CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Through the centuries, puritans have been made to wear many historicalmasks. The godly have sometimes been cast as self-righteous and hypocriticalbusybodies—intolerant, small-minded and repressive; at other points, theyhave appeared as champions of liberty, the heroic founding figures of a triumphantWhig-liberal narrative of progress and human freedom; in this century,they have not infrequently graced the scholarly stage as the insurgents of anew bourgeois order, the standard-bearers of a proto-capitalistic ethic destinedto cut the shackles of feudal bondage. In part because of this seeminglyboundless malleability, a number of modern commentators have come to regardthe admittedly amorphous categories of "puritan" and "puritanism"with a certain suspicion, some even going so far as to reject them as vague andmisleading vestiges of seventeenth-century polemical battles. Yet in spite ofsuch well-intentioned skepticism, the godly have continued to exercise a powerfulhold over scholars of early modern England, who remain plagued by anagging intuition that without "puritanism" (or some synonymous category),we cannot begin to explain the tumultuous political and cultural world of Tudor-StuartEngland.

The staying power of puritanism is in part a product of historiographicalfashion. The drive to destabilize, or even to banish, the category was pushedforward by the first wave of "revisionism" that swept through the field ofearly modern English history beginning in the late 1960s. One of the centralfeatures of the revisionist assault on Whig orthodoxy was an attempt todownplay the existence of ideological conflict in the century or so before theEnglish civil war. Where Gardiner, Notestein, Neale, and others had positedan escalating conflict over constitutional principles progressing hand-in-handwith a battle between a puritan "opposition" and an establishment Anglicanism,revisionists sought to lay down a picture of relative ideological homogeneity,stability and consensus. Crucial to this revisionist picture was the researchof Nicholas Tyacke, whose seminal work on Arminianism suggestedthat the Church of England prior to the reign of Charles I—far from representingan ideological via media between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism—hadin fact been dominated by a strain of evangelical Calvinism, a stateof affairs that was disrupted only by the rise of an aggressive anti-Calvinistmovement in the 1620s. His work had a double effect: it simultaneously underminedthe notion of a freestanding Anglican tradition, while likewise implyingthat "puritanism," if it existed at all, was merely the most fastidious oraggressive manifestation of a broader, consensual Calvinism that was sharedby the vast majority of early Stuart churchmen. Tyacke's conclusions wererapidly assimilated into the revisionist synthesis, most notably by Conrad Russell,who used Tyacke's arguments to downplay the existence of ideologicalconflict prior to the late 1620s, when Arminianism and fiscal breakdown weretaken to have produced ruptures that had not previously existed. So, too, inthe wake of Tyacke's work, a number of scholars—including Michael Finlayson,Paul Christianson, J. C. Davis and, at certain moments, Patrick Collinson—teasedout the implications of his thesis, arguing that the category of"puritanism" was at best overused, and at worst entirely incoherent, a fictioncreated by a combination of seventeenth-century polemicists and later historians.3 In recent years, however, "puritanism" as a concept has experiencedsomething of a historiographical renaissance, owing in no small part to whatmight be termed the "second generation" of revisionist scholarship. Havingoverturned the conflictual model of the Whigs, revisionist scholars foundthemselves at length forced to provide a positive explanation for the extraordinaryevents of the mid-century, leading many of them, including KevinSharpe, John Morrill, Peter White, and even Russell himself to seize upon religion,and more specifically upon a godly or puritanical movement to reformthe church, as perhaps the central ideological precipitant of the English civilwars. In this, revisionists appear to be joining hands with their "post-revisionist"critics, most of whom have never doubted the existence of significantreligious friction in the early modern period. Thus, although large differencesremain over details of interpretation, scholars appear to be convergingupon a major re-evaluation of the early Stuart period, one in which religiousfactors, and above all puritanism, will play a very substantial role.

Yet if this felicitous convergence can be explained partly by examining thefortunes of revisionism as a historiographical trend, it also owes much to theseemingly undeniable and inordinate role assumed by militant Protestants inthe cataclysmic events of the 1640s and 1650s. Beginning with Clarendon andHobbes in the seventeenth century, historians who have sought to come togrips with the massive upheaval of the English Revolution have returned againand again to puritans for insight and explanation. This is hardly mysterious.From the apocalyptic fast sermons of the Long Parliament, to the Root andBranch attack on episcopacy, to the iconoclasm of grassroots parliamentarysupporters, to the famed psalm-singing roundheads of the New Model Army,the upswell of resistance that led to the civil war had from the outset bornethe hallmarks of a rigorous and unyielding form of Protestantism. So, too, theRevolution is rightly linked in our minds with the strange and dizzying proliferationof sectarian groupings that emerged from the wreckage of episcopacy.Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists, Fifth Monarchists, Levellers, and Quakersall appear at least to have evolved out of what might be termed the leftwingof English Protestantism—the world of conventicles, scrupulous nonconformity,and committed, logocentric religiosity that contemporaries oftenbranded with the label "puritan." Indeed, it is in large measure because thesesectarian movements are so close to the center of the English Revolution—socrucial to what made the events of mid-century politically, religiously, and intellectuallyradical and unique—that the concept of puritanism has proved sodifficult to bury.

For all this, however, there has been surprisingly little substantive scholarshipdevoted to the process whereby these striking forms of social and religiousradicalism emerged from the bosom of pre–civil war puritanism. To put itanother way, although scholars now seem to agree as to the centrality of thegodly for our understanding of the civil war and revolution, we remain quiteignorant as to how, why, and under what circumstances the English puritancommunity splintered into numerous competing factions, many of them bearingideas of seemingly unprecedented social, political, or theological radicalism.The following book represents a first attempt to map out this complexand obscure process.

Two Puritanisms?

To more fully understand how and why such a gaping historiographicalvoid exists, we must turn to the work of the two greatest postwar scholars ofpuritanism, Christopher Hill and Patrick Collinson. Working from very differentperspectives, these two historians in many ways set the tone for the studyof English puritanism in the second half of the twentieth century. At the sametime, however, an examination of their scholarship helps to illustrate many ofthe puzzles and contradictions that have beset the field in recent years.

Hill, of course, is perhaps best known for the interpretation of puritanismelaborated in his seminal collection of essays, Society and Puritanism in Pre-RevolutionaryEngland (1964). Building on the insights of R. H. Tawney andother socioeconomic historians, but offering his own decidedly Marxian glosson the matter, Hill argued that puritanism represented the ideology of a newlyemergent bourgeois class. This ideology of "the industrious sort of people"stressed the virtues of work, excoriated the wickedness of the idle and able-bodiedpoor, and waged war on the irrational and festive habits of the Englishcountryside. It was thus very much a vehicle through which the "middlingsort" sought to discipline a recalcitrant, increasingly impoverished, and reluctantlower class, so as to create both a pliable workforce and an orderly societyat a time of great economic stress. Even as it worked to control the unrulyand disenfranchised poor, however, puritanism also looked "upward" in thatit sought to disassemble the increasingly precarious feudal structures that stilldominated the English church and state. Hence, puritanism was simultaneouslya force of repression (of the lower orders) and of revolution (againstfeudal landowners, monarchy and church). Armed with this multilayeredschema, Hill went on to interpret the mid-century upheavals as a bourgeoisrevolution, carried forward by a vanguard of musket-wielding puritans.

This picture, however, presented certain logical problems, for as Hill wasalways aware, the violent events of the revolutionary decades saw the emergencenot merely of a repressive, "bourgeois" puritanism, but also of a phenomenonthat might be termed "plebeian" puritanism. Neither the radicaldemands of the Levellers (whose ranks were swollen with sectaries of manydifferent persuasions), nor the profoundly disturbing and transgressive egalitarianismof the Ranters, nor the Christian communism of the Diggers couldeasily be explained away as manifestations of an ascendant bourgeois ideology.And in fact, far from seeking to explain away such figures, Hill embracedand celebrated them, holding them up as founders of an ongoing, continuoustradition of British radicalism stretching from the seventeenth century to thenineteenth. This project reached its high point in his famed study, The WorldTurned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (1972).Here, Hill sought to provide a comprehensive survey of mid-century sectarianism,in all its colorful and outrageous splendor. In the same pages, however,he tacitly revealed that he was himself aware of the potential contradictionimplicit in his own work. For if the disciplinary rigor of puritanism embodiedthe revolutionary aspirations of the "middling sort," how had the same puritanismproduced the equally revolutionary, but scarcely bourgeois, ideology ofthe lower orders?

Even in his early work, Hill appears to have been cognizant of this tension,leading him to suggest at times that during the course of the revolution, thedisenfranchised and the poor had seized upon certain aspects of puritanthought and deployed them for their own, counter-bourgeois ideological purposes.By the time of the publication of The World Turned Upside Down,however, Hill appears to have adopted a rather different approach to theproblem. While still clinging to the notion that the lower orders had appropriatedand molded certain aspects of the puritan heritage, he now hinted thatthe radicalism of the 1640s and 1650s had grown in large part out of ongoingtraditions of sectarian religiosity that had subsisted at the edges of English societysince the Reformation (or earlier), surviving especially among themasterless and poor men of the highlands, the forests, the fens, and other culturallyand economically marginal regions of the country. This argument,muted in the book, would be elaborated more explicitly and forcefully in his1978 article "From Lollards to Levellers." Drawing upon the apparent persistenceof various forms of rural dissent in these specific regions, Hill now hypothesizedthat there might have been a genealogy of plebeian heresy and rebelliousnessthat began with pre-Reformation Lollardy, mutated into muchpersecuted forms of heterodox Protestantism—the Marian Free-willers, Familists,Grindletonians, and various flavors of separatist—only to flower againduring the Revolution. Such an account preserved Hill's "bourgeois puritanism"while explaining the existence of an apparently separate and distinctive"radical puritanism," which represented the interests of the lower orders ofsociety. Despite its bold scope, Hill's sweeping hypothesis found no championsand few critics, primarily because such claims are profoundly difficult totest against the historical record. The consequence, perversely, was that themost illustrious scholar of English radical religion had provided a daring butspeculative account of the origins of that radicalism that was not obviouslyverifiable.

Understandably, then, both Hill and his would-be interlocutors were reluctantto pursue the matter much further, helping to ensure that the question ofthe origins of radical puritanism has remained largely unexplored over thepast three decades. At a more subtle level, since Hill's account tended to accentuatethe chasm between the repressive puritanism of the "middling sort"and the liberatory puritanism of the lower orders, neither he nor subsequentscholars have been inclined to investigate the connections between the two.The putative radicalism of the sectaries has been, as it were, sealed off fromthe main body of puritanism, thus leaving the precise relationship between thetwo largely unexamined. As a consequence, although a handful of scholarshave followed Hill in devoting time and energy to the study of the civil-warsects, his work has in certain respects had the paradoxical effect of closingdown some of the most intriguing questions surrounding the very radicalismhe sought to elucidate. This stands in stark contrast to his work on thebourgeois "industrious sort of people," which gave rise, directly or indirectly,to many of the most important and creative works of Tudor-Stuart social historywritten over the past four decades.

If Hill's research has thus left enormous unanswered questions about thenature of "puritanism," Collinson's work has probably done more than anyoneelse's to problematize the concept itself. A historian of a very differentmethodological temperament, one might say that Collinson has played fox toHill's hedgehog, combining the skills of a political historian and social historianof religion with a keen anthropological eye to provide a vision of thegodly that is at once more multifaceted and less amenable to straightforwarddescription than that of Hill. Where Hill consistently privileged the social underpinningsof puritan religion, Collinson has been rather more inclined totake puritans at their own word, accentuating the autonomous power oftheological or religious concerns in shaping the behavior of the godly. WhereHill used his puritans to construct a totalizing theoretical model that explainedthe entire period, Collinson's puritans have come to life in a piecemeal,almost fragmented, fashion, through a series of narratives, detailed casestudies and thematic essays that have incrementally, and not always straightforwardly,painted a rich, textured portrait of the godly community as itchanged over time. For Hill, class was always the preeminent analytical tool;Collinson, by contrast, tended to ground his puritans in the ebb and flow ofpolitics, as is most evident in his masterpiece The Elizabethan Puritan Movement(1967). This unparalleled piece of narrative history traced the originsand development of an impulse within English Protestantism for the furtherreform of the church, culminating with the story of the rise and demise of afull-blown presbyterian movement. Although not easily reduced to a pottedsummary, it could be said that The Elizabethan Puritan Movement tended, ingeneral, to emphasize the distinctive and disruptive aspects of puritanism as apolitical and social force. In this respect, it dovetailed with the then-regnantWhig interpretation of Elizabethan and Stuart political history (and perhaps,somewhat more obliquely, with Hill's newly promulgated Marxist interpretation).

Yet from another perspective, Collinson's meticulous researches tendedquietly to undermine those interpretations. As Peter Lake has put it, a closereading of The Elizabethan Puritan Movement "revealed the myriad ways inwhich the Elizabethan establishment was shot through with Puritan attitudesand personnel." As Collinson demonstrated, even troublesome nonconformistsand presbyterians could count on patrons and protectors in the highestechelons of Elizabethan government, including but not limited to luminariessuch as Leicester, Warwick, Walsingham, Mildmay, Knollys, Beale, and onmany occasions, Burghley himself. Similarly, and perhaps more surprisingly,Collinson found that many of Elizabeth's earliest bishops and churchmen—Parkhurstof Norwich and Grindal of Canterbury to name two of the more interestingcases—were themselves in sympathy with many of the basic aims ofthe so-called puritans. This suggested that the relationship between puritanismand the political and ecclesiastical establishments was in fact far more complexthan previous expositors had supposed.