Chapter 11 - Episcopalian Royalism in the 1650s

Summary

It is customary for the 1650s to be portrayed as a time when disenfranchised ‘Anglicans’ heroically maintained their church’s practices and beliefs unchanged. This chapter presents a rather different and ambiguous picture: some episcopalian royalists undoubtedly imitated the actions of puritan separatists in shunning local services, but the image of principled ‘Anglicans’ fleeing into the wilderness is shown to have been a popular trope rather than an accurate account of what was a far more messy and changing picture of partial compliance with the authorities, where preaching rather than Prayer Book usage played the key role in maintaining the episcopalian royalist identity. The second section of the chapter studies how the episcopalians of the 1650s located themselves vis-�is the pre-war church, and identifies a notable range of opinions concerning earlier Reformations, the Elizabethan and Jacobean Churches, and relations with the foreign Reformed Churches. A third section studies the remarkably rich new thinking in episcopalian circles in these years on a whole range of doctrinal, liturgical and ecclesiastical topics, partly reflecting the absence of any agreed arbiters of episcopalian orthodoxy. It is demonstrated that episcopalian divines showed a remarkable readiness to contemplate significant changes to the formularies of the pre-war church.