Protestants: The Radicals Who Made the Modern World. Alec Ryrie

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       CHAPTER 5

       The British Maelstrom

      Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low. . . . And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed.

      – ISAIAH 40:4–5

      In the middle of the seventeenth century, the themes of Protestantism’s early history came together in a bloody, chaotic, and exhilarating symphony. They did so in an unlikely place: the island of Great Britain, which until then had played a supporting role in Protestantism’s drama. The island’s two kingdoms, England and Scotland, had both embraced the Reformation, allowing them to overcome their perennial mutual hostility. Since 1603, both realms had been subject to the same king. During the religious wars, both countries sent volunteers, money, munitions, and – occasionally – formal armies to the Continent, and England also completed a savage conquest of Catholic Ireland. But they managed to keep their wars at arm’s length. Spain’s attempts to bring the war to Elizabeth I’s England failed, most famously in the disastrous Armada expedition of 1588. From 1560, Britain enjoyed an unprecedented era of internal peace and of religious stability. After 1560, both kingdoms were more or less Calvinist, although the English church had retained some Catholic structures and a ceremonial streak in its worship. Religious debates in both countries could be lively, but they took place within a widely shared consensus, which included an almost universal commitment to the ideal of a comprehensive, national church.

      And yet, between 1637 and 1642, first Scotland, then Ireland, and finally England rebelled against their king, setting off two decades of war, political turmoil, regicide, and wave after wave of religious revolution. When the smoke finally cleared and the blood soaked away, the monarchy and the old churches were restored in the 1660s almost as if nothing had happened. In fact, the new beliefs that took shape in this crucible would make themselves felt around the world for centuries to come.

An Unlikely War

      The collapse during 1637–42 had many causes, most of them beyond our concern. The immediate disputes over a dysfunctional system of taxation were symptoms of a deeper philosophical conflict. A century earlier, England’s political classes had been utterly cowed by Henry VIII, but by the early seventeenth century they had turned mulish. Perhaps the turmoil of the Reformation and a series of nail-biting succession crises had convinced them that politics was too important to be left to kings. Perhaps Protestantism had simply corroded the ideal of obedience. For whatever reason, a broad class of gentlemen, merchants, and lawyers were newly willing to stand on their rights and answer back to their kings. James I, England’s king from 1603 to 1625, had been raised in Scotland’s bare-knuckle politics and had learned to use his royal dignity to face down his opponents, but he understood that asserting his divine right to rule was a political ploy. His son Charles I utterly believed it and had little interest in political realism. For all the deep forces at work, the most obvious cause of the disaster was his profound inadequacy as a ruler.

      Still, penny-pinching, idealistic legalism versus overweening, extravagant royal incompetence is the ordinary stuff of politics. What made this nasty brew toxic was religion. In both England and Scotland, royal power had long been associated with religious conservatism. King James had had his fill of assertive Calvinists as king of Scots, and when he became king of England after Elizabeth I’s death, he eagerly embraced the English church’s ceremonialist strand, especially its government by well-behaved bishops. Yet he still allowed room for “Puritans”, who thought the English Reformation was unfinished and who dreamed of completing it.

      King Charles shared his father’s opinions but not his caution. He exclusively promoted ceremonialist priests and bishops, many of whom denied the core Calvinist doctrine of predestination and froze out anyone who disagreed. Leading the king’s campaign was William Laud, bishop of London from 1628 and archbishop of Canterbury from 1633. Under Laud’s eye, a counter-revolution was imposed on English parishes: Communion tables dressed and railed like Catholic altars, choral music instead of simple metrical hymns, sermons downgraded in favour of liturgy, and set forms of prayer favoured over spontaneous outpourings.

      For a great many English people, all of these things smelled of “popery”: creeping re-Catholicization. Charles’s queen, a French Catholic princess, maintained her own Catholic chapel in the heart of London, and Puritans suspected her husband was likewise smuggling “popery” into the English church. Of course Charles denied it, but he would, wouldn’t he? Laud’s campaign awakened English Protestantism’s martyr complex. Puritans were being driven from office. In one notorious case in 1637, three outspoken preachers were imprisoned and had their ears cut off for defying the king. Meanwhile, Charles steadfastly refused to intervene in the Thirty Years War to save his suffering Protestant brethren in Europe. Was he, in fact, now the puppet of Catholic plotters?

      By the late 1620s, political trust had almost completely collapsed. A series of Parliaments clashed head-on with the king, until finally in 1629 Charles dismissed Parliament and set about governing without it. Which he could, but only as long as England remained at peace and could manage without the СКАЧАТЬ