worship God.’Footnote ²⁷ Similarly, William Tomlinson issued A Word of information to them that need it – ‘Judge in yourselves, is it suitable to this covenant to annex to it a dead, literal, formal Common Prayer Book, the ministry of which may be performed without any measure of the spirit of the new covenant’.Footnote ²⁸ The radicals were answered by A Winding Sheet for the Anabaptists and Quakers, or the death and burial of their fanatic doctrines, which asked what about those who lacked the spirit? – ‘I do not speak against praying by the spirit, for I know that God's people always prayed as they felt their wants, but for the poor, ignorant people who have not the spirit of prayer, what provision were made for them? The answer is, just none.’Footnote ²⁹

One work that stands apart from these contentious debates was Zachary Bogan's A Help to Prayer, both extempore and by a set forme, published in September 1660. Bogan had died a year earlier, leaving behind this balanced account of the advantages and disadvantages of both means of prayer – which he had composed in 1651. He contested the prejudices on both sides, for ‘Most of those that speak against extempore prayer have not used it at all, and many, if not most, of those that speak against a form never used it so well as they might.’ Bogan had himself profited from each kind at different times, though he usually found improvised prayer more satisfying:

But in 1660 Bogan's account was probably read as an endorsement of liturgical prayer in public:

This became a standard episcopalian answer to the claim that the holy spirit was constrained if a minister had to read a set form of prayer – that the congregation was constrained by a minister's extempore prayer.Footnote ³⁰

By the end of 1660, eight months after the recall of the king, 46 books had been published in the controversy over the Book of Common Prayer – 21 for and 25 against, of which four on the episcopalian side were reprints and eight on the nonconformist. To simplify, Congregationalists and the sects argued against liturgy; Presbyterians argued for a reformed but flexible and voluntary liturgy; and ‘the episcopal men’, as they were often called, argued for the Prayer Book. The themes of the debate were pretty clear – the alleged defects of the Prayer Book and the alleged dangers of extempore prayer; whether modes of worship needed biblical endorsement; whether the magistrate could impose things indifferent; whether the primitive Church and reformed Churches used liturgies; and restriction of ‘the gift of prayer’ or of congregational understanding and participation. By the early part of 1663 a further 59 texts had been printed, 29 for the Prayer Book and 30 against, and by and large both sides went over ground that had been well and truly covered.

One subsidiary issue was given new prominence by the publication early in 1661 of an English translation of Eleazar Duncon's 1634 Cambridge determination on the lawfulness of bowing towards the altar. His main arguments were that God should be worshipped with the body as well as the mind, and bowing had been the practice of the universal Church through the ages.Footnote ³¹ In fact, both Duncon's arguments and those of his critics were applicable to liturgical worship in general and were probably read as such. The energetic Presbyterian Zachary Crofton responded with Altar-Worship or Bowing to the Communion Table considered, and addressed Duncon's claim that bowing was not to the altar but to God through the altar:

Daniel Cawdrey's Bowing towards the Altar upon religious reasons made the same point: ‘Though he says they do worship God before or towards the altar, yet it is much to be feared that some part of their worship sticks to the altar’. Cawdrey and Crofton both feared that ordinary Christians would be led into superstition: ‘The danger is of very great scandal both to the ruder sort and to wiser men, to censure them as altar-worshippers as well as papists to be image-worshippers … All that he says to excuse it will not prevent it.’Footnote ³³

Eighteen of the publications of 1661–62 related to the crown-sponsored negotiations between episcopalians and Presbyterians on revision of the Prayer Book. Three sets of proposals from the Presbyterian side were printed, as well as two accounts of the discussions between the bishops and the ministers at the Savoy in London. Since the Presbyterians gained little by these negotiations, publication may have been a deliberate initiative, to mobilize support, influence the parliamentary debates, and get the king to intervene – though Richard Baxter, who drafted most of the papers, denied involvement and blamed poor printers seeking a profit.Footnote ³⁴ The Presbyterians’ proposals accepted that some sort of liturgy was the only viable option, but asked that the deficiencies of the Prayer Book should be removed and promoted a more flexible alternative to be used if a minister wished. Their restrained Petition for Peace was answered by the raging cavalier propagandist Roger L'Estrange in The Relaps'd Apostate, accusing them of appealing to the crowd as in 1641: ‘Gentlemen, you are now re-entered upon that deadly path that leads from heaven to hell, from conscience to disobedience, from the reforming pulpit to the king's scaffold’.Footnote ³⁵A Short Treatise of the epidemical diseases of these times by J.C. was a knockabout attack on ‘the old Presbyterian prologue to war, a book entitled A Petition for Peace’, and called the authors ‘these arch-botchers of Reformation’.Footnote ³⁶ The Presbyterians’ Two Papers of Proposals and other texts were also attacked by L'Estrange, in State-Divinity, using the same charges of sedition and fanaticism: ‘Those that are struck with this distemper take fancy for inspiration, their dreams for divine advertisements, and the impulse of a besotted melancholy for the direction of the holy spirit.’Footnote ³⁷

A more subtle and probably more effective response was Semper eadem, or a reference of the debate at the Savoy 1661 to the conference at Hampton Court 1603/4. The anonymous author complained of the ‘arrogant confidence’ of the Presbyterians in publishing an account of their debate with the bishops, as if they had ‘unanswerably foiled the adverse party’. In an account of the Hampton Court conference, he argued that their complaints had been authoritatively rejected almost 60 years before – ‘there is hardly any difference in those and these postulate and desires and as little variation in the petitions, and no doubt their answer and conclusion will be the same’. That 1604 conclusion had been most satisfactory: ‘Hence forward, many cripples in conformity were cured of their former halting therein, and such who knew not their own till they knew the king's mind in this matter, for the future quietly digested the ceremonies of the Church.’Footnote ³⁸ The Presbyterian papers on the Savoy conference were also answered by Laurence Womock's Pulpit-Conceptions, Popular-Deceptions:

An exchange between Richard Baxter and Bishop Morley towards the end of the Savoy conference led to an acrimonious argument over whether a law imposing a liturgy might be the occasion of sin and therefore itself sinful. Morley had preached against Baxter, arguing that his view ‘is destructive of human society in taking away the authority of commanding and the obligation of obeying’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Baxter gave his interpretation of the exchange in the preface to The Mischiefs of Self-Ignorance, and Morley gave his in The Bishop of Worcester's Letter to a Friend – with a general discussion of the right of a ruler to determine worship and punish disobedience. Then it was a free-for-all. Edward Bagshaw, posing as ‘D.E.’ published A Letter unto a person of quality, containing some animadversions upon the bishop of Worcester's letter, which went through three editions, and an enterprising publisher put together Baxter's preface, Morley's Letter and Bagshaw's Animadversions. Bagshaw was then attacked by four different foes – Henry Yelverton in A Vindication of my Lord Bishop of Worcester's Letter, J.C. in A Letter with animadversions upon the animadverter, H.G. in Reflections upon the Animadversions, and S.H. in D.E. Defeated – mostly arguing for obedience to the orders of crown and Church. D.E., alias Bagshaw, produced A Second Letter unto a person of quality, challenging Bishop Morley to justify the imposition of a liturgy under penalty, and Roger L'Estrange concluded the row with A Whipp, a Whipp for the schismaticall animadverter and A Whipp for the animadverter in return to his second libell. After 11 books, it is not surprising that Richard Baxter regretted Bagshaw had leapt to his defence: ‘I could have wished he had let it alone, for the man had no great disputing faculty but only a florid epistolary style, and was wholly a stranger to me and to matters of fact.’Footnote ⁴¹

In three years following the Restoration, then, 105 books were published in the Prayer Book controversy: 50 for and 55 against. Much of the argument was repetitive, and much repeated positions set out before the Civil War. Critics of the Prayer Book presented themselves as heirs of the godly tradition in English Protestantism, appealing to The Old Nonconformist (as in a tract of 1660) and the revered puritan names of Bradshaw, Bolton, Ames and the rest. Episcopalians looked back too, though usually to claim that nonconformity led to rebellion. Some of the arguments of 1660–62 might seem like a rerun of those of 1640–42, with ten books from then reprinted and John Gauden acting as Joseph Hall and Giles Firmin and Zachary Crofton as the Smectymnuans. Of course, the political context was different, and the dynamic was now with the episcopalians – as was public opinion, it seems. And there were new themes, or rather new emphases.

The most obvious one was the Congregationalist and sectarian objection to any liturgy at all. The Quakers clearly took this line, but so did the Baptist Vavasor Powell and the Congregationalist leader John Owen. Owen's A Discourse concerning Liturgies and their imposition in 1662 claimed that at the crucifixion ‘all the disciples of Christ were taken under his immediate lordship and made free to the end of the world from all obligations in conscience unto anything in the worship of God but what is of his own institution and command’ – even the Lord's Prayer was given under the Old Law and so was not binding.

This last point – that submission to a liturgy was itself sinful – was to be crucial after 1662, and divided those dissenters who thought they should nevertheless remain within the national Church from the separatists who abandoned it.

The assertion of the minister's right to exercise ‘the gift of prayer’ was a more prominent theme in the early 1660s than it had been before, though the point had been made by the Smectymnuans. But now there was a determination to preserve the freedom which had been available in practice since 1642 and in law since 1645. It is striking that much of the nonconformist argument in 1660–62 related to the clergy – whether they could or could not pray as the spirit guided them. Giles Firmin protested that ‘when I am tied to the words of other men I am straightened, they will not serve to express what lies upon my heart, and who is it that knows what the work of the spirit of God and the workings of a heart are in prayer that will not soon find these hindered by being tied to other men's words?’Footnote ⁴³ Zachary Crofton thought it was a betrayal of a minister's calling to submit to a stinted liturgy – but being Crofton he wouldn't put it as simply as that. ‘Ministerial modification of public worship by personal abilities is the formal act of the ministerial office’, he wrote – ‘an exerting by the authority of the received office personal abilities, ministerial gifts infused or acquired’ was the duty of a minister.Footnote ⁴⁴ Although the nonconformists stressed continuity with their puritan predecessors, they had come a long way from them. In negotiation with the episcopal men in 1661 Presbyterians would have conceded a reformed Prayer Book, but it was not what they desired. Within an agreed liturgical framework, they wanted ministers to pray as the spirit moved them. But the Presbyterians still aimed for a compulsory national Church: Zachary Crofton argued fiercely against set forms, but he wrote Reformation not Separation, or Mr Crofton's Plea for Communion with the Church. It was only as they realized that they would never have an acceptable national Church that, painfully, they too became separatists.

Critics of the Prayer Book often protested against the congregational responses in the prescribed services. Zachary Crofton insisted the people should be silent during worship, ‘for the minister is their mouth to God and “Amen” is the part and only part that good order and God's words doth appoint the people in their assembly’. A congregation's responses ‘do square better with confused, vulgar clamours condemned in the heathen, than solemn public prayer’, protested Crofton.Footnote ⁴⁵ William Prynne argued that any responses beyond saying ‘Amen’ ‘have no precept nor precedent in Scripture or solid antiquity’ and should be excluded.Footnote ⁴⁶ Giles Firmin mocked Bishop Gauden's praise of congregational participation, as approving the involvement of drunkards and other sinners in the worship of God – ‘Then it seems the minister is not the mouth of the people, their own mouths speak for themselves, and why should not the minister say “Amen” to their prayers?’Footnote ⁴⁷

In contrast, a new emphasis on the Prayer Book side was in asserting the needs of the congregation, especially of the uneducated. The London layman E.M. particularly commended the congregational recitation of the Creed, and complained that without the Prayer Book ‘we poor underlings, the sinful sons of Adam, must be tongue-tied and may not bear a part in those heavenly hallelujahs’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Henry Hammond and Jeremy Taylor had argued in the mid-1640s that a set liturgy was helpful to parishioners because it was familiar, but now there was positive endorsement of a congregational role in prayers – as Henry Leslie put it, set prayers are ‘better understood because the people are acquainted with them, bear some part in them by their suffrages and answers, and so heartily join in all prayers, for which cause it is called Common Prayer’.Footnote ⁴⁹ The assessment of the congregation's needs was often condescending, but it was at least pastoral. John Barbon thought that without a familiar liturgy the people wouldn't be able to say ‘Amen’ with conviction, and without their responses ‘drowsiness and non-attention will steal upon the hearers while they have no task, no share in the service’.Footnote ⁵⁰ George Masterson argued that:

Anthony Sparrow's monumental Rationale upon the Book of Common Prayer was perhaps the most enthusiastic. The congregation should recite the Creed, because ‘Fit it is that every man as well as the priest should bear his part in it, since every man may do it for himself as well, nay better than the priest can do it for him, for as every man knows best what himself believes so it is fittest to confess it for himself’. On the congregational responses, so much criticized as disruptive of the flow of prayer, he commends ‘the order of answers of the people in all places of the service where it stands. It refresheth their attention, it teaches them their part at public prayers, not to stand by and censure how well the priest plays the mouth of the congregation. Lastly, it unites the affections of them together and helps to keep them in a league of perpetual amity.’Footnote ⁵² That was the theory, anyway.

These pastoral concerns seem a long way from the priorities of the dictatorial Laudian Church of the 1630s. George Herbert had written like this, but not the Laudian bishops or their leading theologians and preachers. The only defence of the Prayer Book reprinted from the 1630s was a visitation sermon from 1636 on the right of a Christian prince to impose ceremonies in worship – and even that had been dedicated to John Williams, that most un-Laudian bishop.Footnote ⁵³ Most of the other reprints were from the Church under the cross – Hammond from 1645, Samuel Gunton from 1650,Footnote ⁵⁴ Prideaux and Sparrow from 1655. It used to be argued that the Restoration saw the victory of Laudians in the Church of England, and it is true that once the ‘prelatical men’ felt safe they made few concessions to the Presbyterians. But there is a new temper to the early Restoration Church, in its piety if not yet in its politics – epitomized in Richard Allestree's The whole duty of man laid down in a plaine and familiar way for the use of all, but especially the meanest reader. This too was a product of the Church under the cross, in 1658. It was a commonsensical guide to practical devotion and social obligations, and focused on the needs of ordinary people; there was not very much in it on the godly shibboleths of regeneration by faith and the experience of the holy spirit – but a lot on how to pray and the duty of holy communion. It became the runaway best-seller of the Restoration period, endorsed by Henry Hammond and recommended by bishops, selling more than 80 editions in its first 70 years.Footnote ⁵⁵

The debate over the Prayer Book subsided, though did not disappear, in 1663. It was overtaken by the question of conformity. Episcopalians now argued that the issue of liturgy had been decided and the nonconformists should knuckle under, while dissenters debated whether they could attend parish churches and justified nonconformity. The opponents of a fixed liturgy had lost – in politics if not necessarily in argument. Presbyterian writers had presumably hoped to persuade moderate episcopalians to agree to a reformed liturgy and some flexibility in its use, but had achieved only minimal concessions and now had to decide whether or how far to conform. If they had aimed to influence the king or parliamentarians by their public campaign against the Prayer Book, they failed: Parliament passed the Act of Uniformity in 1662 and the king had to drop his Declaration of Indulgence in 1663.Footnote ⁵⁶ The Congregationalists and Baptists can hardly have expected to prevent a prescribed liturgy, so their writers sought to encourage nonconformity and achieve some toleration. The episcopalians had a polemical advantage, presenting their opponents as the authors of heterodoxy, irreligion and disorder, but they also engaged in serious debate over the merits of a fixed liturgy and the practice of the early Church. Though some authors stressed public order and obedience to established laws, others argued from the needs of churchgoers and for congregational involvement in liturgical worship. The Church of England's leadership had seemed dictatorial and out of touch in the 1630s, more concerned with formal obedience than real devotion in the parishes. By the 1660s things were different: perhaps the ‘episcopal men’ had learned something from all their years in the wilderness.