In February 1642 Parliament justified its exclusion of the bishops from the House of Lords by suggesting that the bishops' temporal power had rested on a “skewed interpretation” of the Elizabethan Act of Supremacy and was not “by law established.” The practical utility of such a move for parliamentary reformers is obvious, but in his new book on constitutionalism in early modern England and Scotland, Charles Prior pushes readers to think of this exclusion and other events in Caroline history as products of intellectual principle as well: “[W]hat,” he asks, “did this phrase ‘by law established’ actually mean?” (226).
Prior does not offer any neat answer to this question; indeed, his book explores the fact that early modern Britons could not neatly answer this question either. Following Conrad Russell, Prior notes that England was reformed by statute and that these statutes were quite vague regarding the relationship of civil and ecclesiastical law. Who was sovereign over the church—the king himself, the king in Parliament, the king's clerical delegates?—thus remained an enduringly controversial question. And given that the church was “co-extensive” with the state (8), these questions of sovereignty extended to the secular realm as well. Prior shows how resultant traditions of politicized ecclesiology sought to work out a constitutional understanding of the church and, by extension, the state itself. Moreover, he suggests that this unanswered question of sovereignty became a factor in—even a “trigger of”—Britain's political turmoil in the 1630s and 1640s (3). The Crown was responsible for protecting both true religion—which included enforcing the power delegated to ecclesiastical authorities—and the liberties rooted in common law, and the potential conflict between these responsibilities primed Britain for constitutional crisis.
Prior's book focuses primarily on early modern thinkers' own historical research and argumentation. The Tudor Reformation may have established England's national church by positive statute, but it claimed merely to be restoring an “ancient” state of affairs (10). Consequently, ecclesiological debates largely consisted of bringing precedents—ancient, medieval, and modern; native and cosmopolitan; customary and transhistorical—to bear on modern issues. Prior traces these historical arguments in detail through a variety of debates in print related to ecclesiology; his topics include the controversies over bowing and the use of altars (chapter 3), the National Covenant (chapter 4), the Canons of 1640 (chapter 5), and the status of the bishops and the Protestation of 1641 (chapter 6). He finishes his book with in-depth, contrasting case studies on the pro-episcopal Thomas Aston and the anti-episcopal Henry Parker (chapters 7 and 8).
There is a simultaneous looseness and coherence to Prior's argumentation across these chapters. On the one hand, intellectuals—seventeenth century or otherwise—are not easily herded into clear-cut groupings and narratives, and Prior's detailed readings of documents allow him to respect the individuality of his subjects' positions. On the other hand, Prior reveals norms of British constitutionalism that crossed partisan lines by consistently returning to a few key points about the deeply political nature of ecclesiology, and he allows himself at least a provisional generalization about two common constitutional positions. On one side, writers supportive of the bishops defended a holistic, imperial integration of church and state by turning to the postclassical Christian world, ancient Judaism, and the formal authority of properly constituted laws. Their opponents, in contrast, resisted clerical overreach—and upheld the ecclesiastical sovereignty of the Crown and the privileges of Parliament—by appealing to English and Scottish historical and legal traditions, and the authority derived from consistency with scripture and common law.
Through this intellectual history, Prior seeks to revise our understanding of the conflicts of the Caroline period. First, he suggests that historians of religion have been too ready to emphasize questions of doctrine and theology at the expense of political issues. He thus demotes Arminianism—strictly understood as a soteriological position—as a catalyst of crisis; this theological position becomes instead merely “part of a larger backlash against politics and ‘innovations’ that define the ecclesiology of the Personal Rule” (14). Second, Prior also wants to change how political historians have understood constitutionalism as a driver of Caroline history. This term, Prior posits, has “usually meant a secular mode of political language,” and he has suggested that this period saw “an encounter between this secular constitutionalism, and versions of an absolutist clericalism” (2). But if church and state are co-extensive, as he repeatedly argues, then such a division is not possible: defenses of Parliament and the common law should be understood, not as seeking Erastian hegemony over the religious, but rather as one particular way of incorporating the secular with the religious. Building on this understanding of intertwined political and religious spheres, Prior ends by arguing against the commonplace model of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms as “wars of religion,” a term that suggests that religion could be separated from politics. Instead, he offers the term “wars of reformation” as a means to emphasize the importance of historical precedent for the ideologies that drove Caroline conflict (226).
Some readers will no doubt wish that Prior had addressed further questions raised by his study. How exactly was the intellectual history that he describes translated into parliamentary decisions and other tangible elements of England's conflicts? How did the “trigger” of ecclesiology interact with other social, economic, or political causes of the wars? What are the implications of Britain's intense legalism for the larger history of state formation or rationality? What does the historicism of these ecclesiological debates add to our theory of history itself? Prior perhaps wisely has excluded these larger questions from his project. But with A Confusion of Tongues as a reference point, we may hope that either he or his readers will take up these issues in the future.
