While the Cromwellian ecclesiastical establishment has often been portrayed in negative terms as the absence of a national church, Chapter 10 supports the case for seeing this establishment in many practical respects (and in the eyes of many serving ministers) as a continuation of the pre-war national church. The chapter discusses how many aspects of the Church settlement were conceptualized and organized at a national level, and the sustained pressure for religious uniformity. A further section discusses the ‘half-life’ of the reforms of the 1640s – an existing Reformation that lurked constantly in the background in this decade, its formularies reprinted and in some cases still deployed. The chapter also seeks to capture something of the Cromwellian church on the ground, where gathered and parochial church forms existed rather awkwardly side by side, where local practice was marked by creativity and improvisation, and where the ritual life of parishes was not as attenuated and token as is sometimes suggested. A final section explores how far the reformers of the 1650s -- and even its most radical spirits -- still situated their positions with reference to the past history of the Church of England and some of its famous figures.

The conclusion reviews the findings of the book, noting that the ‘second Reformation’ included a series of changes and reform endeavours – Laudian, abortive, Westminster, Cromwellian, Caroline – which all in their different ways sought to push the Church of England’s ambiguous Tudor legacy in specific new directions. It notes that all religious groups were prepared to contemplate change to the church’s pre-war formularies, and that all were indeed required to adapt their religious ideas and practices in the face of the upheavals of these years. Portraying the disruptions of the 1640s as the climax of the Church of England’s early history rather than as an aberration in an otherwise continuous ‘Anglican’ master-narrative, the book has demonstrated how many elements of the reforms of the 1640s and 1650s had been anticipated in the doctrines, practices, statutes, bills, and reform proposals of earlier decades. It also maintains that compromise and negotiation were as ubiquitous as change and radicalization in the period’s religious politics, and argues the need to look beyond the simple binary oppositions of contemporary polemic. The period is best seen as a time when everyone was obliged to rethink what the established church was and how its past should be understood.

‘Laudianism’ was not simply a different perspective on the Church of England’s identity from that held by other English Protestants, but a systematic attempt to impose a particular reading of the English Church on all parishes, and to privilege and prioritize certain facets and formularies over others. This chapter focuses on how the Laudians chose to situate their reforms vis-à-vis the earlier history and formularies of the Church of England. Like the Protestant Reformation itself, the Laudian Reformation framed itself as the repudiation of an impure present, and as a return to a more pure or ‘primitive church’ that had existed before the current abuses had taken hold. However, the chapter argues that the identity of that ‘primitive church’ was subject to constant change. It demonstrates how different Laudian authors found elements of the Jacobean church and Elizabethan settlement wanting, and instead selectively appropriated and sampled elements from earlier reformations, and from the medieval and patristic churches. For all their often conservative rhetoric, the chapter also explores the Laudian readiness to promote a language of progressive reformation and revelation, and to seek to change existing structures and formularies where possible.

Chapter 6 traces the place of religion in negotiations for a settlement between Charles I and his opponents from 1642 up to the regicide. Often dismissed as irrelevant and futile gestures by two sides with irreconcilable positions who negotiated in bad faith, it is argued here that these negotiations nevertheless provide intriguing sets of potential reformation settlements that could have reshaped the Church of England in significant ways, and useful indications of where creative compromises might be made. The chapter demonstrates the official royalist commitment to upholding the reforms of 1640-41, and readiness to offer further reforms curbing the power of episcopacy, offering toleration to ‘tender consciences’, and the calling of a national synod to debate further religious reforms. The parliamentarian side in negotiations was significantly hamstrung by the restrictions of the Solemn League and Covenant’s condemnation of ‘prelacy’ and the uniting of the British churches. The chapter traces the arguments through various peace negotiations, noting in particular the new opportunities opened up by the army’s intervention and the offers of the Heads of the Proposals. It is noted that the concessions offered by Charles – however insincere – would enjoy a significant after-life in his published works and future reform proposals.

The Introduction explains the book’s intention to look at the religious history of the mid-seventeenth century in the context of the history of the Church of England and its earlier Reformations. Given that recent historians have emphasized that there was no single clear Church of England orthodoxy in the pre-war period, and have mostly ceased to use the term ‘Anglican’ altogether to describe pre-war conformists, it does not seem to make sense to describe the religious upheavals of these years as the destruction of a coherent established church. The book will instead propose that these events should be studied as an extended argument over the identity of the Church of England, and how it should be reformed, that involved a wide range of religious opinions. The use of the term ‘second Reformation’ to describe this phenomenon, and the rationale behind including the Laudian movement of the 1630s as part of this process, are explained. A final ‘Note on Terminology’ explains the meaning and rationale of several new terms introduced in the book to describe some of the phenomena discussed therein, and explains the rejection of the terms ‘Anglicanism’ and ‘Restoration settlement’ as anachronistic and/or misleading.

Chapter 12 challenges the assumption that the ‘Restoration church’ inevitably accompanied the political restoration. It begins by charting the different attempted reformations of 1659-60, from radical Congregationalist proposals to the rapid re-establishment of the 1640s Presbyterian settlement just before the king’s return in 1660. The attempted comprehensive settlements of the following ten months are then carefully analysed with reference to the ‘abortive reformation’ of 1640-41 discussed in Chapter 4, the peace negotiations discussed in Chapter 6, and other past reform initiatives. Analysing the wide range of commentary by puritan divines and more moderate episcopalian writers, it points to elements of possible compromise in areas of doctrine, church government (including the revival of plans for ‘reduced episcopacy’), liturgy and ceremonies, and extemporary prayer, culminating in the remarkable concessions of the Worcester House Declaration of October 1660. Other elements of the abortive reformation of 1640-41 are also observable, such as anti-Laudianism, the robust re-assertion of the Church of England’s links with the foreign Reformed churches, and some notable memorializing of earlier evangelical conformists who had been members of the Williams Committee. It is argued that hindsight has led historians to miss these many continuities with earlier reforming initiatives.

Chapter 4 focuses on the ‘abortive reformation’ – a series of measures proposed and in some cases implemented in the years 1640-41 which aimed at the reform rather than the abolition of episcopacy and the Prayer Book. It initially surveys how Laudian ideas and policies were systematically rejected by senior clergy, not least by the advisory sub-committee under Bishop Williams established by the House of Lords committee investigating religious innovations. De-Laudianization in itself re-formulated the Church of England, but was combined with a readiness to contemplate significant reforms of church government, liturgy and ceremonies. The chapter analyses these reforms proposed by a range of protagonists including the Williams Committee, which addressed some of the objections raised in the puritan Ministers’ Petition and Remonstrance. Episcopal reforms – most notably in the shape of ‘reduced episcopacy’ – show conformists ready to contemplate significant changes to the established church. It is argued that Parliament played a key role in all the envisaged reforms and was already seizing de facto power over the existing ecclesiastical system. Despite the failure of these reforms to be implemented, both sides at the outbreak of war were theoretically committed to this ‘abortive reformation’ in their competition for the ideological middle ground.

Chapter 5 analyses the different forces working against the ‘abortive reformation’ discussed in Chapter 4. It begins with the Scottish commissioners, seeing their significance less in propelling a Presbyterian agenda than in their more circumspect undermining of the calls for reduced episcopacy. The chapter then discusses the various parliamentary forces working against episcopacy, along with the role played by more radicalizing religious discourses beyond Parliament’s immediate control. To explain why more marginal ideas were able to gain traction in public discourse about religious change, attention turns to the prestige of anti-Laudian martyrs and the disproportionate public importance of prominent Congregationalists, the format and distribution of the tracts themselves, but also the ways in which the language of religious change was also developing in this period, which opened up areas of ambiguity in which radical solutions could flourish. Here discussion centres on the languages of reformation, anti-Laudianism, apocalypse, eschatology and covenant, with detailed attention to the role played by the 1641 Protestation in particular in polarizing religious opinion. Importance is also attached to the conservative backlash that this radicalization provoked, which undermined conformist support for further reform and empowered more conservative and even Laudian figures.

Chapter 13 analyses the different forces that worked against the comprehensive religious settlement that was attempted in 1660-61. It begins with a study of conservative elements hostile to any compromise with Presbyterianism, noting their emphasis on the evils of sacrilege, and how the language of ‘restoration’ was often expressed in prophetic rather than conservative terms. It then discusses the Presbyterian opposition to a range of aspects of the new settlement – from the threat of reordination to the repudiation of the Solemn League and Covenant and the stricter imposition of liturgical conformity. While these problems were not insuperable, most puritans could find at least one feature of the new settlement that they considered non-negotiable. The chapter then analyses the settlement itself, and argues that it was not a simple restoration of the pre-war church, or of the Laudian church, but constituted a rather eclectic hybrid of different elements of the Church of England’s earlier identities. Its features could be glossed in different ways, and both the Clarendon Code and the 1667 agitation for a comprehension bill presented themselves as further rationalizations of the intended settlement. It is argued that the principles of the abortive reformation were not conclusively defeated in 1662.

Challenging the assumption that the Elizabethan religious settlement was clear in its content and meaning to contemporaries, Chapter 1 explores the many areas of confusion and ambiguity surrounding the settlement’s formularies. It emphasizes the contested authority of a range of official and semi-official formularies and commentaries, and of past doctrinal and liturgical forms, which potentially pointed in very different theological and ecclesiastical directions. A number of unresolved issues are highlighted relating to church government, liturgy and ceremonies, doctrine, ministerial maintenance, and ecclesiastical law. As a result, the Church of England’s position was inevitably subject to continual negotiation and debate, and to countless proposals for further reform and clarification. It is argued that, as a result, a very broad range of English religious thinkers and activists – from militant high-churchmen to staunchly Calvinist and incipiently Presbyterian puritans – could in the ensuing years seize on some of these threads and claim with some legitimacy to be accomplishing the final clarification and consummation – and indeed the apotheosis – of the earlier Reformations. The Laudian movement would thus constitute just one contested reading of this haphazard corpus of ambiguous ecclesiastical and doctrinal formulations.

Chapter 9 explores the period 1649-53 as a time when all religious groups were forced to rethink the Church of England and to contemplate significant changes to their religious lives. Beginning with the radical reform programmes of 1649-53, it argues that many of these reforms (such as attacks on lay impropriations and tithes) had been prefigured in pre-war debates or could command more mainstream support, and can be studied in continuity with earlier reforming initiatives rather than as a radical break with the past. The stymieing of the 1640s Presbyterian settlement, and the political troubles of presbyterian royalists, are examined. The chapter discusses the practical and ideological problems that both Presbyterians and episcopalian royalists faced over how far they should adapt their customary forms of worship and administration of communion in the face of the new settlement, and documents their failure to create agreed positions on conformity. The chapter also outlines the negotiations conducted by Charles II and his ministers with the Scottish Covenanters, delineating not a simple capitulation but a series of negotiations involving foreign divines, where forms of reduced episcopacy were still being discussed, but ending with an alliance which drove episcopalian royalists to question the royal supremacy.

It is customary for the 1650s to be portrayed as a time when disenfranchised ‘Anglicans’ heroically maintained their church’s practices and beliefs unchanged. This chapter presents a rather different and ambiguous picture: some episcopalian royalists undoubtedly imitated the actions of puritan separatists in shunning local services, but the image of principled ‘Anglicans’ fleeing into the wilderness is shown to have been a popular trope rather than an accurate account of what was a far more messy and changing picture of partial compliance with the authorities, where preaching rather than Prayer Book usage played the key role in maintaining the episcopalian royalist identity. The second section of the chapter studies how the episcopalians of the 1650s located themselves vis-�is the pre-war church, and identifies a notable range of opinions concerning earlier Reformations, the Elizabethan and Jacobean Churches, and relations with the foreign Reformed Churches. A third section studies the remarkably rich new thinking in episcopalian circles in these years on a whole range of doctrinal, liturgical and ecclesiastical topics, partly reflecting the absence of any agreed arbiters of episcopalian orthodoxy. It is demonstrated that episcopalian divines showed a remarkable readiness to contemplate significant changes to the formularies of the pre-war church.

Moving beyond the familiar focus on the radical puritan reaction, Chapter 3 examines the full range of expressed opposition to the Laudian programme, not just from hard-line puritans, but also from conformists including those in the senior ranks of the Church. These arguments consistently adopted a remarkably conservative mode of defending established orthodoxy in doctrine and practice against recent Laudian innovations, with even puritans invoking the Prayer Book and the 1604 Canons. Even radical presses run by sectarians abroad could juggle with more conservative rhetoric. Most of the arguments of the famous anti-Laudian puritans Henry Burton, John Bastwick and William Prynne still followed more conservative lines (despite the violence of their language) although they radicalised after their punishments. The Scottish opposition to the new Prayer Book, it is argued, was mostly directed against pre-Laudian grievances (with the exception of Robert Baillie’s Ladensium Autokatakrisis which was aimed at English MPs in the Short Parliament). The chapter also analyses the Short Parliament and opposition to the etcetera oath, noting that tactical moderation still meant that the pre-eminent (although not the sole) mode of public debate concerning the Church of England was a conservative one that left the door open for moderate reforms.

Chapter 7 traces the emergence of the Reformation implemented by the parliamentarian side in the Civil War. After noting the ambiguous status of the Westminster Assembly, the chapter analyses the drawing up of the Westminster Confession, the Directory for Public Worship, the Catechisms and the form of Presbyterian church government. In each case, it is argued that these represented more sweeping changes than the limited reforms originally contemplated by Parliament. But in each case, it is also demonstrated that the new formularies reflected many pre-war ideas and forms, while the orthodoxy of the Thirty-nine Articles and the Book of Common Prayer was still partly maintained. The reform of church government reflected the continuing determination of Parliament to retain ecclesiastical control. The second half of the chapter describes how these reforms were presented and understood, noting how shared discourses of anti-Laudianism, the covenant, fellowship with the foreign Reformed churches, providentialism, and biblicism both justified the changes but also created a language that could be turned against fellow parliamentarians. It is concluded that, for all the radical changes being contemplated and (partly) implemented, the Westminster Reformation encompassed a mixture of change and continuity with the pre-war church.