The sources for investigating Laudianism and Puritanism in Essex during the 1630s and early 1640s are especially rich, illuminating the beliefs, attitudes and actions not only of clergymen but also of lay people from all social groups. The thesis begins with a general chapter in which the extent and type of evidence for Laudianism and Puritanism amongst the clergy is discussed. The reliability and accuracy of the sources is assessed and it is demonstrated that about equal numbers of beneficed Puritan and Laudian clergy are known to have been working in Essex at the outbreak of the English Civil War. Chapters two, three and four provided three individual case studies of clergy in order to provide a fuller understanding of Laudianism and Puritanism as they manifested themselves in the parishes of Essex. Chapter two examines the Laudianism and career of Richard Drake. As comparisons of his beliefs with those of other Laudians demonstrate, Drake was extremely representative of the Laudian movement. It is shown that Drake was typical too in confining himself largely to the company of other Laudians, and refusing in any way to accept the religious changes of the Civil War and Interregnum. The life and works of the Puritan clergyman Henry Greenwood, who started his career as a nonconformist but shortly before his death embraced the Prayer Book ceremonies, are central to chapter three. The close analysis of Greenwood's early published sermons vividly illustrate Puritan piety, painful preaching and the uncompromising faith of those who looked only to the Bible for guidance and authority. The examination of the tract written by Greenwood after his 'conversion' to conformity, on the other hand, provides an insight into the mindset of those Puritans who believed in wholehearted loyalty to the Church of England. Chapter four focuses on the life and beliefs of Nehemiah Rogers, who during a career that stretched from 1618 to 1660 changed his opinions on a number of religious and theological issues. Rogers began his career as a Calvinist and a moderate Puritan. Rogers remained a Calvinist until 1640 but by 1631 he had abandoned Puritanism become instead an enthusiastic advocate of conformity. Furthermore, during the 1630s Rogers forged close links with the Laudians William, Lord Maynard and Robert Aylett. During the 1650s Rogers changed his views again, becoming doctrinally Arminian and expressing admiration for the Protectorate. Chapters five and six furnish collective studies respectively of lay attitudes towards Laudian and Puritan ministers in Essex. From the evidence presented therein four main conclusions are drawn. Firstly, that Laudian ministers had supporters among the laity, and were certainly not as unpopular as John Morrill, for example, has suggested, but were opposed by Puritan nonconformists and Prayer Book Protestants. Secondly, that moderate Puritan clergymen also had supporters but that they faced levels of opposition similar to those encountered by Laudian ministers. Thirdly, that Puritan nonconformist ministers had a reasonable amount of identifiable lay support but that, even taking into account the fact that opposition to nonconformity is difficult to trace, were not as popular with the laity as historians such as T. W. Davids, Harold Smith and William Hunt have implied. Finally, it is concluded that substantial numbers of lay people from all social groups had definite, fixed opinions on religious issues and thus that even at a parish level religious controversy did not so much emerge during the Civil War as hold some responsibility for provoking it.

The "beauty of holiness," the ceremonialist agenda of the Laudians during the Personal Rule of King Charles I (r.1625-1649), was in many ways a serious shift from and challenge to the devotional and theological ethos that had dominated the Church of England since the 1570s. So stark was this shift that scholars today regularly cite the rigid enforcement of the "beauty of holiness" as one of the precipitating causes of the English Civil Wars that broke out in 1642. The rise of Laudianism, then, and its claim on the character of the nation's established church, the church's devotional life, and England's confessional identity, was no small matter. Perhaps the most understudied aspect of the Laudian movement was the way this circle of clergy argued that their program for the church was neither a challenge nor, for that matter, innovative. Recent historians have described how the Laudians used various rhetorical strategies to present their vision as perfectly orthodox, a mere restatement of old-fashioned principles and practices long enjoyed since the happy reign of Queen Elizabeth (r.1558-1603). Developing arguments from scripture, from the practice of the early church, or simply the more obvious need to worship God with reverence, the Laudians shifted their apologetic strategies depending on the moment. This project considers in detail a particular Laudian strategy - the appeal to precedents from the Elizabethan church. In addition to reflecting on the malleable nature of history in the early modern period and on the character of what one might call the rhetoric of conservatism, this project reveals the power of the image of Elizabeth Tudor in seventeenth century religious polemics. This dissertation is concerned not so much with Puritans, but rather with two groups who both claimed to be conformists and who both based that claim on adherence to Elizabethan principles. Both Laudians and, as one scholar describes them, "old style" conformists both claimed ownership of a legitimating Elizabethan past and thus ownership of a normative identity. At a broad level, my research seeks to understand a moment of religious and social change and how that change was persistently negotiated by recourse to history. My goal is to consider the way the Laudians appropriated the image of Elizabeth for their own designs. This examination does not end with the reign of Charles, however. The Laudian claim of true conformity and denial of innovation did not end when civil war erupted in 1642 or even when the king was executed in 1649. One finds this historical claim in the mouth of Archbishop William Laud at his trial for treason. Likewise, one finds during the Cromwellian Protectorate in the 1650s the rise of full historical enterprises, not simply the invocation of history in polemic. When the monarchy was restored in 1660, works by the Laudian historian Peter Heylyn were ready for Royalist consumption and, as one might suspect, they offer an interpretation of the past that legitimates the Laudian program and brands its opponents as foreign and dangerous. This type of literature was polemic under the form of history. Yet we cannot casually dismiss such arguments as simple propaganda. We must understand them instead as alternative readings of the past, stories that contemporaries told themselves and which worked to confirm a particular vision of the world. My project, in sum, will offer an assessment of the way historical claims functioned within the discourse of religious and political legitimacy at a time of intense religious and political strife. My concluding argument is that the tradition known as Anglicanism, while it had a long gestation, was born not in the reign of Elizabeth or even in the early Stuart period, but rather at the Restoration in 1660 when Charles II came to the throne and a particular vision of what it meant to be a loyal conformist achieved canonical status.

This thesis examines the life and works of the English Calvinist clergyman Daniel Featley (1582-1645) through the lens of various printed and manuscript sources, especially his manuscript notebooks in Oxford. It links his story and thought to the broader themes of early Stuart religious, political, and intellectual history. Chapter one analyses the first thirty- five years of Featley’s life, exploring how many of the features that underpin the major themes of Featley’s career—and which reemerged throughout his life—were formed and nurtured during Featley’s early years in Oxford, Paris, and Cornwall. There he emerges as an ambitious young divine in pursuit of preferment; a shrewd minister, who attempted to position himself within the ecclesiastical spectrum; and a budding polemicist, whose polemical exchanges were motivated by a pastoral desire to protect the English Church. Chapter two examines Featley’s role as an ecclesiastical licenser and chaplain to Archbishop George Abbot in the 1610s and 1620s. It offers a reinterpretation of the view that Featley was a benign censor, explores how pastoral sensitivities influenced his censorship, and analyses the parallels between Featley’s licensing and his broader ecclesiastical aims. Moreover, by exploring how our historiographical understandings of licensing and censorship have been clouded by Featley’s attempts to conceal that an increasingly influential anti- Calvinist movement was seizing control of the licensing system and marginalizing Calvinist licensers in the 1620s, this chapter (along with chapter 7) addresses the broader methodological issues of how to weigh and evaluate various vantage points. Chapters three and four analyse the publications resulting from Featley’s debates with prominent Catholic and anti-Calvinist leaders. These chapters examine Featley’s use of patristic tradition in these disputes, the pastoral motivations that underpinned his polemical exchanges, and how Featley strategically issued these polemical publications to counter Catholicism and anti-Calvinism and to promulgate his own alternative version of orthodoxy at several crucial political moments during the 1620s and 1630s. Chapter five focuses on how, in the 1620s and 1630s, the themes of prayer and preaching in his devotional work, Ancilla Pietatis, and collection of seventy sermons, Clavis Mystica, were complementary rather than contradictory. It also builds on several of the major themes of the thesis by examining how pastoral and polemical motivations were at the heart of these works, how Featley continued to be an active opponent—rather than a passive bystander and victim—of Laudianism, and how he positioned himself politically to avoid being reprimanded by an increasingly hostile Laudian regime. Chapter six explores the theme of ‘moderation’ in the events of the 1640s surrounding Featley’s participation at the Westminster Assembly and his debates with separatists. It focuses on how Featley’s pursuit of the middle way was both: a self-protective ‘chameleon- like’ survival instinct—a rudder he used to navigate his way through the shifting political and ecclesiastical terrain of this period—and the very means by which he moderated and manipulated two polarized groups (decidedly convictional Parliamentarians and royalists) in order to reoccupy the middle ground, even while it was eroding away. Finally, chapter seven examines Featley’s ‘afterlife’ by analysing the reception of Featley through the lens of his post-1660 biographers and how these authors, particularly Featley’s nephew, John Featley, depicted him retrospectively in their biographical accounts in the service of their own post-restoration agendas. By analysing how Featley’s own ‘chameleon-like’ tendencies contributed to his later biographers’ distorted perception of him, this final chapter returns to the major methodological issues this thesis seeks to address. In short, by exploring the various roles he played in the early Stuart English Church and seeking to build on and contribute to recent historiographical research, this study sheds light on the links between a minister’s pastoral sensitivities and polemical engagements, and how ministers pursued preferment and ecclesiastically positioned themselves, their opponents, and their biographical subjects through print.