This chapter analyses the ways in which a variety of men negotiated the collapse of the Personal Rule and the Laudian project. On the one hand, we have the Calvinist conformist Robert Sanderson, who, by shifting the emphasis of what remained the same set of opinions was able to distance himself, and the church of England, from the excesses of Laudianism, while still protecting that church from what he presented as the reckless assaults and absurdities of the puritans, and rallying support for the king. On the other hand, we have Peter Heylyn, by this point the archetypal Laudian, engaging ideologue, tacking and trimming by emphasising his opposition to popery, even as he used the same arguments that he was deploying against the papists to continue his remorseless assault on the puritans. Here, in effect, we can watch the Laudian coalition coming apart at the seams under the pressure of the Scots war and the political crisis that ensured in England.

This chapter looks at Andrewes’ political theology, that is to say his vision of divine right monarchy and the absolute powers of the prince over both church and state; notions that are placed in the overarching structures of his theological position. In the process, the populist principles of the Jesuits and the presbyterians are revealed, in Andrewes’ view, equally and equivalently anti-monarchical in their effects. Andrewes held the injunctions to fear God and to fear the king to be equally compelling and mutually reinforcing injunctions: loyalty to the prince being just another facet of faith in and obedience to God.

The Laudians attempted to strike a balance between human free will and divine grace, as opposed to what they presented as the brutal determinism of the Calvinists and puritans. Their position stressed the role of human effort, whilst attempting to leave no room for any ‘popish’ notions of merit. This chapter describes how some Laudian authors did just that, by concentrating on repentance, amendment and works of penitence. The question of reprobation, and in particular of when even hardened sinners like Judas and Pharaoh could be said to have become reprobate, that is, doomed to damnation, is addressed through the treatment of the former by Edward Kellett, and of the latter by Thomas Jackson. The chapter charts a distinctively Laudian/Arminian route to assurance through works of charity, piety and penance. It concludes with a re-evaluation of the relationship between Arminianism and Laudianism, as the latter has emerged in and through the argument of this book.

This chapter homes in on the explicitly political, and allegedly anti-monarchical, effects of puritan error. Here what Andrewes presents as the integral connections between puritan presumption, hypocrisy and popularity – the latter defined as an obsession with getting and keeping the good opinion of the people, if necessary by defaming their rulers from the pulpit and in the press. Puritanism is thus presented as wholly inimical to monarchical authority in the state and episcopal authority in the church. Again, Andrewes is shown asserting the broad equivalence of the seditious doctrines and practices of the puritans and the papists. He placed special stress on the predestinarian roots of puritan hypocrisy and presumption and hence on the political consequences of what Andrewes took to be (typically puritan) predestinarian error.

Long before the United States was any more than a collection of British colonies in North America, Protestants viewed Catholicism as a threat to national identity, individual liberty, personal salvation, and the stability of free government. Their fears continued up through the presidential campaign of John F. Kennedy. Understanding why Protestants viewed Catholicism with fear and loathing reveals much about the evolution of American understandings of freedom, which for decades were forged unabashedly in opposition to the Catholic Church and its understanding of what freedom was and how people could attain it. To be sure, social issues like birth control and gay marriage have helped to create a “new ecumenism.” Just as important, however, have been the inequities caused by the advent of modern industrial capitalism, which have forced American Protestants to stop using the Catholic Church as a foil when defining freedom and the conditions that sustain it.