While one can quibble over the exact verisimilitude of the widely known aphorism by H. L. Mencken that a Puritan is someone who possessed the “haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy,” the controversy over the Book of Sports, which spanned the reigns of James I and Charles I, encapsulates the zeitgeist of this culture of protest. Alistair Dougall's The Devil's Book: Charles I, the Book of Sports and Puritanism in Tudor and Early Stuart England provides a long overdue and excellent contribution to our enriched perspective on this acrimonious and intensely negotiated realm of cultural orthodoxy and political expediency surrounding the idea, simply put: whether playing sports on Sundays constituted a licit form of recreation.
A comment or two on the structure of the book and how that manages to enhance our understanding of the complex layers of this debate are apropos. Dougall offers a three-page chronology, which traces the roots, not only to the immediate theological issues of Sabbatarianism at hand, but also, more crucially, to the larger question of Erastianism and the role of the Head of State as the pontificator and promulgator of religious doctrine and political allegiance thereto. Thus, we have the 1543 publication of The King's Book as the requisite predecessor of the Book of Sports. Then we have the 1584 Elizabethan veto of the Sabbath observance bill, bucking the truculent encroachment of radical Sabbatarians upon royal prerogatives on the shape of calendrical piety. Then we have the tussle between Parliament and James I, ranging from the latter's Declaration to his Subjects, Concerning Lawful Sports in August 1617 to Parliament's forceful passing of a Sabbath observance bill, only to be vetoed most unequivocally by James. The chronology of the head-spinning turn of events in 1633 is neatly presented in the chronology, again offering the reader an accessible entry into the religiopolitical issues at stake.
The key part of the authorial intent was to demonstrate the historiographical error of underestimating the significance of the controversy generated by the Book of Sports when “considering the religious and cultural divisions in English society during the reign of Charles I” (6). While Dougall's account is influenced by Kenneth Parker's The English Sabbath: A Study of Doctrine and Discourse from the Reformation to the Civil War (Cambridge, 1988), it seeks to correct a few interpretive vexations caused by Parker's thesis that the Sabbatarianism of Elizabethan and Jacobean radical Puritans was a continuation of the religious milieu of pre-Reformation England. Pace Parker, Dougall painstakingly shows that the innovators were neither James I, Charles I, nor Archbishop Laud. Rather it was the strict Sabbatarian Puritans for whom opposition to Sunday dancing, wakes, May games, and bowling became both a badge of honor and a shibboleth to assess the religious fervor of their anti-Puritan neighbor.
The cumulative effect of chapters 1–3 is to demonstrate, rather convincingly, that a rather porous membrane between calendrical piety and weekly recreation of ales and games existed as an indispensable accoutrement of late medieval religion in England (chap. 1); to show that even with the break with Rome, Henrician, Edwardian, and Marian regimes allowed for lawful Sunday sports vis-à-vis a spate of endeavors to stampede the continuation of the “profanation of the Sabbath” (chap. 2); and to show that Elizabeth followed this political arc of a laissez-faire approach. Dougall discusses the tantalizingly allusive (at least so in terms of what it teaches about the specific ways to rest and recreate on Sunday) text of Alexander Nowell's semiofficial Catechism and argues that Nowell's text cannot be used to buttress the widely held Sabbatarian convictions among the godly in Elizabethan England (chap. 3). Yet à la Parker, the 1580s and 1590s are duly noted as the period of heightened polemical exchanges and publication of jeremiads in which strictures around Sunday pastimes became both markers of true piety and signs of obstreperous merriment rudely halted. Chapter 4 sets the Jacobean context of the original Book of Sports as a historical backdrop for the forthcoming showdown in the Caroline period, the discussion of which forms the main part of Dougall's narrative (chap. 5).
Initially a measure to deal with the local Lancashire issue of circumventing the onerous Puritan meddling on Sunday pastimes by James I, the Book of Sports was published on 24 May 1618 for the entire nation. James sought to parry the blows of the Puritans by inscribing what could be done after Sunday service attendance in terms of “lawful” recreation. The real reason, as Dougall compellingly argues, for the publication of the 1618 Book of Sports had little to do with the trial of John Traske, the über-Sabbatarian and the radical preacher who wanted to restore Jewish ceremonial observances, as Kenneth Parker had argued. But the trial of Traske in June 1618 became the legitimating terminus ad quem of James's new policy, now nationally extended. As James and theologians in service of his cause connected strict Sabbatarianism with vestigial elements of fastidious Judaistic observance, and established it as a subverter of peace, it was hardly a surprise that many Puritans, in Lancashire and beyond, saw the Book of Sports as James's willful turning of a blind eye to the potential decline of religion.
Stepping into the historiographical and historical debate as to who was more explicit (and who more complicit) in getting the Book of Sports to be republished, Dougall successfully disentangles the web surrounding the agencies between Charles and Laud, leading up to the 1633 publication. Dougall also persuasively shows a real Jacobean self-fashioning on the part of Charles I and how the republication reflects both the looming influence of James's policy on his son and the recalcitrant presence of this debate well into Charles's reign. Charles's sentiment in seeking to enforce the Book of Sports is nicely captured by Dougall: “Charles decided that he would not only reissue his father's Declaration but that, unlike his father, he would have it enforced and ensure that it was published in parish churches across the land. Charles was well aware of the power of the pulpit, and told his son many years later that ‘people are governed by the pulpit more than the sword in times of peace’” (123).
As parliamentary records indicate, even after an eleven-year hiatus, MPs were eager to engage the controversial topic of the Book of Sports when the Short Parliament first sat in April 1640. Both Francis Rous and John Pym, along with Sir Walter Earle, excoriated the unjust and inordinate nature of punishment meted out to the nonconforming ministers, and even after the Long Parliament began, the rancor around this Book had not subsided, quite conversely so, in fact. Thus on 8 September 1641, the Commons resolved to quash the Book of Sports, averring that “the Lord's day should be duly observed and sanctified; that all dancing, or other sports either before or after divine service, be foreborne and restrained” (149). The most spectacular act of defiance against royal prerogative was the burning of the Book of Sports on 10 May 1643, by the order of Parliament. Therefore, Dougall has portrayed the cultural, religious, and political significance of the Book of Sports as simultaneously a precipitating cause of the Civil War in England and a symbolic effect of the Parliament's untrammeled opposition to the religious and social policies of Charles I and his Archbishop William Laud.
