This chapter demonstrates that the Laudian avant garde was not limited to the university but encompassed older men in rural livings, whose commitment to Laudian values was, by this point, decades old, but whose views were also connected to the universities. The chapter reveals lively exchanges amongst such provincial ministers, in print and the pulpit, on some of the hot issues of the day. The chapter homes in on three men in rural livings, Robert Shelford, James Buck and Edward Kellett, all of whom have featured prominently throughout the book. Shelford’s works can be connected to firebrands in Cambridge like Richard Crashaw or Edward Martin, and to bulwarks of the provincial puritan establishment like Samuel Ward of Ipswich, who borrowed the image of the lodestone from Shelford in order to refute, in print, some of the central Arminian contentions that underpinned Shelford’s position. Some of the central claims made by Buck developed themes canvassed in the university and elicited a response, again in the pulpit and in print, from Humphrey Sydenham in Somerset. In this way something of the liveliness and fluidity of the theological scene during the 1630s is recaptured.

Chapter 5 demonstrates how the league of nations became an important political issue in 1917–1918. While the pro-league movement succeeded in attracting public attention for the post-war plan, pro-leaguers came to promote a conception of the league that they had opposed in 1914–1915: a league of victorious powers aligned against Germany. Begun as a reaction against anti-German jingoism and the balance-of-power politics, the movement initially aspired to change the norms of international relations by creating a new institution comprised of all the great powers. Yet by 1918, the activists had come to promote the league as a continuation of the war-time alliance, backed by a powerful argument both to defeat Germany and to form the league as a coalition of democratic states. An extension of the war-time politics, not the yearning for peace as scholars have supposed, led to the creation of the League of Nations.