Laudianism is well-trodden ground. Peter Lake stresses his debts to Kenneth Fincham, Anthony Milton, Nicholas Tyacke and others. But his study makes a significant contribution to the field in its own right, dissecting Laudianism as an ideological challenge to England’s Reformation: ‘a full-scale remaking, a true reformation, of the English Church, based on a coherent vision of what that church ought to look like and of what the salvific mission of the visible church was, a vision at odds with a good deal that had passed for normal, or even orthodox, amongst English protestants in the decades since the Edwardian reformation and Elizabethan settlement’ (p. 3). For Lake Laudianism was not simply a turbo-charged ‘Anglicanism’, bullish in demanding obedience and conformity, but a strain of Protestantism that departed from England’s Reformed tradition and which underpinned Charles i’s Personal Rule.

On Laudianism is divided into five sections. ‘Where it Came From’ presents Laud’s edition of Lancelot Andrews’s XCVI Sermons (1630) as Laudianism’s ideological genesis. ‘What it Was’ describes Laudianism’s reconceptualisation of the church as a holy place, feast days as holy time, and both as avenues for communion with God. ‘What it Wasn’t’ underlines Laudianism’s dependence on Puritanism as a defining other, and ‘Laudianism and Predestination’ shows that the anti-Calvinist case against double predestination was an important, but limited, element of Laudianism, which was more than an English branch of Arminianism. Finally, ‘Laudianism as Coalition’ highlights the compromises that allowed Caroline churchmen to support aspects of Laudianism most attuned to their consciences or ambitions. Because Lake quotes his churchmen at length, we hear Laudianism’s tone and timbre. Some voices are familiar – chiefly Andrews and Heylyn. But many are not, and the space given to Walter Balcanquall, Edward Boughen, Peter Hausted, Samuel Hoard, Foulke Robartes (and others) enhances Lake’s thick description of the subject. There are surprises. Joseph Mede, generally pigeonholed as a father of English millenarianism, was a Laudian of sorts, too.

Lake argues that Laudianism was a ‘distinctive way of being Christian’ (p. 569), which departed from the Reformation in its understanding of faith. For the Reformed, faith was built on knowledge of Scripture strengthened by hearing the Word preached. For Laudians, faith was a response to the awe felt before God’s presence, a ‘holy fear’ (pp. 139–42) experienced in sacred spaces (the church) and at sacred times (the sacraments and ceremonies) that inspired believers to thanksgiving, repentance and the pursuit of good works. Faith required few beliefs. Because these could be instilled by the catechism and the Book of Common Prayer, Laudian reforms rebalanced English liturgy, downgrading preaching (to Puritan horror) and elevating the public worship which nurtured faith through the experience of the Holy Spirit in prayer and the real presence in the eucharist. Laudianism’s beauty of holiness was designed to imbue worship with the aura of that divine presence. Replacing communion tables with railed-off altars, enforcing the orderly practice of public prayer and ensuring unity and decorum in worship worked on parishioners’ bodies as a means of moving their souls. Believers were to be moved to repentance not through admonishment from the pulpit (as the Puritans had it) but in ceremonies in which they knelt in awe before God, meditated on Christ’s life, or tearfully considered his suffering on the cross. Laudianism’s reconception of ‘the nature and presence of God in the world [and] how salvation might be achieved’ was a radical departure from the Reformed tradition and rested on reasserting the authority of ‘the visible church and clergy in bringing that outcome about’ (p. 568). The clergy’s role was sacerdotal. They were priests, not preachers, mediators between God and humans in a Church whose discipline and worship were jure divino.

This new strain of Protestantism was a product of unresolved tensions in England’s Reformations. Laudianism was constructed against, and saw itself as the antidote to, Puritanism, which it perceived as a conspiracy to corrupt the Church. This has been shown in previous studies, but no historian has unpicked anti-Puritanism as closely as Lake does here. ‘Puritans’ had been damned as seditious hypocrites and a threat to civil and religious order since the 1590s. Their attacks on error in the English Church were not motivated by godly zeal, but masked a lust for power, filling credulous ears with cries of ‘popery’ to gain influence that rivalled the proper powers of bishop and king. Lake shows how Laudians developed the stereotype, causing anti-Puritanism to slip into anti-Calvinism. The scope of what was unacceptably ‘Puritan’ was broadened, encompassing elements of Reformed Protestantism that had been orthodoxies of the Elizabethan and Jacobean Church including scripturalism, predestination, anti-popery and an aversion to the use of images in worship. What had been accepted for decades as loyalist and moderate Calvinism was now redefined as dangerous Puritanism.

This shattering of the Calvinist consensus in the Church was crucial to Laudianism becoming the ‘political theology’ (pp. 14–16) of the Personal Rule. Lake argues that Laudianism was no mere continuation of the Elizabethan and Jacobean case for conformity (as revisionist accounts of the Personal Rule claim) but was an ideology central to the Caroline monarchy’s re-education of its subjects in the virtues of obedience after the political turmoil of the mid-1620s. Its visions of the awe and reverence believers should feel before God readily transferred to the awe and reverence subjects should feel before the king. The Personal Rule gave the Laudian movement its political moment. But to reform the Church, as Lake shows in part v, they needed converts. ‘Laudians’ were a varied bunch, a coalition of ageing anti-Puritans emerging from the shadows of the Calvinist consensus with sharpened hatchets (Edward Kellett and Robert Shelford), conforming Calvinists turning with the wind (Robert Sanderson and Humphrey Sydenham), zealots (Peter Hausted, Thomas Laurence, Robert Skinner and Peter Studley) and ‘avante garde’ Laudians at Cambridge who pushed further than Laud was prepared to, making statements about sola fides, original sin, confession and priestly power that chafed at the edges of Protestantism. These were the slips of an ideology moving from ideal to implementation.

We might question whether a coherent ideology survived so many inconsistencies. Lake argues that it did, presenting Laudianism as a spectrum stretched between minimum and maximum poles. The minimum position presented Laudianism as a renewal of the Edwardian and Elizabethan Reformations, emphasising order, ceremony and the Church’s authority over things indifferent as a moderate via media that cleansed the Reformation of the corruption inflicted on it by Puritanism. The maximum position made much bigger claims about the authority of the Laudian reforms. It presented the Laudian Church of England as heir to the primitive and apostolic Churches, claiming that its ceremonies followed the instructions for worship handed by God to Moses and Solomon. This gave ‘a religious significance and a spiritual charge’ to its authority, a divine sanction to which the Elizabethan and Jacobean case for uniformity grounded in the Royal Supremacy ‘could not and did not aspire’ (p. 579). Lake argues that, compromises aside, Laudians were bound by a shared purpose, united in the direction of travel their reforms should take even if they could not agree on where they should end.

There are some gaps. Laud is largely absent from this account. Lake notes that he directed reforms (pp. 40–1), but the manner of direction requires further discussion, as does the appeal (or not) of Laudianism to ordinary parishioners. Quibbles aside, On Laudianism is an impressive intervention into the history of post-Reformation England. Lake’s presentation of Laudianism as a reform of the Reformation is convincing, as is his emphasis on its not being an aberration confined to the 1630s but a broader part of the history of English Protestantism with legacies in the Restoration, in the eighteenth-century High Churchmen and in Tractariansm. Historians too focused on the English Reformed tradition have underappreciated other strains of Protestantism, Lake argues: ‘If [the post-Reformation] is to be properly understood, the same hermeneutic sympathy needs to be extended to puritans and Laudians as to “prayer book Protestants”; to Laudians and Calvinist conformists or moderate puritans; or, amongst the various style of conformist churchmanship on offer, to Whitgift and Bancroft as well as to Grindal or Abbot or Andrews and Laud’ (p. 599). For Lake, the history we should be writing is of the relationship between rival versions of ‘Protestant England’, not a singular tradition of English Protestantism. Recent work by Anthony Milton and Robert Ingram complements that view, showing that the fractious legacies of England’s Reformations provoked competing visions of what a Protestant England should be in the mid-seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, respectively. Lake’s Laudians were part of this contested history. We would be wise to trace their legacy in later centuries.