Sermons have long proved crucial to scholars’ understandings of the period that William White's subtitle refers to as “the English Revolution,” with Stephen Marshall's 1641 Meroz Cursed as the most (in)famous. Indeed, the term “English Revolution” tends to conjure the familiar cast of sectaries and radicals beloved of historians like Christopher Hill: tub-preachers using religion to turn the world upside down. For White, however, the revolutionary preachers under consideration are not Baptists or Diggers but episcopalian royalists. Building on the substantial recent scholarly attention to royalism, White sets out to show that episcopalian preachers, much like (and indeed learning from) their radical counterparts, used sermons to influence policy, shore up the persecuted faithful, and even to call for holy war.
White argues that episcopalian royalist sermons, rather than merely being conservative in the sense of trying to preserve an old order, evolved in response to changing circumstances, not only within the broader culture but also within royalism itself. His analysis centers royalists who remained committed to episcopalian church-government and who opposed the prospective alienation of episcopal lands, showing that the identification of royalism with episcopalianism (especially at the Restoration) was less an established fact on the ground than the result of a concerted campaign. Anthony Milton's work on factions within royalism thus provides a key foundation for White's attention to the role of sermons in advancing the episcopalian faction's cause.
The major challenge that episcopalian royalism faced between 1640 and 1662 was the prospect that royalism might accommodate itself to other forms of church-government. The pressure to accommodate was most acute in 1641–42, as Parliament responded to the Root and Branch petition; in 1644, as the Oxford Parliament considered potential means of reconciling with Westminster; in 1648, amid negotiations for the Treaty of Newport; during the Protectorate, whose quasi-monarchical form drew in many erstwhile royalists; and at the Restoration, given the new king's stated preference for a broad church-settlement. At each of these junctures, White demonstrates that episcopalian preachers used sermons to advance their cause in a variety of ways, whether by offering counsel through long-established homiletic convention or by urging auditors to remain steadfast in their faith.
Interleaved with chapters attending to these flashpoints are chapters in which White considers royalist sermons in other contexts. Of especial interest is the chapter on the First Civil War, in which White shows how royalist preachers used the pulpit to call for holy war, including by invoking the curse of Meroz so indelibly associated with Stephen Marshall. White is not simply engaging in the both-sides-ism of showing that the royalists did it, too, but is rather showing how wartime exigencies overcame some ministers’ resistance to politicized preaching and indeed led them to learn from their parliamentarian counterparts. The core issue motivating this shift was the instability of allegiance, with local interests often able to prevail over the imperatives of national politics. However loyal to the king people may have been by default, material support still needed to be drummed up once the practical costs started to assert themselves. Preaching to both the converted and the unconverted, as it were, had a role to play in this effort, and in the former context supposed moderates like Bramhall proved perfectly capable of calling for holy war.
In an additional interleaved chapter, White addresses the fraught question of whether ministers of episcopalian leanings ought to continue in the ministry under the republican and Protectoral regimes. Sometimes, vestry machinations enabled episcopalians to hold livings and preach to mostly royalist congregations—even in London—at least for a time. The phenomenon of sermon-gadding knew no partisan bounds. But ministers operating in less favorable circumstances faced accusations of cowardice or lack of conviction, to which one response was that those who opted for principled retirement had abandoned their flocks to the wolves. Meanwhile, royalist clergymen like John Gauden and Ralph Brownrigg flirted with accommodation, so episcopalians with pulpits used them to inveigh against apostasy while also crafting providentialist narratives that might encourage auditors to remain faithful amid persecution.
A major theme of the book involves the relationship between sermons as preached and sermons as printed, with White's core argument being that print both de- and re-contextualized what had begun as an oral event. For instance, by printing by royal command a sermon in which he offered the king counsel, Henry Ferne could imply to readers that his views aligned with the king's and thereby amplify the effect of his counsel. White approaches the complex interplay of print and orality from a variety of perspectives. He compares editions of sermons published during the 1650s with post-Restoration editions of the same sermons, thinking about both self-censorship and the need to demonstrate retroactive fidelity to the cause. He compares auditors’ notes against preachers’ notes, thinking about when preachers went off-script and about auditors’ capacity to pick up on political subtexts. (Mileage on this latter point varied, as White shows by comparing the notes that different auditors took on the same sermon.) He detects a robust short-term print market for politically resonant sermons while noting that the longer-term market tended to favor more purely devotional works.
In sum, White's book offers an important addition to the recent literature devoted to drawing out the complexities and internal fissures of royalism by using sermons to show that episcopalian royalism was an option that needed to be argued for and defended instead of being the default position. The Lord's Battle invites further scholarship on sermons by royalists with other relationships to episcopalianism than that studied here. More broadly, by identifying commonalities between episcopalian royalist and puritan parliamentarian sermons, White invites scholars to reimagine mid-seventeenth-century sermon culture as a contiguous whole in which partisan differences, important as they were, should not be understood as primary.
