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Serving God and the Times: The Calvinist Conformity of Robert Sanderson

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Peter G. Lake
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Extract

Robert Sanderson was a Calvinist, indeed, he was an evangelical Calvinist anxious to impart, through pulpit and press, the central tenets of Calvinism to the laity. He also hated Puritanism and said so loud and often. During the 1630s Sanderson cooperated enthusiastically with the Laudian regime. As a Royalist during the Civil War, he was one of the divines taken by Charles I to the Isle of Wight to provide spiritual counsel as the king struggled to save the church from its Puritan enemies. Nevertheless, during the 1650s Sanderson felt able to take the engagement and to give over the use of the prayer book in order to preserve his place in the ministry. At the Restoration, however, he returned to the establishment as the bishop of Lincoln, in which role he proved himself less than sympathetic to the nonconformists. In short, Sanderson's career is difficult to accommodate within many of the received categories currently in favor in the religious history of the period. As if to prove the point, Sanderson figures prominently both in C. H. George and K. George's attempt to demonstrate the homogeneity of English Protestant opinion before 1640 and J. Sears McGee's assault on precisely that proposition. Sanderson seems to offer particular difficulties to those of us committed to the notion that the English church was dominated by Calvinism down to at least the 1620s and that thereafter the confrontation between Calvinism and Arminianism represented the crucial division in English religious opinion before the early 1640s.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 27 , Issue 2 , April 1988 , pp. 81 - 116
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1988

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References

1 For details of Sanderson's career see the Dictionary of National Biography (DNB); and below.

2 George, C. H. and George, K., The Protestant Mind of the English Reformation, 1570–1640 (Princeton, N.J., 1961), pp. 72, 100, 108, 126, 248, 355–56Google Scholar; and McGee, J. Sears, The Godly Man in Stuart England (New Haven, Conn., 1976), pp. 26, 29, 42, 48, 95, 97, 102, 105, 110, 117, 146–48, 150, 155–57, 159, 210, 218–19, 223–29, 230, 232, 240, 257Google Scholar.

3 For this view, see Tyacke, N. R. N., English Anti-Calvinism (Oxford, 1987)Google Scholar; and Lake, P., “Calvinism and the English Church, 1570–1635,” Past and Present, no. 114 (1987), pp. 32–76Google Scholar.

4 Sanderson, R., Thirty-four sermons, 5th ed. of the 1657 collection of his sermons (London, 1671); pt. 2, pp. 34–35Google Scholar, from a sermon of 1632 before the king.

5 Sanderson, Robert, Twelve sermons (London, 1637), pp. 534–36Google Scholar, from a sermon at Paul's Cross of 1627.

6 Ibid., p. 49, from a Visitation sermon of 1621.

7 Ibid., pp. 551–52, from a Paul's Cross sermon of 1627 for Peter and David; pp. 250–51, from a sermon preached ad populum at Grantham in 1620; pp. 553–55, from a sermon preached at Paul's Cross in 1627; p. 325, from a sermon preached ad populum at Grantham in 1621.

8 Ibid., p. 516, from a sermon preached at Paul's Cross in 1627.

9 Ibid., p. 49, from a Visitation sermon of 1621; this passage was changed in the 1657 edition (pt. 1, p. 24) to read “sound and true and (if rightly understood) comfortable and right profitable doctrines”; p. 274, from a sermon preached at Grantham ad populum in 1620; p. 419, from a Paul's Cross sermon of 1624; Thirty-four sermons, pt. 2, pp. 240, 242, from a sermon preached before the king on the Isle of Wight in 1648; Twelve sermons, p. 341, from a sermon preached at Grantham ad populum, in 1621.

10 Sanderson, , Twelve sermons, p. 75Google Scholar, from a Visitation sermon of 1621.

11 Ibid., p. 48, from a Visitation sermon preached in 1621.

12 Ibid., p. 276, from a sermon preached at Grantham ad populum in 1620. This passage was changed in 1657 to refer only to Pelagianism. Ibid., p. 289, from a sermon preached at Grantham in 1621. This was changed in 1657 to refer solely to Pelagianism. Ibid., pp. 546–47, from a sermon preached at Paul's Cross in 1627; p. 34, from a Visitation sermon of 1619. This marginal note was omitted altogether from the 1657 ed.

13 The text of Sanderson's Pax ecclesiae, on which the rest of this section is based, is printed in The Works of Robert Sanderson, D.D., ed. Jacobson, W. (Oxford, 1854), 5:257–87Google Scholar.

14 Sanderson, , Thirty-four sermons (n. 4 above), pt. 2, p. 23Google Scholar, from a sermon preached before the king at court in 1632; Twelve sermons, pp. 76–77, from a sermon preached at a Visitation in 1621; p. 119, from a Visitation sermon of 1624.

15 Sanderson, , Twelve sermons (n. 5 above), p. 162Google Scholar, from a sermon preached at the sessions at Grantham in 1623; p. 537, from a Paul's Cross sermon of 1627; pp. 306–7, from a sermon preached at Grantham in 1621.

16 Sanderson, , Thirty-four sermons, pt. 1, p. 313Google Scholar, from a Paul's Cross sermon of 1632.

17 For the story of Phineas, see Sanderson, , Twelve sermons, pp. 205–33, esp. pp. 224–27, 229Google Scholar, from a sermon preached at the assizes at Lincoln, August 4, 1625.

18 Ibid., pp. 134–35, from a sermon preached at the sessions at Grantham in 1623; pp. 353–412, a Paul's Cross sermon dedicated to the doctrine of callings and preached in 1621. Such strictures also underwrote the Present distribution of wealth since “the Lord hath in his wise providence so disposed the things of this world that there should ever be some rich to relieve the necessities of the poor and some poor to exercise the charity of the rich” (Sanderson, , Thirty-four sermons, pt. 2, p. 255)Google Scholar.

19 Sanderson, , Twelve sermons, pp. 148–49Google Scholar, from a sermon preached at the sessions at Grantham, 1623; pp. 384–85, from a sermon preached at Paul's Cross in 1621; Thirty-four sermons, pt. 2, p. 71, from a sermon preached before the king in 1637; Twelve sermons, pp. 142, 151–53, from a sermon preached at the sessions at Grantham, 1623; Ibid., pp. 373–74, from a Paul's Cross sermon of 1621.

20 Sanderson, , Twelve sermons, p. 168Google Scholar, from a sermon preached at the sessions at Grantham, 1623; Ibid., pp. 71–72, from a sermon preached at a Visitation in 1621.

21 On Sanderson's common ground with other divines (Puritans included) on the doctrine of callings, see C. H. George and K. George (n. 2 above), pp. 126–43. On the fast sermons, see Baskerville, S., “The Political Theology of the Fast Sermons before the Long Parliament” (Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1987)Google Scholar.

22 Sanderson, , Thirty-four sermons, pt. 1, pp. 292–93Google Scholar, a sermon preached at Paul's Cross in 1632; Ibid., pp. 2–5, for the comparison with the papists and the Pharisees made at a Visitation sermon at Grantham in 1641; pp. 73–74, from a sermon preached at a metropolitical Visitation at Grantham in 1634; pt. 2, p. 179, from a sermon preached at court in 1640; see also Twelve sermons, pp. 441–42, from a Paul's Cross sermon of 1624; Thirty-four sermons, pt. 1, p. 301, from a Paul's Cross sermon of 1632; Ibid., pt. 2, p. 157, from a sermon preached at court in 1640. On Whitgift's rejection of Presbyterianism, see Lake, P., Anglican or Puritan? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London, 1987), chap. 1Google Scholar.

23 Sanderson, , Thirty-four sermons, pt. 1, pp. 299–300Google Scholar, from a Paul's Cross sermon of 1632; Ibid., pt. 2, p. 159, from a sermon preached at Whitehall in 1640.

24 Ibid., pt. 2, p. 156, from the same sermon at Whitehall.

25 Sanderson, , Twelve sermons (n. 5 above), p. 22Google Scholar, from a Visitation sermon preached in 1619; Thirty-four sermons (n. 4 above), pt. 1, p. 1, from a sermon preached at a Visitation at Grantham in 1641; Ibid., p. 64, from a sermon preached at the metropolitical Visitation at Grantham in 1634.

26 Sanderson, , Twelve sermons, pp. 33–34Google Scholar, from the Visitation sermon at Boston in 1619.

27 Sanderson, , Twelve sermons, p. 59Google Scholar, from a Visitation sermon of 1621; Ibid., p. 256, from a sermon preached ad populum at Grantham in 1620.

28 Sanderson, , Thirty-four sermons, pt. 2, pp. 38, 42Google Scholar, from a sermon preached before the king at Newark in 1633.

29 Sanderson, , Thirty-four sermons, pt. 2, p. 27Google Scholar, from a sermon preached at court in 1632.

30 Ibid., p. 159, from a sermon preached before the king in 1640; Twelve sermons, pp. 71–72.

31 Sanderson, , Twelve sermons, pp. 251–53Google Scholar, from a sermon preached ad populum at Grantham in 1620; Ibid., pp. 515–16, from a Paul's Cross sermon of 1627. Of course, no Puritan divine would have argued that it was possible to judge a person's ultimate spiritual condition from his or her external behavior. While some Puritan preachers might have been taken to imply as much, they also often warned their audiences of the dangers of hypocrisy and seeming godliness. At most, therefore, one is dealing here with the practical assumptions made by the godly in their daily lives or more certainly with what Sanderson took to be the underlying drift of Puritan piety.

32 Ibid., p. 254, from a sermon preached in the church of Grantham, in 1620.

33 Ibid., p. 455, from a Paul's Cross sermon of 1624; Sanderson, , Thirty-four sermons, pt. 2, p. 248Google Scholar, from a sermon preached before the king on the Isle of Wight in 1648; Twelve sermons, p. 277, from a sermon preached ad populum at Grantham in 1620.

34 For these developments in Puritan divinity, see Kendall, R. T., Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 (Oxford, 1979)Google Scholar, where the concept of experimental predestinarianism, based on the practical syllogism, is worked out. Kendall may underestimate the continuing role in Puritan practical divinity of the manipulation of the individual's fear and anxiety in the face of his or her ultimate salvation or damnation. For this and the sixteenth-century origins of many of the developments described by Kendall, see Lake, P., Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge, 1982), chap. 7Google Scholar; for the role of the gathered group of godly believers in establishing and maintaining the individual's sense of soteriological assurance, see Brachlow, S., “Puritan Theology and Radical Churchmen in Pre-revolutionary England” (D. Phil. thesis, Oxford University, 1978)Google Scholar; also see Lake, P., “William Bradshaw, Antichrist and the Community of the Godly,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 36 (1985): 570–89Google Scholar.

35 Kendall, chap. 8.

36 Ibid., p. 122.

37 Porter, H. C., Reformation and Reaction in Tudor Cambridge (Cambridge, 1958), pp. 285–86Google Scholar. For Whitgift's rejection of Presbyterianism, see Lake, Anglican or Puritan? (n. 22 above), chap. 1; for “self trial,” see Sanderson, , Twelve sermons, p. 258Google Scholar, from a sermon ad populum at Grantham in 1620.

38 For Cotton's theology before c. 1632, see Kendall, pp. 110–17; on Cotton's career, see Ziff, L., The Career of John Cotton (Princeton, N.J., (1962)Google Scholar; also see Holmes, C., Seventeenth Century Lincolnshire (Lincoln, (1980), pp. 52–63, 95–96, 116–18Google Scholar. On the issue of conformity's absence from the sphere of public dispute in the central years of James's reign, see Tyacke, N. R. N., “Puritanism, Arminianism and Counter Revolution,” in The Origins of the English Civil War, ed. Russell, C. (London, (1973)Google Scholar.

39 On the farming regions of Lincolnshire and political responses to the forced loan, see Cust, R. P., The Forced Loan and English Politics (Oxford, (1987), pp. 293–97Google Scholar; on “ale-bench anglicanism,” see Underdown, D., Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603–60 (Oxford, (1985), pp. 66–72Google Scholar; on Sanderson as a guardian of “community values,” see Holmes, p. 63. It no doubt remains the case that the hierarchical stability of Sanderson's area—the limestone upland, with its classic openfield agrarian structure, comprising small, closed villages, generally dominated by a resident squire, and containing a large proportion of landless laborers—contributed to Sanderson's loathing of Puritan divisiveness and disobedience and his ultimate Royalism. I am indebted to Richard Cust for discussion of these questions and for allowing me to see proofs of his book in advance of publication.

40 Sanderson, , Twelve sermons (n. 5 above), pp. 383–84Google Scholar, where he denounced as unlawful the “callings” of “jugglers and fiddlers and tumblers and bear wards and rope dancers and rymers” and went on to cast doubt on, without actually denying, the lawfulness of the callings of “pantomimers” and “stage players.” “For my own part I dare not at all say the practise is, neither will I now say the calling is, unlawful, only let them that make a calling of it consider themselves and their calling well and examine whether God hath not bestowed upon them some gifts which they might have employed a better way.”

41 The first Visitation sermon at Boston is the first of the sermons ad clerum in Sanderson's Twelve sermons, pp. 1–42. It is followed at p. 43 by the second Visitation sermon of 1621; Ibid., pp. 74–75, 79–80.

42 Ibid., pp. 545–52. For Sanderson's links with Laud, see a letter of September 1640 in which Sanderson discussed the “copying out” of two of his sermons at the Archbishop's request. Sanderson also recounted his own willingness to take the etc. oath. However, he also pointed out that opposition was not limited to the “preciser sort” “whose dislike is the less to be regarded because they will like nothing that is not of their own devising” and expressed his fear that compromises might be required from the government if a crisis were to be avoided (Sanderson, , Works [n. 13 above], 6:360–62)Google Scholar. See a sermon preached before the king at Berwick in July 1639 in Sanderson, 's Thirty-four sermons (n. 4 above), pt. 2, pp. 123–24Google Scholar.

43 Sanderson, , Thirty-four sermons, pp. 129, 134Google Scholar, from the sermon preached before the king at Berwick in 1639.

44 Ibid., pt. 1, p. 4, from the Visitation sermon at Grantham in 1641.

45 See Sanderson's “The case of the sabbath,” a manuscript discussion of the claims of the sabbath to iure divino status written in 1634 and printed in his Works, 5:5–16, esp. 11–14Google ScholarPubMed.

46 Sanderson, , Thirty-four sermons, pt. 2, pp. 142–46Google Scholar, from a sermon preached before the king in July 1640; Ibid., pp. 216–17, from a sermon preached before the king at Stoke Poges in 1647.

47 Sanderson, , Twelve sermons, p. 230Google Scholar, for the situation in 1625, from a sermon preached at the assizes at Lincoln in 1625; Thirty-four sermons, pt. 2, p. 134, for a comparison between the Puritan and papist attitudes to resistance theory, from a sermon preached before the king in 1639; Ibid., pt. 1, p. 305, for a parallel between the spiritual tyranny over lay consciences wielded by the Puritans and papists, from a Paul's Cross sermon of 1632; also see Ibid., pt. 1, p. 4, for a similar point from a Visitation sermon of 1641; for Puritanism as an encouragement for popery, see Twelve sermons, pp. 33–34, from a Visitation sermon of 1619. Also see Thirty-four sermons, pt. 2, pp. 117–18.

48 Sanderson, , Thirty-four sermons, p. 33Google Scholar, from a sermon preached before the king at Newark in 1633; on the ideological framework of the Personal Rule, see Sharpe, K. , “The Personal Rule of Charles I,” in Before the Civil War, ed. Tomlinson, H. (London, (1983)Google Scholar.

49 Sanderson, , Thirty-four sermons, pt. 1, pp. 6–7Google Scholar, from a Visitation sermon at Grantham in 1641.

50 See the letter from Sanderson to an unnamed correspondent in Oxford, in his Works, 6:363–65Google ScholarPubMed, dated October 4, 1644.

51 See a letter from Sanderson to one N. N., which is undated in Ibid., pp. 372–74; also see his “The case of the engagement,” a manuscript case of conscience justifying the taking of the engagement, in Ibid., 5:20–35.

52 See Sanderson's “The case of the Liturgy,” in Ibid., 5:36–57.

53 Sanderson, , Thirty-four sermons (n. 4 above), pt. 1, p. 6Google Scholar, from a Visitation sermon preached at Grantham in 1641; pt. 2, p. 193, from a sermon preached before the king in 1641; p. 219, from a sermon preached before the king in 1647.

54 See the preface to the 1657 ed. of the Thirty-four sermons, and a letter from Sanderson to N. N., dated April 1649, in his Works (n. 13 above), 6:368–71Google ScholarPubMed.

55 See a letter to Thomas Barlow dated September 1656 on the attempt to restore Sanderson to his chair, in Sanderson's Works 6:381–83Google Scholar; also see a letter from Sanderson to George Morley, dated November 1653, for the offer to join the lecture by combination, 6:379. Hammond's comments are given in a footnote on p. 379. For the Manchester classis's response, see Bosher, R., The Making of the Restoration Settlement, 1649–62 (Oxford, (1951), p. 45Google Scholar.

56 Sanderson, , Thirty-four sermons, pt. 1, p. 64Google Scholar, from a sermon preached at the metropolitical Visitation in 1634; pt. 2, p. 153, from a sermon preached before the king in 1640; p. 189, from a sermon preached before the king in 1641; p. 116, for instance.

57 Sanderson, , Twelve sermons (n. 5 above), p. 40Google Scholar, from a Visitation sermon in 1619.

58 See nn. 9 and 12 above; the portions of Sanderson's letter to Pierce published by Hammond are printed in Sanderson's Works, 5:290–346Google ScholarPubMed; for Pierce's remark, see Ibid., 6:355.

59 The letter to Morley is quoted in Bosher, p. 255; for Sanderson's ordination policy, see Ibid., p. 207.

60 On the language of covenant in Puritan preaching, see Zaret, D., The Heavenly Contract (Chicago, (1985), chaps. 5 and 6Google Scholar. For an admittedly rare use of the language of covenant by Sanderson, see Twelve sermons, p. 300, from a sermon preached ad populum at Grantham in 1621, where Sanderson observed that if “men had any seeming interest in God's promises the interest they had they had but by contract and covenant and that covenant whether either of the two it was, law or gospel, it was conditional. The covenant of the law wholly and a priori conditional… do this and live, and the covenant of the gospel too, after a sort, and a posteriori, conditional … believe and live. If then they have broken the conditions of both covenants and do neither believe, nor do what is required, they have by their unbelief and disobedience forefeited ail that seeming interest they had in those promises. God's promises, then, though they be the very main supporters of our Christian faith and hope, to as many of us as whose consciences can witness unto us a sincere desire and endeavour of performing that obedience we have covenanted, yet are they to be embraced even by such of us with a reverend fear and trembling at our own unworthiness.” Like Puritan divines, therefore, Sanderson used the rhetoric of covenant to introduce an element of conditionality and voluntarism into a worldview based on a coldly predestinarian foundation and included a sense of fear and unworthiness in the very process whereby the believer gained comfort and assurance from the application of God's promises to his or her predicament.

61 How prevalent this strand of opinion was is a question that awaits further investigation. Certainly Sanderson was not alone; the careers of John Squire (a London minister) and Humphrey Sydenham (one-time fellow of Wadham College and a minister in Somerset) seem to fit the same pattern. Among the laity, Attorney General Heath, a staunch Calvinist, sacked from the royal service for his opposition to Laud, whose Royalism was based on an intense fear of Puritan populism, also fits the bill. I should like to thank Richard Cust for bringing Heath to my attention. I hope to return to the subject of Sydenham and Squire elsewhere.

62 This is not to suggest that Puritanism was simply an emotional style unaffected by abstract ideas. It is merely to argue that the attempt to define Puritanism in either its social or theological aspects in terms of distinctively Puritan Systems of ideas is doomed to failure. AH the organizing concepts of Puritan piety were held in one form or another by people who were not themselves Puritans. (Sanderson is a prime example of such a person.) In order to accommodate this fact within a view of Puritanism as a style of piety, it is not necessary to discount the role of abstract arguments and premises in the formation of Puritan piety. It is merely to acknowledge that none of those ideas in themselves were distinctively Puritan. What was distinctively Puritan was the way in which those ideas were developed, applied, and interrelated to form a practical ideology that contemporaries like Sanderson recognized ail too well when they saw it.