I ought to declare a tribal interest in Patrick Collinson’s latest instalment of collected essays: he and I both grew up in that unjustly overlooked and astringently beautiful county, Suffolk, which figures largely in his text. Our respective childhoods embraced the polarity of Suffolk religion in the mid-20th century: solid Prot, of course, but divided by the great contraries of Church and Chapel.
I was the parson’s son: on Sundays I sat in the Rectory pew in the chancel of our parish church, staring at the monument to one of my father’s predecessors, the Regency baronet who had turned a Tudor farmhouse into an elegant parsonage (rather faded in splendour since his day). By contrast, Collinson recites with deep relish his genealogy of purest Chapel, ready-made to alarm my youthful Anglican priggishness: Ipswich Bethesda Strict and Particular Baptist Church; Colchester Railway Mission; Great Barton Independent Chapel, plus an array of independent evangelicalism, Primitive Methodism, Quakerism.
John Calvin, a Godot-like absent presence in Collinson’s essays, might have discerned a divine calling in two such complementary childhoods, a providential designation as church historians of that now much-altered East Anglian world. He would also have been puzzled and saddened that the Elizabethan Reformation, of which (with reservations) he had high hopes, had split into two such opposed identities.
Nothing quite like it happened elsewhere in Europe, but the English pattern reproduced itself more dramatically and exuberantly in England’s cuckoo in the nest, the future United States of America, where Church (Episcopalianism) has been dwarfed by Chapel, the competing Protestant denominations of English descent. The great divide took place on both sides of the Atlantic within the century and a half, bounded by the Canterbury careers of Archbishops Thomas Cranmer and William Sancroft. Cranmer was at the centre of the untidy evolution of an English Reformation, melding the mediaeval dissent of Lollardy with new enthusiasms from mainland Europe; his martyr’s death at the hands of Queen Mary I was iconic of the Church of England’s deadly combat with Popery.
Sancroft, Charles II’s choice as Archbishop, was a paradox: one of that hard-principled group of High Churchmen largely responsible in the years after 1660 for creating an exclusive Anglicanism out of King Charles’s restored episcopal Church. In the process they created the category of Dissent out of Protestants who had mostly been content to remain within the national Church before the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642. Yet Sancroft himself ended up as a very Strict and Particular sort of Dissenter: a ‘Non-Juror’, so-called because he would not break his oath of allegiance to James II, even though that doltish Roman Catholic monarch had done his clumsy best to reverse the whole English Reformation.
The paradoxes multiply, since Sancroft had previously led six of his colleagues in defiance of James’s tactless religious policies: these ‘Seven Bishops’ had made themselves national heroes, possibly the only time that this can be said of any group of bishops of the Church of England, after the fiery deaths of Cranmer, Ridley and Latimer in Oxford’s Broad Street. Yet nearly all of the Seven Bishops accompanied Sancroft into the ghetto of the Non-Juring Church.
Between these episcopal bookends, Collinson uses his characteristic brand of elegant humour and human sympathy to sketch the lineaments of that often misunderstood and maligned beast, the Puritan. More than any other modern historian, he has brought the Puritans home, back into the Church of England. They were the heirs of Cranmer and John Foxe just as much (if not more than) their contemporary foes Lancelot Andrewes or Richard Hooker, and certainly more than Archbishop Sancroft could claim to be. Admittedly, home was not always a comfortable place. Elizabeth I was mother of their Church, but she would have considered Puritans the equivalent of sulky adolescents around the house, tortured by identity crises, engendering much slamming of doors before tearful or grudging reconciliations. Yet as Collinson consistently demonstrates, rarely did Puritans leave home for good, until the whole overarching Church structure shattered into fragments in the English Civil War of 1640–46. When Puritans did gather with like-minded godly folk in what others disapprovingly called ‘conventicles’, often these were only just outside the back door of their ecclesiastical home: unwilling and indecisive dissenters.
Collinson paints an engaging vignette of one separatist minister, the majestically named Henoch Clapham, self-exiled to Amsterdam, staring glumly at his upper-room congregation of six, and coming round to the conclusion that Queen Elizabeth’s CofE wasn’t so bad after all. Clapham’s rueful account of this revelation would have been music to the ears of musical Archbishop Sancroft, but it transpired that a century after Clapham came back, Sancroft left — or in his eyes, as for many a separatist before him, the Church left him. But at least, like myself and Professor Collinson, the self-exiled Archbishop had the Suffolk countryside to console him.
Diarmaid MacCulloch is Fellow of St Cross College and Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford University. His most recent book is Reformation: Europe’s House Divided (Penguin/Allen Lane).
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