In 1665, the prominent Cambridge neo-Platonist Henry More was publicly accused of apostasy and heresy. It was the culmination of a whispering campaign, an anonymous tract, and finally a book by the master of Peterhouse, supported by the vice-chancellor. Among other offences, More was said to have betrayed the Church of England in An explanation of the grand mystery of godliness (1660) and his Apology (1664), in admitting that the church had disappeared during the Interregnum: ‘the English Church was out of sight, if not out of being,…that is to say it was politically dead’.Footnote 1 Where was the Church of England in the 1650s, when episcopacy, cathedrals, and the Book of Common Prayer had been abolished by parliamentary ordinance; when one supreme governor had been executed and the next was in exile and flirting with Scottish Presbyterians; and when loyalist clergy had been banned from officiating? ‘So farewell all, excepting Churches without apostles, apostles without mission, pastors without sheep, sheep without shepherds, faithful without churches.’Footnote 2 It was quite an issue. Presbyterians claimed the Church of England was now theirs,Footnote 3 the papists declared it was dead and ‘vanished into air’,Footnote 4 and Congregationalists asserted that it had never existed anyway.Footnote 5 However, ‘[H]ad the question been asked, “Where is the Church of England?”, it might truly have been answered that it was in England still, though unworthily and sadly oppressed’, said More's accuser.Footnote 6 But More himself had given the wrong answer.
What had been the right answer, for clergy who remained at heart loyal to the church as it had been before 1646? Where was, what was, the Church of England? There was confusion over what to think and what the clergy were to do. The University of Oxford protested unrealistically that the church was unchanged as the king had not consented to parliament's ordinances,Footnote 7 but it was hard to ignore them. Gilbert Sheldon, deprived warden of All Souls College, reported in 1653 on clerical disagreements about the now-proscribed Book of Common Prayer:
Among those who either are or would be thought to be loyal subjects to the king and obedient sons of this Church, there is great diversity of opinion and practice about prayer and the public worship of God, some believing themselves excused by the times if they wholly omit it; some contriving the substance of it into a prayer of their own making, supposing they have done their duty well if they pray nothing against the old form; others retain part, some more, some less, according to their several judgements; and some again, holding themselves obliged to use all according to their former engagements, and not so much as to communicate with any that use it not (supposing them schismatical), are consequently deprived of the benefit of others’ ministry and excluded from any public employment themselves.Footnote 8
These views about worship align with the different answers to the question ‘Where is the Church of England?’ Was it the surviving national system of parish churches, Sunday services, and tithes, though currently deformed by the loss of bishops and the Prayer Book? Was it only those episcopalian clergy and congregations within that system who maintained what they could of the old observances? Or was it a recusant church, an uncorrupted society of true believers who worshipped in secret or in exile and thought everyone else was in schism? Was it the church of John Gauden and Robert Sanderson, or the church of Jeremy Taylor and Thomas Pierce, or the church of Henry Hammond and Herbert Thorndike?
Historians of mid-seventeenth-century English religion have not generally examined this question. Those who have considered the fate of the Church of England in these years have usually focused on the survival of Prayer Book practice, conformity, and resistance to the state's requirements by episcopalian clergy, and the intellectual defence of episcopacy.Footnote 9 In recent years, there has been detailed attention to aspects of organizational continuity, especially the leadership exercised (or not) by bishops and their practice of ordination.Footnote 10 Kenneth Fincham and Stephen Taylor have now discussed the fashioning of a complex ‘episcopalian identity’ in the 1640s and 1650s, through the experience of persecution and an adjustment to minority status.Footnote 11 This article asks a different but related conceptual question: what exactly did loyalist clergy mean by ‘the Church of England’, and where was it to be found – in a community, in a set of liturgical practices, or in an institution? The various answers were of more than theoretical significance, for they influenced how ministers responded to the shifting ecclesiastical requirements of parliaments and protectors. And they were to divide the Church of England after the Restoration.
I
Although John Gauden was a leading campaigner for episcopacy, he regarded a church without it as a true church: ‘I conceive that the social outward profession of religion as it is held forth in the word of God, in its truths, seals, duties and ministry, makes a true Church among men.’ But the Church of England had been punished for its clergy's ‘unworthiness’ and its people's ‘inconstancy’, and God had allowed ‘floods of miseries and billows of contempt to overwhelm, for a time, the face of this Church’ – ‘yet we are not quite destroyed’.
Both ministers and people must do the best they can in their private spheres and particular congregations to which they are related to preserve themselves and one another, as brethren in Christ, from such deformities and abuses as are destructive to the power of godliness, the peace of conscience and the honour of reformed religion, until the Lord be pleased to restore to this Church that holy order, ancient government and discipline which is necessary, not to the being of a Christian or a true Church as its form or matter, which true believers constitute by their internal union to Christ by faith and to all Christians by charity, but only as to the external form and polity, for the peace, order and well-being of a Church, as it is a visible society or holy nation and fraternity of men, professing the truth of Jesus Christ.Footnote 12
Gauden served as rector of Bocking throughout the Civil Wars and Interregnum, priest of a deformed but still national church – and became a bishop at the Restoration.
Many other episcopalians bewailed the alteration of the church, but it was the Church of England nonetheless. Robert Sanderson acknowledged that ‘episcopal government and a well-formed liturgy’ and ‘Christian festivals’ had been ‘laid aside’, but ‘the Church of England’ remained. Sanderson had determined that he would abandon use of the Prayer Book ‘rather than forsake my station’ as a pastor, and he served on as rector of Boothby Pagnell until he too was made a bishop in 1660 – using a garbled version of Prayer Book prayers with his own additions. He was one of many ‘episcopal (that is to say the true English Protestant) divines’ who ‘do yet so far yield to the sway of the times, and are persuaded they may with a good conscience so do, as to forbear the use thereof in the public worship’. He believed that the Act of Uniformity was still in force, but the lawmakers of 1559 had intended ‘the public good’ – so if obedience ‘would rather be prejudicial than advantageous to the public’ then ‘in such case the law obligeth not’. Any incumbent who used the Book of Common Prayer and in consequence lost his benefice, might be ‘in some measure, guilty of his own undoing, of deserting his station and of betraying his flock’. So ‘regular sons of the Church of England’ might conform, and Sanderson remained loyal to ‘my dear mother the Church of England’.Footnote 13
Thomas Warmstry, sequestrated from his Gloucestershire benefice, thought in 1648 that disputes between ‘the episcopal party and the Presbyterian’ might ‘prove the ruin of them both and of this poor Church betwixt them’. But a reformed episcopacy would ‘be a great means to recollect the scattered members of this poor distracted Church unto one another again in unity and order’.Footnote 14 In 1653, Warmstry was willing to join Richard Baxter's Association (until dissuaded), but became dean of Worcester in 1660. George Hall admitted in 1655 that the church was ‘grovelling in the earth’, but defended the public role of ‘the legally ordained ministers of the Church of England’ and cited ‘fruitfulness in their ministry’ as evidence of their calling. He protested against ‘the rigid punctilio-men both of the right hand and of the left’ who maintained divisions in the church, and he promoted the cause of ‘communion with dissenting brethren’. ‘Oh, what rivers can wash off that deep scandal which sticks upon the late glorious and most uniform, but now miserably deformed and even antic Church, for which we may thank the giddiness of men.’Footnote 15 Hall was rector of St Botolph Aldersgate in London, and, like Gauden and Sanderson, he became a Restoration bishop. John Hacket retained his rectory at Cheam and was appointed to the Westminster Assembly; he struggled to persuade local gentry not to defect to Rome, arguing ‘that the Church of England was still in being and not destroyed, rather refined by her sufferings’ – ‘so the Church of England was the Lord's in all its penury and emptiness’.Footnote 16 He too became a bishop.
More surprisingly, perhaps, some pre-Civil War bishops apparently had a broad view of the post-1646 national church as still the Church of England. The most likely example is Ralph Brownrigg who, ‘with others of our learned English bishops, thought it might be venial or tolerable in some cases of persecution, necessity and civil obstructions’ to conform to the state's requirements, and was certainly eirenic in his approach to religion. His biographer (appropriately, John Gauden) reported that ‘he was, out of love to his native country and pity for the Church of England, inclined to any fair and fraternal accommodations’ with Presbyterians – which contributed to a reputation ‘of not being zealous enough for the Church’.Footnote 17 In the late 1650s, Brownrigg served as chaplain to the lawyers of the Inner and Middle Temple, while Bishop Skinner retained his living at Launton and preached regularly. Bishop Morton perhaps had similar views. Although he insisted that ordination by a bishop was the only legitimate entrance into the ministry, he recognized there were ‘those in this Church who have received their ordination only from mere presbyters’ – that is, Presbyterians were members of ‘this Church’ too.Footnote 18
Edward Symmons complained that ‘The papists on the one side scoffingly ask us “Where is now your God? Where is your Church become?”’, while ‘our brethren on the other side, that outwardly profess the same faith with us’ cry ‘down with it, down with it, even to the ground.’ Parliament had been allowed ‘to lay level this famous Church, to take from it all honours, orders and degrees’, while the Assembly of Divines ‘have concurred and assisted to suppress and torture their king, to alter and change the form of doctrine and discipline in this Church’ – yet it was still, apparently, the Church of England.Footnote 19 Richard Samwayes, who lost his Oxford fellowship, addressing ‘the Church of England’ in 1653, recognized ‘that many will hardly allow thee the honour of this title in the present disorder and confusion of all things’ – but supposed ‘there is yet remaining in thee some little spark or weak degree of life’. He blamed the divisions in the church on ‘neglect of duty’ and ‘abuse of power’ by the bishops and factiousness by ‘the anti-prelatical brethren’.Footnote 20 Writing on behalf of ‘we who are conformists’, James Harwood clearly identified with a category of ministers who served in parish churches and obeyed the law, but held to the values of the pre-1646 church: they were ‘the orthodox divines of our mother Church of England’, ‘the orthodox conformist[s]’.Footnote 21
William Langley shared these values: he wrote in defence of episcopacy and an educated and ordained ministry, appealed to the authority of the Thirty-nine Articles, and defended his practice of open communion at St Mary's Lichfield ‘in a time when there was no government or discipline in the Church’.Footnote 22 Jeffrey Watts's ‘vindication of the Church and universities of England’ was endorsed by John Gauden and Nathaniel Hardy (who became dean of Rochester in 1660). Watts argued that ‘the Church of England is a true Church of Christ’, since it had the marks of a true church, ‘a settled ministry of the word’ and ‘a hearing, professing and converting people’. Certainly, the church had defects, but they were not crippling. It was now divided – ‘some are of presbyter, some of Independent, some of bishop, each despising the other’ – but so was the church at Corinth. It had no effective discipline, but ‘all true ministers and members of the Church must by a Christian prudence and patience wait for such a medicine till it come’.Footnote 23 Daniel Getsius, an ‘adopted son’ of ‘his dear mother the Church of England’ and vicar of Stoke Gabriel in Devon, cried against division: ‘This is the way to ruinate the Church, altar against altar, professor against professor, who getteth thereby? Satan, the papists, to whom we have given this staff to smite us with, namely our contentions.’Footnote 24
As more and more people defected from parish churches to the sects in the 1650s, separatist congregations were attacked as schismatics from the national Church of England. In 1652, Jasper Mayne, vicar of Pyrton, Oxfordshire, preached against schism from the Church of England, which he identified with ‘our parish congregations’.Footnote 25 In the same year, Robert Boreman protested against sects ‘in opposition to our national Church’, and criticized those who attended private meetings ‘when they should join with the people of God in a church appointed for God's public worship and service’. He blamed the Presbyterians for beginning the disintegration of the church, ‘when they brought in their motley Directory into the Church, by which means they drove many out of it into conventicles’.Footnote 26 Clement Raie, a Suffolk rector, complained about the restrictive practices of Presbyterians and Congregationalists, and pleaded for an open, national church.Footnote 27 William Smyth attacked sectarian religion and claims of inspiration by the spirit, and asserted ‘the visible profession of the Church of England and its ministry’ as evidenced by the fruits of ‘the ministry of this national Church’.Footnote 28
Thomas Fuller was told by ‘an ingenious gentleman’ that he had better finish his history of the Church of England quickly, ‘for fear, said he, lest the Church of England be ended before the history thereof’. When he finally published the book in 1655, Fuller noted that ‘[B]lessed be God, the Church of England is still, and long may it be, in being, though disturbed, distempered, distracted, God help and mend her most sad condition.’ The Thirty-nine Articles defined the ‘legitimate religion of the Church’, and ‘those controversies concerning episcopacy’ were only ‘things of a day's life and of no permanency, the Church being built upon a rock’. Fuller admitted that his preference was for ‘the episcopal government…conceiving it consonant to the word of God and practice of the primitive Church’. However, ‘If denied my first desire to live under that Church government I best affected, I will contentedly conform to the Presbyterian government and endeavour to deport myself quietly and comfortably under the same.’Footnote 29
These clergymen regarded the national framework of parish churches as ‘the church’ – though some of them also thought of themselves as the ‘orthodox divines of our mother Church of England’.Footnote 30 Gauden, Sanderson, Hall, Hacket, Harwood, Langley, Watts, Getsius, Raie, Smyth, and Fuller served as parish ministers, Mayne served until he was finally removed in 1654 – and they all conformed in 1662 (except Fuller, who died in 1661, and Raie, who conformed later). Symmons was sequestered from his rectory in 1643 (and died in 1649), and Boreman was ejected from his college fellowship – then got a DD and a rectory in 1660. Almost all of them were ‘conformists but peaceable’, as Harwood put it. They bewailed the wrecking of the Church of England as they had known it, they resented the traducing of the professional ministry by sectarians, and they hoped for the restoration of episcopal authority and the Book of Common Prayer. ‘Meantime’, wrote Gauden, ‘we think it better to bear with patience those defects which we cannot hinder or amend, and to supply them (what we can) with private care, industry and discretion.’Footnote 31 They worked within the national framework and defended it as the church, truncated though it was – in part because it was a bulwark against enthusiasm and irreligion.
II
John Gauden had apparently identified the Church of England with the national framework in 1653, but by 1659 he had apparently changed his mind – presumably because of Oliver Cromwell's 1655 declaration banning prelatical clergy from ministering, even in private. In 1659, Gauden's Church of England was the church as it had once been, and a church deprived of bishops was no longer the Church of England.
So by the name of the Church of England…we plainly and charitably mean that part of mankind in this polity or nation which, having been called, baptized, instructed by lawful ministers in the mysteries and duties of the gospel, maketh a joint and public profession of the Christian faith and reformed religion in the name and as the sense of the whole nation, as it is grounded upon the holy scriptures, guided also and administered by that uniform order, due authority and holy ministry for worship and government which, according to the mind of Christ, the pattern of the Apostles and the practice of all primitive Churches, hath been lawfully established by the wisdom and consent of all estates in the nation, in order to God's glory, the public peace, and the common good of men's souls.
This was the church its enemies sought to destroy – ‘no bishops, no presbyters, no Catholic succession, no right ordination, no true ministers, no baptism, no confirmation, no consecration, no liturgy, no polity, no Church’. But there were still ‘those Christians that have the courage and conscience to own the reformed Church of England as their mother and the reformed clergy as their spiritual fathers’ – ‘Thus may the Church of England be heard, in every closet and in every congregation where devout souls either retire or meet, sighing out its sorrows.’Footnote 32 So Gauden's Church of England was now restricted to the clergy, laity, and congregations of those still loyal to the church of bishops and the Prayer Book.Footnote 33
This was probably how Jeremy Taylor now saw the Church of England, as a loyalty rather than an institution – since her enemies had sought ‘to dissolve her being a body politic, and almost reduced her only to the being Christian’.
[T]he supplanters and underminers are gone out and are digging down to the foundations, and having destroyed all public forms of ecclesiastical government, discountenanced an excellent liturgy, taken off the hinges of unity, disgraced the Articles of Religion, polluted public assemblies, taken away all cognisance of schism by mingling all sects and giving countenance to that against which all power ought to stand upon their guard. There is now nothing left but that we take care that men be Christians.
Of course, Taylor did not accept the papists’ charge ‘that the Church of England now it is a persecuted Church is no Church at all’, and declared that in suffering ‘the Church of England was more glorious than at any time before’. He warned a lady converted from Rome, ‘Be curious not to communicate but with the true sons of the Church of England’, and avoid those who ‘are gone out from us because they were not of us’.Footnote 34 John Sherman had a similar view: conformity and obedience would keep the church alive. ‘Good God! What will become of irregular clergy? And if they be irregular, what will become of the people? And if the people be irregular, what will become of the Church?’Footnote 35
In 1651, Robert Mossom published ‘this summary of divine truths, being wholly consenting with the judgement of the Church of England’, approved by some of the bishops and in accordance with the Thirty-nine Articles, the Homilies, and the Book of Common Prayer. Later, he encouraged his London congregation to ‘keep firm to that profession of faith which the orthodox clergy have preached in their sermons and still preach in their sufferings’, trusting only ‘the Church universal, and next to her, or rather with her, our mother this Church national’. ‘What do we have to answer those who say we have no Church?…That a Church does not cease when she ceaseth to be glorious, but is visible in her constant sufferings when not visible in her public ministry.’ God is ‘pleased to vouchsafe us here the visible face of a Church’, though some could only ‘meet in a private participation and communion of the ordinances where you cannot have them in public’.Footnote 36 John Hewitt, like Mossom, ministered to a London congregation in the 1650s, praying for ‘this Church which is now under the cross and near to utter ruin and extirpation’, and asking God to ‘raise up the former government both in Church and state, that we may no longer be without king, without priest, without God in the world’.Footnote 37 Hewitt was executed in 1659 as a royalist conspirator.
Thomas Pierce declared himself ‘a very orthodox Protestant of the Church of England’, ‘a man of the Church of England’ – and there others like him, ‘unwavering men of the Church of England’, ‘the unchangeable divines of the Church of England’, ‘regular sons of the Church of England’, ‘episcopal men who have not changed with the times’, ‘unchangeable sons of the Church of England’, ‘every true son of the Church of England’, ‘we who continue and persevere in the good old way of the Church of England, in which we were born and baptized’. His emphasis is on the consistency of the clergy and their loyalty to the ‘true established Church’ as it was ‘in the year of our Lord 1641’. But where was it when he was writing, in 1658 and 1659? It did not include ‘rigid Presbyterians’, who had driven people to leave the church and become papists – so it did not include all parish congregations, but only those served by loyal ministers such as Pierce himself, who became rector of Brington in 1656.Footnote 38 Lionel Gatford too was among ‘we ministers of the reformed religion of the Church of England’, and wished to defend the ‘true, reformed Protestant religion established in the Church of England’. He had lost his benefice in 1642, but pleaded for those who had retained theirs and for congregations that wanted to use the Book of Common Prayer.Footnote 39 Though William Nicholson was deprived of his preferments, he still used the title ‘archdeacon of Brecon’ and regarded himself as responsible for ‘his loving parishioners of Llandilo-vawr’. He argued against both ‘combinational Church’ and ‘Presbyterial Church’, and for ‘this national Church’, ‘our mother the Church of England’ distinguishing ‘our brethren of the Church way’ from ‘our dissenting brethren’.Footnote 40
It must be admitted that it is hard to be sure of a clergyman's position on this issue, and the borderline between those in our first and second categories is hazy. Although they all had a conventional understanding of the marks of a true church, most did not give an explicit answer to the question we are considering, and some used ‘the Church of England’ in more than one sense – so sometimes only a best guess is possible. But there was a fundamental distinction between those who regarded all non-sectarian parish congregations as ‘the Church of England’ and those who had an exclusive conception founded on loyalty to episcopacy and the Prayer Book. Who was included in the communion of the church? Perhaps attitudes towards Presbyterians was key: were they in or out of the Church of England? Fuller thought they were in, Nicholson that they were not. For Thomas Pierce, even Richard Baxter and Edward Reynolds were ‘enemies of the Church’,Footnote 41 though both were offered bishoprics in 1660 and Reynolds accepted.
Between 1646 and 1660, perhaps as many as 2,500 men were ordained by bishops. A few of them also had Presbyterian ordination, but most had chosen to seek their orders from a bishop – perhaps because it was a simpler process, but probably many of them because only episcopal ordination could make them proper priests or presbyters. Nevertheless, the vast majority went on to serve in the bishop-less national church.Footnote 42 Further, three-quarters of the clergy ordained and appointed to benefices before 1640 continued in their posts, and some of the 25 per cent who were sequestered were later re-employed.Footnote 43 This suggests a huge pool of clergy who were in some sense episcopalian but either regarded the post-1646 national church as ‘the Church of England’ (as in our first category) or thought that traditionalist congregations within the national framework could constitute that church (as in our second). The two conceptions of the church expressed by theologians and polemicists were apparently shared by many clergy, though the first was surely more prominent than the second. Moreover, the considerable evidence of popular loyalty to Prayer Book worship and festivalsFootnote 44 hints that an idea of the true Church of England was maintained among the laity in some parishes of the national church.
III
Things are somewhat clearer with our third category: those clergy for whom the Church of England was a recusant church of true believers, owing obedience to the surviving bishops and worshipping in secret or in exile by the Book of Common Prayer. Whereas most of those who thought some degree of conformity to the state's requirements was permissible had served a parish congregation after 1646, all those we are about to consider had been sequestered or had fled and, in effect, resigned – they were outsiders from the national church. Their redefinition of the Church of England was particularly striking, for, as Richard Baxter pointed out, their once-established church was now a sect. Baxter attacked
the new prelatical recusants or separatists, that draw their followers from our churches as no churches and our ordinances of worship as none or worse than none, and call them into private houses as the meetest places for their acceptable worship. Who would have thought that ever that generation should have come to this, that so lately hated the name of separation.
This ‘new prelatical party’ taught that they alone were the true Church of England, and others merely schismatics. A correspondent of Baxter complained that according to ‘some rigid prelatical scholars…we must be all unchurched for casting off diocesan episcopacy’.Footnote 45
Baxter had particularly condemned Dr Edward Hyde, ‘who brandeth the very front of his book with these uncharitable stigmata’, and ‘The senseless queries of one Dr Swadlin.’Footnote 46 Hyde had indeed begun his Christ and his church by declaring ‘When conscientious ministers cannot officiate in the church and conscientious Christians cannot go to church, and customary Christians go thither either to little purpose because no true worship or to great shame because no true ministers, ‘tis fit the Church should come to private houses.’ ‘I hope it will not be said that I seek to justify a Church which is not, for the truth and righteousness whereby it was a Church are the same they ever were’ – ‘The Church of England is God's trustee for the Christian religion as to the people of his nation.’Footnote 47 Thomas Swadlin, several times imprisoned as a royalist, was equally explicit: ‘The Church of England I acknowledge is under a cloud and eclipsed, but the candle is not quite out and extinguished.’ Christ had promised to be with his people, ‘And wheresoever a lawful priest or pastor of the English Church is with two or three of his congregation, I will not, I dare not, doubt of the performance.’ Swadlin distinguished firmly between the true Church of England with its Bible-based Prayer Book and the schismatical Presbyterians with their Directory, and resolved ‘never to be of their communion upon earth’. ‘[W]e communicate neither with Presbyterian nor Calvinist, let them all be one, it is all one to me; they are at a greater distance from us than Rome itself.’Footnote 48
As early as 1644–5, Henry Ferne was contending that there were then two churches in England, for the ‘Presbyterians’ had set up a rival to the Church of England – and he later argued it was sacrilege and schism to deny obedience to the bishops of ‘this national Church’. Though by 1652 his church was ‘under the power of the sword, oppressed by the hand of violence, persecuted, scattered’, no one should ‘think that he is not therefore in the bosom of the Church because he cannot lie in it quietly and at ease as formerly’. For ‘notwithstanding the attempts of violence, there is the same doctrine and power of discipline remaining, the same liturgy and form of worship, the same government by bishops and inferior pastors’ – though ‘not yet so regularly provided for in the present disturbed condition of this Church’. Ferne thought the bishops had let the church drift, ‘yet now it calls for the more courage and zeal in providing for that which seems to have been too long neglected, a more regular Church-way or communion and worship’. There must now be a more effective recusant church, led by bishops exerting their authority – ‘If any ask how, how but by the power of the keys?’Footnote 49
The most significant writer in this group was the indefatigable Henry Hammond, defending ‘our precious dear persecuted mother’ against Presbyterians, sectarians, and Roman Catholics. Episcopacy was central to Hammond's view of the church, and the key to its survival. The papists asked ‘Where now is your Protestant English Church, when your church doors…are shut up against those of you which are the ancient remaining bishops and presbyters of the Church of England?’ But ‘blessed be God, the Church of England is not invisible: it is still preserved in bishops, and presbyters rightly ordained, and multitudes rightly baptized, none of which have fallen off from their profession’. The church would remain ‘as long as either bishops stand and continue to ordain among us, or it is not our fault that they do not stand’ – so Hammond did envisage a vestigial church without bishops. Though the formal structures of the church had been destroyed, the church had not: ‘Order is required to the well-being, but not necessary absolutely to the being of a Church; an orderless or secret society of brethren may be a Church still.’ And that secret church must be an active one, for the clergy had an obligation in charity to minister to the laity and the laity an obligation in piety to gather together for worship, ‘holding up the synaxes, how thin soever they are fain to be’.Footnote 50
Edward Boughen (the deprived vicar of Bray) thought bishops were crucial. ‘Of the essence of the Church, I take to be these two: the Catholic faith and the Apostolic government’, and ‘this national Church’ had both. So where bishops were, there was the church, and ‘no bishop, no Church’.Footnote 51 Peter Heylyn insisted that, since episcopacy had been established by Christ and his Apostles, it could not be abolished by earthly power. In principle, the church was as it had been: ‘though some alterations have since happened in the face of this Church’, yet ‘I look upon it now as in the same condition and constitution in which it shined and flourished.’ In practice, it was different, and in 1659 Heylyn dedicated Certamen epistolae ‘To my dear brethren the poor remainders of the old regular and conformable clergy of the Church of England.’Footnote 52 John Allington, ‘a sequestered divine’, likewise argued that the state could not change the worship or government of the church, and that he was bound to use the Book of Common Prayer: ‘I have sworn to my diocesan and subscribed to maintain the service of God…according to the particular form and way of the Church of England.’Footnote 53
This ‘form and way’ was observed by many of the hundred or more clergy who went into exile in France or the Low Countries, and formed little overseas branches of the ‘prelatical’ recusant church. The most prominent and energetic was Bishop John Bramhall. He acknowledged that the Church of England ‘now groans under the heavy yoke of persecution’, but denied that it was ‘dead’ or had been ‘suppressed’ by parliament: ‘The external splendour was abated…but the order [of bishops] was not extinguished’, and ‘there are not only seven thousand but seventy times seven thousand that mourn in secret…for the devastation and desolation of the city of their God’. ‘Wherever there is a lawful English pastor and an English flock and a subordination of this flock to that pastor, there is a branch of the true English Protestant Church.’ The key word, of course, is ‘lawful’, an episcopally ordained priest who had not surrendered to evil. Bramhall rejected the papists’ accusation that the church as he understood it had fallen into schism by communion with ‘Puritans and Independents’, for ‘a national Church cannot communicate with schismatics’. This church had kept itself pure, ‘And if that hard weapon necessity have enforced any, perhaps with an intention to do good or prevent evil, to comply further than was meet, I do not doubt but they pray with Namaan, “The Lord be merciful to me in this thing.”’Footnote 54
Others were fiercer against those who conformed to the times. The exile Richard Steward thought it was his duty to the church to help keep the laity ‘from communicating too deeply in sin with those who have now cast her on the ground’.Footnote 55 But he had been safe in Paris, as chaplain to the duke of York. At home, the ‘sequestered divine’ Theophilus Wodenote was scornful of worldly temptations. ‘Mightest thou be freed from sequestration and sundry other oppressions? Mightest thou be preferred to offices and sundry other favours, wouldst thou but confer thyself to some men's humours…? Alas, what trifling and temporary baits are these: refuse them, despise them.’ Instead, ‘Rejoice under the cross, and be glad when thou sufferest for the truth.’Footnote 56 And William Brough, ex-dean of Gloucester, wrote too of a church under the cross, in which ‘a judicious Christian may prop himself in the truth and goodness of religion and stand firm’. ‘As the body of the church can never be nothing, so it will ever be somewhere. It may lose beauty but not being, want prosperity but not preservation’ – so ‘the Church hath a place ever to be in, and thou where to stand.’ A recusant church had no public platform, and for now must worship where it could. ‘Meanwhile, till a better place to stand there is a good one to kneel in…And thus saints, however separate, may keep their assemblies and outpray their enemies, though these be in and they out of churches.’Footnote 57
The stern voice of Herbert Thorndike told the faithful what they must do in adversity – if they could follow his contorted prose. The leaders of the church had a duty to oppose the state for ‘the maintenance of the society of the Church in unity’. ‘Christian souls’ must not ‘communicate with schism’, but ‘seek the communion of the Church’ in observing the authority of the bishops and such traditional worship as was possible. They must not acknowledge ministers of the state's ‘public profession’, for ‘they do not constitute such a Church by being a member whereof a man may reasonably assure himself of salvation upon any principle of Christianity, but such a Church as is indeed no Church’. Instead, there was the recusant church, ‘the scattered remains of the Church of England’ – ‘there are hitherto, everywhere, of the clergy that adhere to the church, who will find it their duty to see your infants christened, your children catechized, the eucharist communicated to all that shall withdraw from churches forcibly possessed by them whom you own not for pastors’. And when there was no service, ‘you have the Scriptures to read for part of it, you have store of sermons manifestly allowed by the church to read, you have prayers prescribed for all your own necessities and the necessities of the church.Footnote 58
That was Thorndike in 1656: by 1659, he was gloomier. Thorndike had a high view of the visible ‘society of the Church’, in its succession from the Apostles, its communion in the Catholic Church of Christ, its governance and discipline, its priesthood, its sacraments and services, its ability to save souls. But could the recusant Church of England still meet the conditions of ‘the society of the Church’, in the circumstances in which it found itself?
For neither is it actually and properly a Church, the order whereof in the service of God is not visible, nor is there sufficient means in that case for the effect of a Church, and of that visible order in which the being of a Church consisteth, towards the salvation of those who are of it or might be of it.Footnote 59
Which is pretty close to what the papists had been saying, that there was now no church. In Brussels, Sir Edward Hyde was horrified: ‘I pray tell me what melancholy has possessed poor Mr. Thorndike? And what do our friends think of his book?’ Perhaps he could not help having ‘doubts and scruples’, but ‘I do not know what impulsion of conscience there could be to publish those doubts to the world in a time when he might reasonably believe the worst use would be made and the greatest scandal proceed from them.’Footnote 60 Like Henry More, though from a very different standpoint, Thorndike had given a wrong answer.
IV
In 1663 ‘the Church’ cried out in grief:
Ah, blessed Hammond, thou didst write rationally; excellent Gauden, thou didst persuade peacefully; devout Taylor, thou didst urge pathetically; honest Nicholson, thou didst answer satisfactorily; solid Sanderson, thou didst also clearly; holy Ussher and Hall, you did offer moderately, heartily and learnedly. But who, oh ye worthies, believed your report, who would hear you, who was convinced by you?Footnote 61
If they were not believed, perhaps it was because they were not saying the same things. Hammond had advocated a recusant church, though not as stridently as Thorndike and Ferne. Gauden had recognized the state's church as the Church of England, at least for a time, and he, Sanderson, and Nicolson had served within its framework. James Ussher and Joseph Hall proposed a reformed episcopacy in the interests of unity between prelatists and Presbyterians – as had Gauden.Footnote 62 Taylor had argued for toleration and a ‘liberty of prophesying’, seeming to accept a world of equal denominations – though he claimed later it was a tactic against the persecution of episcopalians.Footnote 63 Such differences are not surprising, in the difficult and developing situation churchmen had faced. For ‘Where is the Church of England?’ was also ‘Where should the Church of England be?’ – serving the nation in the only ways the state would permit, serving faithful congregations as far as was possible, or preserving the purity of the bride of Christ? The clergy had no agreed answer, but fragmented opinion diluted their influence and weakened episcopalian loyalty as a political force.
As the attack on Henry More showed, having the right answer was important after the Restoration, when a clean record was at the least a career advantage. A right answer, and right conduct, were regarded by some as tests of loyalty. For the hard-line refuseniks, those others who had taken a broad view of the Church of England and conformed within the Cromwellian ‘public profession’ had betrayed the cause – and those who had retained their benefices with their old loyalties were not much better. Thorndike had grudgingly admitted that ‘my brethren of the clergy that think fit to comply with the power which we are under’ might have done so ‘in respect of their flocks rather than their fruits’, but thought Sanderson had gone too far in conforming.Footnote 64 Lionel Gatford, who suffered imprisonment for his royalism, resented those who had held on to their posts and ‘either comployed with our enemies or moved neither tongue nor pen against them’.Footnote 65 Gilbert Sheldon opposed the nomination of Gauden to a bishopric, and young men who had been ordained secretly by a bishop but begun a career within the Cromwellian church found themselves suspect after 1660 as ‘a party very dangerous both to the king and Church’.Footnote 66
Although the more eirenic Gauden, Sanderson, Hacket, Nicholson, George Hall, Taylor, and Mossom were made bishops, it was the attitude of the purists that triumphed after 1660.Footnote 67 Heylyn and Thorndike were sidelined and Hammond died before he could be consecrated, but Sheldon became bishop of London and then archbishop in 1663 – and he, with Hammond, had been one of the leaders of the underground church.Footnote 68 There was to be no ‘reduction of episcopacy’, no reform of the Prayer Book, no acceptance of Presbyterian orders – and, for our enquiry, that was key. To reject non-episcopal ordination was to unchurch the Presbyterians and to deny that the Cromwellian national church had been ‘the Church of England’.Footnote 69 Those who had preserved a conception of an undefiled and distinct church through the years of darkness were not going to sacrifice it in compromise when they came out into the light. Nevertheless, the Restoration did not see the end of differences over what ‘the Church of England’ really was – and the differences mattered. For those clergy, such as Edward Stillingfleet, who shared a Gauden-esque view of the church as a community with flexible arrangements, were much more open to the possibility of concessions to nonconformists than were the Hammond-esque churchmen who thought of the church as an institution whose essential features had been defined by Christ and his Apostles.Footnote 70
V
Late in 1660, the young Edward Stillingfleet published his Irenicum. He had been ordained in secret by Bishop Brownrigg in 1657, and presented to the rectory of Sutton in Bedfordshire. Irenicum was written to further ‘the accommodation of our present differences’, arguing that Christ had decreed no particular form of government for his church.
My main design throughout this whole treatise is to show that there can be no argument drawn from any pretence of a divine right that may hinder men from consenting and yielding to such a form of government in the Church as may bear the greatest correspondency to the primitive Church and be most advantageously conducible to the peace, unity and settlement of our divided Church.Footnote 71
Stillingfleet's standpoint followed from his conception of the church as a community of the faithful rather than a hierarchical institution: ‘A particular Church then I would describe thus, that it is a society of men joining together in the visible profession of the true faith, having a right to and enjoying among them the ordinances of the gospel.’ A national church was ‘a whole nation professing Christianity, in which the ordinances of the gospel are duly celebrated in particular congregations’ – and ‘a nation joining in the profession of Christianity is a true Church of God’.Footnote 72 And it was for the Christian magistrate to decide how the national church should be governed,Footnote 73 so, presumably, parliament's Presbyterian church and Cromwell's ‘public profession’ were both legitimately ‘the Church of England’.
This is not at all what Hammond and Thorndike meant by a true church – indeed, Hammond was probably Stillingfleet's particular target.Footnote 74 Hammond's church was an authoritative organization of bishops, priests, and people, and if it did not have bishops it was defective.Footnote 75 Thorndike went further: if government by bishops were abolished, a church ceased to be a church – so the ‘public profession’ in England was no church.Footnote 76 Stillingfleet regarded ordination by presbyters as valid, but Hammond and Thorndike had declared that only bishops could ordain.Footnote 77 Irenicum got Stillingfleet into difficulties, partly because the role he gave to the Christian magistrate led to accusations of Hobbism.Footnote 78 So in 1662, he published a slim tract asserting the independent disciplinary power of the church and attacking Hobbes, and added it to the second edition of Irenicum as an appendix.Footnote 79 The charge of Hobbism was a useful weapon against him, but Stillingfleet's conception of the church was a more significant issue for some of his fellow-clergy, including younger men who had not faced the dilemma of whether to serve in Cromwell's church. He faced continuing claims that Irenicum undermined the authority of the church, and in 1679 he represented it as a youthful indiscretion that had tried too hard ‘to remove the violent prejudices of the dissenting party against episcopal government’. He claimed, disingenuously, that Irenicum had simply argued ‘that among us there was no necessity of entering upon nice and subtle disputes about a strict jus divinum of episcopacy’ – when in fact it had straightforwardly denied any divine right.Footnote 80
Controversy over Stillingfleet's views was revived by his provocative 1680 sermon published as The mischief of separation. There, he accused nonconformists of schism in departing from the national church, but his characterization of that church enraged some conformists and brought renewed attacks on Irenicum. In 1680, as in 1660, Stillingfleet saw a church as ‘a society of men united together for their order and government according to the rules of the Christian religion’, and the Church of England as ‘that society of Christian people which in this nation are united in the same laws of government and rules of divine worship’.Footnote 81 But those laws and rules might be adapted, and he envisaged liturgical concessions to nonconformists and reform of church courts.Footnote 82 This, argued his conformist critics, was a betrayal of the church and its authority as prescribed by Christ. William Sherlock defended Stillingfleet against attacks from dissenters, but asserted a very different kind of national church – an institutional union of bishops as successors of the Apostles.Footnote 83 Samuel Parker wrote The case of the Church of England ‘to blow up Dr Stillingfleet's Irenicum’, arguing that the church's authority depended on episcopacy as instituted by Christ and practised by the Apostles and the primitive church. But now, the church's ‘mistaken friends’ left its form of government to be determined by the magistrate – as if Charles II could properly have settled a church without bishops, ‘which, if he had done, then that had been the Church of England’.Footnote 84 But it would not have been the Church of England as understood by Parker and Sherlock (or Hammond and Thorndike).Footnote 85
In May 1683, Simon Lowth wrote an open letter to Stillingfleet, denouncing his opinions and demanding ‘a recantation as public as your error, scandal and offence’.Footnote 86 Stillingfleet was in the soup again – but protested there was nothing to recant. As in 1679, he gave Irenicum a favourable gloss and admitted ‘I do now think much more is to be said for the Apostolical institution of episcopacy than I at that time apprehended.’Footnote 87 But Lowth would not be appeased: he complained of Stillingfleet's neglect of ‘that great and eminent divine Dr Henry Hammond’ and claimed that Stillingfleet's church was no more than a ‘combination’ of people come together for worship. He denounced Stillingfleet's toned-down version of what Irenicum had meant as ‘not fair nor true’; rather, it was ‘the very centre of puritanism and epitome of fanatic madness’. Lowth was infuriated by Stillingfleet's excuse that Irenicum had been published before the legal re-establishment of the church and its discipline,Footnote 88 as if the church had not existed before it was validated by parliament. ‘But, pray, was not the Church of England the same under the Rump Parliament and Cromwell and the Committee of Safety, as it now is?…For how can this Church be disestablished by any confusions in the state, or lose its power.’Footnote 89 Like Henry More two decades earlier, Stillingfleet had given the wrong answer. But times would change: soon Stillingfleet would be bishop of Worcester, John Tillotson would be archbishop, and it was Lowth's answers that were wrong.
