Godly Reformers and their Opponents in Early Modern England: Religion in Norwich, c. 1560-1643.

Marshall, Peter

Godly Reformers and their Opponents in Early Modern England: Religion in Norwich, c. 1560-1643. By Matthew Reynolds. Studies in Modern British Religious History 10. Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell, 2005. xvi + 312 pp. $90.00 cloth.

Historians of religious cultures in early modern England can loosely be divided into two camps: those who like to stress elements of consensus and communal harmony, and those whose attention is drawn to discord and division. Matthew Reynold's lively and engaging study of religious politics in Elizabethan and early Stuart Norwich belongs firmly in the latter category, it is his conviction that religious conflict was always liable to intense distillation in urban settings, and at the outset he warns readers that anyone predisposed to see the Church of England in this period as "characterised by a high degree of workaday consensus will no doubt come away from this study disappointed" (ix).

The religious history of England's second city in the immediate post-Reformation decades is hardly a neglected topic. It was a major theme of John Evans's Seventeenth Century Norwich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), which painted a picture of a self-contained urban community able to handle its own disputes. More recently, Muriel McClendon has argued that the city governors eschewed conflict and factionalism, and in the interests of civic order operated a system of de facto religious tolerance (The Quiet Reformation: Magistrates and the Emergence of Protestantism in Tudor Norwich [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999]). Reynolds will have no truck with any of this and makes a convincing case that the eventual "triumph" of godly Protestantism in Norwich was a much more divisive and contested process, drawing in outside agents and culminating in fractured political allegiances on the eve of the Civil War. The case is established in fine empirical style, with a detailed chronological reconstruction of successive microdisputes, threatening in places to overwhelm the inattentive reader in a welter of names and a tangled web of patronage, kin, and ideological connections. Divisions among Norwich clergy were endemic from the 1560s, when a clutch of conservatives and crypto-Catholics centered on the cathedral establishment. Meanwhile, ideological considerations colored the calculations of lay magistrates. The much vaunted 1570 scheme for poor relief devised by godly mayor John Aldrich, so Reynolds argues, aimed to put forward an explicitly reformed rationale for social welfare and challenge notions of merit and intercession. A measure of stability provided by the long incumbency of the Jacobean bishop, John Jegon, was undercut by a seemingly ineradicable tradition of separatism and dissent, stemming from the Brownist movement of the 1580s. Successor bishops were less acceptable to the godly. Samuel Harsnett (1619-29) was a ceremonialist disciplinarian who began the potentially explosive strategy of redefining Calvinism itself as doctrinal Puritanism. Local opposition led to the framing of articles against Harsnett in the parliament of 1624, for curtailing preaching and encouraging the erection of images. But this spectacularly backfired when James I stepped in to commend Harsnett "for thus ordering his churches" and commanded other bishops to do likewise. Even more pugnacious was the Laudian bishop, Mathew Wren, who between 1635 and 1638 enforced Caroline altar policy with such enthusiasm that his successor, long-standing bete noire of the godly, Richard Montagu, seemed conciliatory by comparison. In recounting these events, Reynolds rattles a succession of historiographical cages. Against the famous "Jacobean consensus," he seeks to demonstrate that disputes over church decoration informed religious faction fighting before William Laud's elevation to Canterbury. He reasserts, against the trend of some recent research, the fundamentally religious motivation of the "Great Migration" to America of the 1630s, and his reconstruction of the pulpit skirmishes between the Puritan William Bridge and the Arminian John Chappell gives the lie to Kevin Sharpe's suggestion (The Personal Rule of Charles I [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992]) that doctrinal issues, and debates about predestination in particular, were not really an issue in the parishes.

The book's most important achievement is to demonstrate a vigorous and persistent strain of religious conservatism in this most "godly" of English towns, transmuting by the 1630s into something that Reynolds christens "civic Laudianism." But what is the actual genealogy of this phenomenon? Reynolds is dismissive of Judith Maltby's identification of a stable tradition of moderate "Prayer Book Protestantism" (Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998]). Nor, though he himself identifies some links between Laudian supporters and recusants, is Reynolds much drawn to the suggestions of Christopher Haigh and Alexandra Walsham that the Caroline project managed to draw on long-standing reservoirs of crypto-Catholicism (Haigh, "The Church of England, the Catholics and the People," in The Reign of Elizabeth I, ed. Haigh [Basingstoke, U.K.: Macmillan, 1984]; Walsham, "The Parochial Roots of Laudianism Revisited," Journal of Ecclesiastical History 49 [1998]). Instead, Reynolds observes that Bishop Wren was "able to tap into a core of native sentiment out of alignment with the general direction of evangelical Protestantism'--a somewhat evasive formula (213). The notion that a variety of strands of anti-Puritanism could by the 1630s be channeled into support for Laud's reforms is an important and compelling one, though arguably the book could do more to establish the evolving lineaments of urban anti-Puritanism as a social and cultural phenomenon. It might also consider the possibility that some Norwich "Laudians" were simply jumping onto a political bandwagon.

Nonetheless, this is a very worthy, and noteworthy, contribution to the ongoing debates about the formation of religious allegiances in the years between Elizabethan Settlement and Civil War. As the book's conclusion is keen to point out, its significance is by no means limited to the world of Norwich studies and raises important questions about political and religious alignment in other urban communities. For decades now, historians of the period have been obsessed with identifying Puritans and defining "Puritanism." Readers of this fine study will emerge convinced that a no less important task is to continue probing the religious and political priorities of those we might just end up having to call "Anglicans."

Peter Marshall

University of Warwick, U.K.