Orthodoxy is a shifting target, and so is the terminology used to manage it. This essay explores the plight of royalist defenders of the former Protestant establishment in seventeenth-century England – those who would later be called Anglicans – as they lamented the destruction, impropriation and secularisation of church property during the Civil War and Republic. These people could be forgiven for being perplexed: they embraced doctrines which in the previous century would have risked sending them to the fire as heretics, but which in their own times saw them damned as crypto-papists. They believed themselves to have stayed in the same position; as a result, they had changed sides. This was not merely about shifts in definitions, but also in language. The essay explores how, during the 1640s and 1650s, the term ‘sacrilege’ went from being a Catholic response to Protestant iconoclasm and plunder to a widespread English Protestant response to the parliamentary and republican regimes’ seizures and depredations of church property, material, spiritual and theological. The experience served to nurture the growth of an emergent new orthodoxy: the High Church sensibility that would become a part of nascent Anglicanism.

The Reformation simplified everything. It effected a shift from a religion of symbol and allegory, ceremony and formal gesture to one that was plain and direct: a shift from the visual to the aural, from ritual to literal exposition, from the numinous and mysterious to the everyday. It moved from … a religion that sought out all the senses, to one that concentrated on the word and innerliness.