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A Moderate Puritan Preacher Negotiates Religious Change

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 September 2014

ANN HUGHES
ANN HUGHES*
Affiliation:
School of Humanities, Keele University, Keele, Staffs ST5 5BG; e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article is based on the sermons of the moderate Puritan minister Richard Culverwell, preached in his parish of St Margaret Moses, London, from the mid-1620s to the early 1630s, and recorded in detail by one of his leading parishioners, the fishmonger John Harper. It uses this material to discuss the reception of demanding Calvinist divinity, and to contribute to scholarly debates on the nature and impact of the Laudian regime in London. Although Culverwell continued to preach a Calvinist message, his sermons show a process of adaptation to changing times, and reveal the constraints and tensions that he was facing.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 65 , Issue 4 , October 2014 , pp. 761 - 779
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

1 Harper's notebook is William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles, ms B8535 M3 (cited hereinafter as Clark ms B8535 M3). In quotations I have silently extended Harper's conventional abbreviations, and used his pagination (there are several sections, separately paginated). The volume begins with the notes on Culverwell's series on the Lord's Prayer and the Sacraments, followed by notes on sixteen occasional sermons heard between May 1641 and February 1657, including one recorded from memory in October 1656, Culverwell's sermons on the Creed and Benjamin Needler on ‘severall heads of Divinity’ beginning in August 1655. Another set of ‘occasional sermons’, beginning in August 1657, is written from the back of the volume.

2 The sermons from memory are by Thomas Manton in St Paul's on 30 October 1656 (endorsement quoted), and the first sermon by Charles Burke, the new minister at St Margaret Moses, on 12 October 1662. For endorsements see Clark ms B8535 M3, pagination from the back, 113, 163.

3 Richard Culverwell's ‘Protestation’ sermon in May 1641; a sermon by William Jaggard in February 1650; and six sermons in the parish when the Presbyterian ‘morning exercise’ was held there in January 1659. For the 1620s see Morrissey, Mary, Politics and the Paul's Cross sermons, 1558–1642, Oxford 2011, 25Google Scholar, and for Saxby and ‘gadding’ in London (which was by no means incompatible with parish commitment) see Hunt, Arnold, The art of hearing: English preachers and their audiences, 1590–1640, Cambridge 2010, 110–12Google Scholar, 204–5, 214, 219, and Craig, John, ‘Sermon reception’, in McCullough, Peter, Adlington, Hugh and Rhatigan, Emma (eds), The Oxford handbook of the early modern sermon, Oxford 2011, 178–97Google Scholar, esp. pp. 189–93. I am grateful to John Craig for a copy of this essay in advance of publication.

4 For the Harpers as the richest family in the parish see ‘Inhabitants of London in 1638: St Margaret Moses, Friday Street’, in The inhabitants of London in 1638 (1931), 99–100, consulted online: http://www.british-history.ac.uk. John Harper, Sr, left £10 to Culverwell, and a further £5 to his godson Richard Culverwell, as well as £10 to the library of the newly founded Sion College: TNA, PROB 11/162/659 (Nov. 1632). For note-taking and repetition see Hunt, Art of hearing, 72–80. Harper's shorthand was clearly adequate for scriptural references but the range of reference in the Culverwell sermons is unusual. For useful discussions of manuscript sermon notes see Sullivan, Ceri, ‘The art of listening in the seventeenth century’, Modern Philology civ (2006), 34–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hunt, Art of hearing, 94–115; Lancelot Andrewes: selected sermons and lectures, ed. Peter McCullough, Oxford 2005, lii. 40, 265–6, 462–6; Craig, ‘Sermon reception’; and Morrissey, Politics and the Paul's Cross sermons, 39–41.

5 Hunt, Art of hearing, 13, 98, 109. Boys named John Harper were admitted to Merchant Taylors’ school in 1607 and 1615: Robinson, Charles J., A register of the scholars admitted into Merchant Taylors’ School, i, Lewes 1882, 57Google Scholar, 84.

6 Harper described himself as John Harper, Jr, before the death of his father in 1632, which suggests that the original notes were a contemporary record. Ian Green distinguishes between preacher and hearer notes: Continuity and change in Protestant preaching in early modern England (Friends of Dr Williams Library, 60th Lecture, Dr Williams Trust, 2009), 19–25. Harper's volume, however, like many others, straddles these categories. His volume also includes examples of both of Green's lay categories – selective notes of the main points, and fuller notes. Harper's Culverwell notes are similar to records of the sermons of the London preacher Thomas Salisbury which got him into trouble with Laud in 1629: Como, David R., ‘Predestination and political conflict in Laud's London’, HJ xlvi (2003), 263–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar at p. 270n. Como suggests that these were derived from preacher's notes. Other comparable London examples include a more polished ‘The some of certaine sermons preached by Mr Obadiah Sedgwick in anno domini 1630 written by Thomas Gellibrand’, BL, ms Harleian 1198 (with a slightly different version in ms Harleian 1209), and a volume kept by a John Archer from 1623 to 1626, consisting mostly of notes from the sermons of Richard Sibbes at Grays Inn: Birmingham University Library, ms 388. I am grateful to David Como and Hugh Adlington for these references.

7 Haigh, Christopher, ‘The taming of the Reformation: preachers, pastors and parishioners in Elizabethan and early Stuart England’, History lxxxv (2000), 572–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and The plain man's pathways to heaven, Oxford 2007. But compare Hunt, Art of hearing, ch. vii; Lake, Peter, The boxmaker's revenge: ‘orthodoxy’, ‘heterodoxy’ and the politics of the parish in early Stuart London, Manchester 2001Google Scholar; and Merritt, J. F., ‘The pastoral tightrope: a Puritan pedagogue in Jacobean London’, in Cogswell, Thomas, Cust, Richard and Lake, Peter (eds), Politics, religion and popularity: early Stuart essays in honour of Conrad Russell, Cambridge 2002, 143–61Google Scholar.

8 Tyacke, Nicholas, Anti-Calvinists: the rise of English Arminianism, c. 1590–1640, Oxford 1987, 192Google Scholar, 261.

9 Fincham, Kenneth and Lake, Peter, ‘The ecclesiastical policies of James i and Charles i’, in Fincham, Kenneth (ed.), The early Stuart Church, 1603–1642, Basingstoke 1993, 23–49Google Scholar; Davies, Julian, The Caroline captivity of the Church: Charles I and the remoulding of Anglicanism, Oxford 1992CrossRefGoogle Scholar; White, Peter, ‘The rise of Arminianism reconsidered’, P&P ci (1983), 34–54Google Scholar.

10 Brett Usher, ‘Culverwell family (per. c. 1645–c. 1640)’, ODNB [accessed online Jan. 2008]; Calendar of state papers domestic, 1635–1636, 115; Lake, Boxmaker's revenge, 277–9, 286; Como, David R. and Lake, Peter, ‘Puritans, Antinomians and Laudians in Caroline London: the strange case of Peter Shaw in its contexts’, this Journal l (1999), 684–715Google Scholar at p. 689, and ‘ “Orthodoxy” and its discontents: dispute settlement and the production of “consensus” in the London (Puritan) underground’, Journal of British Studies xxxix (2000), 34–70; Seaver, Paul, The Puritan lectureships: the politics of religious dissent, 1560–1662, Stanford 1970, 178Google Scholar.

11 Beaven, A. B., The aldermen of the City of London, London 1908, i. 210Google Scholar; Woodhead, J. R., The rulers of London, 1660–1689, London 1965, 84Google Scholar. Harper was a churchwarden in 1637, active in charitable trusts connected with the Fishmongers Company, and Prime Warden of the company in 1654: GL, ms 9537/15, fo. 59v; LMA, A/JM/451–2.

12 Craig, ‘Sermon reception’, 190–2; Hunt, Art of hearing, 110–12. Wallington and the Presbyterian activist Walter Boothby combined sermon notes with personal meditations, comments on current events and common-placing techniques: Nehemiah Wallington, ‘The groth of a Christian’, BL, ms Add. 40, 883; Walter Boothby, ‘A nosegay of everlasting orificall flowers gathered out of Heavens paradice’, Bodleian Library, Oxford, ms Eng c 2693. I owe this last reference to David Como. For Boothby see Lindley, Keith, Popular politics and religion in civil war London, Aldershot 1997, 375Google Scholar and n.; for the more pragmatic motivations for note-taking see Green, Continuity and change.

13 Rogers, quoted in Morrissey, Politics and the Paul's Cross sermons, 39; Clark ms B8535 M3, 2nd pagination, 151. The medical metaphor is repeated in A method for meditation, London 1651 (Wing U191A), attributed to Archbishop Ussher, which described preaching as spreading a ‘plaster’ on the heart: quoted in Hunt, Art of hearing, 80. I hope to write in more detail on Harper's note-taking on another occasion.

14 For St Margaret Moses see Liu, Tai, Puritan London, Newark, Del–London–Toronto 1986, 26Google Scholar; for consistory court and visitation records for the 1620s and 1630s see LMA, DL/C/622–4, 318, 322, 326 (consistory court act books), and GL, ms 9537/13, 15 (visitations).

15 Lake, Boxmaker's revenge; Milton, Anthony, ‘Licensing, censorship and religious orthodoxy in early Stuart England’, HJ xli (1998), 625–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar at pp. 630–1.

16 Hunt, Art of hearing, 380–5.

17 Kevin Killeen, ‘Veiled speech: preaching, politics, and scriptural typology’, in McCullough, Adlington and Rhatigan, Oxford handbook, 387–403; Green, Continuity and change, 9. Culverwell's ‘political’ comments as recorded by Harper were oblique and circumspect. He did include a conventional contrast between God's power and that of earthly monarchs at the end of his sermons on the Lord's Prayer in 1627: the power and glory of ‘all earthly kings and potentates’ was ‘from God, who is the onely potentate, that sets up kings, and throwes them dowen againe, as he pleases’, but notes on the later sermons include only one brief and general reference to parliament, comparing divisions in ‘that great assembly of the kingdome, the Corte of Parlament’ to divisions in church assemblies: Clark ms B8535 M3, ‘Lord's Prayer’, 77; ‘Sacraments’, 30.

18 Ian Green, ‘Preaching in the parishes’, in McCullough, Adlington and Rhatigan, Oxford handbook, 137–54. Arnold Hunt has emphasised Puritan commitment to the Lord's supper: ‘The Lord's supper in early modern England’, P&P clxi (1998), 39–83. There are many examples of preparatory sermons from early Stuart London: see, for example, Randall, John, Three and twentie sermons or catechisticall lectures, London 1630Google Scholar (ESTC 20682); Stephen Denison's monthly lecture in preparation for the sacrament: Lake, Boxmaker's revenge, 67–73; and a sermon by Obadiah Sedgwick: ms Harleian 1198, fo. 64r.

19 Kenyon, J. P., The Stuart constitution, Cambridge 1966, 146Google Scholar. Hunt stresses that the 1622 declarations were rarely enforced: Art of hearing, 303, 372–3.

20 Kenyon, Stuart constitution, 154–5.

21 Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, 263; Peter Lake, ‘Calvinism and the English Church, 1570–1635’, P&P cxiv (1987), 32–76; Cogswell, Thomas, The blessed revolution: English politics and the coming of war, 1621–1624, Cambridge 1989Google Scholar; Cust, Richard, ‘Charles i, the privy council and the parliament of 1628’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6th ser. ii (1992), 25–50Google Scholar. Hunt, Art of hearing, 374; cf. Cyndia Clegg on the survival of Calvinist book publishing after 1626: Press censorship in Caroline England, Cambridge 2008, 46.

22 Clark ms B8535 M3, ‘Lord's prayer’, 15.

23 Ibid. 50. Culverwell quoted Ambrose and Bernard, ‘an antient father and of their owne’, against this position; cf Randall, ‘I am perswaded that the Children of God can never have mention of man's merit, but presently they thinke of eternall condemnation’: Three and twentie sermons, 161.

24 Clark ms B8535 M3, ‘Lord's prayer’, 57–8, and also 20; ‘Sacraments’, 9; ‘Creed’, 38, 32; Lake, Boxmaker's revenge, 208–11. For Sedgwick salvation was the city, regeneration and sanctification ‘the suburbs we must passe through before we can come to the city’: ms Harleian 1198, fo. 103v.

25 Clark ms B8535 M3, ‘Lord's prayer’, 69–71.

26 Ibid. 72; ‘Sacraments’, 4, 7, 18.

27 Hunt, ‘Lord's supper’, esp. pp. 56–9 (using Randall and Denison amongst his examples). Thus ‘I say not that we should worship the Sacrament as the Papists, nor Christen the Sacraments as some of the Lutherans, but in the use of the Sacrament as being the speciall memorial of him and of his Death’: Randall, Three and twentie sermons, 3. For similar sentiments from Obadiah Sedgwick's sermons see ms Harleian 1098, fos 53r, 106v–107v.

28 Clark ms B8535 M3, ‘Sacraments’, 1, 13, 23, 2, 4.

29 Ibid. ‘Creed’, 35, 38.

30 Ibid. 67–8. See Hunt, Art of hearing, 380–5. For moderate Calvinist positions on the possibility of falling from grace and for the importance of the issue see Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, 183, 262.

31 Haigh's arguments are effectively challenged in Hunt, Art of hearing, 344–54, and Lake, Boxmaker's revenge, 13. Lake cites notes made by his parishioner Henry Fleming to argue that positive reception of Denison's predestinarian preaching was not ‘restricted to a cadre of often puritanically inclined clerical intellectuals’. The sermons and treatises of John Randall also circulated amongst his parishioners in St Andrew Hubbard and some were discussed at evening exercises: Workes of that famous divine master John Randall, London 1629 (ESTC 20668), dedication to Mr Thomas Fanshawe, appended to The great mysterie of godlinesse; cf Haigh, ‘The taming of the Reformation’.

32 Clark ms B8535 M3, ‘Lord's prayer’, 60–1, 72; ‘Sacraments’, 8, 37, 96–7.

33 ms Harleian 1198, fo. 102r. Similarly, in a Christmas sermon, Sedgwick explained that he was not going ‘to trouble your attention with unnecessary things’ and so skirted round the way in which the divine and the human nature of Christ were ‘conjoined’ (fos 83v–84r). In print Obadiah Sedgwick cautioned against ministerial displays of learning unsuited to the congregation: Christs counsell to his languishing church of Sardis, London 1640 (ESTC 22151), sig. A8r.

34 Clark ms B8535 M3, ‘Sacraments’, 37, 81; ‘Creed’, 54; Hunt, Art of hearing, 14, 220–3.

35 Merritt, ‘The pastoral tightrope’, 157.

36 Clark ms B8535 M3, ‘Sacraments’, 104, 9, 83; ‘Lord's prayer’, 69–71. For Sibbes in contemporary sermon notes see ‘But above all take heed of despairing, a sin against the whole gospel’: Birmingham University Library, ms 388, fo. 4r, and for Sedgwick's insistence that the absence of full assurance did not mean the lack of true faith, and that ‘a Christian should not despair’ see ms Harleian 1198, fos 28v, 41v, 47r.

37 These measures were attached to a reissue of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England (sometime after June 1628) and to a tactical suppression of Richard Montagu's offensive Appello Caesarem (Jan. 1629): Gardiner, S. R., Constitutional documents of the Puritan revolution, 3rd edn, Oxford 1906, 75–6Google Scholar; Morrissey, Politics, and the Paul's Cross sermons, 94–8.

38 Como, ‘Predestination and political conflict’, 265; Davies, Caroline captivity of the Church, 120–1; Haigh, Plain man's pathways, 214.

39 Morrissey, Politics and the Paul's Cross sermons, 99–100; Clark ms B8535 M3, ‘Lord's prayer’, 17, 30. Denison continued to denounce Arminians in conjunction with Jesuits in the later 1630s (in sermons noted by a hearer): Lake, Boxmaker's revenge, 346.

40 Clark ms B8535 M3, ‘Sacraments’, 31; Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, 125–6, 173, 227. Montagu's claims that it was extremists on both sides (Jesuits and Puritans) who were the main barriers to closer relationships with Rome fuelled such suspicions: Milton, Anthony, Catholic and Reformed: the Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant thought, 1600–1640, Cambridge 1995, 225–8Google Scholar, 353–7.

41 Davies, Caroline captivity of the Church, 27–8, 130–40.

42 Milton, ‘Licensing, censorship and religious orthodoxy’, 639, 651.

43 Clark ms B8535 M3, ‘Creed’, 19 (my emphasis).

44 Hunt, Art of hearing, 377–9; Lake, Boxmaker's revenge, 407, 200–4; Lake and Como, ‘Puritans, Antinomians and Laudians’.

45 Clark ms B8535 M3, ‘Sacraments’ 30–1.

46 Ibid. ‘Creed’, 50–1. The preaching of the word and the proper administration of the sacraments were, of course, the essential marks of a true Church.

47 Julia Merritt suggests that Hill's extended defence of set prayers was a response to doubts about the practice amongst his parishioners: ‘Pastoral tightrope’, 156. For a trenchant defence of the English Church as a true visible Church ‘against all opposites and slanderers, the Papists on the one side, and the separatists on the other’ see also Randall, Three and twenty sermons, 308–16. Like Culverwell, Randall was clear that he was not defending ‘any abuses or corruptions amongst us’, but that there was nothing wrong with the English Church that justified the ‘whisperers and seducers’ who sought to entice the people to ‘come to this Church, goe to that Church’.

48 Clark ms B8535 M3, ‘Sacraments’, 45, 75 (my emphasis).

49 Ibid. 76–8. Denison similarly argued that outward forms were very variable (Lake, Boxmaker's revenge, 80) but Culverwell put more stress on the importance of obeying the authority of the Church.

50 Ferrell, Lori Anne, ‘Kneeling and the body politic’, in Hamilton, Donna B. and Strier, Richard (eds), Religion, literature and politics in post-Reformation England, 1540–1688, Cambridge 1996, 70–92Google Scholar, quotation at p. 81; Rhatigan, Emma, ‘Knees and elephants: John Donne preaches on ceremonial conformity’, John Donne Journal xxiii (2004), 185–213Google Scholar at p. 186 for the last comment.

51 Clark ms B8535 M3, ‘Sacraments’, 87, 92–3; Haigh, Christopher, ‘Communion and community: exclusion from communion in post-Reformation England’, this Journal li (2000), 721–40Google Scholar.

52 For the impact in London see Tyacke Anti-Calvinists, 181–3; Como, ‘Predestination and political conflict’; and Seaver, Puritan lectureships, ch. viii.

53 Como, ‘Predestination and political conflict’, 271. For Culverwell on politics see n. 17 above.

54 John Davenport was accused of preaching that the elect could not totally and finally fall from grace, while miscellaneous articles were presented against Henry Roborough in 1634, including ceremonial nonconformity and opposition to the Book of Sports, as well as preaching that the Saints could not fall from grace. Roborough did not deny this last point: Como, ‘Predestination and political conflict’, 287–8.

55 Milton, ‘Licensing, censorship and religious orthodoxy’, 646; Clegg, Press censorship, 181.

56 Hunt, Art of hearing, 380–5; Milton, Catholic and Reformed, quotation at p. 439, and 536–9; Como, ‘Predestination and political conflict’, 289–93, quotation at p. 289.

57 Hunt, Art of hearing, 342; Killeen, ‘Veiled speech’, 393.

58 Clark ms B8535 M3, 113 (pagination from the back).

59 Hunt, Art of hearing, 95. See also n. 1 above.

60 Clark ms B8535 M3 (this section is not paginated). Quotations are from sermons of 4 May 1656 and 27 February 1659.