Crown Under Law by Rosenthal Alexander S

Author:Rosenthal, Alexander S. [Rosenthal, Alexander S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781461633280
Publisher: Lexington Books, a division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2013-07-10T16:00:00+00:00

PURITANS, LAUDIANS, AND LATITUDINARIANS

Equally natural were those opponents of absolute monarchy before, during, and after the civil war, who saw fit to emphasize precisely those aspects of Hooker’s political theory that sought to limit the prerogatives of the Crown. Thus, what emerges especially during the Restoration period is the construction of a “Tory” Hooker, and a “Whig” Hooker. Each side used for partisan advantage those aspects of Hooker’s thought that cohered with their own ideas and purposes, while deliberately playing down those aspects that did not. The formation of these highly distinctive and partisan readings of Hooker has their early roots in the period of religious controversy leading up to the civil war. By the 1630s, at least three ecclesiastical factions had emerged: the Puritans, who hoped to implement a strict Calvinist reform of the Church; the Laudians, who insisted forcefully on conformity to the established liturgy and doctrine; and what we might describe as the Latitudinarian camp, who hoped a theological compromise could still be achieved, and civil war avoided. All three factions made some use of Hooker in support of one or another of their objectives. It was the ultimate failure of the Latitudinarian project that led to the polarization of English religion and politics into two contending factions.

Among the conformists of the early seventeenth century, the most prominent English religious leader in the period immediately preceding the civil war was William Laud, who became the Archbishop of Canterbury under Charles I in 1633. Possessed of strong “High Church” sensibilities, Laud was viewed as a crypto-Catholic by his Calvinist opponents. For his part, Laud was intolerant of Puritanism and was determined to put an end to the controversy over the government and ritual of the Church of England. Laud’s chosen method was to enforce a stern ecclesiastical discipline that included extensive use of the Court of High Commission, the court that insured religious conformity through judicial penalties and to which was delegated the fullness of the Crown’s ecclesiastical authority. Under Laud’s direction, the High Commission proceeded to impose rigorous censorship against the printing of Puritan tracts under a law that required all books published in England to have the approval of an Archbishop. In some cases, authors of hostile pamphlets were cruelly punished, as in 1637 when the dramatist William Prynne, the doctor John Bastwick, and the clergyman Henry Burton, were publicly pilloried and their ears cut off.

Laud furthermore established his authority by the device of the Metropolitan Visitation, which gave to Laud a direct universal jurisdiction over every parish in England. Under this stewardship, the forms of worship were scrutinized to ensure their conformity with the official rubrics, and preachers suspected of Calvinist sympathies were silenced and/or removed. These measures aroused no little disquiet in the Puritan party; some of whom responded by seeking an exodus to the nascent English colonies in America, while others were motivated increasingly to consider open rebellion.

Although the The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity was not as central to the theology of William

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.