Grace and Conformity The Reformed Conformist Tradition and The Early Stuart Church of England Oxford Studies in Historical Theology Stephen Hampton Full Chapter

Grace and Conformity: The Reformed
Conformist Tradition and the Early

Stuart Church of England (Oxford
Studies in Historical Theology) Stephen
Hampton
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Grace and Conformity
OX F O R D S T U D I E S I N H I S T O R IC A L T H E O L O G Y
Series Editor
Richard A. Muller, Calvin Theological Seminary
Founding Editor
David C. Steinmetz
Editorial Board
Robert C. Gregg, Stanford University
George M. Marsden, University of Notre Dame
Wayne A. Meeks, Yale University
Gerhard Sauter, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn
Susan E. Schreiner, University of Chicago
John Van Engen, University of Notre Dame
Robert L. Wilken, University of Virginia
ORTHODOX RADICALS REFUSING TO KISS THE SLIPPER
Baptist Identity in the English Revolution Opposition to Calvinism in the
Matthew C. Bingham Francophone Reformation
DIVINE PERFECTION AND HUMAN Michael W. Bruening
POTENTIALITY FONT OF PARDON AND NEW LIFE
The Trinitarian Anthropology of John Calvin and the Efficacy of Baptism
Hilary of Poitiers Lyle D. Bierma
Jarred A. Mercer THE FLESH OF THE WORD
THE GERMAN AWAKENING The Extra Calvinisticum from Zwingli to
Protestant Renewal after the Early Orthodoxy
Enlightenment, 1815–1848 K. J. Drake
Andrew Kloes JOHN DAVENANT’S
CATHOLICITY AND THE HYPOTHETICAL UNIVERSALISM
COVENANT OF WORKS A Defense of Catholic and Reformed
James Ussher and the Reformed Tradition Orthodoxy
Harrison Perkins Michael J. Lynch
THE COVENANT OF WORKS RHETORICAL ECONOMY IN
The Origins, Development, and Reception AUGUSTINE’S THEOLOGY
of the Doctrine Brian Gronewoller
J. V. Fesko GRACE AND CONFORMITY
RINGLEADERS OF REDEMPTION The Reformed Conformist Tradition and
How Medieval Dance Became Sacred the Early Stuart Church of England
Kathryn Dickason Stephen Hampton
Grace and Conformity
The Reformed Conformist Tradition and the
Early Stuart Church of England
S T E P H E N HA M P T O N
1
3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hampton, Stephen William Peter, author.
Title: Grace and conformity : the reformed conformist tradition and the
early Stuart Church of England / Stephen Hampton.
Description: New York, NY, United States of America : Oxford University
Press, 2021. | Series: Oxford studies in historical theology series |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020049812 (print) | LCCN 2020049813 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190084332 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190084356 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: England—Church history—17th century. | Church of
England—Doctrines—History—17th century. | Church and
state—England—History—17th century. | Christianity and
politics—England—History—17th century. | Great
Britain—History—Early Stuarts, 1603-1649.
Classification: LCC BR756 . H2554 2021 (print) | LCC BR756 (ebook) |
DDC 274. 2—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020049812
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020049813
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190084332.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Abbreviations ix
Introduction: The Reformed Conformist Style of Piety 1

1. The Act Lectures of John Prideaux 28
2. John Davenant and the English Appropriation of the
Synod of Dort 68
3. Responses to Montagu 110
4. The Defence of Grace after the 1626 Proclamation 149
5. The Articulation of Justification by Faith 177
6. The Lord’s Supper 207
7. Episcopacy 237
8. Disputed Ceremonies and the Liturgical Year 268
Conclusion 300
Notes 311
Bibliography 393
Index 403
Acknowledgements
I should express my thanks, first of all, to the Master and Fellows of Peterhouse
for affording me the time to undertake this research. It is a delightful irony
that I have been researching Early Stuart Reformed Conformists from what
was an enemy redoubt. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Anthony
Milton for his unflagging enthusiasm for this project, his patience in reading
draft material, and his willingness to share the fruits of his formidable
learning. Richard Muller’s scholarship has been an inspiration, and his sup-
port and guidance in bringing the manuscript to publication have been a
singular encouragement. I am grateful for many entertaining, challenging,
and illuminating conversations with David Hoyle, John Adamson, Stephen
Conway, and Michael McClenahan which have so often refreshed my interest
in the topic. Mari Jones’s combination of academic experience and friendly
advice have been a constant support. My colleagues James Carleton Paget,
Magnus Ryan, and Scott Mandelbrote have frequently and graciously inter-
rupted their own work to help me with mine. I should also express my thanks
to Nicholas Rogers, Archivist of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, for his
patience and help in accessing the Ward manuscripts, and to John Maddicott,
who has generously shared the fruits of his own research on John Prideaux.
Abbreviations
ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

Hooker, Laws Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity
Aquinas, S.Th. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica
Introduction: The Reformed Conformist
Style of Piety
‘My House Is the House of Prayer’
On 5 October 1624, at 8 o’clock in the morning, the resident doctors of Oxford

University gathered in the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, ‘clad
in their scarlet robes’.1 The assembled academics then accompanied John
Howson, Bishop of Oxford, in a solemn procession to Exeter College. They
were met at the gate by the Rector, fellows, and scholars of the College, dressed
in their surplices, with the rest of the College’s students in their academic
gowns. To the sound of choral and instrumental music, the expanded proces-
sion then walked round the Quad to the recently completed College Chapel.
The construction of this new building had been overseen by George
Hakewill, Archdeacon of Surrey, the wealthy clergyman who paid for it. Two
years previously, Hakewill had lost his place at Court and been briefly im-
prisoned for presenting the young Prince of Wales (later King Charles I), to
whom he was then a Chaplain, with an unauthorized tract denouncing the
Prince’s proposed marriage to the King of Spain’s daughter, the Infanta Maria
Anna. In the interim, Prince Charles, accompanied by his father’s favourite,
George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, had travelled to Spain in an unsuc-
cessful attempt to woo the Spanish Princess. So Hakewill’s insistence that his
new Chapel be consecrated on 5 October, the anniversary of the Prince’s re-
turn to England, may have held some savour of vindication.2
Hakewill’s new chapel was undoubtedly a remarkable building. Unique
among the chapels of Oxford and Cambridge, it was almost square, with two
parallel aisles separated by a line of Perpendicular arches.3 The Chapel was
distinguished by its broad, traceried windows, its delicate Mannerist wood-
work, an ornamental plaster ceiling in the gothic style, and a great trompe l’oeil
window painted on the east wall.4 Across every otherwise clear-glazed light
were inscribed the words ‘Domus Mea, Domus Orationis’: ‘My house is the
house of prayer’.5
Grace and Conformity. Stephen Hampton, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190084332.003.0001
2 Grace and Conformity
Perhaps the Chapel’s crowning glory, though, was its striking pulpit, whose
ornate, pinnacled canopy was held up by a pair of distinctive Solomonic col-
umns.6 Legend had it that the Emperor Constantine had taken such pillars
from the ruined Temple in Jerusalem and installed them in front of the altar of
St Peter’s Basilica, in Rome. Raphael had consequently incorporated columns
of that design in a tapestry cartoon depicting the healing of the lame man at
the Beautiful Gate, a cartoon which entered the English royal collection in
1623. Their use in Hakewill’s chapel antedates their better known use in the
porch of Oxford’s University Church by over a decade.7 Incorporating such
pillars into a pulpit dramatically underlined the significance of preaching as
the locus for a Christian’s encounter with God.8 The effect would have been
particularly powerful when the Exeter pulpit was moved, as intended, to the
centre of the main aisle.
On entering the new chapel, Bishop Howson received an oration of wel-
come from a member of the College, before being led to his seat beneath
the pulpit and close to the carpeted communion table.9 After formally en-
quiring whether it was the will of the College ‘to have this house dedicated
to God and consecrated to his divine service,’ the Bishop knelt and began
the rite with a prayer of dedication.10 The whole service, which included the
ordinary Prayer Book office for the day and was again accompanied by elab-
orate choral and instrumental music, lasted nearly four hours.11 The sermon
was preached by the Rector of Exeter, John Prideaux. Prideaux had been
Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford since 1615 and was an internation-
ally renowned exponent of Reformed orthodoxy. In 1624, he was already
serving for the second time as Vice-Chancellor to his powerful patron, the
University’s Chancellor, William Herbert, Third Earl of Pembroke. Prideaux
took as his text the words inscribed on the Chapel windows: Luke 19:46, ‘My
house is the house of prayer’.
Bishop Howson had published two sermons on the equivalent text from
Matthew’s gospel in 1597 and 1598, and he cannot have missed the fact that,
at significant points, Prideaux took a rather different line from his own. Both
men certainly exhibited a profound reverence for sacred space. Prideaux
began by underlining the anger that Christ had expressed in the Temple
against the sacrilege perpetrated there.12 He then applied that dominical ex-
ample to the proper use of church buildings in his own day:
God will have a house; this house must appear to be his peculiar; this pecu-
liar must not be made common, as an [gu]ild hall for plays or pleadings; or a
Introduction 3
shop for merchandise; or a cloister for idle walkers; or a gallery for pleasure;
or a banqueting house for riot; much less a brothel for wantonness, or a
cage for idolatrous superstitions but reserved as a sacred congregation-
house, where penitent & submissive supplicants may learn their duty by
preaching; assure their good proceedings by sacraments, obtain their
graces by prayer.13
Howson had quoted Chrysostom to much the same effect, twenty-five

years earlier.14 Admittedly, Prideaux’s reference to the particular dangers of
‘idolatrous superstitions’ lent his idea of reverence for sacred space an anti-
Catholic edge, which Howson’s remarks had not conveyed.15
Prideaux underlined that Christ and the Apostles had never spoken
against the ‘Cathedral Temple’ or the ‘parochial synagogues’ of the Jews.
On the contrary, they had set Christians an example, by using them for
their proper purpose in preaching, prayer, catechizing, and disputation.
Prideaux commended the generosity with which Christians of earlier ages
had established their churches. He remarked, however, ‘That which true de-
votion first grounded, necessity urged, conveniency furthered, holy ability
perfected, and God blessed: opinion of merit, false miracles, apish imitation
of Paynims, superstition toward relics and saints departed; and perchance
in some, an itching ambition to get a name; through Devil’s stratagems, and
man’s vanity, quickly perverted and abused’.16 True religion was consequently
reduced to a mere show; ‘And no marvel, for God’s word and preaching once
laid aside, and reconciliation by faith in Christ little sought after, or mistaken;
what May-game and outward pomp, which best contented the sense, might
not easily pass for the best religion’.17 For Prideaux, in other words, the neg-
lect of preaching and a heterodox theology of salvation had led directly to a
corruption of the medieval Church’s attitude to church buildings and liturgy.
Howson had passed over such issues in silence, merely criticizing the medi-
eval Church’s worldliness and excess.18
Even in the Patristic era, Prideaux pointed out, the Fathers had begun to
express concern about the dangers of excessive devotion to church buildings.
That said, Prideaux did not hide their appreciation of appropriate splendour,
so long as it was combined with a sound theology of grace:
Not that these good men . . . misliked decency, cost, or state, propor-
tional to situations, assemblies, and founders, and the abilities of such
houses for Gods worship; but desired to restrain excess, curb ostentation,
stop superstition, which at length began to be intolerable in images and

relics: but especially to beat men off from the conceit of merit, and rectify
their good minds, where circumstances so required in divers cases, to more
charitable employments.19
Where such problems were not in evidence, Prideaux remarked, the

Fathers had applauded investment in church buildings. As a result, he went
on, ‘they are not worthy therefore to be confuted, (or scarce deserve to be
mentioned) who in hatred of a nation, or religion, or in heat of faction, over-
throw God’s houses’.20 Prideaux lamented the fact that a proper regard for
church buildings was lacking among the Christians of his own day. ‘It were to
be wished . . . ’ he remarked, ‘that in building, repairing, and adorning such
religious houses, our devotion were as forward as our warrant is uncontrol-
lable. The very Turks may shame us in this behalf, who neglect their private
mansions, to beautify their profane mosques. Surely God hath need of no
such Houses, but the benefit of them redoundeth to ourselves’.21 Howson had
said much the same, though at considerably greater length.22
Prideaux had no truck, however, with the superstitious opinions about
church construction prevailing within the Church of Rome. He ridiculed
Bellarmine’s discussion of the subject in the De Controversiis Christianae
Fidei, taking particular exception to the Cardinal’s specious reasons that
churches should point east.23 Prideaux underlined that he was perfectly
happy for church buildings to point east, but not on such preposterous
grounds: ‘These are the great Cardinal’s reasons for church architecture:’ he
wrote, ‘which I refute not, but leave, for their conversion, who affect to direct
their prayers by the rhumbs in the compass. The thing we disallow not, as in
itself merely indifferent; yet embrace it not, on such Jesuitical inducements,
but in regard of a commendable conformity’.24
Prideaux then turned to the question of consecration.25 Under the Old
Covenant, he pointed out, God had instituted special ceremonies to dedi-
cate certain objects, persons, and places to his service, ‘the consideration
whereof might breed a reverence in his worshippers that should use them;
and vindicate them from miscreants that should employ them otherwise’.26
This practice had continued in the Early Church, and all the relevant Patristic
authorities agreed that the consecration of church buildings was ‘an ancient
and necessary Church-constitution’. All agreed, too, Prideaux pointed out,
‘that no minister inferior to a bishop, might canonically consecrate it’.27 So
there was therefore an episcopalian edge to his sermon, too.
Introduction 5
Originally, church consecrations had simply involved prayer and

preaching, and Prideaux cited approvingly the Second Helvetic Confession’s
stipulation that ‘on account of God’s Word and sacred use places dedicated to
God and his worship are not profane’.28 Prideaux’s positive reference to the
Second Helvetic Confession was a rejoinder to Howson, who had criticized
the Confession in his 1598 sermon. It also served to anchor the Exeter rite of
consecration firmly within the wider Reformed tradition.
Prideaux complained that these innocent ceremonies had become un-
necessarily elaborate over time and also been embroidered with specious
legends. Prideaux offered several examples of these, ‘to acquaint the younger
sort with these Romish mysteries; the notice whereof may give you a taste,
how inclinable the Italian humours are always to play the mountebanks; and
how blessed our case is, who so fairly are freed from them’. For, as Prideaux
underlined, with yet another reference to the need for an orthodox soteri-
ology, ‘As our Founders disclaim all merit, so our Reverend Bishops (as you
see) pretend no miracles to credit their consecrations’.29
Prideaux believed that the consecration of church buildings had ample
scriptural warrant. ‘Have we not this ground from the Apostle himself,’ he
asked, ‘ “That every creature is sanctified by the word of God and prayer?”
1. Timothy 3.5. And what is sanctification, but that in general which conse-
cration is in special, a severing of places, persons, and things, from common
use, by deputing them through convenient rites, to Gods peculiar worship
and service’.30 Such ceremonies, Prideaux pointed out, had ‘procured here-
tofore respect to the things, reverence to the persons, and an awful regard
in men’s behaviours, as often as they entered into such sanctified places’.31
Sadly, this reverence for the sacred was much decayed: ‘In the looseness of
these latter times: impudency pleads prescription for greater presumption,
more commonly in such houses and assemblies, than would be tolerated be-
fore a Chair of State, or a common Court of Justice: nay, that pupil or servant,
who in a College quadrangle will honour his Master, at least with a cap, in a
Church at sermon time will make bold to affront him covered, howsoever he
stand bare to deliver God’s message’.
Prideaux encouraged his congregation to a different course: ‘Take heed
therefore . . . not only to thy foot, but to thy head, hands, and heart, when
thou enterest into the House of God. . . . Not for the inherent sanctity of
the place (which our adversaries press too far) but through the objective
holiness, adherent to it, by Christ’s promises, sacred meetings, united de-
votion, joint participating of the Word and Sacraments, lively incitements
through others examples’.32 For Prideaux, in other words, although a

church building was not holy, in and of itself; it certainly was holy in a de-
rivative sense, by virtue of its connection with holy things.33 As a result,
it was a Christian duty to express suitable reverence in church buildings,
both inwardly and outwardly.
If any question was raised about whether church buildings should be
dedicated, as Hakewill’s Chapel was, to departed saints; Prideaux’s response
was clear: ‘We affirm, they may; not for their relics contained in them, or
invocation directed to them, or graces expected from them; as the Papists
contend to have, and the Puritans fondly cavil we give: but for certain notes
of difference, the better to discern one church or chapel from another; and
a religious retaining of those in memory, by whom God is honoured, and
good men excited to imitation’.34 The printed version of the sermon in-
cluded a marginal reference, at this point, to Richard Hooker’s discussion
of the dedication of churches in the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.35 Prideaux’s
explicit condemnation of Puritanism here was significant: Puritanism was
clearly one of the ‘others’ against which he was defining his own ecclesias-
tical identity.
A second ‘other’ emerged, when Prideaux defined the main purpose of all
church buildings. As he put it,
these houses are not here Christened by the names of Concionatoria, or

Sacramentaria; houses of preaching and administering the sacraments;
(though preaching and sacraments be the ordinary and blessed means, for
the begetting and confirming true faith in us, whereby our prayers may be
effectual) but of . . . Oratoria, places of prayers, and Courts of Requests to
the Great King of Heaven, as both the Greeks and Latins style them from
the primary action; prayer . . . including, by a notable synecdoche, all other
religious duties, which are ordered to it, and receive a blessing by it. And
surely (beloved) public prayers and sermons, (for ought I find) never tres-
passed one upon another, till the itching humours of some men of late,
would needs set them together by the ears. For what? must sermons needs
be long to shorten prayers? or prayers be protracted or multiplied of pur-
pose to exclude preaching? I pray God there be not a fault of both sides; of
laziness in the one, and vain glory in the other: When those would excuse
their slackness, or insufficiency, by a pretended devotion; and the other
draw all devotion to attend on their discourses. Let preaching therefore so
possess the pulpit, that prayer may name the church, as here it doth.36
Introduction 7
With these words, Prideaux pointedly distanced himself from Howson’s

sermon on the same dominical words; because setting public prayers and
sermons together by the ears was precisely what the Bishop of Oxford had
done twenty years earlier.
In 1598, Howson had taken exception to the injunction in the Second
Helvetic Confession that ‘The greater part of meetings for worship is . . . to
be given to evangelical teaching, and care is to be taken lest the congregation
is wearied by too lengthy prayers’.37 Howson complained that ‘Though the
Church of England hath no such constitution, yet the people entertain the
practise of it, many of them condemning common prayer, but a greater part
neglecting them, and holding it the only exercise of the service of God to hear
a sermon’.38 ‘I complain not that our Churches are auditories,’ Howson under-
lined, ‘but that they are not oratories: not that you come to sermons, but that
you refuse or neglect common prayer’.39 Prideaux’s words were therefore a
public criticism of the man consecrating Exeter’s new chapel.
That said, they also represented a distinct qualification of the liturgical at-
titudes of the Second Helvetic Confession; an attitude which many Puritans
shared. One of the Puritan complaints against the Prayer Book expressed in
the 1605 Abridgment was that ‘It appointeth a liturgy which by the length
thereof, doth in many congregations oft times necessarily shut out preaching’.40
The Abridgment had been republished in 1617 and would be again in 1638.
Prideaux was therefore carefully locating his view of sacred space, and of
orthodox Conformist devotion, in contradistinction to the likes of Howson,
on the one hand, and the Puritans, on the other. He was also passing over, in
discreet silence, the fact that the tension which both Howson and the Puritans
perceived to lie between preaching and praying was a tension acknowledged
by the Second Helvetic Confession, of which Prideaux had earlier approved.
Here was, in other words, an appropriation of Reformed theological reflec-
tion on sacred space, but nuanced by the particular polemical situation of a
Conformist working within the English Church.
The Consecration of Exeter Chapel was a memorable ceremony. It also
presents a conundrum to historians of the Early Stuart Church, because it
combines religious elements that have often been taken to be incompat-
ible. Here was a stately liturgical ceremony, incorporating fine choral and
instrumental music, taking place in a richly and symbolically decorated
building, but a sustained hostility to the Church of Rome was also present.
Here was a sermon extolling the spiritual significance of sacred space, the
need for bodily reverence, and the legitimacy of costly church architecture
and furnishings, but also a sermon promoting orthodox Reformed soteri-

ology, preached by one of Europe’s most celebrated Reformed divines. Above
all, the event was an expression of Conformist devotion that was evidently
as opposed to the more avant-garde expressions of Conformity as it was to
Puritanism. The Consecration of Exeter College Chapel therefore stands as
an eloquent testimony to what Peter McCullough has referred to as ‘a pecu-
liarly Jacobean ecclesiastical culture which seemed increasingly comfortable
with church beautification, both architectural and musical—as long as that
did not threaten the inherited Elizabethan commitment to the ministry of
the Word through preaching’.41 The purpose of this book is to explore the
religious tradition within which this distinctive combination of religious im-
pulses made sense.
Neither Puritan nor Laudian
In Scandal and Religious Identity in Early Stuart England (2015), Peter Lake
and Isaac Stephens have forcefully reiterated the case that the Early Stuart
Church was shaped by the interaction between a number of distinct, iden-
tifiable, and self-conscious religious identities. The identities around which
Lake and Stephens primarily focussed their analysis were Puritanism and
Laudianism. Their central contention, based on a close, intertextual reading
of public and private sources, was that these two identities were not ‘the
product of ideology and false consciousness, merely factitious constructs,
generated by contemporaries in self-interested pursuit of polemical and pol-
itical advantage’. Rather, ‘Founded on positions, both publicly canvassed and
privately held, these terms effectively encode and characterize what a con-
siderable number of centrally placed and influential groups and individuals
were doing throughout the 1620s and 1630s’.
But Lake and Stephens also underlined that ‘we cannot simply accept the
mutually reinforcing, bi-polar vision of the Laudians and Puritans as any-
thing like an adequate account of the contemporary religious scene’. 42 In
their study, they pointed to a 1637 sermon by the moderate Puritan Edward
Reynolds and to Elizabeth Isham’s Book of Remembrance as evidence for a
much richer spectrum of religious cultures.43 The consecration of Exeter
College Chapel, and Prideaux’s sermon at it, is another case in point: a prom-
inent religious ceremony that was neither Puritan nor Laudian, but explicitly
and self-consciously distinct from both.
Introduction 9
Lake and Stephens are certainly not the only historians who have
tried to move beyond the binary opposition of Puritan and Laudian, in
their analyses of the Early Stuart Church. As long ago as 1973, Nicholas
Tyacke identified a ‘mainstream of Calvinist episcopalianism,’ in which
he placed John Davenant.44 In The Early Stuart Church (1993), Kenneth
Fincham underlined the significance of the conformist Calvinists within
the Church of James I and Charles I, arguing that ‘we urgently need more
studies of such conforming Calvinists, who are usually lost sight of be-
tween the more visible extremes of Puritan and Arminian’.45 In Catholic
and Reformed (1995), Anthony Milton extensively discussed the views
of those ‘Calvinist Conformists,’ among whom he numbered Prideaux.46
In Conforming to the Word (1997), Daniel Doerksen celebrated the fact
that ‘Historians are at long last studying the Calvinist conformists,’ among
whom he located John Donne and George Herbert.47 In Prayer Book and
People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (1998), Judith Maltby es-
tablished a significant bedrock of popular Conformity that was staunchly
Protestant, attached to the Book of Common Prayer, and yet neither
Puritan nor Laudian in sympathy.48 In other words, the use of ‘Calvinist
Conformist’ as a category and the recognition that ‘Calvinist Conformity’
was a distinct and significant expression of English Protestantism during
the Early Stuart period are well established in the literature. That said,
scholarly interest in the tradition has generally been confined to studies
of individual ‘Calvinist Conformists,’ rather than attempting to engage
with the tradition as a whole.49 This is in marked contrast to the way his-
torians have approached both Puritanism and Laudianism. The study of
Puritanism is so well established as to be virtually a subdiscipline in its
own right. Laudianism has also attracted a number of dedicated studies.50
Calvinist Conformity has not.
Doerksen is arguably an exception here. His book sets out to answer the
question ‘What kind of conformity characterized the Jacobean Church?’51
However, he does not engage in depth with the theology that was deployed
to defend conformity or with the writers who deployed it. His aim was rather
to contextualize the writings of George Herbert and, to a lesser extent, John
Donne, by reference to a broadly drawn conformist hinterland. Fincham is
another scholar who engages with Calvinist conformity as a distinctive trad-
ition. In Prelate as Pastor (1990), he made the case that a number of Jacobean
bishops whom he describes as ‘evangelical Calvinists,’ or simply ‘evangelicals,’
embraced a practical theology of episcopacy—a ‘churchmanship’ as Fincham
calls it—that was demonstrably distinct from that of their Arminian and
Laudian contemporaries and yet cannot meaningfully be described as pur-
itan.52 Fincham’s study certainly engages with the theology of ministry that
underlay the pastoral approach of these men. He does not, however, seek to
engage with contemporary discussions about the doctrine of grace or with
the theological underpinnings of liturgical conformity. His primary focus is
also on the reign of James I, when such evangelical Calvinists were clearly on
the front foot, rather than on the reign of Charles I, when their religious trad-
ition came under pressure.
Debora Shuger accounts for the relative neglect of Calvinist Conformity
by ‘the extent to which the historiography of belief still depends on the arma
virumque model, in which the primary task is to identify the two sides and
then trace their conflict through its various stages’.53 Certainly, if an adver-
sarial model of ecclesiastical history is assumed, the opposition between
Puritanism and Laudinism is more obvious, and more thoroughgoing, than
the opposition between either and Calvinist conformity. Another factor may
be the assumption that Laudianism and Puritanism had an afterlife in the
Restoration Church, in High Churchmanship and Nonconformity, respect-
ively, whereas Calvinist conformity did not. That is an assumption which
I have sought to challenge elsewhere.54 The phenomenon of post-Restoration
Reformed Conformity only reinforces the need to understand its Early Stuart
antecedent.
The result of this relative neglect is that the only work offering an in-
depth analysis of the theology of Calvinist conformity remains Peter Lake’s
Anglicans and Puritans? (1988), which was a study of its Elizabethan, rather
than its Stuart expression. There, Lake drew a sharp distinction between the
conformity exhibited by John Whitgift and that exhibited by Richard Hooker.
‘Whitgift,’ Lake wrote, ‘certainly made no attempt to develop a positively and
distinctively conformist style of piety’. ‘He never claimed that the ceremonies
in question had any religious significance at all,’55 rather, ‘They were prof-
fered as aids to order and uniformity, their value derived from the authority
of the prince who enjoined them’.56 ‘Nor is there any sign in his thought of a
sacrament—rather than a word-centred style of piety . . . . The word read, but
particularly preached, remained the only way to edify the flock of Christ’.57
As a result, Lake suggested,
Whitgift’s religion or style of piety remained a pallid, one-dimensional ver-

sion of the puritan one. Centred on . . . an impoverished understanding
Introduction 11
of edification as the mere transfer of knowledge, it was backed up by a ra-

ther wintry and fatalist Calvinism. Those who wanted a religious or emo-
tionally compelling alternative to puritan divinity were not going to find it
in Whitgift’s works. The search to fill the resulting vacuum at the heart of
the conformist position was to occupy anti-puritan polemicists for the re-
mainder of the reign.58
Lake contrasted Whitgift’s uninspiring, Erastian style of conformity

with Hooker’s much richer offering. For Hooker, religion was fundamen-
tally a matter of worship, and worship involved more than the preaching of
the word. It involved church ceremonies, prayer, and, above all, the sacra-
ments. ‘Church ceremonies, [Hooker] claimed (in direct disagreement with
previous conformists) could and should edify’. As a result, Hooker’s style
of conformity entailed ‘little short of the reclamation of the whole realm of
symbolic action and ritual practice from the status of popish superstition to
that of a necessary, indeed essential means of communication and edifica-
tion; a means, moreover, in many ways more effective than the unvarnished
word’.59 Furthermore, ‘Prayer, for Hooker, was of at least equal importance
with preaching in the life of the church. Indeed the two activities perfectly
complemented each other.’60 Church ceremonies and prayer provided the
proper context for what Hooker conceived as the most important element
of worship—the sacraments. For Hooker, Lake underlined, ‘The sacraments
were the major instruments through which we are incorporated into Christ’s
mystical body’.61 As a result, he argued, Hooker’s agenda was effectively to
replace a word-centred view of Christian ministry, which Whitgift shared
with the Puritans, with a sacrament-centred one. In this, he was emulated
by a number of ‘Arminian or proto-Arminian divines,’ including Lancelot
Andrewes, John Overall and John Buckeridge.62
Lake’s analysis of conformist thought, in which the two poles are the
Erastian, word- centred Calvinism of Whitgift, and the ceremonious,
sacrament-centred piety fostered by Hooker and embraced by the anti-
Calvinists, continues to shape perceptions of English conformity.63 That may
be why, in Altars Restored (2007), Kenneth Fincham and Nicholas Tyacke
include Prideaux’s Consecration sermon among a range of sermons that they
suggest illustrate ‘just how far the ecclesiological views of Richard Hooker
and John Howson still were from winning general acceptance’ at the end
of James I’s reign.64 Yet as has been indicated, Prideaux’s concerns actu-
ally echoed Howson’s on a number of points, and the marginal reference to
Hooker’s discussion of the dedication of church buildings, that appears in the

printed version of the sermon ‘Vid. Hookerum l.5 sect. 12, 13, 16’ suggests a
more positive engagement with Hooker’s style of conformity than Fincham
and Tyacke seem to allow.
This is not entirely surprising because, as Michael Brydon has shown in
The Evolving Reputation of Richard Hooker (Oxford, 2006), there was a con-
certed effort amongst conforming Calvinists to redeem Hooker from the sus-
picion of crypto-Catholicism raised by his early detractors65 and to reclaim
him as a sound Reformed authority for conformity.66 As a result, it became
possible for orthodox Reformed theologians to quote Hooker in defence of
the established Church and so to absorb, selectively and critically, Hooker’s
style of conformist piety.67 In the Early Stuart period, in other words, con-
forming Calvinists were in a position to move beyond the Erastian con-
formity of Whitgift and offer a richer articulation of conformist practice,
without thereby abandoning their Reformed doctrinal credentials.68 It fol-
lows that Lake’s analysis of conformist thought under Elizabeth I, in which
doctrinal Calvinism and an appreciation for ceremony and symbolism were
alternatives, is less well-adapted to the situation under the Early Stuarts. By
then, a richer mode of Calvinist conformity had become possible. Prideaux
was one exponent: this study will show that there were others.
As a result, this study will raise a question mark over a key contention
of Alec Ryrie’s Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (2013). There, Ryrie
attempted to demonstrate that Early Modern British Protestantism was a
‘broad-based’ religious culture, in which ‘the division between puritan and
conformist Protestants, which has been so important in English historiog-
raphy, almost fades from view when examined through the lens of devotion
and lived experience’.69 In order to display this homogeneity, Ryrie focussed
exclusively on works that he defined as devotional, rather than ‘works of doc-
trinal definition and controversy’.70 He also excluded works by separatist
Protestants and, more controversially, those written by ‘Laudians, and other
17th-century prophets of ceremonial revival’.71
Lake and Stephens have decisively rebutted Ryrie’s argument, at least with
regard to Puritans and Laudians. However, since Ryrie explicitly excluded the
Laudians from his discussion, a full response to his thesis requires the discus-
sion, not of the anti-Calvinist conformists, who populate Lake and Stephens’s
study, but of Calvinist conformists such as Prideaux. Lake and Stephens
were, of course, restricted by the range of religious identities documented
in relation to the 1637 case that was their centrepiece. Their discussion
Introduction 13
consequently lacks the Calvinist conformist voice, which is as necessary as

the Puritan voice, if Ryrie’s thesis of a broad-based Protestant consensus is to
be challenged. The present study allows that voice to be heard.
Thus far, the terms ‘Calvinist Conformity’ and ‘Calvinist conformists’ have
been used, since they are the terms most widely adopted by most scholars
of the British Church. However, as Philip Benedict explained, in Christ’s
Churches Purely Reformed (2002), ‘Reformed is . . . for several reasons a more
historically accurate and less potentially misleading label than Calvinist to
apply to these churches and to the larger tradition to which they attached
themselves’. This study will follow his lead, and refer rather to ‘Reformed
Conformity’ and ‘Reformed conformists’.72
It will also embrace the scholarly approach articulated by Richard Muller,
in ‘Directions in the Study of Early Modern Reformed Thought’ (2016).
There, Muller underlined that ‘The study of early modern Reformed thought
has altered dramatically in the last several decades’. In particular, ‘The once
dominant picture of Calvin as the prime mover of the Reformed tradition
and sole index to its theological integrity has largely disappeared from view,
as has the coordinate view of ‘Calvinism’ as a monolithic theology’.73 This
development has prompted a significant shift of emphasis within Reformed
studies. ‘Given what can be called the demotion of Calvin from the place of
founder and norm for the whole Reformed tradition,’ Muller has pointed out,
‘studies of later sixteenth and seventeenth-century Reformed writers have
examined their thought in its own right as representing forms of contextually
located theology, or, indeed, theologies’.74 As Muller has pointed out, how-
ever, the field is far from exhausted: quite the contrary: ‘Further study . . . is
called for—particularly with a view to uncovering further the diversity of the
tradition and the nature of its debates’.75 The Reformed Conformity of the
Early Stuart English Church is precisely the kind of distinct and contextually
located expression of Reformed theology that students of the Reformed trad-
ition need to explore. As a result, the present study will make a significant
contribution to Reformed studies as a whole, not simply to the historiog-
raphy of the English Church.
Of course, ‘Calvinist’ is not the only adjective that has been problematized
in the scholarship, ‘conformist’ has as well. In Conformity and Orthodoxy
in the English Church (2000), Peter Lake and Michael Questier argued that
both conformity and orthodoxy should be understood not as ‘stable quan-
tities, but rather . . . the sites of conflict and contest’.76 This point is well
made. In his Consecration sermon, Prideaux was evidently making the
case for a particular vision of conformity, one that excluded both Puritans
and Laudians and was evidently rooted in the theological instincts of the
Protestant Reformation. The same is true for the other figures that are the
focus of this study. Their conformity was an argued and evolving case, de-
fined against, and in tension with the various constructions of conformity
being advanced by their moderate Puritan or Laudian colleagues, and in-
deed by those Reformed Conformists who still adhered to something closer
to Whitgift’s model of conformity.77 This becomes particularly clear in their
discussions of English Church polity.
It is worth making a final point about the sources that inform this study.
Lake and Stephens took exception to Ryrie’s decision to exclude academic
and controversial texts from his study of the period. ‘It is never a good idea,’
they pointedly remarked, ‘on the basis of some a priori value judgement
about the appropriate hierarchy of sources or about what real Christianity
is all about, to decide, in advance, what really mattered and what did not,
what was really central or ‘mainstream’, and what merely peripheral’.78 Quite
the contrary: an examination of private texts ‘almost perfectly replicates and
confirms the contents and purport of the public polemical sources’.79 What
is more, the doctrinal issues that divided the Arminians from the Reformed
were clearly central to the contemporary interpretation of this case.80
The need to attend more to academic and controversial theology, rather
than sidelining it as irrelevant to the majority of the population, has been
a growing theme in the historiography. Julia Merritt has observed that the
sharp dichotomy between the worlds of university and parish, which is as-
sumed in much of the scholarship, needs to be overcome.81 Martin Bac has
underlined that ‘recent interest in Puritanism is focussed on its piety apart
from its theology . . . and therefore loses sight of its fundamental structures’.82
Arnold Hunt has noted that historians often find excuses for avoiding a de-
tailed discussion of academic theology, particularly in relation to the debates
about predestination, suggesting that the questions it raised were too rarefied
to have been of great interest to the wider lay population.83 Hunt forcefully
challenges the idea that these academic debates were not of interest to people
outside the theological academy. As he puts it, ‘A survey of English sermon
manuscripts . . . warns us against drawing too sharp a contrast between aca-
demic theology and popular religion,’84 for, as he underlines, ‘even the aca-
demic debates on predestination were of interest to many people outside the
universities’.85 Indeed, ‘lay people in the parishes were surprisingly well in-
formed about debates in the universities’.86 Leif Dixon has recently explored
Introduction 15
how preachers from various ends of the Reformed spectrum worked hard
to ensure that the doctrine of predestination became a source of comfort
for their parishioners, rather than anxiety, and has demonstrated how pas-
toral purpose was by no means incompatible with the search for theological
precision.87
By suggesting that pastoral theology can be distinguished from, and should
be preferred to, academic and controversial theology, Ryrie is therefore swim-
ming against a powerful tide, and this study will not follow him. Instead, it
will focus on the very academic and controversial texts that Ryrie passes by;
using them to illustrate that, for the English Reformed Conformists, as for
most other seventeenth century theologians, neither academic nor polem-
ical theology was uninformed by practical and pastoral concerns.
Representative Voices
John Prideaux offers an excellent way in to an important network of prom-

inent Reformed Conformists working within the Early Stuart Church. As in-
dicated above, Prideaux was Rector of Exeter College, Oxford, from 1612, and
Regius Professor of Divinity from 1615; a position he did not relinquish until
he became Bishop of Worcester in 1641. His was consequently the leading
voice of the Oxford Divinity Faculty for most of the Early Stuart period.
A Reformed theologian of international reputation, who narrowly missed
being appointed to the British Delegation at Dort,88 Prideaux was a magnet
for foreign scholars and well-connected pupils alike. As Anthony a Wood
later remarked, these who knew him reckoned him ‘so profound a divine,
that they have been pleased to entitle him columna fidei orthodoxae [pillar of
the orthodox faith], and malleus heresecus (sic) [hammer of heresy], Patrum
pater [father of the Fathers], and ingens scholae & academiae oraculum [the
prodigious oracle of the school and university]’.89
It was Prideaux’s eminence as an exponent of Reformed orthodoxy that led
Joseph Hall to request his support, shortly after Hall’s appointment as Bishop
of Exeter, in 1627. Hall was a former member of the British Delegation at
Dort, though illness forced him to leave the Synod early. He was accused of
Popery for suggesting, in The Old Religion (1628), that the Church of Rome
might be considered a true Church; so he turned to a number of impec-
cable Reformed authorities for their endorsement, among them the Regius
Professor at Oxford. ‘Worthy Master Doctor Prideaux:’ Hall wrote, ‘All our
little world here, takes notice of your worth, and eminency; who have long
furnished the Divinity Chair in that famous University, with mutual grace
and honour. Let me entreat you . . . to impart yourself freely to me, in your
censure; and to express to me your clear judgement, concerning the true
being, and visibility of the Roman Church’90
Hall may well have known Prideaux from their time as chaplains to the late
Prince Henry of Wales,91 and they both enjoyed the patronage of William
Herbert;92 but Hall’s appointment to Exeter had made him ex officio Visitor
of Exeter College, bringing them into more regular contact. Prideaux’s reply
was everything that Hall could have wanted: ‘As often as this hath come in
question in our public disputes, we determine here no otherwise, then your
Lordship hath stated it. And yet we trust to give as little vantage to Popery,
as those that do detest it; and are as circumspect to maintain our received
doctrine and discipline without the least scandal to the weakest, as those that
would seem most forward’.93 The pillar of the orthodox faith therefore gave
Hall a welcome imprimatur, and it was not long before the Bishop of Exeter’s
sons began making their way to Exeter College for their education.94
As Regius Professor, one of Prideaux’s duties was to determine the aca-
demic disputations offered by doctoral candidates in divinity. Anthony a
Wood records that, in 1617, one such candidate, Daniel Featley, who had re-
cently been appointed as domestic chaplain to Archbishop Abbot, ‘puzzled
Prideaux the King’s professor so much with his learned arguments, that a
quarrel thereupon being raised, the Archbishop was in a manner forced to
compose it for his Chaplain’s sake’.95 Abbot’s intervention was clearly suc-
cessful. Featley and Prideaux worked together closely during the controversy
surrounding Richard Montagu, and Featley became a good enough friend
to be imparting both gossip and advice to Prideaux in the late 1620’s.96 In
one letter, Featley spoke of ‘my love to you my most honoured father’ and
signed himself ‘your affectionate son’.97 Featley’s appointment as chaplain
to the Archbishop came to a sudden end in 1625 and he spent the rest of
Charles I’s reign as an incumbent of three churches in the diocese of London,
publishing his sermons and revising his celebrated devotional work, Ancilla
Pietatis (1626).
Featley was himself close to another Reformed Conformist grandee,
Thomas Morton. Morton was a distinguished Cambridge scholar, who be-
came successively Dean of Gloucester in 1607, Dean of Winchester in
1609, Bishop of Chester in 1616, Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield in 1619,
and Bishop of Durham in 1632. Morton first met Featley when Morton
Introduction 17
incorporated his Cambridge degrees in Oxford in 1606. Morton’s biographer

recorded that Featley had performed his academic exercises ‘with such ap-
plause as made Dr Morton carry a great friendship towards him ever after,
which was answered with a proportionable reverence on the other side’.98
Morton commissioned Featley to produce an abridged biography to John
Jewel, to preface Jewel’s republished works, in 1609,99 and the two men be-
came regular correspondents.100 Like Prideaux, Morton was one of the
Reformed authorities to whom Hall turned during the Old Religion con-
troversy, and Hall clearly believed that they were theological fellow travel-
lers. ‘I suffer,’ he wrote, ‘for that wherein yourself, amongst many renowned
orthodox doctors of the Church, are my partner . . . . I beseech your Lordship,
say, once more, what you think of the true being, and visibility of the Roman
Church, your excellent and zealous writings have justly won you a constant
reputation of great learning, and no less sincerity, and have placed you out
of the reach of suspicion’.101 Morton responded to Hall’s letter with evident
warmth: ‘Right Reverend, and as dearly beloved brother . . . . In that your
Lordship’s tractate, I could not but observe the lively image of yourself; that is
(according to the general interpretation of all sound professors of the Gospel
of Christ) of a most orthodox divine’.102 So Morton and Prideaux both recog-
nized Hall as a theological fellow-traveller.
Morton corresponded regularly with Samuel Ward, Master of Sidney
Sussex College, Cambridge from 1610, and Lady Margaret Professor of
Divinity from 1623. Morton sought Ward’s advice on various theological
matters,103 and they were sufficiently close for Morton to invite Ward to
stay with him, when he was Bishop of Durham.104 Ward had been one of the
translators of the Authorized Version, and a Chaplain to the King from 1611.
James Montagu, then Bishop of Bath and Wells, made Ward first a Prebend
of Yatton in Wells in 1610, and then Archdeacon of Taunton in 1615.105 Like
Hall, Ward was a member of the British Delegation at Dort. Like Prideaux,
his long tenure of the Lady Margaret Chair in Cambridge ensured that he
shaped the flavour of university divinity for much of the Early Stuart period.
Another Cambridge Conformist who benefited from the patronage of
James Montagu was George Downame. Downame had actually preached
the sermon at Montague’s consecration in 1608. This went down so well with
King James I, that Downame was made a Royal Chaplain; soon to be joined
in that position, of course, by Ward and Prideaux. When Ward was made
Archdeacon of Taunton in 1615, and acquired a different prebendal stall, it
was to Downame that Montagu gave Ward’s Prebend of Yatton. Downame
had to resign it a few months later, when he was made Bishop of Derry. He
continued to publish theological works from his Irish See, until his death in
1634; works that Ward commended in his lectures.106
Ward’s predecessor as Lady Margaret Professor was John Davenant, and
the two men were close friends, regular correspondents, and editorial col-
laborators throughout their lives. Like Ward, Davenant was a member
of the British Delegation at Dort; indeed the two travelled out together.107
Prideaux clearly took an interest in Davenant’s theological views, since he
had acquired a manuscript copy of Davenant’s opinions on the issues to be
debated at Dort, which George Hakewill asked to see, around the time the
Synod was meeting.108 Shortly after returning from Dort, in 1621, Davenant
was made Bishop of Salisbury. Like Prideaux and Morton, Davenant received
a request for support from Hall over The Old Religion, a request reinforced
by the remembrance of their brief time together at Dort.109 Once again,
the tone is evidently familiar: Hall signed himself ‘Your much devoted and
faithful brother’110 and Davenant responded with equal warmth, ending his
letter with encouragement and solicitude: ‘be no more troubled with other
men’s groundless suspicions, then you would be in like case, with their idle
dreams. Thus I have enlarged myself beyond my first intent. But my love to
yourself, and the assurance of your constant love unto the truth, enforced me
thereunto’. Alongside Morton and Hall, Davenant was one of the Reformed
bishops, to whom John Dury turned for support in his efforts towards
Protestant unity, following the Leipzig Colloquy of 1631.111
Ward and Davenant both knew George Carleton well, since he had been
their leader in the British Delegation at Dort. Admittedly, they and Carleton
had not always seen eye to eye;112 but they were united in their defence of the
Synod when it later came under attack.113 Carleton lobbied for the Synod’s
canons to be endorsed by Convocation.114 He also collaborated with Ward
and Davenant over the publication of the British Delegates’ defence of
their conduct at the Synod in 1626, and of Carleton’s reply to their attacker,
Richard Montagu. Carleton was already Bishop of Llandaff when he went to
Dort, and he was promoted to the bishopric of Chichester on his return to
England, in 1619. He died in 1628.
Ward and Davenant were also familiar with another member of this
Reformed Conformist connexion, John Williams. Educated in Cambridge,
Williams became Dean of Salisbury in 1619, Dean of Westminster in 1620, and
Bishop of Lincoln in 1621, In 1621, he was also became the last clergyman to
hold the Great Seal of England, serving as Lord Keeper from 1621 until 1625.
Introduction 19
Davenant knew Williams from his time as Lady Margaret Professor. When
the Elector Palatine, Frederick V, visited Cambridge in 1613, he was enter-
tained with a display disputation, which Davenant moderated, and for which
Williams was specially summoned back to Cambridge to be the primary op-
ponent.115 Williams’s performance was apparently so impressive that it brought
him the lasting admiration of Ward and Downame’s patron, James Montagu,
‘who from henceforth was the truest friend to Mr. Williams of all that did wear
a rochet to his last day’.116 Montagu later secured Williams a royal chaplaincy.
Williams’s biographer suggests that it was actually Williams who ‘spake and
sped for Dr Davenant to be made Bishop of Salisbury’.117 The relationship be-
tween the two men was sufficiently enduring that, mere days before he lost
his position as Lord Keeper, Williams was expected at Davenant’s house.118
Thereafter, Davenant is said to have become one of Williams’s episcopal role-
models, as he engaged more fully with his duties as Bishop of Lincoln.119
Williams’s episcopal palace was at Buckden, which was close to
Cambridge, and he was regularly visited there by members of the
University, not least by Samuel Ward. Indeed, as Williams’s biographer re-
corded, ‘when Dr. Ward and Dr. Brownrigg . . . came to do him honour
with their observance, it was an high feast with him. These were Saints of
the red letter in the calendar of his acquaintance’.120 Williams’s contacts
were not limited to Cambridge, however. He was in close enough contact
with Prideaux to join with him in an attempt to prevent William Laud be-
coming Chancellor of Oxford, in 1630. All the Colleges of which Williams
was Visitor supported Prideaux’s candidate, Philip Herbert, Fourth Earl
of Pembroke. Williams had been a good friend of Prideaux’s patron, the
Third Earl;121 and following Williams’s demonstration of his ongoing loy-
alty to the Herbert family during the chancellorship election, the Fourth
Earl sent his sons to be educated at Williams’s palace at Buckden.122 Three
sons of Philip Herbert subsequently moved from Williams’s household
to study under Prideaux, at Exeter College; reinforcing the link between
Buckden Palace and Exeter College.
As Bishop of Lincoln, Williams’s patronage was extensive. Among those
Reformed Conformists who benefited from it was Richard Holdsworth.
Holdsworth was a celebrated London preacher and also Professor of Divinity
at London’s Gresham College from 1629. Williams made Holdsworth
Prebend of Buckden in 1633123 and Archdeacon of Huntingdon in 1634.124
These appointments were significant, not merely because they placed
Holdsworth close to William’s palace, but also because, in 1633, Holdsworth
had been elected Master by the Governing Body of Williams’s old College, St
John’s; only for the election to be overruled, and a prominent anti-Calvinist,
William Beale, imposed by royal mandate instead. Samuel Ward had actively
supported Holdsworth’s candidature for St John’s,125 and was deeply suspi-
cious of Beale.126 By promoting Holdsworth, Williams was making very clear
where his own loyalties lay. Holdsworth was eventually elected Master of
Emmanuel, in 1637, and proved an ally of Ward within the University there-
after.127 It was later alleged that Holdsworth had corrected Williams’s Holy
Table, Name and Thing for the press.128
These ten clergymen, Prideaux, Hall, Featley, Morton, Ward, Downame,
Davenant, Carleton, Williams and Holdsworth were not the only prominent
Reformed Conformists working with in the Early Stuart Church. Indeed, the
very fact that they were not, is part of what makes this study interesting. However
eminent they may have been, they were merely the tip of the iceberg.129
Furthermore, the relationships which have been noted between them were
not invariably the strongest relationships which they had with other Reformed
Conformist colleagues. Ward’s relationship with Davenant and Prideaux’s
relationship with Featley were undeniably strong. But Prideaux was at least
equally close to George Hakewill, and Ward was equally close to James Ussher,
Archbishop of Armagh. Williams has relationships with Ralph Brownrigg and
John Hacket, just as warm as those he had with Ward or Holdsworth Mutatis
mutandis, the same is true of the other members of this network.
The reason for selecting these ten theologians as representatives of
Reformed Conformity is not, therefore, that the connexions that linked them
were the most conspicuous or close-knit within the Early Stuart Church; al-
though it is significant, in terms of their coherence as a group, that they were
all connected. The reason for selecting them as representative Reformed
Conformists is rather that they all made important contributions to the ar-
ticulation and defence of Reformed Conformity within the Early Stuart
Church, contributions which enable us to examine the Reformed Conformist
agenda across a range of theological issues, in a variety of polemical circum-
stances. This study will be shaped by those contributions.
The Distinctiveness of the Tradition
This study will argue that the ten writers at its heart were united by more than
bonds of friendship, correspondence and collaboration. It will argue that
Introduction 21
they were also united by their adherence to a common theological tradition,

a common style of piety and a common religious identity which is aptly de-
scribed as Reformed Conformity.
Considered as a theological tradition, Reformed Conformity exhibited a
resolute adherence to the soteriological principles of Reformed orthodoxy,
combined with a positive estimation of the institutions which distinguished
the English Church from most other Reformed churches in Europe. To the
Reformed Conformist mind, these distinguishing institutions, above all
episcopal government and the liturgical ceremonies enshrined in the Prayer
Book, were of positive religious value and consequently instruments of God’s
grace. Episcopacy guaranteed that the faithful were guided and taught by
legitimate pastors; and that, in turn, ensured the outworking of God’s plan
of salvation for the elect through the authorized preaching and faithful re-
ception of the Word. The Prayer Book’s characteristic liturgical provi-
sions, such as the liturgical calendar, the surplice, the cross in baptism, and
kneeling at communion, were, when rightly used, conducive to the edifica-
tion of the elect, and consequently capable of furthering God’s saving will. It
is this positive estimation of the Church of England’s distinctive patterns of
church order and worship which distinguish Reformed Conformists from
their ‘moderate’ or ‘conformable’ puritan counterparts, for whom those dis-
tinctive patterns were tolerable defects that could be accepted for the sake of
the Gospel.130
For Reformed Conformists, true Conformity involved a doctrinal com-
mitment to Reformed soteriology because that was the teaching which they
derived from the Scriptures, observed in Catholic Antiquity, and read from
the Church of England’s Articles and Homilies. Conformity also involved a
practical commitment to the idiosyncratic order of the English Church, as
the most fitting vehicle for, and complement to, that teaching. As a result,
Reformed conformists were ready to defend the Reformed vision of grace
and salvation, whenever that vision came under attack, whether in England
or abroad. They were also prepared to defend the established liturgy and
hierarchy of the Church of England, even when this put them at loggerheads
with those who shared their view of grace.131
Peter Lake has encouraged scholars to analyze the religious life of Early
Stuart England, not merely in terms of the explicit theological commitments
of those studied, but also in terms of what they have called their distinctive
‘styles of piety’. The religious instincts that Lake associates with the puritan
style of piety are a commitment to double predestination; the cultivation of
a sense of assurance; active membership of the godly community; an em-

phasis on the preached Word and on worthy reception of the Lord’s Supper;
and strict Sabbath observance.132 Lake underlines that the Puritan style of
piety ‘is made up not so much of distinctive puritan component parts, the
mere presence of which in a person’s thought or practice rendered them de-
finitively a Puritan, as a synthesis of strands, most or many of which taken
individually, could be found in non-puritan as well as puritan contexts, but
which taken together form a distinctively puritan synthesis or style’.133
Lake has applied this kind of analysis to the Laudian style of piety, as
well. The strands he associates with Laudianism are a strong sense of sacred
space, and an anxiety about its misuse; a concern for the material fabric of
the church and for ecclesiastical ornamentation; a desire for uniformity and
reverence in worship; an appreciation of the positive value of distinctive re-
ligious ceremonies and bodily devotion; an emphasis on the importance
of prayer and the sacraments, as opposed to preaching, in public devotion;
an attachment to and celebration of the liturgical year.134 Once again, Lake
underlined that ‘scarcely any of the constituent parts of Laudianism as it is
here discussed were novel in the 1630s, and not all of them, viewed in iso-
lation from the others, constituted exclusively Laudian opinions’.135 Once
again, it is the bringing together of a number of these elements that counts,
not the presence of any specifically ‘Laudian’ characteristic.
Approaching Reformed Conformity in a similar way, this study will pro-
vide compelling evidence that there was a distinctively Reformed Conformist
style of piety. The Reformed Conformist style of piety involved a synthesis of
strands some of which could also be found in a puritan, and some of which
could also be found in a Laudian context. It shared with the puritan style
of piety the conviction that saving grace was sovereign and utterly free; the
conviction that the primary instrument used by the Spirit to kindle such a
faith in the heart of the elect was the Word preached; the conviction that it
was proper to the faithful, except under grave temptation, to be certain about
their present faith and assured of their ultimate salvation; the conviction that
a rightly ordered Christian life involved a devout observance of the Sabbath.
It shared with the Laudian style of piety a concern for reverence, order, and
decorum in Christian worship; a concern to ensure a proper balance in that
worship, such that prayer took its proper place alongside preaching; a con-
cern for the identification and beautification of sacred space; a celebration of
the Apostolic derivation of ministerial authority, legitimately handed down
through the personal succession of bishops.
Introduction 23
Individual Reformed Conformists undoubtedly struck their own balance

within this synthesis, just as individual Puritans or Laudians did. As a re-
sult, not all the strands making up this style of piety were equally present in
all its adherents.136 Nevertheless, they all shared the conviction that the dis-
tinctive institutions of the English Church did not detract from, but rather
sustained and promoted the spiritual life of the elect, a spiritual life that they
conceived in the terms of orthodox Reformed soteriology. This confidence
in the positive religious value of the Church’s established polity was what sets
the Reformed Conformists apart from most of their puritan colleagues; just
as their Reformed theological convictions set them apart from most of their
Laudian colleagues.
This is, of course, the point at which the Reformed Conformist theological
tradition and style of piety became a religious identity. This Introduction
began with Prideaux’s sermon for the consecration of Exeter College Chapel.
In that sermon, he explicitly defined the religious position he was com-
mending against both the Laudian tendency to set up prayer and preaching
in opposition to each other, and the Puritan disrelish of naming church build-
ings after the saints. He was, in other words, promoting a sense of religious
identity that was neither Laudian nor Puritan. Other Reformed Conformists
delineated their position in a similar way. Carleton condemned Montagu’s
reading of grace, but was outraged by the suggestion that his divinity made
him a Puritan. Featley denounced the Popery of the Gag and the Appello
Caesarem; but he was equally scathing about the liturgical prejudices of the
hotter sort of Protestant. In the Consecration sermon for Robert Wright,
Featley made both his Reformed and his conformist loyalties very clear:
Gestures in religious actions are as significant, and more moving than

words. Decent ceremonies in the substantial worship of God are like
shadowing in a picture, which if it be too much (as we see in the Church
of Rome) it darkeneth the picture, and obscureth the face of devotion; but
if convenient, and in fit places, it giveth grace and beauty to it. Superstition
may be, and is as properly in such, who put religion in not using, as in those
who put religion in using things in their own nature merely indifferent.
Christian liberty is indifferently abridged by both these errors about things
indifferent. And as a man may be proud even of the hatred of pride, and con-
tempt of greatness; so he may be superstitious in a causeless fear, and heady
declining of that which seems, but is not superstitious. Which is the case of
some refined reformers (as they would be thought) who according to their
name of Precisians, ungues ad vivum resecant, pare the nails of pretended

Romish rites in our Church so near, that they make her fingers bleed. For
fear of monuments of idolatry, all ornaments of the Church (if they might
have their will) should be taken away: for fear of praying for the dead, they
will not allow any prayer to be said for the living at the burial of the dead: for
fear of bread-worship, they will not kneel at the Communion: for fear of
invocating the Saints deceased, they will not brook any speech of the de-
ceased in a funeral Sermon . . . for fear of overlaying the Queen’s vesture
with rich laces of ceremonies, they rip them off all, cut off the fringe, and
pare off the nap also.137
Reformed Conformists were aware, in other words, that they were neither
Puritans nor Laudians, and they were conscious that their own religious in-
stincts were, in significant respects, opposed to both groups.
The distinct religious identity of the Reformed Conformists was also
clearly recognized by their contemporaries. Even an observer as unsympa-
thetic to Reformed Conformity as Peter Heylyn conceded it. In his biography
of Archbishop Laud, he distanced himself from the polemical suggestion
that ‘Puritan and Calvinian are terms convertible. For though all Puritans
are Calvinians, both in doctrine and practise, yet all Calvinians are not to be
counted as Puritans also; whose practises many of them abhor, and whose
inconformities they detest, though by the error of their education, or ill dir-
ection in the course of their studies, they may, and do agree with them in
some points of doctrine’.138 For Heylyn, in other words, the Reformed theo-
logical tradition in England had both puritan and conformist expressions,
and they were not to be confused.
Outline of the Study
The first two chapters explore how Reformed Conformists articulated their
understanding of grace before they faced significant public challenge from
within the English Church. Chapter 1 focuses on the Act Lectures that
Prideaux delivered in Oxford between 1616 and 1624. The series exhibits
the breadth, interconnectedness, and pastoral orientation of the Reformed
Conformist vision of grace. As the teaching that Oxford’s senior theology
professor delivered on the most public occasion in the University calendar,
Prideaux’s Act Lectures represent something close to an official statement
Introduction 25
of English orthodoxy. They are useful both in terms of the range of topics
that they cover and because they offer a coherent account of Reformed
Conformist teaching on grace that locates specific debates on the topic
within their wider theological context.
Chapter 2 builds on the previous chapter’s emphasis on the breadth and
pastoral orientation of the Reformed Conformist approach to grace, with an
examination of the Collegiate Suffrage of the British delegates at the Synod
of Dort (1618–19). It underlines that the Suffrage was drawn up to make
room for Davenant and Ward’s distinctive reading of the death of Christ, a
reading shared by influential clerics at home. The chapter then shows how
the positions adopted in the Suffrage were echoed but also given a different
inflection in the lectures that Davenant delivered in Cambridge, when he re-
turned from the Synod. Davenant’s lectures on Predestination and the Death
of Christ show how he adapted the teaching of Dort to suit his own reading of
the Church of England’s confessional position, whilst offering extensive ad-
vice on the pastoral application of that teaching both in the pulpit and in the
spiritual lives of the faithful.
The next three chapters extend the study by exploring how Reformed
Conformists reacted, when their vision of grace came under public attack,
first in the works of Richard Montagu and then through the official restric-
tion of theological discussion during the reign of Charles I. Chapter 3 dis-
cusses the immediate responses to Montagu’s undertaking by a number of
Reformed Conformists. It exhibits the range of polemical approaches they
used and establishes that Reformed Conformists were in the vanguard of
the public opposition to Montagu. Daniel Featley’s Parallels illustrate how
Reformed Conformists brought the teaching of the academy to bear within
the public sphere. His Ancilla exhibits the use of devotional literature to ad-
vance the Reformed Conformist cause. Ward’s Gratia Discriminans sets out
the Reformed Conformist case that their theology of grace did not under-
mine human free choice, as its opponents claimed. His Joint Attestation then
emphasized the loyalty of the British delegates at Dort to the polity of the
English Church. Carleton’s Examination took up the theme of the Attestation,
rejecting Montagu’s suggestion that a Reformed view of grace was a mani-
festation of Puritanism and asserting its consonance with the Thirty-nine
Articles. Hall’s unpublished Via Media, by contrast, advocated an irenic and
moderate reading of English orthodoxy, but one in which there was still
no room for any teaching that made salvation ultimately dependent on the
human will.
Chapter 4 establishes the ongoing promotion of the Reformed Conformist

approach to grace during the 1630s, in the face of an attempt to stifle such
opinions by royal proclamation in 1626. Using Ward’s professorial determin-
ations at the Cambridge Commencement, the chapter shows how Ward en-
sured that the Reformed vision of grace still held a prominent place within
Cambridge and defended its compatibility with English Church polity. The
chapter also explores Ward’s editorial collaboration with Davenant, in the
publication of Davenant’s academic works. It underlines that the work of
Ward and Davenant ensured that the University press remained a vehicle for
Reformed Conformity throughout the 1630s.
Chapter 5 develops this theme of Reformed Conformist resilience during
the reign of Charles I. Drawing on Ward’s determinations, Davenant’s
Praelectiones, and Ward’s treatise on justifying faith, it establishes that the
doctrine of justification by faith alone was likewise the subject of regular de-
fence and articulation in Cambridge throughout the 1630s. As Prideaux’s
lectures and Montagu’s remarks on the subject demonstrate, this doctrine
was integral to the Reformed vision of grace.
With the last three chapters, the focus of the study becomes the Reformed
Conformist understanding of what it meant to conform—an understanding
that was not divorced from, but informed by their reading of grace. Taken
together, the chapters argue that Reformed Conformists offered a vision of
Conformity in conscious rivalry with that promoted by the Laudians.
Chapter 6 charts the hostility of the Reformed Conformists to the language
and liturgical innovations, promoted by some Laudians, that supported the
idea that the Eucharist might be understood as a real sacrifice. Drawing par-
ticularly on the writings of Williams and Morton, it shows that the Reformed
Conformist understanding of Conformity was decisively shaped by their
rejection of the Roman Catholic teaching on the sacrifice of the Mass. This
rejection informed the Reformed Conformist reading of canon law, and in-
spired their opposition to the erection of altars within English churches. The
chapter also returns to Prideaux, whose 1631 Act lecture on the Mass repre-
sented a very public attack on Laudian language and church furnishings at
the heart of Laud’s own university.
Chapter 7 analyzes the Reformed Conformist attitude to the Church’s
hierarchy. It uses Carleton’s Consensus to establish the high regard in which
Reformed Conformists held episcopacy, and reinforces that point through
the writings of Ward and Davenant. On that basis, it presents Hall’s notorious
work, Episcopacy by Divine Right Asserted, as in fundamental continuity
Introduction 27
with the Reformed Conformist tradition, despite the editorial interventions

of William Laud and Matthew Wren. The chapter then establishes, through
Downame’s Two Sermons and Prideaux’s 1624 Oratio, that episcopal ordin-
ation played a significant role within Reformed Conformist soteriology.
Chapter 8 extends this analysis of the conformity of the Reformed
Conformists, by establishing that they found spiritual value in the distinctive
liturgical provisions of the Prayer Book. The chapter shows that Morton’s
defence of three controversial English liturgical provisions did not merely
defend them on the grounds of obedience, but also ascribed positive reli-
gious value to them, as aspects of God’s worship. Featley’s Ancilla made the
same point in relation to the liturgical year, as did Holdsworth in relation to
the Lent Fast, an institution that distinguished the Church of England from
the other Protestant churches of Europe. The chapter then uses Featley and
Prideaux’s polemically inspired collections of sermons to demonstrate that
Reformed Conformists believed that the liturgical year might be profitably
used by the faithful, and so become an instrument of divine predestination
and a vehicle for Christian assurance. The final section of this study demon-
strates, in other words, that for the Reformed Conformists, grace and con-
formity went hand in hand.
1
The Act Lectures of John Prideaux
Introduction
On 6 July 1616, John Prideaux delivered his first Act lecture as Oxford’s new
Regius Professor of Divinity. The annual Oxford Act was the highlight of the
university calendar, drawing crowds of alumni and distinguished guests. Act
lectures therefore offered the Regius Professor a very public opportunity to
articulate the university’s orthodoxy on the disputed theological questions of
the day. Prideaux took as his text Romans 9:10–12,1 a passage that would be
the starting point for every Act lecture he gave until 1624. The 1616 Act lec-
ture was, in other words, the beginning of a lecture series, perhaps the most
high-profile lecture series in the country, and Prideaux used it to explore the
nature and consequences of grace.2
Given the prominence and scope of Prideaux’s lectures, it is surprising that
they have not attracted much scholarly interest.3 In Anti-Calvinists, Nicholas
Tyacke used them to demonstrate that ‘Calvinist’ orthodoxy prevailed at
Oxford into the 1620s, but his discussion extended little further than a list
of Prideaux’s topics: ‘During these years Prideaux lectured on conversion,
justification, perseverance, and the certainty of salvation, all in refutation
of Arminianism’.4 The same level of analysis prevails in the relevant section
of The History of the University of Oxford, as well, where Tyacke says only
that, ‘Between 1616 and 1622 Prideaux, as Regius Professor, had lectured
regularly at the Act against Arminianism’.5 This last observation reveals the
pitfalls of taking too broad-brush an approach to these lectures. Prideaux’s
1623 lecture, De Salute Ethnicorum (‘On the salvation of heathens’) actually
contains several attacks on Remonstrant thinking, which Tyacke would ap-
pear to have overlooked6; and Prideaux clearly envisaged his 1624 lecture, De
Visibilitate Ecclesiae (‘On the visibility of the Church’) as the final instalment
in the series, since it is based on exactly the same texts as all the others.7
Furthermore, Prideaux’s intention in these lectures cannot be reduced
to refuting Arminianism. He certainly attempted to answer a number of
Arminian writers: but he was consciously engaging across a broader front
Grace and Conformity. Stephen Hampton, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190084332.003.0002
The Act Lectures of John Prideaux 29
than that. As he made clear in his first lecture, Prideaux identified as his ad-
versary any theologian who echoed the dangerous opinions on grace, which
had been condemned in the Pelagians and Semi-Pelagians by Augustine,
Fulgentius, Prosper, and their disciples. Prideaux discerned such hetero-
doxy in a wide range of writers, both Protestant and Roman Catholic. He
saw it in late medieval writers, such as William of Ockham and Gabriel Biel.
He saw it in many contemporary or near-contemporary Jesuits: Luis de
Molina, Gabriel Vasquez, Francisco Suarez, Leonardus Lessius, and Martin
Becanus.8 He saw it among those he called the ‘Pseudo-Lutherans’ of Upper
Germany. And, of course, he saw it in those critics of Reformed orthodoxy,
who had emerged from within the Reformed fold, such as Peter Baro, Jacob
Arminius, Conrad Vorstius, Johannes Corvinus, Peter Bertius, and Nicholas
Grevinckhoven.9
In a recent study of James’ Ussher’s soteriology, Richard Snoddy ar-
gued that
Ussher lived and ministered in a context in which he and many others felt
that the truth of the gospel was under attack. The threat came from Rome,
from the Laudians, and from Arminian theology. These threats were not
always neatly distinguished. Indeed, there was political mileage in blurring
the edges. Whatever their differences, the common root was a Pelagianising
tendency, a downplaying of divine initiative and the sheer gratuity of
human salvation.10
This observation applies to Prideaux as much as it does to his friend and

correspondent James Ussher. Prideaux’s list of adversaries bears this out, as
does the substance of his lectures; he spent quite as much time engaging with
Jesuit theology as he did engaging with Arminian theology.
Take, for example, the second of Prideaux’s lectures, which focuses on
the doctrine of Middle Knowledge. Middle Knowledge is an attempt to ex-
plain how God can have certain foreknowledge of human decisions that are
both contingent and independent of God’s will. As such, it was an essential
theological prop for the claim that the decrees of predestination and repro-
bation were motivated by God’s eternal foresight of human actions, whether
in terms of good works (as the Jesuits suggested) or faith (as Arminians
proposed).
The concept of Middle Knowledge was elaborated by a number of Jesuit
theologians and subsequently adopted by Arminius and the Remonstrants.11
In his lecture, Prideaux accurately charted the genesis of this idea,12 and in
his discussion of it, he spent significantly more time engaging with Jesuit
thinking13 than he did in responding to Arminius and Grevinckhoven.
At the same time, Prideaux pointed out that a number of his objections to
Middle Knowledge had been anticipated by Roman Catholic writers, par-
ticularly the Dominicans. He mentions Francisco Zumel, Pedro de Cabrera,
Raphael Ripa, and Diego Alvarez14 and makes significant use of both Ripa
and Alvarez in the formulation of his arguments.15
It is, therefore, an oversimplification to categorize Prideaux’s Act lectures
as a refutation of Arminianism. Prideaux’s intention was to expose and coun-
teract any theology that compromised the gratuity of salvation or exagger-
ated the role of human activity in redemption, wherever that theology was to
be found. His lectures might therefore be more accurately described as Anti-
Pelagian than Anti-Arminian.16
It is also misleading to present these lectures as a straightforward example
of ‘Calvinist’ orthodoxy. Prideaux undoubtedly felt the need to respond to
those who vilified what they labelled ‘Calvinism,’ and he was evidently of-
fended by those attacks.17 That said, he was quick to underline the foolish-
ness of adhering doggedly to the views of any one theologian, no matter how
respected18; and he certainly drew from a wide range of Reformed sources
beyond Calvin. In his first lecture alone, he referred to Zanchi, Paraeus,
Piscator, Beza, Kimedoncius, Junius, Hommius, Ursinus, and Polanus from
the continental Reformed churches, as well as Hutton, Whitaker, and Perkins
from the Church of England.19 In fact, Prideaux made a point of underlining
the breadth of the tradition within which he was working, writing: ‘It is not
therefore only Calvin against Pighius, or Beza against Castellio, or Perkins
and his summists, sustaining our thesis; but almost all (that I know) the more
perspicacious theologians, and those who stick closer to the text’.20 Prideaux
was clearly not prepared to accept a narrow definition of the orthodoxy that
he sought to defend.
Prideaux drew, as most of his Reformed contemporaries did, from far
too broad a range of Reformed authorities for him to be helpfully labelled
a ‘Calvinist’.21 Antagonists such as Peter Heylyn undoubtedly tarred him
with that brush22; but the label is only as helpful in Prideaux’s case, as the
label ‘Arminian’ is in the case of William Laud or Richard Montagu. It ex-
presses an aspect of the truth, in that Prideaux shared a number of Calvin’s
theological and exegetical instincts, but describing Prideaux as a ‘Calvinist’
does no justice to Prideaux’s range of theological reference, nor to the ways
in which Prideaux’s theological agenda was shaped by his particular ecclesi-

astical situation.
Furthermore, when Prideaux drew upon the Reformed tradition, he was
always conscious of its relationship with the wider and older world of Catholic
theology and of the insights that the Reformed shared with an earlier gener-
ation of Lutherans. Prideaux made the point that, in their defence of Absolute
Reprobation, the Reformed were not merely following Calvin or Beza but
were equally following Augustine and those whom Augustine cited, such as
Cyprian, Ambrose, and Gregory Nazianzen. They were following Augustine’s
immediate disciples: Prosper, Fulgentius, and Joannes Maxentius. They were
following Peter Lombard and many of his commentators; they were fol-
lowing Thomas Aquinas and many of his commentators; and, finally, they
were following Luther himself, as well as Johannes Brenz, ‘all of whom, if not
truly, yet at least approximately, you might call Calvinists in this cause’.23 In
fact, Prideaux remarks, Calvin himself never spoke as uncompromisingly
of God’s absolute dominion over his creatures as Augustine had done.24 To
put it another way, Prideaux saw himself as defending Catholic rather than
Calvinist orthodoxy.
The identification of Prideaux’s lectures as a ‘Calvinist’ attack on Arminian
theology reflects the long-established tendency within the historiography
to treat the Reformed tradition as an intellectual monolith. An increasing
number of scholars have cast doubt on this approach. Richard Muller has
dedicated much of his career to demonstrating that the Reformed theological
tradition was flexible, diverse and decisively shaped by its political and in-
stitutional context.25 This insight was applied to the Early Stuart Church
of England by Sean Hughes, who rejects the use of ‘Calvinism’ in relation
to English theologians of this period, both because it is too blunt an ana-
lytical tool for any discriminating purpose and because it subjects English
Protestantism to a Genevan magisterium, ignoring the diversity of traditions
among the Reformed Churches of Europe.26 Hughes writes: ‘What we must
not do . . . is to assume that predestination was a particularly Reformed doc-
trine, or to treat any formulation of that doctrine, Bezan or otherwise, as the
only serious expression of it . . . . We need to keep in mind the sheer range of
the tradition . . . and the powerful but often unacknowledged contribution
of Roman Catholic ideas’.27 In Prideaux, of course, the influence of Roman
Catholic ideas was not merely recognized: in some areas of doctrine, it was
positively celebrated. David Como has echoed Sean Hughes’s insistence on
the diversity of the Reformed tradition in England, underlining that the
so-called Calvinist consensus that ‘was neither simplistic nor monolithic’.28

Indeed, apart from a small number of ‘crucial and emotionally charged
points . . . ’ Como argues, ‘there was space for a good deal of disagreement as
to the finer points of predestinarian formulation’.29 More recently, Jonathan
Moore made the same argument in specific relation to Reformed discussion
of the death of Christ.30
Since Prideaux’s Act lectures were clearly intended to engage with more
than just Arminian theology, and since the term ‘Calvinist’ is now widely
acknowledged to be an inappropriate and imprecise way to describe any
theologian working within the Early Stuart Church of England, there is
a pressing need for their reappraisal. It could be argued that the same is
true, and for the same reasons, of a number of the other theologians whom
Tyacke and others have categorized as ‘Calvinist’. Since scholars effectively
used the adjective ‘Calvinist’ to mean no more than ‘not Arminian,’ their
discussion of those authors often overlooks the subtlety and diversity of that
theological tradition.
Absolute Reprobation
Prideaux’s decision to defend the doctrine of Absolute Reprobation in his

opening lecture was avowedly polemical. As he underlined, the Reformed
had been accused by the Remonstrant Peter Bertius of teaching an esoteric
doctrine that they did not dare to expound publicly or subject to examin-
ation. Prideaux was determined to show that this was not the case. That said,
he acknowledged the perilous nature of such an undertaking.31
The question that Prideaux set out to investigate was straightforward: ‘Is
there an absolute decree of reprobation?’32 Prideaux acknowledged that many
people found it easier to accept an absolute decree of election than an abso-
lute decree of reprobation. He insisted, however, that these two decrees are so
interrelated that the election of some simply cannot be conceived without the
simultaneous reprobation of everyone else.33
Prideaux began by defining his terms. In this question, he underlined, the
word ‘absolute’ was intended to convey that the decree of reprobation has
no external efficient cause: that it is not, in other words, elicited by anything
outside God himself.34 The word ‘reprobation,’ he noted, actually expressed
two quite distinct divine acts which should be distinguished. First, there is
the negative act of reprobation, which is God’s decision not to elect someone
to eternal life, but rather to pass them by. Secondly, there is the positive act
of reprobation, which is God’s decision justly to condemn that person for the
sins of which they are guilty, an act more accurately expressed, Prideaux in-
dicated, by the term ‘predamnation’.35
This distinction was fundamental to Prideaux’s discussion of reprobation.
For as he underlined, whereas the negative act reprobation (i.e., non-election
or preterition) depends solely on the good pleasure of God, the positive act
of reprobation (i.e., predamnation) invariably presupposes sin in its object,
since it is an effect of God’s justice.36 So although the negative act of repro-
bation was absolute, as Prideaux defined the term, the positive act of repro-
bation was not, since the sins of the reprobate person were the reason God
condemned them. Prideaux’s use of this distinction echoed its use by his pre-
decessor in the Regius Chair, Robert Abbot. The distinction would also be
deployed, a couple of years later, by the British Delegation at Dort.37 It had
the advantage of showing that no one is ever sent to Hell, except because of
sin, and that made it easier to demonstrate the compatibility of absolute rep-
robation with divine justice.
Prideaux underlined that the divine decrees did not conform to human
patterns of thinking. Human beings reason from the end of their action
back toward the requisite means and then consider the relevant acts in
order of priority. God does not. God conceives of all things, whether prior
or posterior, means or end, in one infallible act of knowing. Properly
speaking, therefore, the only order in the divine decrees lay in their exe-
cution, not in the decrees themselves.38 Prideaux was clearly discour-
aging any attempt to subject the divine decrees to an analysis derived from
human modes of reasoning: there was mystery here, which he thought
should be respected.39
Difficulties also arose in the discussion of reprobation, Prideaux indicated,
if the different acts involved in the execution of the decree were not related to
objects suitable for those acts. Such muddled thinking, he thought, was the
main reason for the intra-Reformed controversy about whether the object
of predestination was man conceived as not yet fallen or man conceived as
fallen and corrupted by sin.40 In order to avoid this problem, Prideaux de-
lineated the various acts and objects of predestination with particular care.
His nuanced approach to this issue vindicates Richard Muller’s observation
that there was a ‘broader spectrum and . . . variety of Reformed thought be-
yond the simple (or perhaps simplistic) division of opinion between supra-
lapsarians and infralapsarians’.41
The object of predestination in general, Prideaux underlined, was any in-

tellectual creature, insofar as it was liable to fall and capable of either pun-
ishment or reward. Such intellectual creatures could be either angels or
human beings. Human predestination, in turn, had either Christ as its ob-
ject or the members of Christ. Although he was initially focussing on the
elect, Prideaux underlined that the same kind of analysis could be applied to
reprobation.42
Prideaux pointed out that since some of the angels did not fall at all, the
decree of reprobation passed upon the fallen angels cannot have considered
them as part of an already fallen mass. Furthermore, he pointed out, although
Christ was undoubtedly an elect human being, he was never part of the fallen
mass either, since he was without sin. So sin was not necessarily a factor in
either reprobation or predestination as such. Christ’s situation was of par-
ticular relevance here, Prideaux thought, because, ‘If any believer (Augustine
states) wishes thoroughly to understand this doctrine, let him consider the
Head, and in him he will find himself also’.43
Turning specifically to the reprobation of those human beings who were
not members of Christ, Prideaux deployed the distinction he had drawn
between preterition and predamnation. Whereas the positive act of repro-
bation, predamnation, necessarily required sin in its object, he argued; the
negative act of reprobation, preterition, did not.44 Prideaux consequently
concluded that those who would not elevate the decree of reprobation any
higher than the fallen mass of humanity had either to be talking about the
positive act of reprobation or they had to be accommodating their speech to
those of weaker comprehension.
Prideaux therefore traced a path in this lecture that eludes straightfor-
ward characterization as either supralapsarian or sublapsarian. He was
clear that the divine decision to condemn the reprobate is always the result
of their sin. But by denying that sin was necessarily required for the (logic-
ally prior) divine decision not to elect them to grace, Prideaux left the way
open for either a sublapsarian or a supralapsarian approach to decree. And
although his own convictions were or, at least, would become sublapsarian,
he clearly objected to incautious or exorbitant expressions of that opinion.45
In fact, he ranked as among the opponents of orthodoxy, on this point, those
Reformed theologians who, although rejecting the teaching of the Jesuits
and Arminians, still advanced sin ‘as necessarily required (as they put it)
in the object . . . lest the divine justice in the decree of absolute reprobation
should seem too harsh’.46 Prideaux was perhaps trying to support a common
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Grace and Conformity The Reformed Conformist Tradition and The Early Stuart Church of England Oxford Studies in Historical Theology Stephen Hampton Full Chapter

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Grace and Conformity The Reformed Conformist Tradition and The Early Stuart Church of England Oxford Studies in Historical Theology Stephen Hampton Full Chapter

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Grace and Conformity: The Reformed

Conformist Tradition and the Early

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data

Introduction: The Reformed Conformist Style of Piety  1

ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

‘My House Is the House of Prayer’

On 5 October 1624, at 8 o’clock in the morning, the resident doctors of Oxford

Howson had quoted Chrysostom to much the same effect, twenty-​five

stop superstition, which at length began to be intolerable in images and

Where such problems were not in evidence, Prideaux remarked, the

Originally, church consecrations had simply involved prayer and

through others examples’.32 For Prideaux, in other words, although a

these houses are not here Christened by the names of Concionatoria, or

With these words, Prideaux pointedly distanced himself from Howson’s

and furnishings, but also a sermon promoting orthodox Reformed soteri-

Neither Puritan nor Laudian

Whitgift’s religion or style of piety remained a pallid, one-​dimensional ver-

of edification as the mere transfer of knowledge, it was backed up by a ra-

Lake contrasted Whitgift’s uninspiring, Erastian style of conformity

Hooker’s discussion of the dedication of church buildings, that appears in the

consequently lacks the Calvinist conformist voice, which is as necessary as

John Prideaux offers an excellent way in to an important network of prom-

incorporated his Cambridge degrees in Oxford in 1606. Morton’s biographer

The Distinctiveness of the Tradition

they were also united by their adherence to a common theological tradition,

a sense of assurance; active membership of the godly community; an em-

Individual Reformed Conformists undoubtedly struck their own balance

Gestures in religious actions are as significant, and more moving than

name of Precisians, ungues ad vivum resecant, pare the nails of pretended

Outline of the Study

Chapter 4 establishes the ongoing promotion of the Reformed Conformist

with the Reformed Conformist tradition, despite the editorial interventions

This observation applies to Prideaux as much as it does to his friend and

in which Prideaux’s theological agenda was shaped by his particular ecclesi-

so-​called Calvinist consensus that ‘was neither simplistic nor monolithic’.28

Prideaux’s decision to defend the doctrine of Absolute Reprobation in his

The object of predestination in general, Prideaux underlined, was any in-

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Introduction: The Reformed Conformist Style of Piety 1

Howson had quoted Chrysostom to much the same effect, twenty-five

Whitgift’s religion or style of piety remained a pallid, one-dimensional ver-

so-called Calvinist consensus that ‘was neither simplistic nor monolithic’.28