ABSTRACT
Historians like Collinson and Tyacke have judged Archbishop Laud ‘the greatest calamity ever visited upon the Church of England’a because he disrupted the reformed consensus of the Church by rigorously imposing theological and ceremonial innovations. In their view, he enforced a theology opposed to traditional English Calvinism, a heightened emphasis on the sacraments and corresponding repression of preaching, and new structures and forms of worship that looked remarkably like a return to ‘popish superstition’ —railed altars rather than simple communion tables, for instance, and bowing at the name of Jesus. Their judgement is similar to that of seventeenth-century Puritans who were sure that Laud’s repressive enforcement of ceremony was misguiding the Church of England right back to Rome.
