Skip to navigation – Site map

HomeIssues XXVII-3Puritanism from the Outside

Abstracts

Puritanism has, rightly, been seen as a primarily English phenomenon. But puritan ideas can also be studied in very different contexts, as they spread throughout the English-speaking religious world. This article seeks to “decentre” puritanism by examining it from the perspective of the other two national churches in Britain and Ireland – those in Scotland and Ireland. Taking Patrick Collinson’s definition of puritanism—that it was not something definable in itself, but rather it was one half of a stressful relationship – it is shown that in both Ireland and Scotland, puritanism only came into existence when it was attacked by the English monarch and by those who saw puritanism in terms of its English manifestation. Until well into the seventeenth century, puritanism in both Ireland and Scotland was just a largely unnoticed part of a broadly reformed church. Only with the extension of royal power in the course of the first half of the seventeenth century, and the subsequent determination of King Charles I and Archbishop William Laud to bring the three Churches into closer conformity, did puritanism become a major issue in Ireland and Scotland.

Top of page

Full text

English Puritanism

1Puritanism has, rightly, been studied as a primarily English phenomenon. For many years, historians sought to define its nature, identify its supporters, and isolate its theological principles and disciplinary and ceremonial concerns. The task spawned an enormous literature of theses, books, and articles across the second half of the twentieth century, works such as John New’s Anglican and Puritan: The Basis of their Opposition, 1558-1640 (London, 1964), or Richard Greaves weighty (in the literal sense – 925 pages, 1.6 kilos) Society and Religion in Elizabethan England (Minneapolis, 1981), founded on the idea that there was a binary opposition between puritans and their opponents, often labelled “Anglicans”. The tasks of definition and distinction, though, proved deeply frustrating, as puritans turned out to be irritatingly slippery, sharing social attitudes and assumptions with their supposedly Anglican adversaries, their theology proving to be little different from most Elizabethan Protestants.

  • 1 Alexandra Walsham, ‘Patrick Collinson 1929-2011’, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Ac (...)
  • 2 Perceval Wilburn, A Checke or Reproofe of M. Howlets Vntimely Shreeching in her Maiesties Eares (Lo (...)
  • 3 Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 1988), p. 143; (...)

2This historiographical Gordian knot was cut by that “most compelling and influential historian”, Patrick Collinson, who devoted most of his career to rethinking puritanism and early-modern English religion.1 He suggested that we abandon the idea of defining puritanism in either-or terms, and think of it as a spectrum of opinion ranging from the extreme of separatism (which he excluded) to conformist members of the Church of England. Since many of the religious and theological convictions of puritans were shared with other non-puritan clergy, Collinson proposed that what made the former different was the strength of their beliefs, their zeal, or “temperature” – as one contemporary, gratefully quoted by historians, put it, puritans were “the hotter sort of Protestants”.2 But perhaps his most crucial insight, and the one which will be fundamental to our investigation of puritanism here, was that puritans tended to be defined by their opponents, whether playwrights and satirists, or bishops and monarchs: it wasn’t a particular state, it was, rather part of a dialectical process: “There is little point in constructing elaborate statements defining what, in ontological terms, puritanism was and what it was not, when it was not a thing definable in itself but only one half of a stressful relationship.”3

3For all its brilliance and originality, the focus of Collinson’s investigation of puritanism was firmly on England. This is, of course, a perfectly natural emphasis, reflecting the focus of the primary sources. But puritan ideas and churchmanship can also be studied in very different contexts, as they spread throughout the English-speaking religious world, giving rise to two obvious questions: first, how does puritanism look when viewed from non-English perspectives, when you cease treating the English experience as normative; and second, what light does this shed on English puritanism?

Non-English Puritanism

  • 4 The founding father of American puritan studies is of course Perry Miller: see The New England Mind (...)
  • 5 D. T. Rogers, As a City on a Hill: The Story of America’s Most Famous Lay Sermon (Princeton, NJ, Pr (...)
  • 6 For example, Michael McGiffert, Puritanism and the American Experience (Reading, MA, Addison-Wesley (...)
  • 7 K. L. Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism: A History of English and Scottish Churches of the Netherlands in (...)
  • 8 Despite efforts to popularise “Atlantic archipelago”, historians have signally failed to come up wi (...)

4There are, of course, a number of different ways of “decentring” puritanism, largely depending upon which of the various non-English geographical perspectives you adopt. The obvious “other end of the telescope” is America.4 When in 1630 John Winthrop founded his city on a hill – “Massachusetts’s puritan quasi-republic” – puritanism took on a distinctive cross-Atlantic tone and came to be viewed by American scholars within a new and distinctive teleology.5 It was identified as a significant factor in the shaping of American religious, literary, social, economic and political culture, with and abundance of book titles beginning “Puritanism and [...]”, whose reach (unlike English puritanism, which tends to be folded into “dissent” after 1660) extended even to the present day.6 But puritanism can also be viewed from the perspectives of, say, Wales, the Netherlands, or even the Channel Islands.7 For our purposes here, however, I want to shift our perspective to the two other kingdoms in “these islands”. Scotland and Ireland, and see what puritanism looks like when viewed from Edinburgh or Dublin.8

  • 9 Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, Methuen, 1967).

5Let us start by going back to the immediate origins of puritanism in these islands – the experience of the Marian exiles who, after 1553, fled to mainland Europe where they encountered a variety of theological influences in Zurich, Strasbourg, Frankfurt and Geneva, most notably the reformed Protestantism of Bullinger and Calvin. This has, rightly, been identified as a source not only of the “Calvinist consensus”, that unifying force of English Protestantism which came to dominate the English universities in the reign of Elizabeth, replacing the earlier Lutheranism of the English reformation, but also of the subsequent divisions between puritans and English bishops, as the exiles repeatedly disagreed over ceremonies, liturgy and the power of the secular ruler.9

Scotland

6Exile was also the source of a reformation with a very different theological and organizational thrust to the English one, as, after 1559, the two leaders of the congregation in Geneva, John Knox and Christopher Goodman returned to Scotland. Knox, famously, saw Geneva as “the most perfect school of Christ”, and with fierce determination he sought to shape the Scottish reformation accordingly. Exploiting the confused political situation and the weakness of the monarchy, he introduced both a comprehensively reformed theology and a Presbyterian disciplinary structure – the Scottish confession and Book of Discipline of 1560.

  • 10 Hall, Puritans, p. 79; Margo Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early-Modern Scotland (New Haven (...)

7The main difficulty, as so often with reformation settlements, was the relationship between secular and ecclesiastical power. Knox, like Calvin, sought to preserve the independence of the church, with the civil authorities aiding but not dominating the reformation. Initially helped by the succession of a 13-month old King, James VI, in 1567, the difficulty posed by the Kirk’s desire for independence increased significantly when James began his personal rule in 1584. His personal distaste for Scottish Presbyterians, based on painful early experiences and his high vision of royal power, led him to try to rein in the independence of the Kirk. Thus the Black Acts of 1584 sought to increase the role of royally appointed bishops and reduce the power of the General Assembly. That said, by the end of the sixteenth century the Church of Scotland was very different to the Church of England, being more clearly aligned confessionally and in terms of discipline with “the high standards of the Reformed tradition”.10

  • 11 Nicholas Tyacke, ‘The Lambeth Articles (1595) and the Doctrinal Stance of the Church of England’, T (...)
  • 12 Quoted in John Coffey, ‘The Problem of “Scottish Puritanism”, 1590-1638’, in Elizabethanne Boran an (...)

8This alignment results in an interesting absence in Scottish religious discourse in the sixteenth century – there is, with a single exception, no mention of puritanism. The reason is simple. While there were clearly major tensions about the relations between church and state, the concerns of puritans were, in terms of theology and discipline, largely met by the Scottish reformation settlement. Where English Calvinists sought unsuccessfully, in the Lambeth Articles of 1596 to revise the Thirty-Nine Articles by conforming them to the reformed norm of double predestination, such efforts were simply not needed in Scotland.11 The 1604 canons, used by English bishops to force puritans out of their ministry, had no counterpart north of the border. There was, in short, no “other” to define “puritans” in oppositional terms – they were part of the mainstream. The exception – as far as we can see, the only person to use the word in sixteenth-century Scotland – was James VI, who, in his 1599 advice to his son, warned him of the danger of “vaine pharasaical puritans”.12

  • 13 Alan R. Macdonald, ‘James VI and I, the Church of Scotland, and British Ecclesiastical Convergence’ (...)
  • 14 Christopher Hampton, A sermon preached in the cittie of Glasco in Scotland, on the tenth day of Iun (...)
  • 15 Ibid., pp. 17, 27-8.
  • 16 John McCafferty, ‘Ireland and Scotland, 1534-1663’, in Anthony Milton (ed.), The Oxford History of (...)
  • 17 P. H. R. Mackay, ‘The Five Articles of Perth’ (PhD dissertation, University of Edinburgh, 1975); La (...)
  • 18 Quoted in Coffey, ‘Problem of “Scottish Puritanism”’, p. 79.

9In 1603 James VI of Scotland became James I of England and Ireland and, of course, the supreme governor of the Church of England, where the church was clearly subservient to the state. Unsurprisingly, he rather liked the southern model, and from 1603 till his death in 1625 set about trying to make the Scottish system conform more closely to the English – engaging in a kind of “reverse-engineering”, as he tried to turn a Presbyterian system into an Erastian episcopal one.13 He bullied and threatened the General Assemblies and sought to insert royally appointed bishops into the Kirk system. In 1610 James sent his chaplain, Christopher Hampton, to preach obedience to the General Assembly in Glasgow. Taking as his model the Old Testament King David, he explained that “the supreame power and authoritie of settling religion; and the [...] disposition of the ceremonies” belong to kings, who have the power of “making holy lawes, not for the civill state of their kingdomes alone, but in matters also concerning divine religion, and government of the church”.14 Having cheekily quoted Calvin on the need for strict conformity to ecclesiastical rites, Hampton went on to warn against “fanaticall and giddie spirits” who have an “immoderate desire of Christian libertie” and make “an importunate challenge of equalitie in government of the church”.15 When James finally visited his native land in 1617, he brought with him as an example to the Kirk three English bishops, the English Prayer Book, candles, surplice-wearing clergy and a £400 organ.16 As James and his supporters adopted the rhetoric of English anti-puritanism, they also used its tactics: in the 1618 General Assembly (the last to meet for 30 years), James forced through the Articles of Perth, used the standard anti-puritan approach of ceremonial uniformity plus subscription, requiring Scottish clergy to kneel at communion and observe holy days.17 Following the passing of the Articles we have that familiar English story being translated to Scotland, of puritans refusing to use the required rites and ceremonies and being expelled from the church. As the Presbyterian historian, David Calderwood (himself a participant in these events) put it, royalist abuse had had the effect of turning orthodox Calvinists into puritans: “He then is the new puritane that standeth for Christ against Antichrist, that defendeth Gods free grace against mans free will, and would have everything done in the house of God according to the will of God [...].”18

Ireland

  • 19 Jane Dawson and L. K. J. Glassey, ‘Some Unpublished Letters from John Knox to Christopher Goodman’, (...)
  • 20 Jane Dawson, ‘Scotland, Ireland and the Vision of a “British” Protestant Reformation’, Studies: An (...)

10As well as the churches of Scotland and England, there was a third independent church in these islands, the Church of Ireland. Here too there was a link to the Protestant exiles of Geneva. John Knox had throughout his life a vision of the reformation in these islands which transcended national churches and looked to Protestant evangelists to work together to establish the reformed gospel.19 In the wake of the accession of Elizabeth in 1558, as the newly (re-)established Church of Ireland struggled to gain the support of the indigenous population, it turned to Scotland for desperately-needed Protestant preachers. Amongst those who answered the call was Christopher Goodman, who came over to Ireland as chaplain to the Lord Deputy, Sir Henry Sidney in 1566, and proposed setting up a church in Dublin which could establish a “proper” reformed discipline, even inviting over Knox to help him. Goodman gained the support of Archbishop Adam Loftus, the leader of the Church of Ireland, who employed as his chaplain the English puritan, Thomas Cartwright. The willingness to embrace a more radical version of Protestantism in Ireland was evident in the proposal to make Goodman and Cartwright Church of Ireland bishops.20

11Though each soon left Ireland, their concern about the contemporary dispute about ecclesiastical vestments, which was dividing the church in England, was certainly shared by Cartwright’s employer. In 1565 Loftus wrote to his patron in England, the Secretary of State, William Cecil, calling on him to prevent the deprivation of the puritan clergy who refused to wear the surplice.

O crafty devil and subtle Satan, when he cannot overthrow [...] our religion what ado makes he about trifles [...] This enemy of God [...] is wont to deceive the rulers of this world, so that . . . they [...] cruelly persecute the true [...] religion, and where he can bring neither of these to pass, there he turmoils and turns all things topsey turvey until he hath brought in a mixed and mingled religion, neither plainly against nor wholly with Gods word [...]

  • 21 ‘You and your father’s house will perish’: Esther 4.14. Adam Loftus to William Cecil, 16 July 1565, (...)

Alas Master Secretary how should the wearing of the apparel of Antichrist [...] promote the gospel of Jesus Christ, nay I myself have felt [...] how the using of it hath encouraged the adversaries and hindered the course of the true and sincere religion. But I know ye wonder now what moveth me to write thus? Verily the discharge of my conscience; ye are in place where it is possible to help this matter and if ye can and will not. . . tu, et domus patris tui, peribitis.21

  • 22 British Library, Lansdowne MSS, MS 846, fols 205r-207r; J. W. Stubbs (ed.), Archbishop Adam Loftus (...)
  • 23 Alan Ford, James Ussher: Theology, History, and Politics in Early-Modern Ireland and England (Oxfor (...)

12Though the mature Loftus explicitly ruled out Goodman’s dream of Presbyterian discipline within the Irish church, he retained his willingness to employ leading puritans in senior and influential positions.22 In 1594, Walter Travers, who had narrowly escaped imprisonment for his role in the Presbyterian movement within the Church of England, was appointed – with Loftus’ approval – as the first real provost of the newly-founded Church of Ireland university and seminary, Trinity College Dublin, a position he held until 1598.23

  • 24 Christopher Hill, ‘Puritans and “The Dark Corners of the Land”’, Transactions of the Royal Historic (...)

13The idea of leading puritan figures being chosen as bishops, or Travers being made master of a Cambridge College, was, of course, from the perspective of civil and ecclesiastical authorities in England, ludicrous and inconceivable. Why then was it contemplated with equanimity at the highest level in Ireland? One obvious answer, and the one usually offered by historians, has been expediency. Such was the desire of the Church of Ireland for committed clergy that they were prepared to take anyone provided they were Protestant – a pragmatic tolerance that has also been observed in sixteenth century England in relation to the “dark corners of the land” – the frontiers of the reformation.24 Clearly there was a desperate need for ministers in the sixteenth-century Church of Ireland, which can at least partly explain the tolerance of puritan clergy. That said, though, it is clear from Loftus’ extraordinarily outspoken letter to Cecil, that there was also a principled commitment within the Irish church to a broader vision of the reformation than that taken by Elizabeth and her ministers in England. This became apparent in the early decades of the seventeenth century, as the Church of Ireland finally set about defining its confessional and disciplinary structures.

  • 25 Ford, Ussher, ch. 4; Hall, The Puritans.

14In 1615 the church’s convocation passed a confession of faith which, though based on the Thirty Nine Articles, amended them significantly. It did what the Church of England had failed to do – incorporated the 1595 Lambeth Articles, ending any ambiguity about the Church’s commitment to double predestination. The Irish Articles also reflected the broader reformed theology of the Church of Ireland in a number of other ways: identifying the pope with antichrist, ruling out baptismal regeneration, downplaying episcopacy, spelling out the nature of the number and nature of the sacraments in a more firmly Calvinist manner, and recognizing as true churches the many churches “wherein [...] the word of God is taught” – “a nod in the direction of the Reformed international”.25 The natural twin to the Irish Articles was, of course, disciplinary canons, requiring clergy to subscribe to the confession. Interestingly, this simply did not happen in Ireland. There was no Irish equivalent to the Canons of 1604 and the requirement for subscription, so dreaded by puritans.

  • 26 Parr, Life of Ussher, p. 16.

15The result was very similar to what happened in sixteenth-century Scotland – the absence of the word “puritan” from normal ecclesiastical discourse. Where it was used in Ireland it was in one of two contexts. It was used by Catholic controversialists as a way of attacking the orthodoxy of the opposing church – knowing King James’ hatred of them, Catholic leaders regularly complained of the excesses of the Irish “puritans”.26 Or, alternatively, the term was an import from England, usually a product of English émigrés freshly arrived in Ireland finding that standards expected of Irish clergy did not fit their expectations.

  • 27 Angela Andreani, Meredith Hanmer and the Elizabethan Church: A Clergyman’s Career in 16th Century E (...)
  • 28 The National Archives, London, SP 63/214 fol. 214r.

16Take Meredith Hanmer, a Welsh minister who came over to Ireland in the 1590s and was beneficed in Dublin.27 Horrified at what he found, he wrote down some rough notes on Irish “puritanes or schismatics” which have survived amongst his papers. His list includes the obvious English puritans who worked in Ireland, Goodman, Cartwright, and Travers, but also references a number of other ecclesiastics who were at the heart of the Dublin church, referring to their dislike of organs as remnants of popery, and noting that Archbishop Loftus “played all partes”.28 Another example is the position of Trinity College Dublin. This was modelled on a Cambridge puritan College, and soon developed a reputation in England for providing a “godly” education – John Winthrop chose to send his son John to Trinity because of his concerns over the imposition of conformity in English universities. The provost for most of James’ reign was the English puritan William Temple, who had to expend considerable energy in the early 1610s, refuting allegations made to Archbishop Abbot of Canterbury that the fellows failed to wear the surplice in chapel, and that the statutes were “flat puritanical”. Indeed, those allegations might well have come from Christopher Hampton, James’ chaplain, who in 1613 was appointed as Archbishop of Armagh. Like his sermon to the 1610 Assembly in Glasgow, he preached before the 1613-1615 Irish parliament telling the clergy of the Church of Ireland that they must “keep order and decency” or face punishment, finishing his sermon with a stark warning that he was prepared to use discipline if necessary to ensure uniformity of practice within the church. His problem, of course, was that he had few weapons with which to pursue puritans, since nonconformity was not an offence.

  • 29 Dawson, ‘Vision of a "British" Protestant Reformation’, p. 445; Elizabethanne Boran, ‘An Early Frie (...)

17The complexity of the word puritan when it travelled across the Irish Sea was perhaps most evident in the case of James Ussher. Educated in Trinity College Dublin under Travers, Ussher became Professor of Theology there, before being promoted to the see of Meath in 1621, and then succeeding Hampton as Archbishop of Armagh in 1625. One of the most talented scholars produced by the Church of Ireland, at home he was a mainstream Irish reformed prelate. But when he travelled to England he moved extensively in what were clearly puritan circles – indeed on one of his first trips there in 1603 he called in on Christopher Goodman in his home near Chester, just before he died.29

  • 30 Charles Elrington, The Life of the Most Rev. James Ussher (Dublin, Hodges and Smith, 1848), p. 51.
  • 31 Ibid., p. 52.
  • 32 Ibid, pp. 15-17.
  • 33 Boran, ‘Early Friendship Network’.

18Evaluating Ussher’s churchmanship has been a problem, not just for contemporaries, but also for later historians. Travelling to England in the 1610s, as he did regularly to research and buy books, he was pursued by rumours “that he is somewhat transported with singularities, and unaptness to be conformable to the rules and orders of the church” – i.e. a puritan. In the end, Ussher actually went so far as to secure a letter from the Irish Lord Deputy and Council to reassure the English authorities, and the King, that Ussher was “a man orthodox and worthy to govern in the church”.30 Clearly it worked, for two years later James appointed him to the see of Meath. According to one story, James explained his reasoning by means of a paradox: that “the knave puritan was a bad, but the knave’s puritan an honest man”, confirming his dislike of puritans – the knave puritan – but suggesting that the accusation against Ussher was a product merely of malevolence – he was a “knave’s puritan”.31 But what the official letter really reveals is that what was labelled puritan in England was just a normal member of the established church in Ireland. The leading nineteenth-century biographer of Ussher, the high-church (and fiercely anti-Calvinist) Charles Elrington, accepted that he was reformed in his early beliefs, a product of his unfortunate puritan education under Travers at Trinity, but misleadingly claimed that he had grown out of his youthful error.32 A more recent treatment, after a fruitless attempt to define puritan, rightly points to the circles Ussher moved in England as puritan, but misses the fact the term was largely meaningless as a descriptor in the Church of Ireland during the 1610s and 1620s.33

  • 34 Ford, ‘A Puritan church?’, p. 62.
  • 35 Alan Ford, The Protestant Reformation in Ireland, 1590-1641 (2nd ed., Dublin: Four Courts Press, 19 (...)

19Unsurprisingly, puritans were tempted to abandon the challenges they faced in England and move across the Irish Sea to the more tolerant and inclusive atmosphere of the Church of Ireland. In 1608 a collection was made by Manchester to support an unnamed minister who had been deprived of his benefice for nonconformity, and was planning to go to Ireland.34 A friend of John Winthrop, Richard Olmstead, under pressure from his bishop in Suffolk to conform, emigrated and served as a minister in Mountrath in the Church of Ireland, dedicating a book of his sermons to Archbishop Ussher.35

  • 36 Alan Ford, ‘Scottish Presbyterian Clergy and the Origins of Dissent in Ireland’, in David Edwards a (...)
  • 37 Bodleian Library, Oxford, Carte MSS, MS 30, fol. 110r.
  • 38 See Blair’s account of his discussions with Ussher: Ford, Ussher, pp. 167-168.
  • 39 Ford, ‘Scottish Presbyterian Clergy’, pp. 122-123.
  • 40 M. J. Westerkamp, The Triumph of the Laity: Scots-Irish Piety and the Great Awakening, 1625-1760 (O (...)

20As Scottish clergy were deprived for refusing to subscribe to the Articles of Perth they too turned to Ireland. Robert Blair, who was forced to leave his position at Glasgow University in 1623, emigrated to Ireland where the Church of Ireland Bishop of Down and Connor, Robert Echlin, agreed to admit him to the ministry in a ceremony which fused Presbyterian laying on of hands and episcopal ordination. Blair was instrumental in bringing over several Scottish non-conformists, including George Dunbar, banished from Scotland for his refusal to accept the Articles.36 Hampton was again both horrified and impotent. By the early 1620s he was complaining to the authorities in England that “certain factious and irregular puritans” had settled in the Ulster plantation and were “entertaining the Scottish discipline and liturgy so strongly they offer wrong to the church government here established”.37 What is interesting is what happened to these “factious puritans” when Ussher succeeded Hampton as archbishop in 1625: his response was to leave them unmolested. Though recognising that he differed from them in some respects in relation to liturgy and ceremonies, he was content that they agreed in theology and doctrine.38 The only sticking point was Presbyterian discipline – one minister attempted to establish this in his parish, but had to dismantle the structure under episcopal pressure.39 Apart from this the Church of Ireland ministry of the Scots exiles flourished among the largely Scottish planters of north-east Ulster, even creating Ireland’s first Protestant religious revival.40

  • 41 Ford, Ussher, pp. 240-255.

21Again, the question arises: was this peculiar arrangement a product of expediency or principle? And again the answer has to be: a combination of both – the desperation to secure the service of what were very capable parish clergy led to a working compromise that enabled Presbyterians to work within the structures of the episcopal, established church. The alternative Scottish-Irish reformation axis, which Loftus, Knox and Goodman had attempted to forge in the 1560s, had finally come to fruition, producing a compromise unthinkable in the Church of England. The Church of Ireland was a clearly reformed church, as reflected in its confession, but it had an episcopal structure, a combination which worked effectively, since the episcopate was itself solidly Calvinist in its theological outlook. And, of course, it was a formula which offered the prospect of bridging the gap between a purely Presbyterian and an episcopal system, as Ussher recognised in 1641 when he suggest it to King and parliament as a possible compromise religious settlement, a compromise which Charles, with his ineffable gift for failing to take good advice, rejected.41

The Laudian Reaction: Ireland and Scotland

  • 42 Hall, The Puritans, p. 173.
  • 43 Anthony Milton, England’s Second Reformation (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2021), ch. 2.

22The difficulty facing any such Scottish-Irish ecclesiological experiment was, of course, the fact that each church, whether it liked it or not, was subject to a common monarch, and that ruler, as James had already demonstrated, at least in relation to the Scottish church. was determined to impose his authority. The challenge to the churches’ independence was even stronger under James’s successor. Charles I had none of James’ natural sympathy for Calvinist theology, nor did he share his father’s political skills. He was, in the words of David Hall, the kind of king “whose policies contradicted the unspoken rules that enabled conformity to co-exist with nonconformity”.42 Most importantly, his ecclesiastical advisers, especially William Laud, chosen as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633, were driven by an ideological commitment to what has been variously labelled English Arminianism, anti-Calvinism, avant-garde conformity: whatever it was called it was most definitely strongly anti-puritan and hostile to any divergence from English norms in Scotland or Ireland.43

23It is not intended here to trace the religious history England, Scotland and Ireland in the lead-up to the outbreak of the wars of the three kingdoms in the 1640s and 1650s. For the purposes of our investigation, however, it can be observed that the approach to dismantling the reformed consensus in each country was similar: the imposition of canons, the replacement of reformed with Laudian bishops, and the rigorous enforcement of discipline to drive out nonconformists. As a result, in both Ireland and Scotland churches where conformists and those now labelled as puritans had coexisted with relative harmony were now polarized and divided.

  • 44 Ford, Ussher, pp. 186-190.

24A brief illustration from Ireland will suffice. In 1633 Thomas Wentworth came to Ireland as Lord Deputy. He brought with him as chaplain, John Bramhall, appointed Bishop of Derry in 1634. Co-operating closely with Archbishop Laud, Wentworth and Bramhall set out to bring the Church of Ireland into line. When Convocation met in 1634, the two priorities were thus the replacement of the Irish by the English confession, and the passing of disciplinary canons. The response of the Irish church was interesting. Ussher drew up a motion adopting the Thirty Nine Articles, but left out the requirement that clergy subscribe to them. Similarly, when the lower house appointed a committee to redraft the English canons, they repeatedly omitted references to subscription. As Laud commented: “They are in no sort friends of subscription. It is a wonder what kind of acknowledgement of conformity they would have.” The answer, of course, was none.44

  • 45 Ford, Ussher, pp. 185-92

25Wentworth stepped in and forced Convocation to adopt the English articles with subscription, while Bramhall and Laud drafted a set of canons, which, while making due allowance for the different conditions in the Church of Ireland, contained most of the essential disciplinary and enforcement mechanisms of their English originals. Bramhall had now replaced Ussher as the de facto leader of the Irish church, and went on to use the new canons to drive out Scots presbyterian and English puritan clergy from the church in north-east Ulster.45 The old modus vivendi between puritans and the Church of Ireland had ended.

  • 46 Ford, Ussher, p. 192; Alan Ford, ‘Dependent or Independent: the Church of Ireland and Its Colonial (...)

26There were here two markedly different views of the Church of Ireland and its relationship to the Church of England. As far as Laud, Wentworth, and Bramhall were concerned, it was an offshoot of the Church of England, and should, therefore conform as closely as possible to its English mother. Ussher, Irish-born and proud of his native country, stressed the antiquity of the Irish church and its independence from what he saw as its younger English sister, and sought at Convocation to defend the privileges of his “national church”.46

Power and Distance

27Decentring puritanism and removing it from its English context confirms one of Collinson’s essential insights – the idea that it was “one half of a stressful relationship”. Indeed, we can go further than that and say that puritanism was generally defined by its opponents – puritans themselves rarely self-identified as such, preferring more neutral terms such as “the godly”. In the sixteenth century church, which focused upon a broadly-based reformed theology, and had little time for disciplinary canons and weeding out nonconformity through subscription, puritanism largely disappears, subsumed within a Calvinist consensus. The chief disruptor of this cosy modus vivendi was one half of that deeply neuralgic issue, church-state relations, in this case, the monarch. In Scotland, Knox’s fondness for Geneva was perfectly understandable, since Calvin was one of the few reformers who managed to create a balance between secular and ecclesiastical power, so that the latter did not come to dominate the former. James VI, already unhappy with the independence of the Kirk when he was living in Scotland, was presented with an altogether more attractive model of church-state relations when he became King of England and supreme governor of the Church of England. He was determined to subject the Kirk to his direct authority, a policy pursued with even more determination, and with disastrous results, by his son Charles.

28A similar pattern can be observed in the Church of Ireland, though with one very significant difference. There too puritanism was largely indistinguishable, part of a broadly based Protestant church, one which was so focused upon combating Catholicism and securing sufficient preachers that it had no interest in subscription and conformity. Where the word puritan occurs it is usually used by English observers, or recent English émigrés, applying English standards to an unfamiliar church. But in Ireland, unlike in Scotland, complaints about puritanism from these observers found little echo with James and his officials: there was no Irish equivalent of the Articles of Perth – hence the ability of Scots puritans to pursue their ministry in Ireland.

  • 47 The further you are from the god, the further you are from his thunder.’ Journal of the House of C (...)
  • 48 Mark Brayshay, Land Travel and Communications in Tudor and Stuart England : Achieving a Joined-up R (...)

29What was going on here? A possible answer was provided by King James when, in an address to parliament in 1607, he reflected on the natural desire to be near to the centre of power: “But I confess, it is good sometimes to be far from the Prince’s court: ‘Procul a numine, procul a fulmine.’”47 Power, in other words, was moderated by distance. There were, in the multiple kingdoms of these islands in the early-seventeenth century, different ways in which royal power was mediated. In the case of England and Scotland, the King had a direct power over decision making and the state apparatus, and communications within the two “mainland” kingdoms were good and getting better in the early-modern period.48 Ireland was different, in that it was more geographically distant which made communication slower and more difficult. This meant that knowledge and information – essential for taking effective government decisions – did not always flow freely across the Irish Sea. It also had a separate layer of government, with a Lord Deputy, parliament and judicial system which, while modelled on England, was still distinctively Irish. The fact that successive Lords Deputy in the early seventeenth century were veterans of the Irish administration, and not fresh arrivals from England, meant that they were more than capable of protecting the interests, and, indeed, the self-interest, not just of the new-English settlers in Ireland, but also of the Church of Ireland. It was Lord Deputy Chichester, not King James, who approved the 1615 Irish Articles.

  • 49 James Ussher to Luke Challoner, 9 April 1613 from London: Elizabethanne Boran, ed., The Corresponde (...)

30Trinity provides a neat example of the way in which distance could be exploited to preserve freedom of manoeuvre. When in the early 1610s news reached Archbishop Abbot about the College’s, “flat puritanical” statutes, he wanted to redraft them. James Ussher, then Professor of Theology, went over to England in 1613 and had a long audience with the Archbishop. He then sent a warning letter home to his friend and father-in-law, Luke Challoner, the Vice-Provost: “I pray you be not too forward to have statutes sent you from hence. Dictum sapienti.”49 The advice was taken: Trinity’s statutes remained unaltered and the College retained its independence.

  • 50 Alan Ford, ‘That Bugbear Arminianism’: Archbishop Laud and Trinity College, Dublin’, in C.F. Brady (...)

31This also explains what happened in the 1630s under Wentworth and Bramhall. Newly arrived in a country with which they had no previous connection, they had a direct line of communication to Laud and Charles, and information, as a result, flowed back and forth between England and Ireland, exposing the differences between the two polities and, as we have seen, between the two churches. Contrary to the rules of geography, the “distance” – political distance – between the two countries actually shrank in the 1630s and Irish institutions were exposed to direct scrutiny in England. Yet again the results can be seen in Trinity College Dublin. Where Abbot had been deflected, Laud was able to act directly and decisively, ending the College’s independence. He deprived the fellows of their right to elect the provost, personally redrafted the statutes to exclude all puritan elements, and sent over an Arminian, William Chappell, to weed out the Calvinist fellows.50

  • 51 John Winthrop sen. to John Winthrop jun. 20 Apr. 1620: quoted in F. J. Bremer, John Winthrop: Ameri (...)
  • 52 Bremer, Winthrop, pp. 234-240.
  • 53 Quoted in Ford, Ussher, p. 210.

32The new realities of the relationship between distance, power and puritanism were recognised by the recently-created Irish nonconformists. The Scots clergy whom Bramhall had expelled from their parishes were faced with a difficult decision – how were they to continue their ministry? They could neither go back to the even more hostile regime in Scotland, nor remain in Ireland, so they took the logical step of putting even more distance between themselves and the numinous thunderbolts by building a ship and planning to emigrate to America. Though prevented by storms from reaching their promised land, their decision-making was sound. In the 1620s, when he sent his son to Trinity John Winthrop had written to him: “I wish oft God would open a way to settle me in Ireland, if it might be to his glory.51 But by 1630 Winthrop had clearly decided that Ireland was no longer safe for puritans, and sailed instead for Massachusetts. Shrewdly, the Massachusetts Bay Company ensured that its officers and government were based not in London, but in America. Hence, when in 1634 Archbishop Laud, suspicious of the way in which the colonists in America were exploiting their freedom and distance, ordered that they return the charter so that it could be revoked, the colonists took a page out of Trinity’s playbook, and stalled, failing to send it back. The ploy worked for them too – the Charter was only finally rescinded in 1684.52 This shifting perspective on how distant puritans needed to be to preserve freedom of manoeuvre was even noted by Archbishop Ussher. Concerned in the 1630s at the rise of Arminianism in England and Ireland and the increasing censorship of Calvinist theology, he proposed to the godly minister, Thomas Goodwin, that “all good books” be “sent into some part of America for preservation”.53

Conclusion

33There are three general conclusion that can be drawn from this attempt to decenter English puritanism. One is the centrality of the relationship between church and state in the Protestant reformation, hardly an original point, but one which is amply borne out by the differing ways in which the reformed theology and church organisation which the exiles were exposed to in Geneva were put into effect in the different religious settlements in each of the three kingdoms after 1558. Second, is the importance – the disruptive importance – of royal power and personality. James and Charles were exercised their royal supremacy in such a way that made it impossible for the three churches to preserve their freedom of manoeuvre in theological and disciplinary matters: they thus helped to “create” puritans. And finally, we have explored the relationship between this royal exercise of power and distance, and shown how in the 1630s the vigorous exercise of royal power and the determination of Archbishop Laud to impose a degree of ecclesiastical uniformity, or at least congruity, on all three kingdoms shrank the degree of freedom which the Irish and Scottish churches possessed, leaving puritans by the end of the 1640s with only America as a safe refuge.

Top of page

Bibliography

Andreani, Angela, Meredith Hanmer and the Elizabethan Church: A Clergyman’s Career in 16th Century England and Ireland (London, Routledge, 2020).

Boran, Elizabethanne (ed.), The Correspondence of James Ussher: 1600-1656, 3 vols (Dublin, Irish Manuscripts Commission, 2015).

Boran, Elizabethanne, ‘An Early Friendship Network of James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, 1626-1656’, in Helga Robinson-Hammerstein (ed.), European Universities in the Age of the Reformation (Dublin, 1998), pp. 116-34.

Brayshay, Mark, Land Travel and Communications in Tudor and Stuart England: Achieving a Joined-up Realm (Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2014).

Bremer, F. J., John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003).

Carroll, P. N., Puritanism and the Wilderness: The Intellectual Significance of the New England frontier, 1629-1700 (New York, Columbia University Press, 1969).

Charles Elrington, The Life of the Most Rev. James Ussher (Dublin, Hodges and Smith, 1848).

Coffey, John, ‘The Problem of “Scottish Puritanism”, 1590-1638’, in Elizabethanne Boran and Crawford Gribben (eds), Enforcing the Reformation in Ireland and Scotland, 1550-1700 (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2006), pp. 66-90.

Collinson, Patrick, ‘Anti-puritanism’ in John Coffey and Paul Lim (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 19-33.

Collinson, Patrick, The Birthpangs of Protestant England (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 1988).

Collinson, Patrick, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, Methuen, 1967).

Cressy, David, ‘Puritan Martyrs in Island Prisons’, Journal of British Studies 57 (2018), pp. 736-754.

Dawson, Jane, and Glassey, L. K. J. , ‘Some Unpublished Letters from John Knox to Christopher Goodman’, Scottish Historical Review 84 (2005), pp. 166-201.

Dawson, Jane, ‘Scotland, Ireland and the Vision of a ‘British’ Protestant Reformation’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 106 (2017), pp. 439-47.

Ford, Alan, ‘Dependent or Independent: the Church of Ireland and Its Colonial Context, 1536-1647’, The Seventeenth Century 10 (1995), pp. 163-187.

Ford, Alan, James Ussher: Theology, History, and Politics in Early-Modern Ireland and England (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007).

Ford, Alan, ‘Scottish Presbyterian Clergy and the Origins of Dissent in Ireland’, in David Edwards and Simon Egan, eds., The Scots in Early Stuart Ireland: Union and Aspiration in the Two Kingdoms (Manchester, 2016), pp. 116-40.

Ford, Alan, ‘That Bugbear Arminianism’: Archbishop Laud and Trinity College, Dublin’, in C.F. Brady and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds), British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 135-60.

Ford, Alan, ‘The Church of Ireland 1558-1641: A Puritan Church?’, in Alan Ford, James McGuire and Kenneth Milne (eds), As by Law Established. The Church of Ireland since the Reformation (Dublin, Lilliput Press, 1995), pp. 52-68.

Ford, Alan, The Protestant Reformation in Ireland, 1590-1641 (2nd ed., Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997)

Foster, Stephen, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570-1700 (Chapel Hill, NC, University of North Carolina Press, 1991).

Gilmore, M. T., The Middle Way: Puritanism and Ideology in American Romantic Fiction (New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press, 1977).

Hall, David, A Reforming People: Puritanism and the transformation of Public Life in New England (Chapel Hill, NC, The University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

Hall, David, The Puritans: A Transatlantic History (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2019)

Hampton, Christopher, A sermon preached in the cittie of Glasco in Scotland, on the tenth day of Iune, 1610 (London, Thomas Snodham, 1611).

Hill, Christopher, ‘Puritans and “The Dark Corners of the Land”’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5th ser. 13 (1963), pp. 77-102.

Journal of the House of Commons: Volume 1, 1547-1629 (London, His Majesty’s Stationery Office,1802)

Lorenzo, Ronald, The Puritan Culture of the American Military: U.S. Army War Crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan (Farnham, Ashgate, 2014).

Macdonald, Alan R, ‘James VI and I, the Church of Scotland, and British Ecclesiastical Convergence’, The Historical Journal 48 (2005), pp. 885-903.

MacDonald, Alan R., The Jacobean Kirk 1567-1627: Sovereignty, Policy and Liturgy (1998).

Mackay, P. H. R., ‘The Five Articles of Perth’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Edinburgh, 1975).

McCafferty, John, ‘Ireland and Scotland, 1534–1663’, in Anthony Milton (ed.), The Oxford History of Anglicanism, Volume 1: Reformation and Identity c.1520-1662 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017).

McGiffert, Michael, Puritanism and the American Experience (Reading, MA, Addison-Wesley, 1969).

Miller, Perry, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1953).

Miller, Perry, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1939).

Milton, Anthony, England’s Second Reformation (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Olmstead, Richard, Sions Teares Leading to Joy (Dublin, Society of Stationers, 1630).

Roberts, S. K., ‘Welsh Puritanism in the Interregnum’, History Today 41 (1991), pp. 36-4.

Robinson-Hammerstein, Helga, Archbishop Adam Loftus. The First Provost of Trinity College, Dublin (Dublin, Trinity College Dublin, 1993).

Rogers, D. T., As a City on a Hill: The Story of America’s Most Famous Lay Sermon (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2018).

Sprunger, K. L., Dutch Puritanism: A History of English and Scottish Churches of the Netherlands in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Leiden, Brill, 1982).

Stewart, Laura A. M., ‘The Political Repercussions of the Five Articles of Perth: A Reassessment of James Vi and I’s Religious Policies in Scotland’, The Sixteenth Century Journal 38 (2007), pp. 1013-36.

Stubbs, J. W. (ed.), Archbishop Adam Loftus and the Foundation of Trinity College Dublin: Speeches Delivered by Him on Various Occasions (Dublin, Hodges Figgis, 1892).

Todd, Margo, The Culture of Protestantism in Early-Modern Scotland, (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 2002).

Tyacke, Nicholas, ‘The Lambeth Articles (1595) and the Doctrinal Stance of the Church of England’, The English Historical Review 137 (2022), pp. 1082-117.

Van Engen, A. C., City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press 2020).

Walsham, Alexandra, ‘Patrick Collinson 1929-2011’, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy 13 (2014), pp. 91-118.

Westerkamp, Marilyn, The Triumph of the Laity: Scots-Irish Piety and the Great Awakening, 1625-1760 (Oxford, Oxford University Press 1988).

Wilburn, Perceval, A Checke or Reproofe of M. Howlets Vntimely Shreeching in her Maiesties Eares (London, 1581).

Winship, Michael, Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America (New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 2018).

Top of page

Notes

1 Alexandra Walsham, ‘Patrick Collinson 1929-2011’, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy 13 (2014), p. 91.

2 Perceval Wilburn, A Checke or Reproofe of M. Howlets Vntimely Shreeching in her Maiesties Eares (London, 1581), fol. 153v.

3 Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 1988), p. 143; see also his ‘Anti-puritanism’ in John Coffey and Paul Lim (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 19-33, at p. 24.

4 The founding father of American puritan studies is of course Perry Miller: see The New England Mind: the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1939) and The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1953); Stephen Foster, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570-1700 (Chapel Hill, NC, University of North Carolina Press, 1991); David Hall, The Puritans: A Transatlantic History (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2019).

5 D. T. Rogers, As a City on a Hill: The Story of America’s Most Famous Lay Sermon (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2018); A. C. Van Engen, City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press 2020); Michael Winship, Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America (New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 2018), 267.

6 For example, Michael McGiffert, Puritanism and the American Experience (Reading, MA, Addison-Wesley, 1969); David Hall, A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England (Chapel Hill, NC, The University of North Carolina Press, 2011); P. N. Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness: The Intellectual Significance of the New England frontier, 1629-1700 (New York, Columbia University Press, 1969); M. T. Gilmore, The Middle Way: Puritanism and Ideology in American Romantic Fiction (New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press, 1977); Ronald Lorenzo, The Puritan Culture of the American Military: U.S. Army War Crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan (Farnham, Ashgate, 2014).

7 K. L. Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism: A History of English and Scottish Churches of the Netherlands in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Leiden, Brill, 1982); S. K. Roberts, ‘Welsh Puritanism in the Interregnum’, History Today 41 (1991), pp. 36-41; David Cressy, ‘Puritan Martyrs in Island Prisons’, Journal of British Studies 57 (2018), pp. 736-54.

8 Despite efforts to popularise “Atlantic archipelago”, historians have signally failed to come up with a satisfactory term for the “British Isles” which includes Ireland, apart from the rather unspecific “these islands”.

9 Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, Methuen, 1967).

10 Hall, Puritans, p. 79; Margo Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early-Modern Scotland (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2002).

11 Nicholas Tyacke, ‘The Lambeth Articles (1595) and the Doctrinal Stance of the Church of England’, The English Historical Review 137 (2022), pp. 1082-117.

12 Quoted in John Coffey, ‘The Problem of “Scottish Puritanism”, 1590-1638’, in Elizabethanne Boran and Crawford Gribben (eds), Enforcing the Reformation in Ireland and Scotland, 1550-1700 (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2006), pp. 66-90.

13 Alan R. Macdonald, ‘James VI and I, the Church of Scotland, and British Ecclesiastical Convergence’, The Historical Journal 48 (2005), pp. 885-903.

14 Christopher Hampton, A sermon preached in the cittie of Glasco in Scotland, on the tenth day of Iune, 1610 (London, Thomas Snodham, 1611), p. 3.

15 Ibid., pp. 17, 27-8.

16 John McCafferty, ‘Ireland and Scotland, 1534-1663’, in Anthony Milton (ed.), The Oxford History of Anglicanism, Volume 1: Reformation and Identity c.1520-1662 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 255.

17 P. H. R. Mackay, ‘The Five Articles of Perth’ (PhD dissertation, University of Edinburgh, 1975); Laura A. M. Stewart, ‘The Political Repercussions of the Five Articles of Perth: A Reassessment of James VI and I’s Religious Policies in Scotland’, The Sixteenth Century Journal 38 (2007), pp. 1013-36.

18 Quoted in Coffey, ‘Problem of “Scottish Puritanism”’, p. 79.

19 Jane Dawson and L. K. J. Glassey, ‘Some Unpublished Letters from John Knox to Christopher Goodman’, Scottish Historical Review 84 (2005), pp. 173, 181.

20 Jane Dawson, ‘Scotland, Ireland and the Vision of a “British” Protestant Reformation’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 106 (2017), pp. 439-47; Alan Ford, ‘The Church of Ireland 1558-1641: A Puritan Church?’, in Alan Ford, James McGuire and Kenneth Milne (eds), As by Law Established. The Church of Ireland since the Reformation (Dublin, Lilliput Press, 1995), p. 53.

21 ‘You and your father’s house will perish’: Esther 4.14. Adam Loftus to William Cecil, 16 July 1565, from St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, The National Archives, London, SP 63/14/22; Loftus’ letter was clearly linked to, and probably based on this letter: James Pilkington, Bishop of Durham to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, from Bishop Auckland, 25 Oct. 1564, British Library, London, Add. MSS, MS 48064, fols 173r-174v.

22 British Library, Lansdowne MSS, MS 846, fols 205r-207r; J. W. Stubbs (ed.), Archbishop Adam Loftus and the Foundation of Trinity College Dublin: Speeches Delivered by Him on Various Occasions (Dublin, Hodges Figgis,1892).

23 Alan Ford, James Ussher: Theology, History, and Politics in Early-Modern Ireland and England (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 42; H. H. W. Robinson-Hammerstein, Archbishop Adam Loftus. The First Provost of Trinity College, Dublin (Dublin, Trinity College Dublin, 1993).

24 Christopher Hill, ‘Puritans and “The Dark Corners of the Land”’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5th ser. 13 (1963), pp. 77-102.

25 Ford, Ussher, ch. 4; Hall, The Puritans.

26 Parr, Life of Ussher, p. 16.

27 Angela Andreani, Meredith Hanmer and the Elizabethan Church: A Clergyman’s Career in 16th Century England and Ireland (London, Routledge, 2020).

28 The National Archives, London, SP 63/214 fol. 214r.

29 Dawson, ‘Vision of a "British" Protestant Reformation’, p. 445; Elizabethanne Boran, ‘An Early Friendship Network of James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, 1626-1656’, in H. H. W. Robinson-Hammerstein (ed.), European Universities in the Age of the Reformation (Dublin, 1998), pp. 118-34.

30 Charles Elrington, The Life of the Most Rev. James Ussher (Dublin, Hodges and Smith, 1848), p. 51.

31 Ibid., p. 52.

32 Ibid, pp. 15-17.

33 Boran, ‘Early Friendship Network’.

34 Ford, ‘A Puritan church?’, p. 62.

35 Alan Ford, The Protestant Reformation in Ireland, 1590-1641 (2nd ed., Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997), pp. 167-176, 184-5; Richard Olmstead, Sions Teares Leading to Joy (Dublin, Society of Stationers, 1630).

36 Alan Ford, ‘Scottish Presbyterian Clergy and the Origins of Dissent in Ireland’, in David Edwards and Simon Egan (eds), The Scots in Early Stuart Ireland: Union and Aspiration in the Two Kingdoms (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2016), pp. 116-40.

37 Bodleian Library, Oxford, Carte MSS, MS 30, fol. 110r.

38 See Blair’s account of his discussions with Ussher: Ford, Ussher, pp. 167-168.

39 Ford, ‘Scottish Presbyterian Clergy’, pp. 122-123.

40 M. J. Westerkamp, The Triumph of the Laity: Scots-Irish Piety and the Great Awakening, 1625-1760 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 21-32.

41 Ford, Ussher, pp. 240-255.

42 Hall, The Puritans, p. 173.

43 Anthony Milton, England’s Second Reformation (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2021), ch. 2.

44 Ford, Ussher, pp. 186-190.

45 Ford, Ussher, pp. 185-92

46 Ford, Ussher, p. 192; Alan Ford, ‘Dependent or Independent: the Church of Ireland and Its Colonial Context, 1536-1647’, The Seventeenth Century 10 (1995), pp. 163-87.

47 The further you are from the god, the further you are from his thunder.’ Journal of the House of Commons: Volume 1, 1547-1629 (London, His Majesty’s Stationery Office,1802), 2 May 1607, p. 367.

48 Mark Brayshay, Land Travel and Communications in Tudor and Stuart England : Achieving a Joined-up Realm (Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2014).

49 James Ussher to Luke Challoner, 9 April 1613 from London: Elizabethanne Boran, ed., The Correspondence of James Ussher: 1600-1656, 3 vols (Dublin, Irish Manuscripts Commission, 2015), i, p. 93.

50 Alan Ford, ‘That Bugbear Arminianism’: Archbishop Laud and Trinity College, Dublin’, in C.F. Brady and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds), British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 135-60.

51 John Winthrop sen. to John Winthrop jun. 20 Apr. 1620: quoted in F. J. Bremer, John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 140.

52 Bremer, Winthrop, pp. 234-240.

53 Quoted in Ford, Ussher, p. 210.

Top of page

References

Electronic reference

Alan Ford, “Puritanism from the Outside”Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique [Online], XXVII-3 | 2022, Online since 04 January 2023, connection on 07 December 2023. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/rfcb/9914; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/rfcb.9914

Top of page

About the author

Alan Ford

University of Nottingham

Alan Ford is Professor Emeritus at the University of Nottingham. An historian of Irish religion, he has a particular interest in sectarianism and religious hatred and the ways in which denominational commitments have shaped the writing of modern Irish history. He is the author of James Ussher: Theology, History, and Politics in Early-Modern Ireland and England (Oxford, 2007) and ‘The Cost of Democracy: The Church of Ireland and Its Ritual Canons, 1871-1974’, Church History 91 (2022), pp. 575-595.

Top of page

Copyright

CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

Top of page
Search OpenEdition Search

You will be redirected to OpenEdition Search