Religious identity is multifaceted, involving a blend of sensibilities, priorities and commitments. This is true today and it was true in the seventeenth century. In simple terms, women and men never had only one reason for believing something or doing something. Multiple motivations worked in tandem and along varying degrees of importance. In Stuart England such motivations, sensibilities, prejudices and commitments included the role of the king as God's anointed, certain perceptions of primitive Christianity, the fear of innovation, and competing interpretations of legitimacy and authority. Economics, foreign policy and gender roles contributed too, of course. Recently historians have begun to appreciate more and more that people rarely had Damascene conversions during the reformations of the sixteenth century, but rather developed new perceptions of themselves and their religious and political world through a series of negotiations. Certain priorities gradually emerged to foster Reformed sensibilities, loosely understood, among English Christians. This seems to be fully accepted now among most Tudor historians. The question, then, becomes what can we learn if we apply this negotiation model to the post-reformation period, to seventeenth-century English culture? The same situation emerges, namely, a variety of claims about the meaning of conformity jostled against one another resulting in a reconfiguration of priorities.

Having examined Peter Smart and other old style conformists, this chapter considers the Laudian side of that dialogue to see how they operated within this familiar discourse on legitimacy.