ABSTRACT
While Sharpe’s focus is on Laud and his activities, Peter White’s is on theology and liturgical practice. The two agree, however, that blame for the religious division of the 1640s has been wrongly placed on Arminians. White is concerned in his book, Predestination, Policy and Polemic (1992), and in the following essay, to reject altogether the old model of polarity between Calvinist and Arminian, puritan and conformist, in favour of a broad religious spectrum on which no one group had a monopoly of middle ground. He finds that the old version derived less from reality than from seventeenth-century polemic (especially that of the puritan William Prynne). In fact, the middle ground was occupied by people as devoted to ‘puritan’ sermons as to ‘Laudian’ sacramentalism. To the extent that tensions existed over the doctrine of election, they were between two predestinarian factions and were primarily concerned with the centrality of the doctrine and whether it should be preached. White finds that the royal directives of the 1620s against preaching on predestination were not anti-Calvinist decrees, as Tyacke thought, but genuine attempts to silence the controversy about the doctrine that had grown in the wake of the Synod of Dort and the outbreak of the Thirty Years War. Enforcement of the policy, moreover, was even-handed, not biased towards Arminians. The peace of the Church was the central goal for the early Stuart kings and their bishops. They were determined to maintain the Church of England on its traditional ‘middle way’ between the extremes of puritanism and popery. When White turns to the 1630s, he identifies a newly rigorous enforcement of ceremonies and altar placement as the more divisive religious issue, and one not correlated to theological position. By 1640 he finds Arminianism no longer a real point of contention, even in Parliament. Predestinarian theology thus appears to have had nothing to do with the Civil War, the causes of which, for White, ‘remain elusive’.a
The essay below is a sustained attack on the position of Nicholas Tyacke and is best read in the context of Tyacke’s essay and the response to both by Peter Lake in Part III of this volume. Tyacke and White exemplify revisionists who heartily disagree not only with the received version, but also with each other.
