Chapter 36 - The Laudian Avant Garde

Summary

This chapter examines the cutting edge of Laudian theological, ecclesiological and liturgical experiment in Cambridge University during the 1630s. The protagonists here were mostly young men, anxious to push the envelope of the doable and the sayable, and in the process attract the approval of their superiors in the university and church. Moving on from the further reaches of Arminian theology they toyed with notions like justification by works and the necessity of confession to a priest, more and more elaborate decorations of college chapels, and more and more florid performances of what they took to be ceremonial decorum and their critics took to be popish superstition and idolatry. These antics attracted the opprobrium of the old university Calvinist establishment and the support of an emerging clique of Laudian heads of house. A dynamic emerged through which the Laudian agenda was pushed further and faster than some its leading lights, up to and including Laud himself, might have liked. This was a syndrome that continued to operate right up until the collapse of the personal rule in 1640/1.