Archbishop William Laud is a martyred saint of the Anglican church. To the Puritan members of Parliament who sent him to the scaffold on 10 January 1645, he was evil incarnate; the leader of the Arminians and architect of their persecutions. As England's Primate, the "little meddling hocus-pocus"¹ shared Charles I's passion for uniformity. He pushed for standardizing worship in all of his master's dominions by publishing a New Prayer book, inspecting churches to enforce the observance of Church of England liturgy, and purging academia of all Puritans. As early as (29 March) 1625, as an obscure Bishop, he had pleased Charles I by writing up a list of churchmen worthy of promotion, with "O" for Orthodox and "P" for Puritan beside each name. Now, at a time when Protestants in general feared a slide "backwards" into Catholocism, he upheld surplices, kneeling at prayer, candles, crucifixes, and other forms of worship that were regarded as Papist by most Englishmen.

It was the "Book of Sports," reprinted under Laud's direction, that brought Henry Whitfield to the attention of the High Church Commission in 1637. Conceived as a well-intentioned guide to permissible after-church leisure activities that people could engage in without violating rules of the Sabbath, it was seen by Puritans as a blasphemy. To them, the Sabbath was a day of worship, not of frivolities.

James I had first published the "Book of Sports" in the 1620's, and now Charles I reissued it in 1633. The point of contention was that King Charles insisted that every pastor read it aloud to his congregation. Many Puritans, like Henry Whitfield, flatly refused to do so and, like Reverend Whitfield, were called before the Archbishop Laud's Commission and censured.

From a modern perspective, the antipathy of Laudians and Puritans was a clash of extremists. Puritans could not accept the "idolatry" of the Papists any more than the Laudians could accept the austere self-righteous Calvinism of the Puritans. In fact, Laud, who is often and rightly viewed unsympathetically, resisted Calvinist dogma early in his life because he thought Calvin's doctrines of predestination was too harsh. He felt it fundamentally altered the relationship between man and God. "My very soul abominates this doctrine," he wrote, "for it makes God, the God of all mercies, to be the most fierce and unreasonable tyrant in the whole world."²

Ritual and liturgy were very important to Laud, as they gave form and beauty to the act of worship. The Puritans strove to push these things aside as obstructions. They prayed standing up, communing with their God face-to-face. They abhorred the "shiny baubles" of the official church and sometimes resorted to vandalism; smashing stained glass windows, crucifixes, and altars. The uncompromising zeal of both religious factions led to civil war, executions, and regicide.

Seventy years earlier, i n 1565, Archbishop Parker denounced those contentious extremists in the Church as "those precise men", soon to be known as Precisians and eventually Puritans. The were Puritans, it should be noted, not for thier moral code but for their theological doctrine which espoused a return to bedrock fundamentalism. The English Puritans were radical in that they proposed to get at the root of everything, no matter who or what stood in their way. However, in a larger way, they were conservative to the point of being reactionary, since their aim was to restore "the church unspotted," pure of the early Christians so to reform society. They strove to lead the New Testament life and at the same time earn a living.

The form of intense Puritanism that was to influence the clergymen of the Congregational church of our forbears began with Reverend Robert Browne. In 1580, at Norwich, Browne began his reformist ministry. After being jailed a few times for non-conformity he fled with his flovk to Zealand, a part of Holland closest to East Anglia. There he published five books defining his faith and espousing separation from England's church. He and his followers believed that a church that fails to exclude the irreligious cannot represent the saved and lead its membership to salvation. "Magistrates" he postulated, have no ecclesiastical authority. Only by "public covenant with each other and with God" can a genuine and perfect church be created. Church authority, he maintained, rested on member's interpretation of the Bible.

Although Browne recanted in later years, broken by years of struggle, persecution, and imprisonment, his fundememtal message was a guiding light to future Puritan clergymen. He rejected Calvin's thesis that the church had to wait until the state took action. His book, Reformation without Tarrying for Anie. was carried to the new world by William Bradford and the pilgrims of Plimith Bay. At the height of the English Civil War sixty years later, those viewed by the Crown as being "disobedient in manner of religion" were referred to as Brownists.

Puritans proposed to worship as they imagine the early Christians did. Their scholars combed through the Epistles and Acts of the Apostles to discover exactly how the primitive churches were organized. The congregational Church in New England happened to be organized on a democratic basis, not because Puritans were enamored of democracy, but because leaders such as John Cotton (Pastor of Boston 16 ) and Thomas Hooker (Founder and Pastor of Hartford) insisted that their churches copy the exact organization of the First Church of Corinth and the First Church of Phillippe, about which they knew very little. The Apostles and Evangelists did not say much about them.

The Puritans wished to sweep away the practices of the Renaissance, to get back to apostalic times when men who had seen Jesus plain were still alive. God, they believed, had dictated the Bible as the complete guide to life; the Holy Ghost and the Trinity maintained a line of communication to each individual Christian through the Holy Ghost and his conscience. The episcopacy of the Catholic and Anglican churches were encumbrances.

In response to the light of conscience and written word, the Puritan yearned to know God and approach Him directly without intermediary. He rejected ritual because he saw it as a distorting screen between him and the Almighty. At violent odds with his view, however, was the established Church of England represented by Archbishop William Laud.

The Great Migration had begun, with thousands of East Anglican Puritans fleeing to the New World. Reverend John Higginson had prophesied that God would chasten the Motherland with calamaties. "When you see Jerusalem compassed with armies", he warned, "then flee to the mountains." (8) Among those in flight was our ancestor Henry Doude and the congregation of Henry Whitfield.

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¹ Lambert Osbaldeston, a Westminster schoolmaster.
² From Archbishop William Laud by Charles Carlton, p. 12

Sources:

• Carlton, Charles. Archbishop William Laud (1987, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, London)
• Carlton, Charles. Charles I the Personal Monarch (1995, 2nd Edition, Routledge)
• Chitwood, Oliver Perry. A History of Colonial America (1961, Harper & Row, New York)
• Eerdmans, William B., publisher Christianity in America (1983, William E. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, MI)
  
• Harris, John. Saga of the Pilgrims From Europe to the New World (1983, The Globe Pequot Press. Chester, Connecticut)

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