Is Peter Lake a Laudian? In many ways, very obviously not: and yet. He has been producing articles and books on this subject at a pace that any seventeenth-century polemicist would respect for decades, and has now given us his (for now) definitive work on this subject, six hundred closely typed, closely and ferociously argued pages. In an academic world where “nuance” is often taken to mean timidity and hesitation, he hits us with a clear thesis on the first page and pursues it with relentless and exhaustive force to the end. Laudianism was, he insists, a thing: “a comprehensive, indeed a totalizing, vision” of what a Christian church could be, which bubbled up within the Church of England in the early seventeenth century and seized control of it during the 1630s. Lake is not, of course, an apologist for this movement, many of whose theological and aesthetic preoccupations he describes with clinical precision rather than with interior sympathy. But he does chime with its intellectual mood. Combative, revisionist, ambitious, masculine, swift to divide the world into allies and opponents, convinced of their fundamental rightness and of the dangers posed by their opponents’ errors: it does not seem incongruous that he has wanted to spend so many years in the Laudians’ spiky, energetic company.

If the central thesis is easily stated – and, to my eyes at least, amply proven, so much so that I fear Lake may be disappointed by how little pushback he encounters – the real value of course lies in the detail. His subtle work on texts, crossing the literary-historical-theological boundary, is what has made his name, and here he again shows us why. Lancelot Andrewes plays a central part, and indeed, the whole foundation layer he sees at Laudianism’s base is profoundly and unapologetically theological. Richard Hooker, by contrast, is strangely under-represented here, a lingering Elizabethan ghost rather than a main character.

And yet, the Laudian movement as it emerges here is almost anti-theological. A deeper ghost lurking here – entirely unreferenced – is Erasmus, the last great prophet of united Western Christendom. His aesthetic sense was quite unlike the Laudians’, but they share his moralism, his loathing of predestination, his combination of polemical edge and devotional depth, and – above all – his conviction that to be a Christian was a matter of reverent and Christlike living rather than of theology. I would like to know what Lake thinks of Gregory Dodds’ argument that there was a live Erasmian legacy in English anti-predestinarianism.

On the subject of that polemical edge: at the book’s heart is a section titled “Laudianism: What it Wasn’t.” This is not a section where Lake lines up his historiographical enemies in a shooting range, but rather one where he describes the Laudians doing the same with theirs. This was a profoundly, inherently controversialist movement, which defined itself against its “puritan” rivals and drew energy and identity from its contrast with them. Hence the restless energy, and hence, too, the sense of their project as one of “reformation.”

Ben Guyer’s recent How the English Reformation was Named (2022) argues that the label “the English Reformation,” which we conventionally apply to the years 1529–59, might equally be applied to the period 1640–60, depending on whose side you are on. On Lake’s telling, the Laudians would have gladly appropriated it for the period 1629–40, too. As he points out, there is a tension both in the historiography and in the Laudians’ own writing between seeing their movement as innovative and revolutionary, and between seeing it as conservative and restorationist: a tension captured in Lake’s own quip that they were “avant-garde conformists.” And as he recognizes, the term reformation captures this perfectly. Like their Edwardine predecessors nearly a century before, the Laudians modelled themselves on Kings Hezekiah and Josiah, who knew that nothing is more radical than real conservatism, sweeping away dangerous innovations and restoring true religion. And like their Edwardine predecessors, the Laudians chose – disingenuously, if not actually dishonestly – to present their revolution as business as usual, the simple reintroduction of a few unfortunately overlooked norms and quiet suppression of some unhelpfully contentious practices so as to return the English church to its true customs and usages.

It was in the nature of their revolution, then, that one thing they could not do was admit that it was revolutionary. The same fiction of continuity with both recent and ancient past is shot through the Book of Common Prayer itself, which in the mid-sixteenth century served that era’s ruling radicals as a smokescreen to conceal the nature and extent of their innovations. The price was that they bedded that fiction down in their new settlement, where it dozed – it never properly slept – until the Elizabethan anti-Puritans woke it up, and then the Laudians set it on its feet and gave it the keys to the kingdom.

There is even a weird parallel in how the two revolutions ended: sudden overthrow, defeat, exile, martyrdom, and then equally sudden, unlooked-for, providential restoration. Lake teases at Laudianism’s counterfactuals as well as its real legacy. It would, he suggests, have become an enduring establishment if Charles I had not embarked on his foolhardy Scottish adventure – though it is equally hard to see how the king could have endured his two kingdoms’ widening religious divergence indefinitely. As it is, the post-Laudianism that was restored in the 1660s (like the Edwardine Protestantism restored in the 1560s) was not what it had been before the intervening trauma: more embittered, but also more mature, more settled in the identity which the years out of power had helped to create. “It was,” Lake suggests, “precisely in those periods when they felt themselves least constrained by any close tie to a truly established national church,” such as the 1650s, “that disaffected, avant-garde Laudians … felt able to follow the logic of their basic beliefs.” And so they discovered what all the leaders of the English Reformation learned: that true victory lies in defeat.