At the Restoration, a particular interpretation of the English reformation and of conformity to the Book of Common Prayer emerged to install the confessional tradition Anglicanism as the normative face of the Church of England. Its Cavalier proponents understood this installation as a return to an Elizabethan orthodoxy. While it would be hard to imagine that this was the ultimate goal of the Laudians who dominated the church in the reign of Charles I, their arguments initiated a trend in polemics and rhetoric that resulted in this Anglican sensibility three decades later. In 1628, when the old style conformist Peter Smart stepped into the pulpit at Durham Cathedral, he invoked a legitimating history, a narrative that would, for him and others, oust his immediate superiors as gross innovators. The new copes, the candles, the figurative art, the consecration ritual and of course the new stone altar had, according to Smart, violated the constitution of prayer book worship, a devotional and theological paradigm located in the relatively recent past. It would be difficult to describe this man as a puritan in the 1620s, but that was the Laudian response. While John Cosin derided his fellow Durham prebend as a ‘most froward, fierce, and unpeaceable spirit’, other Laudians articulated a competing historical narrative, one that legitimated their vision of the established church's devotional, pastoral and theological life and pushed conformists like Smart into a polemical construction of wicked puritanism.