ABSTRACT
One of the historical issues that has been most heatedly debated in recent years
is the nature of the Church of England in the century between the break with
Rome and the civil wars of the 1640s. At the centre of this controversy have
been the arguments of Nicholas Tyacke, especially because of the way they
have been developed by Conrad Russell. What Tyacke claimed, first in an
Oxford D.Phil. thesis submitted in 1968, then in an influential article published
in 1973 and most recently in the book of his D.Phil. thesis, The Anti-Calvinists,
published in 1987, was that the dominant doctrine in the early seventeenth-
century Church of England was predestination, the belief that God had chosen
some men to be saved but that most would be damned. Tyacke went on to claim
that that belief was vigorously challenged by a group of Arminians, notably
William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1633, who allegedly followed
the teaching of the Dutch theologian Arminius (d. 1609) that Christ had died for
all men and that men could in practice use their free will to seek salvation. The
Arminians’ attack, supported by King Charles I, bitterly divided the Church of
England, both clergy and laymen, and has been seen as the key to understanding
the civil wars of the 1640s, which John Morrill has called England’s ‘wars of
religion’.2
