ABSTRACT
The years of the English Revolution were a dark time for the loyal sons of the Church of England. With church lands sold, episcopacy outlawed and the dwindling number of bishops withdrawing further into solitude, the prospects looked bleak to Henry Hammond, one of Charles I’s former chaplains. His friends and allies were abandoning the church of their youth; some embraced the Catholic Church while others remained content to accept whatever religious settlement was imposed upon England. At the nadir of the Church’s fortunes, in 1654, Hammond confided his fear to his friend Gilbert Sheldon that, unless things changed, ‘it is to little purpose what any write in defence of it [our church]. It will soon be destroyed’.1 Yet, as I will show in this essay, such pessimism hardly does justice to Hammond’s efforts not only to preserve but even to recreate the Church of England. In response to the twin challenges of exile and apostasy, Hammond and his circle began to lay new foundations for the Church, foundations which would be essential to the Anglicanism of the Restoration and beyond. The royalist experience of exile, from England and from the centre of political power, brought new challenges for those who would defend the English Church. As his English friends left their native church, distanced from it geographically and disillusioned with it intellectually, Hammond countered with a new, robust vision of the Church.
