This chapter considers the social and intellectual contexts in which English puritans like John Milton applied the principle of reformation to the tenets of Reformed theology. This was of course not a new trend. As has already been argued, the breadth and ambiguity of the English Articles and liturgy resulted in several episodes of contest and reform during the Elizabethan, Jacobean and early Stuart periods. However, certain environmental factors enabled a more widespread and radical contest to develop during the 1640s and ‘50s, which led to a ‘retreat from Calvinism’. Until recently, Whiggish historiography assumed this anti-Calvinism was part of an inevitable modernizing trajectory, a combination of ‘progressive’ Enlightenment rationalism and social egalitar¬ianism. However, this chapter will highlight political contingencies, alongside longer-term theological trends, during a uniquely disrupted period of English history. Throughout the 1640s and ‘50s, unprecedented religious freedoms combined with millenarian expectations to generate remarkable intellectual exploration and fecundity. For many puritans, the disruption was interpreted as a divine opportunity to purge a church ‘but halfly reformed’. As John Goodwin claimed, the sun had risen higher over the ‘commonwealth of Israel’. Consequently, ‘[many] shall discourse and beate out the secrets of GOD in the Scriptures with more libertie and freedome of judgement and understanding’.

John Milton captured the heady atmosphere as he envisaged manual workers and scholars, ‘sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and ideas … fast reading, trying all things’. The rise of Arminian theol¬ogies was therefore part of a broader impulse for further reform. This chapter will consider social and political contingencies, which contributed to the crisis of Calvinism during a unique period of English history.

After the decade of Personal Rule, the 1640s witnessed dramatic reversals of power as Cavalier defeats ushered in puritan rule. The first ecclesiastical intervention by the Long Parliament annulled the Canons of 1640, including the notorious et cetera oath. In 1641, Laudian bishops were de facto stripped of their powers, having been accused by the Grand Remonstrance of being an unholy alliance of ‘Arminians and Libertines’ in fellowship with ‘Papists’.