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“Orthodoxy” and Its Discontents: Dispute Settlement and the Production of “Consensus” in the London (Puritan) “Underground”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Peter Lake  and
David Como
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Extract

In this article we address the topic of intra-Puritan doctrinal debate and, by examining the mechanisms whereby the godly in the capital tried, if not to conclude then at least to control and ameliorate their in-house doctrinal disputes, to reconstruct some of the mechanisms—social, political, and ideological—whereby doctrinal “consensus” or “orthodoxy” was constructed, policed, and reproduced among the godly. Thus we hope to penetrate the shadowy world of what one might term the London Puritan underground. What emerges from this scrutiny is a world of interministerial dispute and rivalry, of lay activism, based on an urgent word and sermon-centered piety, that found its natural expression as much in the conventicle and the godly discussion group as in the public congregation and clerically delivered sermon or lecture. Here operated an overlapping series of networks of orally transmitted rumors and stories, of manuscript tracts and sermon notes, of conferences, conversations, and arbitrations both formal and informal. Here the reputations of the Puritan clergy were made and maintained, and the nature of orthodoxy debated and defined through mechanisms and exchanges that remain, for the most part, closed to us. This obscurity is not an accident. Only rarely did the interventions of authority or the anxiety or outraged amour propre of some wronged participant combine to leave traces, either in court records or the fulminations of the pamphlet press, of what appears to have been a very active underworld of dispute, discussion, and display.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 39 , Issue 1: Anglo-American Puritanisms , January 2000 , pp. 34 - 70
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2000

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References

1 For the court articles against Peter Shaw, see Public Record Office (PRO), SP 16/139/91, fols. 174r–177r. We have edited and commented at length on these documents in David Como and Peter Lake, “Puritans, Antinomians and Laudians in Caroline London: The Strange Case of Peter Shaw in Contexts” (hereafter cited as “Strange Case of Peter Shaw”), in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History (in press). That Shaw was tried and suspended may be inferred from Laud's comments during later proceedings against the antinomian minister, Samuel Pretty, in 1631, for which see Gardiner, S. R., ed., Reports of Cases in the Courts of Star Chamber and High Commission, Camden Society, n.s. (London, 1886), 39:185Google Scholar. For Shaw's career, see Venn, J. and Venn, J. A., Alumni Cantabrigienses (Cambridge, 1922–1927)Google Scholar, pt. 1, s.v. “Shaw, Peter”; also see the discussion in Como and Lake, “Strange Case of Peter Shaw.” Thus, while Stephen Denison's denunciation of Etherington, John, The White Wolf (London, 1627)Google Scholar, was published at the time, Etherington's counterblast only reached print in the form of two pamphlets published after the breakdown of censorship in 1640. So, too, it was not until after 1640 that the details of the Walker/Wotton dispute made it into print. See nn. 8, 35 below for further discussion.

2 By far the best evocation of that world is to be found in Seaver's, PaulWallington's World: A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth-Century London (London, 1985)Google Scholar, which can be supplemented by his earlier The Puritan Lectureships: The Politics of Religious Dissent, 1560–1662 (Stanford, Calif., 1970)Google Scholar. There are also some pathbreaking suggestions on the extent and nature of Puritan networks in early Stuart London in Tyacke, Nicholas, The Fortunes of English Puritanism, Friends of Dr. Williams Library Forty-Fourth Lecture (London, 1990)Google Scholar.

3 By far the most subtle and influential version of this vision of the early Stuart Church is to be found in Collinson, Patrick, The Religion of Protestants (Oxford, 1982)Google Scholar. Also see Lake, Peter, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Thus, even Etherington's coded familist message of 1610, his Description of the Church of Christ (London, 1610)Google Scholar, took the overall form of a piece of antiseparatist and Anabaptist polemic and in certain of its central passages even challenged the sincerity and reliability of conforming Puritan ministers, let alone their more overtly nonconformist or presbyterian colleagues, who were roundly denounced as a hypocritical threat to order in church and state.

5 See Hill, Christopher, Puritanism and Society in Pre-revolutionary England (London, 1964)Google Scholar. On the question of continuities between Puritanism pre- and post-1640 in its current historiographical setting, see the introduction by Peter Lake to the recent reprint of Geoffrey Nuttall's classic, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (Chicago, 1992)Google Scholar. Compare and contrast Hill, Christopher, The World Turned Upside Down (London, 1972)Google Scholar. Also see Tyacke, Fortunes of English Puritanism.

6 The course of the dispute was revealed to public view in a series of pamphlets published long after the event in 1641–42. Typically, George Walker started it with his Socinianism in the Fundamental Point of Justification Discovered and Confuted (London, 1641)Google Scholar. This provoked Wotton's son, Samuel, , and Gataker, Thomas to produce Mr Anthony Wotton's Defence against Mr George Walker's Charge … Written by Him in His Life Time … and Now Published out of His Own Papers by Samuel Wotton His Son Together with a Preface and Postcript … by Thomas Gataker (Cambridge, 1641)Google Scholar. This in turn led to Walker's second pamphlet on the subject, A True Relation of the Chief Passages between Mr Anthony Wotton and Mr George Walker (London, 1642)Google Scholar. Gataker, who had been a central figure in the dispute and took exception to Walker's version of it, replied again with his An Answer to Mr George Walker's Vindication (London, 1642)Google Scholar. Also see a pamphlet of 1679 by Gataker fils that printed further thoughts on the subject by Gataker père in An Antidote against Error Concerning Justification (London, 1679)Google Scholar.

7 At least three copies of Wotton's initial position paper survive, one among the papers of Samuel Ward, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, Ward Correpondence 0.11; one in a commonplace book of William Sancroft, Bodleian Library (Bodl.), Rawlinson MS D. 1331, fol. 75; and the third among the papers of Henry Airey, Trinity College Dublin, MS 233, fols. 62–90, which last manuscript contains a copy of the original document, a series of additions by Wotton dating from 1613, and an extensive syllogistic disputation between Wotton and an unnamed critic. The fullest manuscript account of Wotton's early position on justification can be found in his treatise on the epistle to the Romans, which was written between 1611 and 1614. A copy survives in Corpus Christi College, Oxford, MS 288, fols. 66–85.

8 For Gataker's earlier contacts and (amiable) disagreements with Wotton on the subject of justification, see Gataker, Thomas, Mr Anthony Wotton's Defence, pp. 7–8Google Scholar. For Gataker's further claim that Wotton had engaged in written dispute with a “Mr Woodcock” and a “Dr Brooks”—both in a “fair and friendly manner,” see Gataker, , An Answer, p. 66Google Scholar.

9 Walker, , True Relation, pp. 11–12Google Scholar.

10 Ibid., pp. 5–6. On the Vorstius affair and James's close personal interest in the subject of Socinian heresy, see Shriver, F. J., “Orthodoxy and Diplomacy: James I and the Vorstius Affair,” English Historical Review 85 (July 1970): 449–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Walker, , True Relation, pp. 5–6Google Scholar. From his own account it is clear that Walker was in London auditioning for jobs. On the prevalence of these unofficial household seminaries among the godly, see Morgan, J., Godly Learning (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 294–300Google Scholar. On Richardson's career and prominence among the godly, see Morgan, p. 296; and Sprunger, K. L., “John Yates of Norfolk,” Journal of the History of Ideas 37 (October–December 1976): 697–706CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For Wotton, see Dictionary of National Biography (hereafter cited as DNB). On the radical Puritan nature of Wotton's nonconformity, see an exchange between him and John Overall on the ceremonies in British Library (hereafter BL), Harleian (hereafter Harl.) MS 750, fols. 91–101. Also see Babbage, S. B., Puritanism and Richard Bancroft (London, 1962), pp. 78–79, 231–32Google Scholar.

12 Walker, , True Relation, p. 6Google Scholar.

13 Another apparent disciple of Wotton's was William Pynchon, who, drawing liberally on Wotton's ideas, would find himself accused of heresy in Massachusetts during the early 1650s. For personal ties between the two men, see Pynchon, William, The Meritorious Price of Man's Redemption (London, 1655), pp. 287, 382–83Google Scholar. On Pynchon, see Winship's, Michael article, “Contesting Control of Orthodoxy amongst the Godly: William Pynchon Reconsidered,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 54 (October 1997): 795–822CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see Walker, , True Relation, pp. 8, 11Google Scholar.

14 Walker, , True Relation, pp. 6–8Google Scholar.

15 Ibid., p. 14.

16 Ibid., p. 8. On Walker's insistent equation, from the beginning of the affair, of Wotton's opinions with those of Socinus see ibid., p. 6. On the burnings of Legate and Wightman for Arianism, see Jordan, W. K., The Development of Religious Toleration in England: From the Accession of James I to the Convention of the Long Parliament (1603–1640) (Gloucester, Mass., 1965), pp. 43–52Google Scholar.

17 On the Blackfriars incident, see Jordan, , The Development of Religious Toleration in England, pp. 8–9Google Scholar; on Spencer, see ibid., pp. 9, 12–13, 17; on the rumors about Walker, see True Relation, p. 14.

18 The text of the letter is reproduced in Walker, , True Relation, pp. 9–18Google Scholar; the threat of a heretic's death is on p. 18.

19 At this point in the proceedings the accounts of Walker and Gataker diverge. According to Walker, , True Relation, p. 19Google Scholar, Wotton approached the bishop through his chaplain, Henry Mason, to head off any official proceedings. On Gataker's account, see Mr Anthony Wotton's Defence, pp. 5–6; far from trying to sabotage an official hearing, Wotton rushed to the bishop to institute proceedings to clear his name and only accepted an unofficial arbitration, with the bishop's chaplain, Henry Mason, centrally involved, on Bishop King's insistence. Mason later dropped out, having been expressly requested by King James to “survey” “a book of Mr John White's ready to be published” (p. 8).

20 Walker's choices were William Gouge, John Downame, Richard Stock, and Richard Westfield. Wotton's choices were Thomas Gataker, John Randall, James Balmford, and William Hickes. Westfield subsequently dropped out and was replaced by Lewis Bayly, at whose church two of the meetings took place. See Walker, , True Relation, p. 19Google Scholar; and Gataker, , Mr Anthony Wotton's Defence, pp. 8–9Google Scholar.

21 Walker, , True Relation, pp. 19–25Google Scholar; Gataker, , Mr Anthony Wotton's Defence, pp. 9–39Google Scholar, which reprints in full Walker's accusations of Socinian error and Wotton's replies, together with the formal verdict of the panel.

22 Gataker, , An Answer, pp. 47, 63Google Scholar.

23 For the warrants for both Wightman's and Legate's deaths, see Phillimore, W. P., ed., An Index of the Bills of Privy Signet Commonly Called Signet Bills, 1584–1624, British Record Society (London, 1890), 4:xiiiGoogle Scholar.

24 This is the main purport of the later stages of Gataker's, An Answer, see esp. pp. 80 ffGoogle Scholar. But where Gataker chose to highlight the intemperance of Walker's language and conduct, and Walker's recourse to the bush telegraph of rumor and innuendo, Walker's own account of the affair, particularly in its early stages, accuses Wotton and his friends of using precisely the same sort of tactics against him. Also see Thomas Gataker to Samuel Ward, 13 February 1630/1, Bodl., Tanner MS 61, fol. 68r; and Gataker to Ward, 2 September 1631, Bodl., Tanner MS 71, fol. 102r–v.

25 For a very different use of the issue of antitrinitarianism as an excuse for an extended exercise in anti-Calvinist and anti-Puritan rant, equating Calvinism, in its locus classicus, the marginal notes in the Geneva Bible, with Socinianism, see a sermon delivered to the University of Oxford by John Howson, on the back of the Wightman affair, in 1612 in Bodl., Rawlinson MS D 320, fols. 46–65. See Cranfield, N. and Fincham, K., “John Howson's Answers to Archbishop Abbot's Accusations,” Camden Miscellany XXIX, Camden Society, 4th ser. (1987), 34:321–32Google Scholar. For the classic statement of the Calvinist consensus model, see Tyacke, Nicholas, “Puritanism, Arminianism and Counter-revolution,” in The Origins of the English Civil War, ed. Russell, Conrad (London, 1973)Google Scholar, and more recently, his Anti-Calvinists (Oxford, 1987)Google Scholar. For a further explication of “consensus” not as simple agreement but, rather, as a form of ideological hegemony and managed consent, see Lake, Peter, “Calvinism and the English Church,” and “Predestinarian Propositions,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 46 (1995): 110–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see, David Como, “Puritans, Predestination and the Construction of ‘Orthodoxy’ in Early Stuart England,” in Orthodoxy and Conformity in the Early Stuart Church, ed. Peter Lake and Michael Questier (in press).

26 Bradshaw, W., A Treatise of Justification (London, 1615)Google Scholar; see especially his preface to the reader. Entered in the Stationers' Register 3 April 1615 and licensed by “Master Sanford,” i.e., John Sanford, one of Archbishop Abbot's chaplains, see Arber, E., ed., A Transcript of the Register of the Company of Stationers (London, 1876), 3:260Google Scholar.

27 Gataker, , An Answer, pp. 73–74Google Scholar. A copy of Walker's attack on Bradshaw survives among the Hartlib Papers, Sheffield University Library, Hartlib Papers, MS 25/12.

28 Walker, , True Relation, pp. 24–25Google Scholar.

29 Ibid., pp. 33–34.

30 Ibid., p. 25.

31 Ibid., p. 4. It was, in fact, Walker's attack on Goodwin as a disciple of Wotton that provoked the pamphlet exchange between Walker and Gataker on which the above account is based.

32 In profession, at least, and seemingly in fact as well (unlike Wotton but apparently like Walker), Denison, a Cambridge man and the perpetual curate and lecturer at St. Katharine Cree throughout the 1620s, was a ceremonial conformist.

33 Denison, , The White Wolf, esp. pp. 33–34Google Scholar.

34 Etherington had published two previous pamphlets; the first was his Description of the Church, and the second, A Discovery of the Errors of English Anabaptists (London, 1623)Google Scholar, which appeared under the name of one Edmund Jessop but which, according to Denison (whose claims were not denied by Etherington), had been written by Etherington; see Denison, , The White Wolf, p. 45Google Scholar.

35 Etherington, John, The Defence of John Etherington against Stephen Denison (London, 1641)Google Scholar; The Deeds of Mr Denison a Little More Manifested by His Answer to the Defence of John Etherington (London, 1642)Google Scholar.

36 Denison, , The White Wolf pp. 34, 49, 50–51, 62–63Google Scholar.

37 Etherington, , The Defence, p. 16Google Scholar.

38 Ibid., pp. 13–14.

39 Ibid., p. 14; Etherington, The Deeds of Mr Denison, sig. A3v.

40 Etherington, , The Defence, pp. 13–15Google Scholar. This outline of events was confirmed by Denison himself, who allowed that it had been Etherington's complaints to the authorities about his sermon campaign against the box maker that had prompted him to demonstrate to the authorities “what just cause I had as a pastor to forewarn my flock of such seducers.” Denison, “To the Christian Reader,” in The White Wolf.

41 Etherington, , The Defence, pp. 26–27, 31, 11, 16Google Scholar.

42 Etherington lists the witnesses against him in The Defence, p. 3.

43 It was in part because of this defiance that he was returned to prison, where he spent much of the remaining three years, at one point petitioning the Parliament of 1628 for his release. See Johnson, R. C., Keeler, M. F., Cole, M. J., and Bidwell, W. B., eds., Proceedings in Parliament, 1628 (New Haven, Conn., 1977–1983), 3:146Google Scholar, a reference we owe to the kindness of Tom Cogswell. Etherington remained adamant throughout that the charges against him were false and was more than proud of the fact that he had never recanted. This, of course, was the point of his pamphlet campaign of 1641/2, for which see Etherington, The Deeds of Mr Denison, sig. A3v.

44 Central among Denison's contacts seems to have been Sir Henry Martin, who, in addition to his role in handling Etherington's initial complaints against Denison, also appears to have been instrumental in getting The White Wolf dedicated to the king. See BL Loan MS 29/202, a letter from Henry Martin to Sir Robert Harley of 11 April 1627, bound between fols. 211 and 223, a reference we owe to the kindness of Jacqui Eales.

45 For Cleaver and Stevens, see Denison, “To the Christian Reader.” For further reference to discussions between Etherington and Cleaver over the Sabbath, see Etherington, , The Defence, p. 32Google Scholar.

46 Denison, “To the Christian Reader”; Etherington, , The Defence, pp. 31, 22Google Scholar.

47 Etherington, , The Defence, p. 31Google Scholar, for public, not private, controversy; on soul murder and the threat of heresy, see pp. 15–16; on the necessity of condign punishment for heretical seducers, see pp. 30–31.

48 Etherington's views will be the subject of a full exposition and analysis in Lake, Peter, Chasing the White Wolf (Manchester and Stanford, Calif., 2000)Google Scholar, a projected analysis of the Denison/Etherington dispute, set in its long- and short-term, local and national, institutional and ideological contexts. See Etherington, Description of the Church, and for the long valedictory passage on the glories of H[enry] N[iclaes], pp. 115–16. On Etherington's familism, see Marsh, Christopher, The Family of Love in English Society, 1550–1630 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 166–67, 178, 239–41, 243–44Google Scholar; for Etherington's dating of the start of his religious quest and association with the godly to the early 1590s, see The Defence, p. 8. For his dating his regular attendance at the “public assemblies and sacraments” of the national Church as starting some fifteen years later, see p. 46. Note his claim that in 1588, when he first came to London (p. 46), he was not yet eighteen years of age (p. 43). These markers can be compared to the brief spiritual autobiography appended to Etherington/Jessop, A Discovery of the Errors, in “To the Christian Reader.” Also see Etherington's later admission of contact with familists around 1605 in Etherington, John, A Brief Discovery of the Blasphemous Doctrine of Familism (London, 1645), pp. 10–11Google Scholar. All this will be the subject of extended exposition and analysis in Lake, Chasing the White Wolf.

49 Etherington/Jessop, A Discovery of the Errors; see esp. pp. 88–91 for an explicit repudiation of many of the self-same familist doctrines espoused in his earlier Description of the Church.

50 Denison, , The White Wolf p. 43Google Scholar; Marsh, , Family of Love, p. 240, n. 16Google Scholar.

51 Denison, , The White Wolf, p. 53Google Scholar.

52 Etherington, , The Defence, pp. 32–33Google Scholar.

53 Ibid., pp. 35–36.

54 The starting point for any investigation into the nature of this emerging movement is provided by Foster, Stephen in his “New England and the Challenge of Heresy, 1630–1660: The Puritan Crisis in Transatlantic Perspective,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 38 (1981): 624–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a groundbreaking investigation into the prewar priorities of “Antinomians,” see Bozeman, T. D., “The Glory of the Third Time: John Eaton as Contra-Puritan,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 47 (1996): 638–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar. And now see Como, David, “Puritans and Heretics: The Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Early Stuart England” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1999)Google Scholar.

55 These quotations are drawn, respectively, from Towne, Robert, The Assertion of Grace (London, 1645), p. 92Google Scholar; Eaton, John, Dead Faith (London, 1662), p. 195Google Scholar; Traske, John, The True Gospel Vindicated from the Reproach of the New Gospel (London, 1636), pp. 27–28Google Scholar.

56 For the political circumstances at the end of the 1620s, see Cust, R. P., The Forced Loan and English Politics (Oxford, 1987)Google Scholar, and his two pendant articles taking the story into 1629, “Charles I and the 1628 Parliament,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 2 (1992): 25–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Charles I, and a Draft Declaration for the 1628 Parliament,” Historical Research 63 (1990): 143–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

57 Nicholas Tyacke has argued convincingly that Laud's opinions on predestination were explicitly Arminian; see his Anti-Calvinists, pp. 266–70. This claim has been challenged by several scholars: see Sharpe, K., The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, Conn., 1992), pp. 286–92Google Scholar; Davies, J., The Caroline Captivity of the Church (Oxford, 1992), pp. 95–103CrossRefGoogle Scholar; White, P., Predestination, Policy and Polemic (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 276–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58 See Tyacke, , Anti-Calvinists, pp. 103, 182, and 81Google Scholar. For such sentiments preached at court by Robert Skinner, see BL Additional MS 20065, fol. 40r.

59 Gardiner, , ed., Reports of Cases, p. 271Google Scholar; quoted in Tyacke, , Anti-Calvinists, p. 269Google Scholar. In 1654 the antinomian Robert Towne claimed that Laud had preached an Ash Wednesday sermon before the king denouncing antinomianism as a threat to all order in church and state; see Towne, R., A Reassertion of Grace (London, 1654), p. 67Google Scholar.

60 For Brian Walton's support of Laudian liturgical policies, see The Articles and Charge Proved in Parliament against Dr Walton, Minister of St Martin's Orgars in Cannon Street (London, 1641), pp. 1–4Google Scholar. Brough would be accused of Arminianism before the Long Parliament for which see Tyacke, , Anti-Calvinists, p. 196Google Scholar. For his role in channeling intelligence of Dutch Puritanism to Laud, see Calendar of State Papers Domestic, 1633–34, pp. 324–25; for Christopher Dow's views, see his Innovations Unjustly Charged upon the Present Church and State (London, 1637)Google Scholar. William Watts would end up as a chaplain to Charles I and then to Prince Rupert, for which see DNB, s.v. “Watts, William”; also see his Mortification Apostolical (London, 1637)Google Scholar. Although we know less of his precise theological orientation, Richard Dell would also find himself in conflict with Puritans in Breda during the late 1630s, for which see Sprunger , K.L., Dutch Puritanism (Leiden, 1982), pp. 269–72Google Scholar.

61 For all three ministers, see Seaver, , Puritan Lectureships, pp. 174–75, 225, 178, n. 151Google Scholar. Culverwell stood as a compurgator for Stephen Denison when he appeared before High Commission between 1633 and 1635, charged, among other things, with sexually harassing several of his female parishioners; see PRO, SP Dom. 16/261/fol. 292v (High Commission Act Book). He may also have been the “Mr Culverwell” named along with Denison and Crabtree in the will of John Juxon, a rich merchant and Denison's first patron in the city; see Prerogative Court of Canterbury (PCC), Hele 112, Prob. 11/150/fols. 22r–26v.

62 Bodl., Tanner MS 71, fol. 35r. Thomas Gataker to Samuel Ward, 11 February 1629/30, detailing Burgess's run-in with the authorities.

63 PRO, SP 16/154/99, fols. 149–50, which items are undated, but appear among the state papers for 1629. Nalton's suspension for his baptismal antics took place in July 1629. His personal appearance before Laud took place on 23 July, and his suspension was relaxed on 31 July. See Greater London Record Office, DL/C/341, fols. 81v–82r (Vicar General's book).

64 PRO, SP 16/261/fols. 35r, 120v, 136r–v, 144v, 243v, 282v–284r (High Commission Act Book).

65 For an early run-in over unlicensed preaching in 1617, see Seaver, , Puritan Lectureships, pp. 227–28Google Scholar; Guildhall Library (hereafter GL), MS 9531, 15, fol. 26r, for a report of his appearance before Laud; for the articles against Crabtree together with his answers see GL, MS 9657, item 3, unfoliated. For his appearance before the High Commission with two others in connection with The Spy, see Cambridge University Library (CUL), MS Dd. ii. 21, fols. lv, 5r (High Commission Act Book). See also I. R., The Spy, Discovering the Danger of Arminian Heresy and Spanish Treachery (n.p., 1628).

66 GL, MS 9531, 15, fols. 21v–22r, 23v. The identity of A. Grame with “Abraham Grymes” is confirmed by this document, which refers to “Abrahamum Graime als Grimes”; PRO, SP Dom. 16/261/fol. 2v, 9 May 1633 (High Commission Act Book). For a later appearance before High Commission on 4 January 1632/33, see CUL, MS Dd. ii. 21, fol. 121r. Also see Bodl., Tanner MS 114, fols. 115r–v, headed “additional to other articles against Abraham Grymes,” dated 1633. Grame, in fact, seems to have epitomized the floating, unbeneficed Puritan lecturer. In addition to his activities at St. Katherine Cree, he was noted as a lecturer at St. Nicholas Aeons (see Seaver, , Puritan Lectureships, p. 250Google Scholar), while Joseph Smith's letter to him (see Como and Lake, “Strange Case of Peter Shaw”) makes it clear that he was preaching regularly at St. Helen Bishopsgate, as well as at St. Martin's in the Field. As far as we know, he held no formal position as lecturer in any of these parishes.

67 PRO, SP Dom. 16/177/item 68. Two pages of sermon notes taken from Philip Nye's discourses at St. Michaels, noting Denison's polemical activities at the end, endorsed, according to the calendar, by Laud on the back, which we have edited and printed in Como and Lake, “Strange Case of Peter Shaw.”

68 The ministers were Shaw, John Eaton, John Traske, Robert Towne, Samuel Pretty, Thomas Hodges, and John Everard. For a brief discussion of several of these figures, see Foster, “New England and the Challenge of Heresy.” Full details of the theological opinions and careers of all these men and of the contours of the antinomian crisis in which they were all major or minor players are to be found in Como's dissertation on English antinomianism, “Puritans and Heretics.”

69 PRO, SP 16/139/91, fol. 175v.

70 Ibid., fol. 174v and fol. 177r. “A faithful copy of a letter sent to Mr A. Grame by an unknown pretended friend about Mr Shaw and his cause.”

71 See Como and Lake, “Strange Case of Peter Shaw.”

72 Ibid.

73 CUL, Dd. ii. 21, fol. 289r–v, where Thomson was described as a joiner of St. Stephens Coleman Street. He continued his articling ways, coming back to haunt Laud himself by giving evidence against him at his trial; PRO, SP Dom. 16/500/6, fol. 38. The signature on the Laud deposition has been compared with that on the Shaw documents—we appear to be dealing with the same indefatigable Thomson.

74 The other cases, which took place in 1630, involved Robert Towne and Samuel Pretty; for Towne's suspension, see PRO, SP Dom. 16/145/55; also see Towne, preface to A Reassertion of Grace, sigs. A2v–A3r, for a description of the private conferences with the godly that presaged his prosecution. For Pretty, see Gardiner, , ed., Reports of Cases, pp. 182–84Google Scholar.

75 On which issue see Collinson, P., “The English Conventicle,” in Voluntary Religion: Studies in Church History, ed. Sheils, W. J. and Wood, D. (Oxford, 1986), 25:223–59Google Scholar.

76 That the Peter Shaw who was elected a fellow of the collegiate church of Manchester in 1633 was the same Peter Shaw who was prosecuted in London may be inferred from the statements of the fellow Richard Johnson, who complained in 1635 of Shaw's “obscenity and paradoxes—that god punisheth in heaven, and the like—for which he hath been sharply censured.” See Chetham Miscellanies (Manchester, 1878), pt. 2, 6:19–20Google Scholar. For the chandler Joseph Smith, see Como and Lake, “Strange Case of Peter Shaw.”

77 Denison, , The White Wolf p. 33Google Scholar.

78 For Thomson, see the discussion in n. 73 above. For Stephen Denison's links to the Juxons, see his two funeral sermons, The Monument or Tombstone (London, 1620)Google Scholar for Elizabeth Juxon, and his Another Tombstone (London, 1626)Google Scholar for her husband, John. For John Juxon's will, see PCC, Hele 112, Prob. 11/150/fols. 22r–26v.

79 Etherington, , The Defence, p. 29Google Scholar.

80 The impact of episcopal authority on the city was hindered by the multiplicity of ecclesiastical jurisdictions that intersected there. These included the deanery of the Arches peculiar, the peculiar of the dean and chapter of St. Paul's, as well as the complex layers of diocesan government.

81 This is not to argue that in London the institutions, offices, solidarities, and symbolisms of the parish were irrelevant even to the religious lives of the godly—as Julia Merritt's excellent study of Westminister has shown, that was far from the case. See her “Religion, Government and Society in Early Modern Westminister” (Ph.D. thesis, London University, 1992)Google Scholar. It is, however, to argue that, in the city, the religious activities of the godly cannot be studied only, or perhaps even primarily, through the parish. It is also to claim that in London there was considerable tension between the structures, the assumed or imagined normalities of a parochial and episcopal national church, and Puritan lecturing—certainly as Grame or Shaw and, perhaps, even as Wotton and Denison practiced it. On the ecclesiological and social resonance of lectureships, cf. Seaver, Puritan Lectureships, with Collinson, P., “Lectures by Combination: Structures and Characteristics of Church Life in Seventeenth-Century England,” in his Godly People (London, 1983), pp. 467–98Google Scholar.

82 For the cultural and political implications of later intra-Puritan dispute and debate, see Hughes, Ann, “The Meanings of Religious Polemic,” in Puritanism: Transatlantic Perspectives on a Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Faith, ed. Bremer, F., Massachusetts Historical Society (1993), pp. 201–29Google Scholar. On the question of the emergence of a public sphere in London at the close of the 1630s and early 1640s, see Freist, Dagmar, Governed by Opinion (London, 1997)Google Scholar.

83 For Thomson's walk-on role in Laud's trial, see n. 73. On this subject more generally, see Seaver, Wallington's World, esp. chap. 6; and Lindley, K., “London and Popular Freedom in the 1640s,” in Freedom and the English Revolution, ed. Richardson, R. C. and Ridden, G. M. (Manchester, 1986), pp. 111–50Google Scholar.

84 Here we are much indebted to ongoing work by Ann Hughes and Kate Peters on Thomas Edwards, for which see Hughes's article on Edwards's Gangraena, “‘Popular’ Presbyterianism in the 1640s and 1650s: The Cases of Thomas Edwards and Thomas Hall,” in England's Long Reformation, ed. Tyacke, N. (London, 1997), pp. 235—55Google Scholar.