This chapter defines Andrewes’ position in terms of its opposition to a body of both religious and political opinion labelled puritan. While Andrewes’ anti-puritanism is shown to have been rooted in traditional conformist concerns about conformity and church government, it also, Hooker-like, encompassed wider issues of religious style and modes of being. Crucial here was what Andrewes identified and excoriated as the puritan cult of the sermon and view of faith centred solely on knowledge rather than practice or works. According to Andrewes, the result was hypocrisy on a heroic pharisaical scale and a histrionic, wholly performative, style of both preaching and piety.

This chapter examines the ways in which the Laudians mixed and matched the authorities of scripture, of natural law, of apostolic and ecclesiastical tradition and of the positive law of the church. Where, on the issue of church government, the Laudians pushed the claims of scripture and of apostolic precept and precedent to assert and exalt the iure divino status of episcopacy, on the Sabbath they played down the authority of scripture and of apostolic practice, while exalting the authority of the church. The result was a nuanced position which refuted the scripturalist sabbatarianism of the puritans, while allowing the Laudians to retain an account of Sunday worship exalted enough for their own purposes and perfectly compatible with their account of the power of the church to consecrate holy times as well as places.

The chapter analyses the Laudian critique of puritanism as politically subversive of both monarchical and episcopal authority. Puritanism was portrayed by the Laudians as an ideology organised around ‘popularity’. This word denoted two things: firstly, the search for popular approval and applause, to be gained by a rabble-rousing espousal of singularity and an unprincipled criticism of those in power in church and state, and secondly, institutional arrangements – in the church, presbyterianism, and, in the state, an enhanced role for parliament – that subjected the rulers to the whims and opinions of the people. The organising trope was the puritan as a firebrand or incendiary, or alternatively as a malcontent tribuni plebis, with frequent either glancing or direct references being made to the so-called puritan triumvirs, Burton, Bastwick and Prynne.

This seeks to summarise the conclusions of the book, asserting and defending Laudianism’s status as a coherent, distinctive and aggressive ideological position, and as a coalition made up of persons of varying views and degrees of commitment, and as such a set of responses to a dynamic and changing set of political circumstances. The methodological approach of the book is defended and the compatibility of the lumping, which underpinned the first four part with the splitting that characterised the fifth, is asserted. In its second half the Conclusion looks forward to the larger significance of Laudianism for the history of ‘Anglicanism’ and ends with an account of the Tractarian use of Laudianism and the ways in which the legacy of the Tractarians has, in turn, shaped the subsequent historiography of Laudianism. The attempt here, as in the book as a whole, is to free the topic from the ongoing quarrels about the historical identity and theological and pietistic essence of the church of England, so that it can be understood in terms of the period during which it first came into existence, and which it tried (so ardently and unsuccessfully) to transform.

This chapter looks at fellow-travelling Calvinist conformists, that is to say persons who had always espoused a Calvinist or reformed view of predestination, who, on certain issues and in certain modes, could sound like any moderate puritan, but who, on the issue of conformity, took a firmly anti-puritan line, and consequently on certain other issues could sound just like card-carrying Laudians. It does so through the analysis and comparison of the careers of two such men, Robert Sanderson and Humphrey Sydenham, whose views on the theology of grace, conformity and puritanism, and indeed on some of the signature values of Laudianism, are analysed and compared.

This chapter addresses the paradox, present both in the scholarly literature and in contemporary discourse, where Laudianism was often seen as both a revolutionary and a largely conservative or even reactionary movement; bent on root-and-branch reform and on the preservation of the moderate ‘Anglican’ status quo. This chapter shows that the Laudians presented themselves both as agents of change, pushing for the radical reformation of a church corrupted by decades of puritan corruption, and as conservatives, returning that church to its essential and original condition. What enabled both cases to be made was the extent of puritan influence over, and penetration of, the social and ideological fabric of the church. It was this that necessitated the reformation, which was designed to return the church to the condition it was in before the puritans ‘ruined’ it. That ideal state was variously located in either the Elizabethan or the early Edwardian reformations, and when such precedents were found insufficient to validate certain parts of the Laudian agenda, in the church of the apostles and the fathers. The result was once again a minimum and a maximum case for Laudian reformation, credit for which was variously attributed to Charles I, Archbishop Laud or the bishops more generally construed.