7 - Defining Church and Corporation: Corporate Towns and Religious Policy

Summary

In 1603, the mayor, aldermen, and commonalty of Salisbury petitioned King James, then passing through the city on his way to assume the English throne, for a royal charter of incorporation. The unincorporated city fell under the bishop's authority, a condition city fathers disliked. They conceived themselves to be the king's immediate deputies in that place, not the bishop’s, and they wished Salisbury to “be your highness's city and so called.” The magistrates sought an immediate connection to the monarch, unmediated by the bishop. It took years of petitioning, but in 1612 James granted Salisbury its charter of incorporation, redrawing civil and ecclesiastical boundaries and removing church officials from authority over the city. In 1632–33, the magistrates of Salisbury found themselves once again petitioning the monarch, this time King Charles, to plead for their city's liberties. The bishop, dean, and chapter sought to undo parts of the 1612 charter and restore ecclesiastical authority to the city. Desperate to stave off this reversal, but seriously hampered by charges of iconoclasm against their recorder, the mayor and aldermen appealed to the king to ignore “aspersions of inconformity” against them and keep the city's liberties as they were. Charles, however, advancing a vision of order that privileged ceremonialism in the church and ecclesiastical authority in government, reshaped the city's liberties and inserted the bishop, dean, and other ecclesiastical officials as justices of peace of Salisbury.

Salisbury's experience provides a useful window into relations between towns and the crown on the fraught subject of religion in the early Stuart period. Questions of jurisdiction as well as belief were central to the experience of religion in many towns, and the changing nature of royal policy produced new answers to those questions. Historians have increasingly come to see religion as a (if not the) key disruptor of order in this period, as beliefs fragmented and the monarchs attempted to impose their own constructs of belief and conformity, less flexible under Charles than under James. The extent to which the crown's religious regime was disruptive has long been a point of debate among historians. Studies of puritanism as a revolutionary force have given way to a focus on the impact of Caroline religious policy as a cause of conflict.