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CATHEDRALS, LAUDIANISM, AND THE BRITISH CHURCHES*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2010

IAN ATHERTON
IAN ATHERTON*
Affiliation:
Keele University
*
Department of History, School of Humanities, Keele University, ST5 5BGi.j.atherton@his.keele.ac.uk
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Abstract

Recent research has argued that English cathedrals, particularly but not exclusively Westminster Abbey, formed a ‘liturgical fifth column’ in the church and were the Trojan horse by which Laudianism – the ceremonial, clericalist, anti-Calvinist policies associated with Charles I and William Laud in the 1620s and 1630s – was introduced into the English church. This article re-examines links between cathedrals and Laudianism, not just in England, but also in the associated Protestant state churches of Charles's other realms: Ireland and Scotland. Laudian divines emphasized cathedrals as liturgical showcases, ‘mother churches’ which their ‘daughters’, the parish churches, should follow in the policy of the ‘beauty of holiness’, particularly the placing, railing of, and reverence to the Laudian altar. However, cathedrals are shown to be more diverse than historians have generally allowed, and Laudian policies are shown to have been grafted on to cathedrals, rather than emerging from them. Caroline cathedrals were more the victims of Laudianism than its midwives.

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Type
Research Article
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 53 , Issue 4 , December 2010 , pp. 895 - 918
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

In the last forty years, narratives of the English Reformation have been transformed from Protestant triumphalism to the state-sponsored imposition of some Protestant forms on a largely unwilling populace. The English Reformation has become a very peculiar process that produced a hybrid church of ‘Catholic structure and Protestant theology’. The Church of England is now depicted as an institution suspended ‘in a state of arrested development’ with an ‘idiosyncratic anchorage in the medieval past’.Footnote 1 Central to this new paradigm has been the research of Diarmaid MacCulloch, whose Reformation has a special place for English cathedrals; for MacCulloch it is cathedrals that embody the ‘ghost … of an older world of Catholic authority and devotional practice’ in the post-Reformation English church. In a series of works, MacCulloch has argued that the continuance of cathedrals was ‘One of the great puzzles of the English Reformation’. Unreformed, cathedrals survived as ‘fossils’. With their choirs intact and the daily round of liturgy trimmed only slightly, they were able to exploit the potential for ceremonious liturgy and musical splendour in Cranmer's prayer book, a possibility unintended and unnoticed by any reformer, including Cranmer himself. Cathedrals formed a ‘liturgical fifth column’ within the Protestant English church, inspiring the Laudian emphasis on the ‘beauty of holiness’ in the 1620s and 1630s. The preservation of cathedrals thus ‘had huge significance’ for the future of Anglicanism.Footnote 2

MacCulloch's cathedrals fit alongside recent scholarship which has emphasized the extent to which many Protestants regarded cathedrals as functionless institutions, medieval foundations designed around an understanding of worship and God's grace rejected and reviled after the Reformation and so lacking a proper place in the reformed world – medieval ships adrift in a Protestant sea.Footnote 3 But if the Edwardian and Elizabethan settlements meant that, in Ralph Houlbrooke's phrase, each cathedral ‘had lost its vocation but failed to find a role’, MacCulloch and others have given cathedrals one key function in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: they became the Trojan horse by which Laudianism was introduced into the English church. Houlbrooke has suggested that ‘attachment to the old ways’ and ‘a conservative reaction’ in all cathedrals both frustrated further reformation of the church and ‘contributed powerfully to the emergence of a different conception of the church in the seventeenth century’ – that different conception being known by historians variously as Arminianism, avant-garde conformity, or Laudianism.Footnote 4

While such arguments suggest that all English cathedrals harboured the seeds of the Laudian revolution, in some versions of MacCulloch's arguments he has placed a special emphasis on one institution wherein those seeds flowered most spectacularly: Westminster Abbey. This emphasis may initially seem puzzling, since Westminster was, from 1560, a collegiate church rather than a cathedral, but MacCulloch has suggested that Westminster was ‘more like a cathedral than most cathedrals’.Footnote 5 The similarities between cathedrals and collegiate churches are worth considering, and suggest that all collegiate churches should be considered as a species of cathedral. Though collegiate churches lacked the seat of a bishop, the cathedra, they possessed the other attributes of a cathedral: a governing chapter composed of a head (variously called a dean, provost, or warden) and prebendaries (or fellows), and a professional choir.Footnote 6 Canon law recognized the similarities between cathedrals and collegiate churches,Footnote 7 and contemporaries were often unable to tell them apart.Footnote 8 In MacCulloch's version of the later Reformation, the choral and ceremonial potentials of a cathedral were most developed at Westminster, allowing him to rechristen ‘avant-garde conformity’ or proto-Arminianism as ‘the Westminster Movement’ by deliberate analogy with the nineteenth-century, high-church Oxford Movement.Footnote 9 MacCulloch's ideas have been taken up by others, sometimes thereby co-opting the subtly different argument of Julia Merritt. She has suggested that Westminster Abbey was sufficiently broad an institution to encompass both ‘Calvinist conformists’ and ‘proto-Laudians’, so that it should not be seen as the ‘cradle’ of Laudianism. She does, however, conclude that its conservative and ceremonial characteristics meant that ‘it certainly acted as one of the midwives at the birth’ of Laudianism.Footnote 10 As others have retold Merritt's views, her caution and caveats have been lost, and Westminster Abbey has been proclaimed as, in Graham Parry's words, ‘a repository of Laudian values’.Footnote 11

In the search for the roots of Laudianism, therefore, a gathering body of scholarly opinion sees Westminster Abbey in particular, but all cathedrals in general, as incubators of conservative, ceremonial, and sacerdotal ideas and practices. Such historians are following the genealogy, if not the language, set out by vituperative puritan critics of cathedrals who denounced them as bastions of popery and who traced direct lines of infection from the medieval church, through cathedrals, to lazy formalists under Elizabeth, and to crypto-Catholic Laudians by the time of Charles I.Footnote 12

The purpose of this article is to re-examine connections between Laudianism and all cathedrals and analyse the roles played by cathedrals in Laudian views of the church. Moreover, it seeks to do so, in part, by broadening the focus from Westminster or England to the British Isles, looking also at the cathedrals of the churches of Scotland and, especially, Ireland to explore the impact of cathedrals in different religious contexts. The three British churches were closely linked: John Morrill has, for example, suggested that the Scottish church was the ‘half-sister’ and the Irish the ‘non-identical twin’ of the English, while early Stuart archbishops of Canterbury were cast as the ‘stepmothers’ of Scottish Protestantism, albeit ‘rather impulsive and ineffectual ones’ – and, it might be added, wicked stepmothers in the eyes of many Scots.Footnote 13 Moreover, the cathedrals of the three churches were interconnected. Although there were significant differences between the cathedrals of the Church of England and those of the Scottish Kirk and Church of Ireland – English cathedrals were wealthier and were thus larger institutions and more architecturally imposing – it should be remembered that there were also significant differences within the English cathedral system: for example, between old and new foundations, or between wealthier English and poorer Welsh cathedrals.Footnote 14 English, Welsh, Irish, and Scottish cathedrals formed close networks of preferment, with many clerics from across the British Isles finding preferment in Irish cathedrals, while a number of Scots were rewarded with preferment in an English chapter.Footnote 15 The cathedrals of Dublin and Edinburgh were often seen as close cousins of grand English ones: Barnaby Rich, for example, compared Christ Church, Dublin, with St Paul's for the extent and quality of preaching heard there.Footnote 16 Charles intended that his new cathedral of Edinburgh should follow an English model. In 1637 he ordered that ‘all things concerning the cathedral’ of Edinburgh were to be directed by three Anglophile Scots: Bishop David Lindsay of Edinburgh, who had defended the ceremonies of the Church of England in print, Dean James Hannay of Edinburgh, who had recently been sent to Durham to obtain ‘ane plott of the queir’ as a blueprint for Edinburgh, and Archbishop John Spottiswoode of St Andrews, who boasted that he had ‘adorn'd’ his private chapel ‘after the decent English form’.Footnote 17 Shortly before the king's command, a merchant burgess of Edinburgh had noted that work had begun to convert the new cathedral with an altar and choristers and organs ‘and sic uther thingis as is necessarie for ye qur of ane Cathedrall kirke’ which were, he had already bewailed, ‘acording to ye order … & ye liturgie of ingland’.Footnote 18 Morrill has suggested that James VI and I and Charles I aimed at ‘congruity’ between the churches of their kingdoms,Footnote 19 but when it came to the cathedrals of their three capitals, something more akin to unity of purpose and status seems to have been the goal.

Most studies of cathedrals have looked at the institutions in isolation – from each other and from the cities and dioceses in which they were located – seeing them as islands of privilege and seclusion, cut off from the rest of society. The arguments of MacCulloch, Merritt, and their followers and adapters properly restore cathedrals to the church of which they were a part, and take seriously the possibility that cathedrals may have been influenced by, and in turn influenced, the wider world. A broader focus on British cathedrals allows a wider consideration of the interaction between cathedrals and their contexts, especially given the very different situations of the Irish and English churches, to test the thesis that Laudianism was born in cathedrals as a by-product of their complex relationships with the wider church.

I

The particularity of Westminster Abbey, a key claim of MacCulloch and Merritt, can, however, be overstated. Its intimate connections to the monarch were not unique: Windsor, St Paul's, and Winchester were also important sites of royal ceremonial, while many other cathedrals were visited by the sovereign.Footnote 20 The Abbey preserved a strong sense of its medieval past and privileges, but so did many cathedrals, where Catholic imagery and vocabulary for offices and officers was retained,Footnote 21 while the dean and chapter of Durham strove to uphold the liberties of St Cuthbert within the palatinate of Durham as their medieval forebears had done.Footnote 22 Westminster should be considered no more of a cathedral than any other. But if there was no Westminster Movement, was there nonetheless a cathedral one?

An alternative way of investigating the relationship between cathedrals and Laudianism is to begin at Gloucester in January 1617, where William Laud had recently arrived as dean. The first months of his decanate may be seen as announcing Laud's vision of a Protestant cathedral. He initiated a chapter act book so as better to preserve the church's records. He moved the communion table from the middle of the choir to the east wall where it was placed ‘altar wise … upon the uppermost greases or steppes’; all were expected to bow to the altar on entering the quire or approaching the table. He created a fund for the repair of the cathedral fabric to prevent ‘soe goodly an edifice’ coming to ‘lamentable ruine’. These initial reforms were quickly followed by further decrees reinforcing the dean's control over expenditure, sorting the muniments, reinstating early morning prayers in the Lady Chapel, improving the organ, and raising the stipend of some of the choir.Footnote 23 In the first year of his decanate, Laud had revealed many of the principles that lay behind his attempts to re-establish the majesty, power, and standing, not only of cathedrals, but also of the whole church: protecting the place of the church and clergy in society, particularly from lay depredations; refurbishing the fabric of ecclesiastical buildings; raising the economic standing of church and clergy; increasing the dignity of services; restoring the position of, and honour accorded to, the altar.

Laud's actions at Gloucester are significant for three reasons. First, the moving of Gloucester's table was paralleled at Durham a few months later,Footnote 24 and was justified by Lancelot Andrewes in a sermon before the king on 5 November 1617 that was quickly published. As Nicholas Tyacke has suggested, these actions suggest a concerted campaign.Footnote 25 Second, Laud explicitly owned moving the communion table and repairing the fabric at Gloucester in letters to his patron, Richard Neile, bishop of Lincoln (but soon to be translated to Durham) and to the bishop of Gloucester, Miles Smith.Footnote 26 That is significant, given the problems of attributing any change specifically to Laud, who preferred to hide behind the authority of the king or allow subordinate clergymen to justify reforms.Footnote 27 Third, and most significantly for present purposes, is the justification given in the Gloucester chapter act book for moving the table: that it should be placed ‘according as it is used in the king's majestie's chappell and in all or the moste part of the cathedral churches of the realme’.Footnote 28 The prescription of cathedral use was to be much invoked during the Caroline altar campaign of the 1630s.Footnote 29 In the context of 1617, however, it was a deliberate falsification, for only one cathedral is known to have had an east-end table before Gloucester. At St Paul's, the Marian high altar was replaced in 1559 by a wooden communion table at the east end of the nave, but in 1563 or 1564 that table was moved to the east end of the quire, at or near the site of the former high altar. That change was probably a practical response to the damage caused by the collapse of the steeple in 1561, rather than an ideologically charged move towards greater ceremonialism.Footnote 30 A similar misrepresentation of the example of cathedrals was perpetrated by Matthew Wren in his answer to the articles of his impeachment, when he not only claimed that Norwich Cathedral had rails ‘Time out of Mind’, but also insisted on an altar-wise position out of uniformity to all cathedral and collegiate churches.Footnote 31 In 1646 Prynne castigated Laud's 1617 reasoning as ‘a grosse untruth’;Footnote 32 historians may prefer to interpret it as selective reading of Reformation history by Laudians.Footnote 33

If 1617 proved a false start for a policy of turning the cathedral table,Footnote 34 from the later 1620s Laudians slowly imposed a railed, altar-wise position on cathedrals. In a number of cases, as at Durham, the initiative probably came from the bishop, rather than from the dean and chapter. At Durham, the wooden communion table was replaced by a marble altar, embellished with cherubim and a painted and gilded screen behind, around 1620; it was railed around six years later.Footnote 35 On his translation to Winchester in 1628, Neile ordered that the communion table, in the words of one of his opponents on the chapter, be ‘removed to the upper end of the quyre to stand like an alter’.Footnote 36 At Exeter, the table was railed in 1629.Footnote 37 In a large number of cathedrals change came only after the metropolitical visitations of 1632–3 in the northern province and 1634 in the southern, and after the test case at St Gregory's in 1633.Footnote 38 At Chester, Neile, by then archbishop of York, had the table moved in 1633, but the following year the dean and chapter of Carlisle were still resisting his pressure.Footnote 39 At Worcester a railed, stone altar was erected in November 1634.Footnote 40 An altar-wise position was enforced on Rochester in 1634 by Laud's vicar-general, Sir Nathaniel Brent.Footnote 41 At Hereford, the chapter withstood Bishop Augustine Lindsell's pressure to move the table in 1634, but succumbed the following year under his successor Wren.Footnote 42 At Wolverhampton collegiate church, a new, railed communion table was consecrated in October 1635.Footnote 43

Once again, the prescription of cathedral use had been invoked to justify the changeFootnote 44 – and once again a highly selective reading of the past was involved. Before Durham's altar was railed around 1626, only one cathedral (Wells) had a railed communion table, where it was moved ‘into such convenient place in the quier as it shall be most decent and comely’ and railed in 1593. This should not be seen as a case of Laudianism avant la lettre, however, for the table thereafter probably stood in the middle of the choir, rather than at the east end, until the early 1630s. Furthermore, in 1632 the king complained that the table lacked ‘decent ornaments as are requisite and as in other cathedrall churches ar supplied’, and three years later Laud was still trying to force the dean and chapter to furnish their table appropriately.Footnote 45

That so few cathedrals had only recently met the required altar policy was inconveniently highlighted by Prynne in 1637.Footnote 46 It is also notable how many cathedrals had flouted the 1604 canons and lacked a cope until the metropolitical visitation of 1634: Bristol, Chichester, Gloucester, and Salisbury all lacked copes; the latter was described by one of its prebendaries as ‘vtterly destitute and naked of all cathedral ornaments’. Exeter, too, may have had no cope, for the vicars choral informed Brent that ‘the ornaments, vtensills & vestments are verie meane for the adorninge of soe beautifull a church & quyre as is fitting for our holye seruice’.Footnote 47 In 1635, it was reported that Southwell collegiate church had had no copes since 1548 – even though the archbishop of York had a palace next door and Lancelot Andrewes had served as a prebendary between 1589 and 1609.Footnote 48 A significant number of cathedrals had to be dragooned into being Laudian showcases; at Hereford it took sixteen pages of Wren's minute, hectoring instructions.Footnote 49 Caroline altar policy did not grow out of cathedrals, but was forced on them.

II

Cathedrals often had to be dragged into the new Laudian dawn because their chapters were by no means filled only with conservative churchmen. Though puritans criticized cathedrals for harbouring formalists and conservatives, not all agreed: the Jacobean author of a defence of cathedral music believed that chapters were stuffed with puritans, who had exerted ‘all their meanes … to gett them Prebends … that so they might be without all control of ecclesiasticall censures’.Footnote 50 Most chapters, appointed over time by a series of bishops, preserved a record of the churchmanship of each succeeding diocesan, rather than an imprint of any alleged conservatism of the institution. Cathedrals and collegiate churches, even Westminster, represented the broad spread of the English church, from conservatives to godly Calvinists; on David Marcombe's reading, many English cathedrals had, by 1620, discovered a Protestant identity as ‘a powerful dynamo of reform’ and as diocesan centres of preaching.Footnote 51 Laudians could gain control of a chapter only through exceptional circumstances such as a series of deaths or resignations, as at Durham, for example, where in five years Neile reversed half a century of evangelical appointments and collated to eight of the chapter's twelve prebends.Footnote 52 Alternatively, the Laudian conversion of dean or prebendaries could occur, as at Norwich.Footnote 53 Until they could gain such control, Laudian chapter members are instead often to be found sniping to Laud about their refractory colleagues.Footnote 54

What could be achieved after a Laudian coup is shown at Christ Church, Dublin, where, by death or resignation, all bar one of the chapter were replaced between 1632 and 1635, mostly by conservative churchmen brought straight from England. The revitalized chapter set about reforming the cathedral with gusto. In June 1633, the communion table ‘was set up after the manner of an altar’; the next few years saw the implementation of a full Laudian programme of quire refurbishment, emphasis on communion, and attempts to increase the stipends of the choir.Footnote 55 From there, Laudianism was introduced to Cork Cathedral – where, between 1633 and 1638, an organ was installed, the cathedral repaired, the regulation of the vicars choral tightened, and the altar ornamented – and to at least one Dublin parish connected to Christ Church.Footnote 56

Nonetheless, the example of Christ Church illustrates two important points. The first is the absence of a native Laudian tradition within Ireland, despite the kingdom's thirty-four cathedrals (compared to twenty-six in the Church of England); Irish cathedrals developed no indigenous Laudianism. The second is the limited extent of Christ Church's influence within its own diocese or the Irish church. Straight lines of influence must not be assumed from cathedral to city, diocese, and wider church. We should not see Laudianism as a destination which first cathedrals and then, under their influence (either baleful or redeeming) the whole church reached. The city of Norwich, for example, provides two examples of schemes of elaborate refurbishment representing the early flowering of parish Laudianism: St Peter Mancroft and St Gregory.Footnote 57 But neither drew its inspiration from Norwich Cathedral. The vicar of St Gregory had been presented by the dean and chapter, but as a godly Calvinist, while the parish's leading citizen had already severed his ties with the cathedral, possibly in pique at the chapter's refusal to maintain St Gregory's chancel. St Peter Mancroft, by contrast, was controlled by the city fathers and not by the dean and chapter. In both schemes of beautification, it was the bishop, the anti-Calvinist Samuel Harsnett, and not the cathedral that provided external encouragement. Only in the 1630s did the cathedral play a significant role in showcasing Laudianism and seeking to spread it across city and diocese.Footnote 58 Norwich Cathedral played a complex and changing role in the city's religious character and politics in the century from the Reformation. The cathedral had been used to attract evangelical pastors to the city as both minor canons and prebendaries in the 1560s and 1570s, and so helped to fashion the godly Calvinism of much of the city. Thereafter, having helped to kick-start the Reformation in Norwich, it then provided a foil to the puritanism and preaching sponsored by the corporation, but until the 1630s the aim was often to tame the radicalism of some of the city preachers, rather than to introduce anti-Calvinist ideas or ceremonial practices. Norwich Cathedral was more the midwife of civic puritanism than of Laudianism, a child the cathedral of the 1630s then sought unsuccessfully to kill. For early modern cathedrals were far more varied than is allowed in those accounts which see them principally as fossils. Even in England, much of Laudian practice was grafted on to cathedrals from outside quite late in Charles's reign. It took sustained episcopal or metropolitical pressure, or the Laudian capture of a chapter, before a cathedral could fulfil the role of a beacon of ceremony and order designed for it in Laudian ideal.

III

To Charles, and to Laud, Neile, and their associates, the proper ordering of a cathedral was particularly important for two reasons: their view of the Reformation, and their understanding of the place of cathedrals in the wider church. Laud's stated aim was to restore the Church of England ‘to the rules of her first reformation’, a goal repeated by his acolytes.Footnote 59 The Laudian answer to the question of where those rules could be found, and where they had continued to be applied, was in the Chapel Royal and the cathedrals, without which, Peter Heylyn claimed, ‘we had before this been at a losse amongst our selves, for the whole forme and fashion of Divine Service’.Footnote 60 The importance of the Laudian fiction that cathedrals had kept themselves pure in preserving the principles of a true Reformation, unpolluted by puritanical excess, is underscored by the second argument that Laudians made concerning cathedrals: an emphasis on a cathedral as a mother church. It was a medieval idea that cathedrals were the mother church of the diocese. Typically, it meant that a cathedral should be the liturgical exemplar of its diocese, with parishes following the same rite or use as the cathedral, albeit in a simplified fashion.Footnote 61 In the sixteenth century, the idea was reinterpreted by Protestants in terms of preaching and teaching: as Prebendary George Gardiner of Norwich had explained in 1569, a cathedral ought to be a true mother church of the diocese ‘to minister vnto hir Children the Foode of gods worde and the example of godlie lief’.Footnote 62 The early seventeenth century saw a reversion to medieval ideas, with the practice of the cathedral used to defend an altar-wise position in the daughter, parish churches throughout the diocese. In 1633, Charles ordained that parishes should be ‘guided’ in the placing of the communion table by the ‘Cathedrall Mother Church’, and he was followed by Bishop William Piers, Peter Heylyn, the pseudonymous ‘R.T.’, and the 1640 canons.Footnote 63 What had begun as the fiction of cathedral use became a prescription enforced on cathedrals themselves and subsequently on parish churches and chapels. Similarly, Robert Shelford used a mother-church argument to justify bowing to the altar, while cathedrals were acclaimed as the pattern and type of true worship by both Bruno Ryves and in a justification of Laudian altar policy tellingly titled ‘The Primitiue Cathedrall’.Footnote 64 The idea was less forcefully applied to Scotland, but Charles did suggest that a cathedral was a ‘common and principall church’ or a ‘principall paroch church’ to all the parishes of the diocese. Moreover, in October 1634 he ordered that, pending the introduction of a new prayer book ‘as neir as can be to this of England’, Scottish cathedrals should use the English service book twice a day, suggesting the role of cathedrals as liturgical exemplars north of the border too.Footnote 65

Opponents recognized not only the power and place of the cathedral mother-church argument in Laudian apologetic, but also its limitations. John Williams, for instance, denied the equation between parish churches and cathedrals, noting how the latter were often guided by special injunctions and local statutes.Footnote 66 Elsewhere, Henry Burton complained that cathedrals were the ‘one speciall Sanctuary’ to which Laudian clergy fled, saying ‘Wee bring in no innovations, no new rites, but what hath beene in use ever since the Reformation, and that in the most eminent Places, even the Mother Churches of the Land.’ Nonetheless, Burton noted how many cathedrals, ‘if not all’, had been ‘strangely metamorphosed’ only ‘within these few yeares, yea but Yesterday’.Footnote 67 Similarly, around 1640, Peter Smart, the main opponent of the Laudians within the Durham chapter, lamented how

the setting up of Altars and Images, with a multitude of superstitious Ceremonies, changing of services, and corruptions of Sacraments … beginning in Durham, have since that time spread themselves over all the Cathedral, Collegiate churches, and Colledges in this Realme; yea, and many parish Churches have set up Altars, Images and Organs, where they were never before since the reigne of K[ing]. Philip and Q[ueen]. Mary …Footnote 68

A dozen years earlier, however, in the midst of the Laudians' rise to power, Smart had interpreted the spread of altars differently. In 1617, the table in Durham Cathedral was moved by Prebendary Francis Burgoyne (also archdeacon of Northumberland from 1620), who then erected a stone altar in his cure at Bishopwearmouth, and ‘This example of Mr. Bvrgonie [sic] many parish Churches else are reported to follow, to … the advancement of Popery and Superstition, which are like to overflow the whole Byshoppricke of Durham.’Footnote 69 In other words, at the onset of the Laudian altar policy, Smart emphasized personal influence over institutional imitation and saw a trajectory not of parishes copying cathedral mother churches, but of local churches succumbing to the influence of powerful diocesan officials. For cathedrals could only function as Laudian mother churches once they had been frogmarched to purity.

IV

As Smart recognized, and as historians have underscored, an altar-wise position lay at the heart of the Laudian policy of the beauty of holiness.Footnote 70 The setting of the altar was crucial, for the church building in which it was housed had to be decently ordered and beautified.Footnote 71 In this respect, cathedrals were no different from English parish churches, and all saw considerable attention to and pressure on their fabric in the 1620s and 1630s.Footnote 72 Laudian ideas do, however, reveal a shift in the way that the fabric of cathedrals was viewed, while the great emphasis placed on campaigns to repair and restore cathedral fabric extended beyond Laudian campaigns to restore parish churches, as shown by the well-known drive to repair St Paul's Cathedral.Footnote 73 While the effort at St Paul's can narrowly be seen as the culmination of seventy years of failure to repair the cathedral after a fire in 1561, it should also be set in two other contexts.

One framework saw St Paul's as symbolic of the Church of England: its unrepaired state a national disgrace convicting Protestants of parsimony and neglect of churches in contrast to Catholicism. It was, moreover, further evidence that the later Reformation had gone awry. Let not people say, warned Bishop Walter Curle of Winchester exhorting contributions to St Paul's, that ‘pater noster built Churches, & Our Father pulls them downe’. Charles I promised that St Paul's restoration would make known ‘our Zeale to Gods house … to all the world’, leaving it as ‘a monument here after’ of our ‘true devotion to Gods seruice and the religion wee profess’.Footnote 74 The king's rebuilding of St Paul's could thus be seen ‘as earnest of his grand design,/To frame no new church, but the old refine’, in the words of Edmund Waller.Footnote 75 If, as Giles Fleming argued, St Paul's was ‘Cathedram Cathedrarum, The mother of all our Cathedrals’, then its restoration both symbolized the Laudian programme for the whole church and gave a lead that other cathedrals should follow.Footnote 76 In this context, the 1630s saw a greater emphasis than previously on repairing the fabric of cathedrals, noticeable not only in the greater sums spent, but also by the greater volume of adverse comment about fabric that was, as Brent commented of Chichester, ‘somewhat out of repair’, Elsewhere, Charles I described Carlisle in 1639 as ‘fallen exceedingly into decay’, suggesting that the dean and chapter had failed to swallow a Laudian vision of the beauty of holiness.Footnote 77

Second, the repairs at St Paul's should be placed in a British context, for the restoration and rebuilding of a number of other cathedrals across the three kingdoms was simultaneously ordered or contemplated by Charles, Laud, and others. In 1634, for example, Charles ordered that St Andrews Cathedral, in ruins since the 1570s, should be re-edified and, in 1635, by mortifying the priory of St Andrews to the archbishopric, he made provision for the repairs. If any work had begun, however, it was quickly reversed by the Covenanters.Footnote 78 Charles also ordered diocesan collections to repair Fortrose, Dunkeld, and Dornoch Cathedrals in 1626, 1630, and 1634 respectively, and in 1635 directed the repair of the east end of Iona Cathedral.Footnote 79 In 1638, the rebuilding of Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin was contemplated. Of Dublin's two cathedrals, Christ Church had become the church favoured by the Dublin administration, yet its fabric was not only unimpressive, but also so dangerously unstable that by the late 1620s, the council refused to worship there during high winds. Lord Deputy Wentworth considered Christ Church ‘rude’ and ‘barbarous’, and planned rebuilding it ‘nobly’, as befitting Ireland's chief cathedral, at a cost of up to £30,000. His plans, however, were postponed to 1639 by economic problems, and then abandoned on account of the Scottish crisis.Footnote 80 At the same time, Bishop Henry Leslie of Down pressed Laud for the rebuilding of his cathedral. Wentworth turned Leslie's suggestion into a proposal to raise taxation for the rebuilding of all the cathedrals in Ireland (which were generally very dilapidated) but again, nothing was achieved.Footnote 81 It is important to recognize, however, that most of the Scottish and Irish cathedrals were unaffected by the Laudian beauty of holiness programme, and most remained in a dilapidated state throughout the 1630s. In Ireland, Kilmore Cathedral, for example, lacked bell, font, and steeple, while in Scotland the chancel roof of Elgin collapsed in 1637.Footnote 82

In Laudian rhetoric, cathedrals were frequently acclaimed for their beauty: the Laudian statutes for Canterbury and Winchester, for example, noted their ‘most beautiful fabric’.Footnote 83 In that there was nothing new: Elizabethan justifications of cathedrals had concentrated on the magnificence of the cathedral buildings either as ends in themselves, or as a means of glorifying the prince and realm, boasting of cathedrals as ‘statelie buildinges … of as greate magnificence, as there be any in all Christendome’, or as mausoleums containing the ‘sepulchres, and monuments of kinges, greate Princes and others’.Footnote 84 In two ways, however, Laudian concentration on the fabric was new in both degree and tone. First, the medieval heritage of cathedrals began to be praised and used as a yardstick by which the actions of sixteenth-century reformers and iconoclasts could be found wanting. Descriptions of cathedrals began to extend beyond the compendia of epitaphs that formed the first published guidebooks to cathedral churches. The account of Canterbury by Laud's registrar of the Canterbury ecclesiastical courts, William Somner, was a paean of praise to the cathedral's medieval glories, an indictment of the actions and ‘neglect’ of the first century since the Reformation, and also a tribute to the ‘piety of the present Churchmen’ who had begun to restore what had been lost at the Reformation.Footnote 85 In an account of the legend of St Cuthbert (written in 1626 but not published until 1663), Robert Hegge's history of Durham Cathedral suggested that it was only under Neile that the cathedral had begun to ‘renew her age’ to match the ‘hight of her glorie’ attained in the eleventh century.Footnote 86 Such accounts suggest the rewriting of Reformation history by Laudians, and recall Laud's remark that it had been a ‘Deformation, not Reformation’. The words may be apocryphal, but it is worth remembering that they were allegedly prompted by his visit to a Scottish cathedral, Dunblane, where the nave was abandoned after 1559 and stood roofless by 1600.Footnote 87 Second, the fabric of a cathedral not only bore the marks of both past piety and puritanical excess, but was also sometimes praised as a devotional tool, pointing to the yet greater glories of the New Jerusalem. John Weever, William Somner, and Bruno Ryves all endorsed Erasmus's comment that the prospect of Canterbury Cathedral was so majestic ‘that it occasions the devotion which should be used there, and strikes a sensible impression of Religion’.Footnote 88

Laudians reinterpreted and resacralized space. Bishop Richard Corbet argued that ‘We admire those things for the most part which are the oldest, and the greatest; old monuments, huge bildings, doe affect us abouve measure: and what's the reason? for what is Ancient, comes nearer God for the Antiquity, and what is great, comes neare his woorks for their spaciousness, and Magnitude’.Footnote 89 In creating St Giles as a cathedral for the new diocese of Edinburgh in 1633, Charles I ordered the city fathers to remove the walls subdividing the building for different congregations, so that it should ‘be ordered as is decent and fitt for a church of that eminencie, and … conforme to the Largnes and conspicuitie of the foundatioun and fabrick, and not to be indecentlie parcelled and disjoyned by walls and partitions’.Footnote 90 Purged of the trappings of Roman worship, post-Reformation cathedrals had once seemed empty shells, raising questions about their place and purpose in the Protestant church;Footnote 91 but in the 1630s the empty spaciousness of cathedral naves was precisely the point. Laud warned the dean and chapter of Gloucester in 1636 that it was the king's ‘expresse pleasure’ that cathedral naves ‘should not be pestered with standinge seates, contrary to the course of cathedrals & the dignity of those goodly piles of building’. Similar warnings were issued to Bristol, Salisbury, Wells, and also to Worcester where Charles deemed it ‘disgraceful … to those goodly fabrics and the proper use of them’ to have fixed seats in the nave. Only moveable pews were to be permitted, so that they could be removed when not used during sermons.Footnote 92 Naves had to be cleared of clutter, whether unnecessary pews, idle perambulators, careless urinators, or the profanations of playing children, so that the ordered spaciousness of the building could reflect its importance as a mother church and point towards the grandeur of Heaven.Footnote 93 Moreover, for the fabric of a cathedral to be properly appreciated, and to be kept clean and hallowed, other buildings, particularly secular ones, must not be allowed to crowd around it. In this context, Charles ordered that houses and other buildings abutting the cathedral churches of Durham, Edinburgh, St Paul's, Winchester, and York be removed as being ‘vncleane … a great deale too near to ye House of God’ and tending ‘much to ye detriment of ye Church, and alltogether to ye disgrace of yt goodly Fabricke’.Footnote 94

Once bent to the royal and archiepiscopal will, many cathedrals saw elaborate schemes of beautification in the 1630s to make them agreeable to Laudian ideas. In 1634, Worcester Cathedral was provided with an azure hanging behind the new stone altar, with a pall, and upper and lower frontals to adorn the altar. New altar hangings at Wolverhampton collegiate church in 1635 depicted angels with SS Paul, Peter, and George.Footnote 95 In 1637, Gloucester Cathedral had an ‘Alltar cloth’ of crimson velvet embroidered with ‘a faire oval with gleames issuinge from it and large letters vizt: I.H.S.’; according to Prynne, these were consecrated by Bishop Goodman who also set up several crucifixes and images in the cathedral. Prynne also claimed that Bishop Robert Wright of Coventry and Lichfield placed ‘a goodly Crucifix in a frame, with the pictures of men and women devoutly praying to it’ over the altar in his cathedral.Footnote 96 At Exeter, Archdeacon William Helyar appealed to Laud in 1638 to force through his scheme of beautification in the teeth of opposition from other canons. A reredos was painted of Moses and Aaron and the ten commandments set within a receding perspective of the west front of the cathedral depicted as the gate of Heaven. At the same time the sedilia beside the altar were repaired and the organ gilded.Footnote 97 The imagery was clear. The cathedral itself was the gateway to Heaven, with the clergy as the gate-keepers, ushering in the faithful through the sacrament of the eucharist to the tune of celestial music played on the organ.Footnote 98

V

A Laudian emphasis on the fabric and furnishings of a cathedral was accompanied by a stress on the worship at a cathedral. In such a vision of a cathedral, the notion of the role of music was neither new nor specifically Laudian, but developed ideas that had been used by those few advocates of church music to justify organs and choirs in worship since the middle of Elizabeth's reign.Footnote 99 Music could be defended from a minimalist position as having the potential to draw people to church,Footnote 100 and from a maximalist position, whereby musical settings of scriptural texts could aid edification – provided the words were clear – drawing the congregation ‘in chaines of gold by the eares to the consideration of holie things’ and into ‘a deuout and reuerent kind of consideration of him for whose praise’ the music was made.Footnote 101 Despite a longstanding attack on church music from many Protestants under Elizabeth, by the middle of James's reign such a defence of liturgical music could come from even a moderate puritan such as Andrew Willet who believed that music could be a means whereby ‘the mindes of the hearers might be stirred vp to the praise of God’, though he hedged his defence with caveats and warnings against overly elaborate settings or ‘tedious Church songs … full of long and vaine repetitions’ which he asserted were still used in many cathedrals.Footnote 102 The last two decades of Elizabeth's reign had marked a turning point in the attitudes of many moderate Protestants to church music, and by 1600 spending on the choir, particularly the copying of music, was increasing at most English cathedrals. In addition, new organs were provided at Norwich and Worcester Cathedrals and at Westminster and Windsor collegiate churches in the first decade of James's reign, and in a number of cathedrals attempts were made throughout his reign to improve the attendance and behaviour of the minor canons and lay clerks.Footnote 103

Laudians deployed similar arguments in favour of church music to those used previously, but dropped the caveats. Fulke Robartes, for example, simply stated that there was ‘no feare of Popery … in the use of the Church Musique’.Footnote 104 Their efforts also extended previous practice. Where James's words of encouragement to re-establish a choir for Armagh Cathedral had come to nothing, in 1634 Charles granted estates to found a new college of vicars choral there.Footnote 105 Four years later, the existing choir of Christ Church, Dublin, was augmented with additional choirboys and extra income, although the collapse of Charles's government prevented these reforms taking effect.Footnote 106 There were also attempts to revive and endow choirs at Cashel, Clogher, and Derry Cathedrals between 1626 and 1631.Footnote 107 In most English cathedrals, spending on music during the first fifteen years of Charles's reign reached a level not seen since Mary's reign, with new organs at Durham, Bristol, York, Windsor, Lichfield, and Gloucester; that at Bristol was augmented with a private bequest to the organist ‘to laude and praise god’ before and after sermons and at morning and evening prayer on Sundays and holy days ‘to move and stir upp the peoples affeccōns the more cheerefully with holy David to laude and magnifie gods most holy name’.Footnote 108 Laudian practice was not, however, merely an intensification of previous ideas. Some began to see congregational psalm-singing as the tuneless babbling of the ignorant and as a poor and irreligious sacrifice to God, and hence a detraction from the offering of a skilled cathedral choir. Meanwhile, Durham revived the choir's singing of the Sursum Corda and Sanctus at communion, a practice virtually unknown since Mary's reign.Footnote 109

Laudian thinking about church music was not, therefore, generally distinctive, but the overall context in which it was placed was new. Elizabethan justifications of cathedrals had often defended them as centres of preaching and teaching and as rewards and retreats for scholars.Footnote 110 In the 1630s, the role of cathedrals as preaching centres, though still significant, was less important than cathedrals as centres of worship. In part, this reflected Laudian arguments about the church in general: that preaching had been over-emphasized and should be restored to its proper place as secondary to praying.Footnote 111 Laudian stress on the importance of common prayer could, however, lead to a new emphasis on the liturgical round at cathedrals, even if most writers were primarily concerned with parish worship.Footnote 112 In 1632, the dean and chapter of Worcester proudly contrasted their choir, employed three times every day ‘in the service of God and in Common Prayer for the Kinge and the whole state of this kingdome’, with parish churches that were silent except on Sundays and some holy days.Footnote 113 Shelford likewise compared ‘countrey-churches’ celebrating services only on Sundays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, with cathedral and collegiate churches where ‘they serve God every day in the week’, adding that the latter provided ‘the continuall burnt-offering commanded’ in Exodus, implying that cathedrals, like the Jewish tabernacle, was where God would meet His people.Footnote 114 Others compared cathedrals, especially St Paul's, with the Jewish Temple: Fleming likened the Temple to cathedrals, and synagogues to parish churches.Footnote 115 A cathedral became the liturgical exemplar for the diocese, the beacon and guide for parish churches, as well as a means for testing the conformity of suspect clergy, who could be set to minister in a cathedral as a test of their orthodoxy.Footnote 116

VI

A cathedral in all its parts was intended by Laudians to be a pattern of order. The worship of cathedrals (as indeed, of parish churches), a model or taste of the heavenly banquet, was also intended to speak eloquently of the divine order,Footnote 117 while the whole institution was intended to be an image of celestial concord and harmony. Cathedrals were meant as perfect societies, microcosms of the proper ordering of the wider world, from the bishop and dean down to the lowliest almsperson. To be fitted for such a role, cathedrals had to be reformed from the inside out, and even saved from themselves. In 1634, for example, fearing that canons were enriching themselves at the expense of their successors by converting leases for years into leases for three lives and pocketing the large entry fines that typically accompanied such conversions, Charles forbade all such exchange.Footnote 118 The following year, the king banned the practice of deans and chapters granting almsrooms in reversion, and cancelled all past reversionary grants.Footnote 119 These changes can be seen as part of Laud's drive to defend the clergy's economic position that he had already shown while dean of Gloucester. Laud and Neile concerned themselves with ensuring that the lesser clergy of the choir were better paid and were properly housed in the precincts before any other laity could lease property there, and chapters followed suit, reflecting notions of the cathedral and close as model commonwealths.Footnote 120 Laud felt that many other failings of cathedrals, cases where deans and chapters either could not be trusted to look after their own, or lacked the power to withstand powerful lay interests, required his personal attention. He fussed over the moral life of cathedral closes, ensuring that they were free of usurers, drunkards, adulterers, simoniacs, recusants, and schoolboys throwing stones, and he worried that cathedral precincts were kept ‘in decent manner without any profanation’ caused by encroachments everywhere, a fair at Canterbury, the ‘noise, and smoke, and filth’ of a brewhouse at Chester, or a public thoroughfare through the close at Lichfield and Worcester.Footnote 121 Cathedrals sometimes took Laud's cue. In 1638, for example, Christ Church, Dublin, appointed an officer to keep its precincts clear of beggars and vagrants.Footnote 122

Attempts to reform cathedrals and purge their precincts of abuses were nothing new,Footnote 123 but the 1630s saw not only an intensification of previous attempts, but also an attention to issues not previously perceived as problems. Concerns at cathedrals extended beyond Laudian worries in parish churches about uniformity of seating or reserving the east end for the altar,Footnote 124 although there are numerous examples of those issues at cathedrals, most famously the controversy over the earl of Cork's tomb in St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin.Footnote 125 In 1640, the dean and chapter at Wells ordered that two galleries be closed, not only because they were ‘uncomely and unusuall in cathedral churches’, but also because men and women sat mixed together ‘in so eminent a place in view of the choyre’, disturbing notions of proper gender relations; Neile had removed the women's seats from the quire at Winchester early in his episcopate.Footnote 126 Laud was concerned to see that the rights of bishops, particularly of visitation, were upheld over chapters, not only on the pragmatic grounds of ensuring that Laudian bishops could impose their reforms on unwilling chapters, but also to end the unseemly squabbling that had so often marked episcopal–capitular relations since the middle ages and, most importantly, so that cathedrals reflected the natural, hierarchical, order.Footnote 127

What Laud regarded as the spurious claims of exemption from episcopal visitation by chapters were quashed in statutes issued to a number of cathedrals. Settling cathedral statutes was one of twenty-four projects that Laud noted in his diary, believing that for want of proper statutes ‘all lay loose … and Men did what they liked’. The deficiencies of the Henrician statutes of the new foundation cathedrals had frequently been recognized since the beginning of Elizabeth's reign, but nothing was achieved until the 1630s, when Canterbury and Winchester, along with Hereford (a cathedral of the old foundation), received new statutes.Footnote 128

Laudian concern that, as Brent put it to the dean and chapter of Worcester, ‘all things should be very decent and comelie in all Cathedrall Churches’ is paralleled by Charles's reforms of his household early in his reign. Both suggest the idea that such reforms were intended as ‘an image of virtue’: a model to inform the rest of society of the due order and harmony of social and political relations.Footnote 129 Such ideas help to explain the Caroline campaign to ensure the attendance of city corporations at cathedral services, both prayers and sermon. Earlier studies emphasizing issues of space, privilege and rampant clericalism, have missed the important role that king and archbishop felt a properly ordered cathedral could play in social relations.Footnote 130 Forcing the attendance of the aldermen was a way of tuning pulpits of the city, which the regime saw as particularly important in cities with a strong tradition of civic puritanism, such as Chester, Gloucester, Norwich, and York.Footnote 131 It was also a means of ensuring that cities recognized ecclesiastical jurisdictions as separate and superior through rituals such as being forced to sit below the clergy, being unable to carry their symbols of authority (mace, sword) in the cathedral or its precincts, and being forced to remove their hats during service and sermon.Footnote 132 Above all, however, civic attendance at cathedrals was for ‘the preseruation of all due honor to the Cathedrall church of that Cittie being the mother Church’, besides being ‘for your own good’, as Charles I lectured the aldermen of Norwich and Winchester respectively.Footnote 133 Finally, Laudians asserted that a cathedral service could be a more effective means of conversion than preaching and was thus the best defence against the religious and political dangers of separation from the established church. Heylyn suggested that, without its cathedrals, England would have seen many more recusants; to make his point, he recounted a story of Henri IV's ambassador who, having observed the majesty of divine service in an English cathedral, allegedly remarked that if the same had been practised by the Huguenots, there would not have been so many papists left in France.Footnote 134 In short, cathedrals, as institutions, and through their precincts and their worship, were patterns and bulwarks of earthly relations.

VII

To many Laudians, cathedrals had a threefold place in their understanding of the church. They stood for the true principles of the first Reformation of the mid-sixteenth century, before that was subverted by Genevan excess. They had preserved the true form of worship, the proper utensils and vestments, and so had saved the Church of England – or so Laudians asserted, even though few or none had in reality maintained such practices. Second, and partly in contradiction of such beliefs, cathedrals could also represent the dangers of the very puritanical exorbitances they were seen as resisting, their fabric bearing the scars that witnessed to iconoclastic fury, Protestant parsimony and misplaced emphasis on word rather than sacrament and prayer. Third, cathedrals represented an ideal or type of the pure church, even if few or no cathedrals actually measured up to the ideal, or only did so after years of sustained pressure. They were a yardstick against which parishes could be judged. They were models of the proper ordering of earthly relations designed to instil discipline in civic corporations. And they were barriers to the growth of profanity, puritanism and pandemonium.

It was not so much that cathedrals were hothouses of Laudianism where ceremonial, liturgical, and theological innovation were forced in conservative seedbeds left behind by the Reformation. It was more that the continuation of the idea of a cathedral could function as an inspiration for conservative experiment. An example of how the idea of a cathedral (rather than the more mundane or diverse reality) could inspire avant-garde conformity is provided by the career of Lancelot Andrewes. In 1589 he was appointed to a canonry at St Paul's. On learning that the stall had originally been founded to support the long-defunct office of penitentiary, Andrewes was inspired to revive the practice of auricular confession, something he and, later, a number of Laudians upheld in the teeth of claims that it advanced popish sacerdotalism. It is suggestive that within a few years of his appointment to St Paul's, Andrewes's churchmanship developed away from the Calvinism he had espoused in his youth towards the avant-garde conformity he became famous for; the causes of that change are not clear, but the inspiration of a cathedral may have been crucial.Footnote 135

These roles were not so much natural growths of past cathedral practice and experience as foreign grafts on to cathedral rootstock. Like a canker, however, Laudianism fatally poisoned cathedrals in the eyes of the godly – who were often already dubious about the place of cathedrals in a reformed church – leading to opposition to cathedrals and their abolition in the 1640s.Footnote 136 Cathedrals were not the agents of Laudianism; they were its – albeit not always entirely unwilling – victims.

Footnotes

*

I am grateful to the Revd Dr Jane Tillier, the editor of this journal, and the two anonymous readers for their comments on drafts of this article, the research and writing of which were facilitated by grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, British Academy, and Leverhulme Trust. I am indebted to the many who have helped my research in various ways, including Professor Kenneth Fincham, Dr Raymond Gillespie, Professor Ann Hughes, Canon Dr Judith Maltby, Dr Sarah Poynting, Dr Raymond Refaussé, the Revd Dr James Saunders, and Dr Nigel Tringham.

References

1 D. MacCulloch, The later Reformation in England, 1547–1603 (2nd edn, Basingstoke, 2001), especially pp. 29, 142.

2 MacCulloch, Later Reformation, pp. 79–81, 85; idem, ‘The latitude of the Church of England’, in K. Fincham and P. Lake, eds., Religious politics in post-Reformation England: essays in honour of Nicholas Tyacke (Woodbridge, 2006), pp. 47–8; idem, ‘The myth of the English Reformation’, Journal of British Studies, 30, (1991), pp. 8–9Google Scholar; idem, ‘Putting the English Reformation on the map’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 15 (2005), especially pp. 90–2; idem, ‘The change of religion’, in P. Collinson, ed., The sixteenth century (Oxford, 2002), pp. 105–6.

3 R. Houlbrooke, ‘Refoundation and Reformation, 1538–1628’, in I. Atherton et al., eds., Norwich Cathedral: church, city and diocese, 1096–1996 (London, 1996), p. 538; P. Collinson, ‘The Protestant cathedral, 1541–1660’, in P. Collinson, N. Ramsay, and M. Sparks, eds., A history of Canterbury Cathedral (Oxford, 1995), pp. 154–203.

4 Houlbrooke, ‘Refoundation and Reformation’, pp. 538–9.

5 MacCulloch, ‘Change of religion’, p. 106.

6 In addition to Westminster, Manchester, Ripon, Southwell, Windsor, and Wolverhampton collegiate churches survived the Reformation or were refounded under Elizabeth and James. P. Jeffery, The collegiate churches of England and Wales (London, 2004), pp. 37–9, 456. A small number of collegiate churches also survived in Ireland: Calendar of state papers, domestic, 1684–1685, pp. 119, 143.

7 W. Lyndwood, Provinciale seu constitutiones Angliae (Oxford, 1679), p. 14.

8 Westminster Abbey was often mistaken for a cathedral: W. S. Powell, ed., John Pory, 1572–1636 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1977), microfiche, pp. 327, 329; J. O. Halliwell, ed., The autobiography and correspondence of Sir Simonds D'Ewes (2 vols., London, 1845), i, p. 273; J. Vicars, Gods arke overtopping the worlds waves (London, 1646), sig. s2v; The National Archives (TNA), SP25/13, fo. 25r; W. Sanderson, A compleat history of the life and raigne of King Charles (London, 1658), p. 888; M. Stevenson, Florus Britannicus (London, 1662), p. 42.

9 MacCulloch, Later Reformation, pp. 80–1; idem, Tudor church militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (London, 1999), pp. 204–13; idem, ‘Latitude’, pp. 47–8; idem, review of S. Lehmberg, Cathedrals under siege, in Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 48 (1997), p. 581.

10 Merritt, J., ‘The cradle of Laudianism? Westminster Abbey, 1558–1630’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 52, (2001), pp. 623–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, The social world of early modern Westminster: Abbey, court and community, 1515–1640 (Manchester, 2005), p. 325. Similar views are advanced by Collinson, Patrick, ‘Elizabeth I and the verdicts of history’, Historical Research, 76 (2003), p. 476CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and in K. Fincham and N. Tyacke, Altars restored: the changing face of English religious worship, 1547–c. 1700 (Oxford, 2007), pp. 82–3.

11 G. Parry, The arts of the Anglican Counter-Reformation: glory, Laud and honour (Woodbridge, 2006), p. 51; P. Marshall, Reformation England, 1480–1642 (London, 2003), p. 133. Both Parry and Marshall claim that Merritt argued that Westminster was a cradle of Laudianism. See also A. Ryrie, The age of Reformation: the Tudor and Stewart realms, 1485–1603 (Harlow, 2009), p. 287.

12 A. Peel, ed., The seconde parte of a register (2 vols., Cambridge, 1915), ii, pp. 208–11; Corpus Christi College, Oxford, MS 206, fos. 9v–10r, 12r. For puritan criticisms of cathedrals see also M. C. Cross, ‘“Dens of loitering lubbers”: Protestant protest against cathedral foundations, 1540–1640’, in D. Baker, ed., Schism, heresy and religious protest (Ecclesiastical History Society, Studies in Church History, 9, 1972), pp. 231–7.

13 Morrill, J., ‘A British patriarchy? Ecclesiastical imperialism under the early Stuarts’, in A. Fletcher and P. Roberts, eds., Religion, culture and society in early modern Britain (Cambridge, 1994), p. 210. For the argument that the English and Irish churches grew into very differing beasts, see A. Ford, ‘Dependent or independent? The Church of Ireland and its colonial context’, Seventeenth Century, 10, (1995), pp. 163–87Google Scholar, and idem, ‘The Church of Ireland, 1558–1634: a puritan church?’, in A. Ford, J. McGuire, and K. Milne, eds., As by law established: the Church of Ireland since the Reformation (Dublin, 1995), pp. 52–68.

14 On English cathedrals, see S. Lehmberg, The Reformation of cathedrals: cathedrals in English society, 1485–1603 (Princeton, NJ, 1988) and idem, Cathedrals under siege: cathedrals in English society, 1600–1700 (Exeter, 1996); on Irish, P. Galloway, The cathedrals of Ireland (Belfast, 1992); and on Scottish, P. Galloway, The cathedrals of Scotland (Dalkeith, 2000).

15 C. Diamond, ‘The cathedral system of Ireland in the Stuart period, 1603–1691’ (Ph.D. thesis, Trinity College, Dublin, 2007), pp. 170–1, 219; Morrill, ‘British patriarchy?’, p. 217. Morrill notes that no English were intruded into Scotland: the rewards in terms of souls to be saved or money to be made were too few to attract English clergy from the richer temporal rewards of England or spiritual ones of Ireland.

16 B. Rich, A new description of Ireland (London, 1610), p. 55.

17 A. Spicer, ‘“Laudianism” in Scotland? St Giles’ Cathedral, Edinburgh, 1633–1639 – a reappraisal', Architectural History, 46, (2003), pp. 102–4; M. Wood, ed., Extracts from the records of the burgh of Edinburgh, 1626 to 1641 (Edinburgh, 1936), p. 174; D. Lindsay, A treatise of the ceremonies of the church (London, 1625).

18 National Library of Scotland, Wodrow MS Quarto ix, fos. 408r, 346r.

19 Morrill, ‘British patriarchy?’ See also J. McCafferty, ‘John Bramhall and the Church of Ireland in the 1630s’, in Ford et al., eds., As by law established, pp. 101–2.

20 J. Nichols, ed., The progresses and public processions of Queen Elizabeth (3 vols., London, 1823), i, pp. 76–9, 209–10, 340, 347, 353, 529, 538–9, ii, pp. 150, 508–21, 537–9; J. Gairdner, ed., Three fifteenth-century chronicles (Camden Society, second series, 28, 1880), pp. 129–30; E. Ashmole, The institution, laws & ceremonies of the most noble order of the Garter (London, 1672); F. Bussby, Winchester Cathedral, 1079–1979 ([Southampton], 1979), p. 122.

21 Houlbrooke, ‘Refoundation and Reformation’, p. 521; Historical Manuscripts Commission (HMC), Calendar of the manuscripts of the dean and chapter of Wells (2 vols., London, 1907–14), ii, p. 392; D. Keene et al., eds., St Paul's: the cathedral church of London, 604–2004 (New Haven, CT, and London, 2004), pp. 60, 72, 159; HMC, Fourth Report (London, 1874), p. 155; National Library of Wales, LL/Ch/3 (I am grateful to Nigel Coulton for a translation).

22 D. Marcombe, ‘The Durham dean and chapter: old abbey writ large’, in R. O'Day and F. Heal, eds., Continuity and change: personnel and administration of the Church of England, 1500–1642 (Leicester, 1976), pp. 128–34.

23 W. Prynne, Canterburies doome (London, 1646), p. 77; P. Heylyn, Cyprianus Anglicus (London, 1668), p. 69; S. Eward, ed., Gloucester Cathedral chapter act book, 1616–1687 (Gloucestershire Record Series, 21, 2007), pp. xxvi, 3–4, 7–10, 12–13.

24 N. Tyacke, ‘Archbishop Laud’, in K. Fincham, ed., The early Stuart church, 1603–1642 (Basingstoke, 1993), p. 61; Lehmberg, Cathedrals under siege, pp. 8–9. For the date of the change, see P. Smart, A sermon preached in the cathedrall church of Durham, Iuly, 7. 1628 (London, 1640), p. 36.

25 L. Andrewes, A sermon preached before His Maiestie (London, 1618); N. Tyacke, ‘Lancelot Andrewes and the myth of Anglicanism’, in P. Lake and M. Questier, eds., Conformity and orthodoxy in the English church, c. 1560–1660 (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 30–1.

26 Prynne, Canterburies doome, pp. 77–8.

27 A. Milton, ‘The creation of Laudianism: a new approach’, in T. Cogswell, R. Cust, and P. Lake, eds., Politics, religion and popularity in early Stuart Britain (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 162–84.

28 Eward, ed., Gloucester Cathedral chapter act book, p. 3. There was no mention of rails for the table, probably because there were none in the royal chapels until the mid 1620s. Tyacke, ‘Andrewes’, p. 32.

29 E.g. HMC, Fourth report, p. 146; Lambeth Palace Library, MS 943, pp. 475ff.

30 D. J. Crankshaw, ‘Community, city and nation, 1540–1714’, in Keene et al., eds., St Paul's, pp. 53–4.

31 C. Wren, Parentialia (London, 1750), pp. 75, 77.

32 Prynne, Canterburies doome, p. 77. See also the annotation, using the same words and probably by Prynne, on Laud's justification to the bishop of Gloucester: TNA, SP14/90, fo. 177r.

33 On Laudian readings of the Reformation, see A. Milton, Catholic and Reformed: the Roman and Protestant churches in English Protestant thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 308, 315–40, idem, Laudian and royalist polemic in seventeenth-century England: the career and writings of Peter Heylyn (Manchester, 2007), pp. 83–8, and Fincham and Tyacke, Altars restored, p. 174.

34 Fincham and Tyacke, Altars restored, p. 119.

35 Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: the rise of English Arminianism, c. 1590–1640 (Oxford, 1987), p. 118; Fincham and Tyacke, Altars restored, p. 232.

36 W. Notestein and F. H. Relf, eds., Commons debates for 1629 (Minneapolis, MN, 1921), p. 144.

37 Fincham and Tyacke, Altars restored, p. 233 n. 28.

38 On the importance of these see Fincham, K., ‘The restoration of altars in the 1630s’, Historical Journal, 44, (2001), pp. 921–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, p. 215.

40 Worcester Cathedral Library, A75, fo. 107r.

41 HMC, Fourth report, p. 146.

42 I. Atherton, Ambition and failure in Stuart England: the career of John, first Viscount Scudamore (Manchester, 1999), p. 223; W. Prynne The antipathie of lordly prelacie (London, 1641), ii, sig. ¶¶2r.

43 W. Prynne, A quench-coale ([Amsterdam], 1637), pp. 196–9.

44 E.g. HMC, Fourth report, p. 146.

45 HMC, Dean and chapter of Wells, ii, pp. 325, 395, 413; Fincham and Tyacke, Altars restored, p. 60.

46 Prynne, Quench-coale, p. 161; Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, pp. 215–16.

47 HMC, Fourth report, pp. 130–1, 138, 142; S. Eward, No fine but a glass of wine: cathedral life at Gloucester in Stuart times (Salisbury, 1985), p. 56; A. Foster, ‘The dean and chapter, 1570–1660’, in M. Hobbs, ed., Chichester Cathedral: an historical survey (Chichester, 1994), p. 92.

48 Nottinghamshire Archives, SC/01/78/15.

49 Fincham and Tyacke, Altars restored, pp. 235–6.

50 British Library (BL), Royal MS B xix, fo. 6r.

51 D. Marcombe, ‘Cathedrals and Protestantism: the search for a new identity, 1540–1660’, in D. Marcombe and C. S. Knighton, eds., Close encounters: English cathedrals and society since 1540 (Nottingham, 1991), pp. 53–5. For those of ‘more robustly Reformed convictions’ at Westminster see Merritt, ‘Cradle of Laudianism?’, pp. 642–4.

52 M. Tillbrook, ‘Arminianism and society in County Durham, 1617–1642’, in D. Marcombe, ed., The last principality: politics, religion and society in the bishopric of Durham, 1494–1660 (Nottingham, 1987), pp. 203–4; J. M. Horn, D. M. Smith, and P. Mussett, Fasti ecclesiae Anglicanae 1541–1857: volume 11 (London, 2004), pp. 86–113.

53 For Laudian conversion see Milton, ‘Creation’, pp. 176–7; at Norwich, both Dean John Hassall and Prebendary Fulke Robartes made public conversions from Jacobean puritanism to Caroline Laudianism: see their entries in Oxford dictionary of national biography (Oxford, 2004).

54 E.g. Lambeth Palace Library, MS 943, pp. 217ff.

55 R. Gillespie, ‘The crisis of reform, 1625–1660’, in K. Milne, ed., Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin: a history (Dublin, 2009), pp. 196–200; Trinity College, Dublin, MS 6404, fo. 116v; Representative Church Body Library, Dublin, C6/1/7/2, fo. 31; P. Marshall, Mother Leakey and the bishop (Oxford, 2007), pp. 64–8.

56 Representative Church Body Library, Dublin, C20/1/1, pp. 94–7, 114, 118, C6/1/26/3, no. 21; National Library of Ireland, MS 1618, part i, pp. 25–49.

57 For this paragraph see M. Reynolds, Godly reformers and their opponents in early modern Norwich, c. 1650–1643 (Woodbridge, 2005), pp. 28–9, 115–16, 128–52, 199–213. Readers should note that Reynolds sees the cathedral playing a far larger role in the fostering of Laudianism in the city. See also Atherton et al., eds., Norwich Cathedral, pp. 512–52.

58 Bodleian Library, MS Tanner 68, fos. 167–8, 219–20; MS Tanner 220, fos. 44–8, 116–27; Reynolds, Godly reformers, pp. 238–42.

59 W. Laud, Works, ed. W. Scott and J. Bliss (7 vols., Oxford, 1857–60), vi, p. 42; P. Heylyn, A briefe and moderate answer, to the seditious and scandalous challenges of Henry Burton (London, 1637), sig. d.

60 P. Heylyn, A coale from the altar (London, 1636), p. 27. An almost identical claim, but applied only to cathedrals, is in Heylyn, Briefe and moderate answer, p. 175.

61 D. Lepine, A brotherhood of canons serving God: English secular cathedrals in the later middle ages (Woodbridge, 1995), pp. 11–13. The justification was from Ezekiel 16:44, ‘As is the mother, so is her daughter’.

62 Norfolk Record Office (RO), DCN 29/1, fo. 38v.

63 Prynne, Canterburies doome, p. 88; Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, p. 203; Heylyn, Coale, p. 27; R. T., De templis (London, 1638), pp. 192–4; G. Bray, ed., The Anglican canons, 1529–1947 (Church of England Record Society, 6, 1998), p. 570.

64 R. Shelford, Five piovs and learned discourses (Cambridge, 1635), p. 20; B. Ryves, Mercurius rusticus (Oxford, 1646), ‘The preface’, in his Angliae ruina ([London], 1647), between pp. 202 and 203; Northamptonshire RO, Finch-Hatton MS 104, preserving only the chapter headings and subheadings of W. W.'s work. Fincham and Tyacke, Altars restored, p. 148 n. 58, suggest it may be by William Watts, prebendary of Wells; they date it to 1637x40. See also M. Godwyn, Articles to be inquired of in the arch-deaconrie of Salop (London, 1639), sig. b2r; and J. Pocklington, Altare Christianum (London, 1637), pp. 155, 159, 161.

65 C. Rogers, ed., The earl of Stirling's register of royal letters (2 vols., Edinburgh, 1885), i, pp. 73–4, 796–7, 800.

66 J. Williams, The holy table ([London], 1637), pp. 15–16, 182–3.

67 H. Burton, For God, and the king ([Amsterdam], 1636), pp. 158–61.

68 P. Smart, A short treatise of altars ([London], n.d.), sig. *. The book is without publication date but is usually assigned to 1643. The title page states that it was written in 1629, though the preface, from which this quotation is taken, is later, certainly after 1633 (for it refers to Laud as archbishop of Canterbury). The preface was probably written when Smart was released from gaol in 1640, and the book published soon after.

69 P. Smart, The vanitie & downe-fall of superstitious Popish ceremonies (Edinburgh, 1628), sig. [*4v].

70 P. Lake, ‘The Laudian style: order, uniformity and the pursuit of the beauty of holiness in the 1630s’, in Fincham, ed., Early Stuart church, pp. 165–81; Atherton, Ambition, pp. 58–61; Fincham and Tyacke, Altars restored.

71 BL, Add. MS 11044, fos. 247–9; G. Fleming, Magnificence exemplified: and the repaire of Saint Pauls exhorted unto (London, 1634), p. 40.

72 For cathedrals see Lehmberg, Cathedrals under siege, pp. 4, 11, 17–22, and Parry, Arts, pp. 46–58; for parish churches, see A. Foster, ‘Church policies of the 1630s’, in R. Cust and A. Hughes, eds., Conflict in early Stuart England (Harlow, 1989), pp. 201–3.

73 For that drive see Crankshaw, ‘Community, city and nation’, pp. 57–60, and G. Higgott, ‘The fabric to 1670’, in Keene et al., eds., St Paul's, pp. 171–82.

74 Hampshire RO, 21M65/A1/31, fos. 13v–14v; TNA, SP16/195/31, fos. 94–5.

75 ‘Upon his Majesties Repairing of Pauls’ (1635), in E. Waller, Poems, ed. G. T. Drury (London, 1893), p. 17.

76 Fleming, Magnificence exemplified, p. 48. For similar ideas see also H. Farley, The complaint of Pavles (London, 1616); TNA, SP16/257, fo. 186r; J. Clifford, The divine services and anthems (2nd edn, London, 1664), ‘The preface’.

77 Foster, ‘Dean and chapter’, pp. 87–90; Carlisle RO, D&C 1/7, fo. 38v. See also Lehmberg, Cathedrals under siege, p. 12.

78 D. H. Fleming, The Reformation in Scotland (London, 1910), pp. 364–8, 607–8; G. Martine, Reliquiæ Divi Andreæ (St Andrews, 1797), p. 178; Galloway, Cathedrals of Scotland, p. 162.

79 Rogers, ed., Stirling's register, i, pp. 73–4, ii, pp. 471, 769–70, 841–2; Galloway, Cathedrals of Scotland, pp. 37–8, 119.

80 R. Stalley, ‘The 1562 collapse of the nave and its aftermath’, in Milne, ed., Christ Church, pp. 218–34; W. Knowler, ed., The earl of Strafforde's letters and dispatches (2 vols., London, 1739), ii, pp. 101, 157, 169; Diamond, ‘Cathedral system’, pp. 120–1; Calendar of state papers, Ireland, 1625–1632, pp. 286–7.

81 Knowler, ed., Letters, ii, pp. 101, 120, 132, 138, 158. See Diamond, ‘Cathedral system’, pp. 112–19, for the state of Ireland's cathedrals.

82 T. W. Jones, ed., A true relation of the life and death of the right reverend father in God William Bedell (Camden Society, second series, 1872), p. 149; Trinity College, Dublin, MS 1188, fo. 17v; Galloway, Cathedrals of Scotland, especially pp. 3, 37–8, 47, 60, 85, 91, 119, 128, 162; McRoberts, D., ‘Material destruction caused by the Scottish Reformation’, Innes Review, 10, (1959), pp. 126–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

83 Collinson, ‘Protestant cathedral’, p. 156; A. W. Goodman and W. H. Hutton, eds., The statutes governing the cathedral church of Winchester given by King Charles I (Oxford, 1825), p. 1; BL, Add. MS 11051, fo. 198v.

84 Lambeth Palace Library, MS 2016, fo. 28r; Westminster Abbey Library, Muniment Book 15, fo. 93v; see also BL, Sloane MS 2596.

85 W. Somner, The antiquities of Canterbury (London, 1640), especially pp. 169–70, 174, 177–8, 181. For early guides to cathedral epitaphs see W. Camden, Reges, reginae, nobiles, & alij in ecclesia collegiata B. Petri Westmonasterij sepulti (London, 1600), and H. Holland, Monumenta sepulchraria Sancti Pauli (London, [1614]).

86 Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, pp. 119–20; [R. Hegge], The legend of St. Cuthbert with the antiquities of the church of Durham (London, 1663).

87 J. Row, The history of the Kirk of Scotland, ed. D. Laing (Wodrow Society, Edinburgh, 1842), p. 369; Collinson, ‘Protestant cathedral’, p. 184; Galloway, Cathedrals of Scotland, p. 47. Cosin had been charged in 1630 with branding the Reformation ‘a Deformation’: G. Ornsby, ed., The correspondence of John Cosin (2 vols., Surtees Society, 52, 55, 1869–72), i, p. 164.

88 Ryves, Angliae ruina, p. 204; J. Weever, Ancient fvnerall monvments (London, 1631), p. 198; Somner, Canterbury, p. 164. For Erasmus's words in his Colloquy on pilgrimage (tanta majestate sese erigit in coelum ut procul etiam intuentibus religionem incutiat), see D. Erasmus, Colloquiorum (London, 1631), p. 300.

89 W. S. Simpson, ed., Documents illustrating the history of St Paul's Cathedral (Camden Society, second series, 26, 1880), p. 135.

90 Rogers, ed., Stirling's register, ii, p. 684.

91 I. Atherton, ‘The dean and chapter, Reformation to Restoration: 1541–1660’, in P. Meadows and N. Ramsay, eds., A history of Ely Cathedral (Woodbridge, 2003), p. 176.

92 Eward, ed., Gloucester Cathedral chapter act book, p. 77; Laud, Works, v, p. 324, vii, pp. 595–7; HMC, Fourth report, pp. 130, 144; HMC, Report on the manuscripts of Wells Cathedral (London, 1885), p. 256; Worcester Cathedral Library, A75, fo. 120r.

93 Simpson, ed., St Paul's Cathedral, pp. 131–3; HMC, Fourth Report, pp. 135, 138; S. R. Gardiner, ed., Reports of cases in the courts of star chamber and high commission (Camden Society, second series, 39, 1886), p. 280; Calendar of state papers, Ireland, 1633–1647, p. 31.

94 TNA, SP16/239/56, fo. 71; SP16/240/10, fo. 35; National Library of Scotland, Wodrow MS Quarto ix, fo. 407v; G. Cobb, English cathedrals: the forgotten centuries (London, 1980), p. 124; H. R. Trevor-Roper, Archbishop Laud, 1575–1645 (London, 1940), p. 123.

95 Merritt, ‘Cradle of Laudianism?’, p. 629 n. 24; Worcester Cathedral Library, A75, fo. 107r; Prynne, Quench-coale, p. 197.

96 Gloucestershire RO, D936/A1/2, p. 67; Prynne, Antipathie, p. 292, sig. ¶¶2v.

97 A. Erskine, V. Hope, and J. Lloyd, Exeter Cathedral: a short history and description (Exeter, 1988), pp. 57–8, 147; M. Swanton, ed., Exeter Cathedral: a celebration (Exeter, 1991), pp. 217, 219.

98 George Herbert reportedly claimed that his attendance at Salisbury Cathedral ‘was his Heaven upon Earth’. I. Walton, Lives (London, 1670), ‘The Life of Mr. George Herbert’, p. 60.

99 This paragraph is indebted to J. Saunders, ‘English cathedral choirs and choirmen, 1558 to the civil war: an occupational study’ (Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge, 1996), ch. 1.

100 J. Bridges, A defence of the gouernment established in the Church of Englande (London, 1587), p. 645; The praise of mvsicke (Oxford, 1586), p. 151.

101 T. Morley, A plaine and easie introduction to practicall musicke (London, 1597), p. 179; see also BL, Royal MS B xix.

102 A. Willet, Harmonie in the seconde booke of Samuel (Cambridge, 1614), pp. 32–3; idem, Thesaurus ecclesiae (Cambridge, 1604), p. 132. For the attack on music see P. A. Scholes, The puritans and music (London, 1934).

103 I. Payne, The provision and practice of sacred music at Cambridge colleges and selected cathedrals, c. 1547–c. 1646 (London and New York, NY, 1993), pp. 66–78; Lehmberg, Cathedrals under siege, p. 181; Parry, Arts, p. 169; S. Bond, ed., The chapter acts of the dean and canons of Windsor (Windsor, 1966), pp. 71–2, 77; W. D. Peckham, ed., The acts of the dean and chapter of the cathedral church of Chichester, 1545–1642 (Sussex Record Society, 1959), pp. 190–1, 207–9.

104 F. Robartes, Gods holy house and service (London, 1639), p. 55.

105 BL, Add. MS 4794, fo. 476; Add. MS 11273.

106 Representative Church Body Library, Dublin, C6/1/7/2, fos. 31r–33r; B. Boydell, ed., Music at Christ Church before 1800 (Dublin, 1999), pp. 71–4, 96–7.

107 Diamond, ‘Cathedral system’, pp. 58, 221.

108 Payne, Provision and practice, p. 80; Lehmberg, Cathedrals under siege, pp. 181–2; Bond, ed., Chapter acts of the dean and canons of Windsor, pp. 175–7, 179–80; Parry, Arts, p. 170; TNA, PROB11/173, fo. 213v; Reynolds, Godly reformers, p. 262.

109 C. Butler, The principles of musik (London, 1636), p. 112; Sanders, ‘English cathedral choirs’, pp. 48–9, 52–5; Ornsby, ed., Correspondence of Cosin, i, pp. 200–2.

110 Lambeth Palace Library, MS 2016, fos. 25–34; TNA, SP12/146, fo. 236; Westminster Abbey Library, Muniment Book 15, fo. 93.

111 J. Browning, Concerning pvblike prayer (London, 1636), p. 124; R. Tedder, A sermon preached at Wimondham in Norfolke (London, 1637), pp. 12–13; J. Swan, A sermon (London, 1639), pp. 11, 15.

112 Tedder, Sermon, pp. 13–15; Swan, Sermon, p. 14; Lake, ‘Laudian style’, pp. 168–9.

113 Worcester Cathedral Library, A75, fo. 102r.

114 Shelford, Discourses, p. 45, referring to Exodus 29:42, ‘This shall be a continual burnt offering … at the door of the tabernacle … where I will meet you, to speak there unto thee.’

115 BL, Add. MS 11044, fos. 247–9; H. Farley, St. Pavles-chvrch her bill for the parliament (1621), sigs. Br–B2v, B3; Fleming, Magnificence exemplified, pp. 38–9.

116 Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson C 368, fo. 2r; MS Tanner 68, fos. 82r, 167r, 336v.

117 Tedder, Sermon, p. 16.

118 A copy of the king's order survives at most cathedrals, e.g. Lichfield RO, D30/2/1/5, fo. 10r, Carlisle RO, D&C 1/6, pp. 392–3; Eward, ed., Gloucester Cathedral chapter act book, pp. 70–1.

119 TNA, SP16/255/2, SP16/295, fo. 142.

120 HMC, Fourth Report, p. 146; Collinson, ‘Protestant cathedral’, pp. 189–90; Worcester Cathedral Library, A75, fo. 132r; Eward, ed., Gloucester Cathedral chapter act book, p. 78; Laud, Works, v, p. 456, vi, pp. 403–4, 601, vii, p. 257; K. Fincham, ed., Visitation articles and injunctions of the early Stuart church (2 vols., Church of England Record Society, 1, 5, 1994–7), ii, pp. 168–70; Nottinghamshire Archives, SC/01/78/4–5, SC/01/78/21.

121 Laud, Works, v, pp. 454–5, 482–4, 486, 488–9, 491, 494, vii, pp. 215–16, 497–8.

122 Representative Church Body Library, Dublin, C6/1/7/2, fo. 42v.

123 National Library of Wales, LL/Ch/495; Peckham, ed., Acts of the dean and chapter of the cathedral church of Chichester, p. 207; Norfolk RO, NCR 9i/10.

124 Foster, ‘Church policies’, pp. 204–5; Marsh, C., ‘Sacred space in England, 1560–1640: the view from the pew’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 53 (2002), p. 296CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

125 J. Crawford and R. Gillespie, eds., St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin: a history (Dublin, 2009), pp. 183–4, 222–3.

126 HMC, Dean and chapter of Wells, ii, p. 422; Notestein and Relf, eds., Commons debates, p. 144. Men and women were conventionally (but not universally) separated in church seating: Marsh, C., ‘Order and place in England, 1580–1640: the view from the pew’, Journal of British Studies, 44 (2005), p. 10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

127 K. Edwards, The English secular cathedrals in the middle ages (2nd edn, Manchester, 1967), pp. 97–134; TNA, SP16/274/41, fos. 93–4; Laud, Works, v, pp. 319, 325.

128 W. Laud, The history of the troubles and tryal, ed. H. Wharton (London, 1695), pp. 68–9, 306; Saunders, J., ‘The limitations of statutes: Elizabethan schemes to reform new foundation cathedral statutes’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 48, (1997), pp. 445–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Westminster Abbey Library, Muniment Book 14, fo. 2; Collinson, ‘Protestant cathedral’, p. 188; Goodman and Hutton, eds., Statutes; S. Lehmberg and G. Aylmer, ‘Reformation to Restoration, 1535–1660’, in G. Aylmer and J. Tiller, eds., Hereford Cathedral: a history (London, 2000), pp. 99–100.

129 Worcester Cathedral Library, A75, fo. 120r; K. Sharpe, ‘The image of virtue: the court and household of Charles I, 1625–1642’, in D. Starkey et al., eds., The English court: from the wars of the Roses to the civil war (Harlow, 1987), pp. 226–60.

130 Patterson, C. F., ‘Corporations, cathedrals and the crown: local dispute and royal interest in early Stuart England’, History, 85, (2000), pp. 565–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Estabrook, C., ‘Ritual, space, and authority in seventeenth-century English cathedral cities’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 32, (2002), pp. 593–620CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

131 C. P. Lewis and A. T. Thacker, eds., A history of the county of Chester, v (1): The city of Chester: general writing and topography (The Victoria History of the Counties of England, Woodbridge, 2003), pp. 109–12; P. Clark, ‘“The Ramoth-Gilead of the good”: urban change and political radicalism at Gloucester, 1540–1640’, in P. Clark, et al., eds., The English commonwealth, 1547–1640 (Leicester, 1979), pp. 167–87; Reynolds, Godly reformers; C. Cross, ‘Conflict and confrontation: the York dean and chapter and the corporation in the 1630s’, in Marcombe and Knighton, eds., Close encounters, pp. 65–6.

132 Cross, ‘Conflict and confrontation’, pp. 66–8; Trinity College, Dublin, MS 6404, fo. 117v.

133 TNA, SP16/316/8, fos. 11–12; Patterson, ‘Corporations’, p. 565. Worcester corporation received similar orders: TNA, SP16/389, fo. 189r.

134 Heylyn, Briefe and moderate answer, p. 175.

135 T. Park, ed., Nugae antiquae (2 vols., London, 1804), ii, p. 192; P. E. McCullough, ‘Andrewes, Lancelot (1555–1626)’, Oxford dictionary of national biography; Tyacke, ‘Andrewes’. For Laudians and their opponents on auricular confession, see Milton, Catholic and reformed, pp. 69–70, 72–5, 472–3.

136 See my forthcoming essay, ‘Cathedrals and the British revolution’, in M. Braddick and D. Smith, eds., The experience of revolution in Stuart Britain and Ireland (forthcoming, Cambridge).