Anthony Milton
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The Reformed conformist tradition, 1640–62
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Since Patrick Collinson’s 1982 Religion of Protestants historians have tended to see the Jacobean church as witnessing the apogee of the ‘Reformed conformist’ tradition, before it was swamped by the Laudianism of the 1630s and the puritan counter-reaction which spelt the doom of the middle ground that Reformed conformist bishops had occupied. They were left with nowhere to go (it tends to be assumed) except to a royalism that was increasingly dominated by hardline conformists and Arminians. The study of ‘Reformed’ or ‘Calvinist’ conformity in England thus tends to disappear for the period 1640-1660. But this chapter suggests instead that in many ways the 1640s and 1650s were in fact the vital moment when ‘Reformed conformity’ played a key role in religious politics and doctrinal debates. Beginning with the ‘abortive reformation’ of 1640-41 and the newly enhanced political role that anti-Laudian episcopalians played in the Williams Committee and elsewhere in trying to facilitate a negotiated settlement with puritan critics, the chapter notes some of the tensions and ambiguities in the balance between the ‘Reformed’ and ‘conformist’ aspects of these divines as the political situation deteriorated. But it also highlights how many of the precepts and tropes of ‘Reformed conformity’ tended to dominate the official royalist negotiating position in the 1640s, while the 1650s and early 1660s were times when there was a veritable cult of figures such as James Ussher, Ralph Brownrigg, and John Prideaux among episcopalians and Presbyterians alike, for a variety of motives.

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