Godly People

Abstract

For Anglicans the crucial happening in 1641 was the destruction of Laudianism. Away went censorship, away went Star Chamber and the Court of High Commission, away went imposition of oaths, away went searching visitations, away went the claim that bishops ruled by divine right — and away went the archbishop himself to a prison cell. Laudianism had perished; with indecent haste, Anglicans set about the task of burial. A solitary mourner was Joseph Hall: his writings, which were intended to be the classic apologia for Laudianism, became its epitaph.’ Later Laud’s biographer, Peter Heylyn, was to claim that the silence of Hall’s colleagues was prompted by a desire ‘not to robbe him of the glory of a sole encounter’.² This was pure fantasy: the characteristic feature of Anglican writing in 1641 is not chivalry but defensiveness. In the debate on the Root and Branch Bill in the Commons, Benjamin Rudyerd set the tone for the Anglican response when he disowned bad bishops such as Laud and his associates and at the same time pointed out that ‘we have some good bishops still, who doe preach every Lords Day’³ With pride, Rudyerd and other non-Laudians pointed to the contribution of the martyr-bishops in the past. Anglicans belatedly rediscovered Foxe. Puritans were unimpressed: witness the stinging attacks on the martyrs — and by implication on Foxe — in the writings of Milton, Prynne, Smectymnuus, Thomas and Fiennes in 1641.’