Foundations of unity and accord: in praise of Saint Bartholomew’s Day 1662

J.C. Ryle and Rowan Williams are not, we might reasonably think, natural bedfellows. What, other than beards, could the low church Victorian evangelical and the postmodern Anglo-Catholic possibly have in common? For both Ryle and Williams, Saint Bartholomew’s Day 1662 is a cause for lament. Ryle thundered his condemnation of the events of that Saint Bartholomew’s Day:

The crowning piece of folly which the majority in the Church of England committed under the Stuarts, was procuring the Act of Uniformity to be enacted in the year 1662 … This famous act imposed terms and conditions of holding office on all ministers of the Church of England which had never been imposed before, from the time of the Reformation. It was notoriously so framed as to be offensive to the consciences of the Puritans, and to drive them out of the Church. For this purpose it was entirely successful. Within a year no less than 2,000 clergymen resigned their livings rather than accept its terms. Many of these 2,000 were the best, the ablest, and the holiest ministers of the day.^[1]

In admittedly rather more urbane tones, Williams – preaching at a Joint Church of England and United Reformed Church service of reconciliation and commitment in 2012 in Westminster Abbey, marking the 350th anniversary of the Great Ejection – focussed on what the Church of England had lost by excluding the vibrant world of the Reformed tradition, “the world in which joy in the things of the mind and the heart helped people move into the space they believed had been cleared for them, the space of being free citizens.”^[2] He contrasted this with the allegiance to Church and Crown defined by the 1662 Act of Uniformity, “the tools of infantilising faith or political identity.”

The 2012 Westminster Abbey service arose from the 2011 Church of England and United Reformed Church report, ‘Healing the Past – Building the Future.’^[3] The report pointed to “the need for the reconciliation of memories between the two churches in order to overcome the memory of the Great Ejection of 1662.” Saint Bartholomew’s Day 1662, then, was a memory to be “overcome,” marked by lament.

The assumption underpinning the report, and evident in Rowan Williams’ sermon, is that the Great Ejection was unnecessary. It was, to use a phrase employed by Williams in the sermon, an expression of “infantile faith.” Infantile because, as Ryle stated, minor concessions would have ensured the loyalty of those clergy whose brave stand for conscience required them to reject the terms of the Act of Uniformity:

It was a disgraceful deed, because the great majority of the ejected ministers might easily have been retained in the Church by a few small concessions. They had no abstract objection to episcopacy, or to a liturgy. A few alterations in the prayers, and a moderate liberty in the conduct of Divine worship, according to Baxter’s calculation, would have satisfied 1,600 out of the 2,000. But the ruling party were determined not to make a single concession.^[4]

The purpose of this essay is to challenge such an interpretation of Saint Bartholomew’s Day 1662. Rather than the Act of Uniformity being an expression of “infantile faith,” it was a reasoned and wise measure to secure the unity of the Church of England, after decades of agitation and conflict. Contrary to Ryle’s view, concessions for those of ‘tender conscience’ were made by the Conformists and enshrined in the Book of Common Prayer. Nor were the ceremonial matters at stake – the wearing of the surplice, kneeling to receive the Holy Communion, the use of the sign of the Cross at Holy Baptism – minor issues, conformity to which was unreasonably required of ministers. As many Anglican commentators now insist that these ceremonies were minor issues, to which conformity was inappropriately required, this essay will focus on the Prayer Book ceremonies, seeking to demonstrate their significance for the Church of England’s unity and accord.

Saint Bartholomew’s Day 1662 provided the foundations for that unity and accord. The term is taken from William Gibson’s 2001 work ‘The Church of England 1688-1832: Unity and Accord,’ a major restatement of the history of 18th century Anglicanism, reflecting how historical research of recent decades has challenged and overturned caricatures of the era. As Gibson states, “the orientation of the eighteenth-century Church was principally and profoundly towards unity and moderation … unity and accord … lay at the heart of eighteenth-century Anglicanism.”^[5 Such was the fruit of Saint Bartholomew’s Day 1662.

“Unity and concord”: Cranmerian and Hookerian wisdom

The 1662 Act of Uniformity’s requirement of conformity to the rites and ceremonies of the Book of Common Prayer, rather than somehow being a disruptive innovation previously unknown to the Church of England, was rooted in Cranmerian and Hookerian wisdom. Cranmer had warned in ‘Of Ceremonies, why some be abolished, and some retained’^[6] – included in the Book of Common Prayer 1559, the authorized liturgy of the English Church from its publication until 1662^[7] – that “without some Ceremonies it is not possible to keep any order or quiet discipline in the Church.” While rejecting an “excessive multitude of Ceremonies,” he retained “those Ceremonies which do serve to a decent order and godly discipline.”

His 1552 revision directed that the minister “at the tyme of the Communion and all other tymes in his ministracion … shall have and wear a surplice”; that the Holy Communion was to be administered “to the people in their handes kneling”; and that at Holy Baptism “the Priest shall make a crosse upon the chyld’s forehead.” Here was “a decent order and godly discipline” which – also in Cranmer’s own words – served “unity and concord.” It was because such ceremonies served the Church’s “unity and concord” that Cranmer robustly warned against a failure to conform:

And although the keeping or omitting of a Ceremony, in itself considered, is but a small thing; yet the wilful and contemptuous transgression and breaking of a common order and discipline is no small offence before God, Let all things be done among you, saith Saint Paul, in a seemly and due order: The appointment of the which order pertaineth not to private men; therefore no man ought to take in hand, nor presume to appoint or alter any publick or common Order in Christ’s Church, except he be lawfully called and authorized thereunto.

While it was true that “Christ’s Gospel is not a ceremonial law,” undermining the unity and accord of the Church was certainly not a minor matter. Ceremonies were required to express and confirm the Church’s unity. For an individual, therefore, to reject authorised ceremonies was “no small offence before God.”

Cranmer’s commitment to this understanding of ceremonies is also seen in his October 1552 letter to the Privy Council, responding to objections to the retention in the revised Book of Common Prayer of the rubric directing communicants to kneel to receive.^[8] In words which could easily have come from a Laudian bishop in the 1630s, he expressed his opposition to “these glorious and unquiet spirits which can like nothing but that is after their own fantasy and cease not to make trouble and disquiet when things be most quiet and in good order.” He noted that objections to ceremonies because they are not explicitly mandated in Scripture “is a subversion of all order as well in religion as in common policy.” What is more, kneeling to receive the Sacrament encouraged “reverent receiving,” an echo of his statement in ‘On Ceremonies’ that such observances “stir up the dull mind of man to the remembrance of his duty to God.”

Cranmer’s understanding of ceremonies and conformity serving the Church’s “unity and concord” was given further exposition by Hooker. Ceremonies were “established with that authority which Christ hath left to his Church for matters indifferent, and in that consideration requisite to be observed, till like authority see just and reasonable cause to alter them.”^[9] Ceremonies in themselves, then, are “matters indifferent.”^[10] Observing the rites and ceremonies established by ecclesiastical authority (and the magistrate) was an exercise in Christian freedom precisely because “the word of God leaveth the Church free to make choice of her own ordinances.”^[11]

Rites and ceremonies, therefore, are indeed “matters indifferent”: not issues of salvific importance, not given in Scripture, not unchanging, revealed truths which the soul must confess. This, however, magnifies the offence when individuals reject the dominical authority given to the Church to order such matters. To disturb the Church’s peace and unity by refusing conformity to such rites and ceremonies was to exalt “matters indifferent” and private judgement over peace and unity:

if against all this it should be free for men to reprove, to disgrace, to reject at their own liberty what they see done and practised according to order set down … what other effect could hereupon ensue, but the utter confusion of [God’s] Church under pretence of being taught, led, and guided by his Spirit? The gifts and graces whereof do so naturally all tend unto common peace, that where such singularity is, they whose hearts it possesseth ought to suspect it the more.^[12]

In another anticipation of Laudian concerns, Hooker declared that undermining the unity and accord of the Church on matters of ceremonies – mindful that Christ bestowed authority on the Church to determine such “matters indifferent” – inevitably resulted in the Church’s authority on salvific matters being likewise undermined:

Suppose we that the sacred word of God can at their hands receive due honour, by whose incitement the holy ordinances of the Church endure everywhere open contempt? No; it is not possible they should observe as they ought the one, who from the other withdraw unnecessarily their own or their brethren’s obedience.^[13]

Cranmer and Hooker, therefore, bequeathed to the Church of England a wisdom which discerned and robustly defended the significance of ceremonies and conformity for ecclesial “unity and concord.” This was to be reflected in the Canons and Constitutions Ecclesiastical of 1604, with their sentence of excommunication for those who rejected the Prayer Book ceremonies:

Whosoever shall hereafter affirm, That the Rites and Ceremonies of the Church of England by Law established, are Wicked, Antichristian, or Superstitious, or such as being commanded by lawful Authority, Men who are zealously, and godly affected, may not with any good Conscience approve them, use them, or as Occasion requireth, subscribe unto them: Let him be Excommunicated ipso facto.^[14]

What is more, the Canons also required those to be ordained, and Ministers entering into any ecclesiastical office, to subscribe to the Prayer Book, with its ceremonies:

That the Book of Common Prayer, and of Ordering of Bishops, Priests and Deacons, containeth in it nothing contrary to the Word of God, and that it may lawfully so be used, and that he himself will use the Form in the said Book prescribed in publick Prayer, and Administration of the Sacraments, and none other.^[15]

The 1662 Act of Uniformity, then, was no innovation. It was deeply rooted in the wisdom of Cranmer and Hooker and their understanding of the role of ceremonies in securing the Church’s unity and accord. It also reflected the provisions of the 1604 Canons, particularly the requirement of clergy to use the rites and ceremonies of the Prayer Book. What made the 1662 Act different was the political will, in both Church and State, to ensure that the divisive agitations which afflicted the Church of England regarding ceremonies since the Elizabethan era had ended.

The political will was a product of “the late unhappy confusions”: the violence, iconoclasm, and usurped authority of the 1640s and 50s, when the Prayer Book and its ceremonies had been prohibited. Hooker had warned that the divisive agitations against ceremonies required by the authority of the Church and magistrate would lead to “manifold dangerous events,” which “should cause posterity to feel those evils.”^[16] The 1662 Act of Uniformity, decisively bringing those agitations to an end, ensured that the unity and accord of the Church of England would be protected for a century and a half.

“The Church’s laws of decency and order”: Savoy, the 1662 revision, and the Conformist response to “tender consciences”

Prior to Saint Bartholomew’s Day 1662, however, Conformist opinion meaningfully sought to reconcile Puritan critics to the rites and ceremonies of the Prayer Book. At the Savoy Conference in mid-1661, convened by Charles II to consider revision of the Book of Common Prayer, the twelve bishops representing the Conformists responded to Puritan proposals – the ‘Exceptions’^[17] – in a manner which emphasized the moderation of Conformist claims for the Prayer Book and its ceremonies.^[18]

For example, the observance of Saints’ days was defended on the grounds of being “of ecclesiastical, not divine institution.” Lenten observance likewise was “a custom of the Church of God.” No claim of necessity was made for either, merely that they were edifying customs. The reading of the Apocrypha was (as in Hooker) equated to preaching, clearly distinguishing “the other Books” from the Canon of Scripture. In addition to this, the bishops indicated their willingness to accept a series of proposed revisions were accepted by the bishops, including the epistle and gospel readings being taken from the Authorized Version (rather than the King’s Bible used in BCP 1559); the introduction of the manual acts at the consecration in the Holy Communion, emphasizing the breaking of the bread (a characteristic of Reformed rites); the font placed conveniently in order that the congregation might hear; and a significant addition to the rubric in the Confirmation rite.

What is more, on the controversial issues of the surplice, kneeling to receive the Holy Communion, and the sign of the Cross at Baptism, the bishops merely restated the long-established Conformist defense of these practices, making no claim for them beyond “Obedience is a duty to the Church’s laws of decency and order.” The bishops, in other words, offered a modest and moderate defense of these practices, requiring no more of those of ‘tender consciences’ than a reasonable obedience to the Church’s authority on matters indifferent.

This characteristic modesty of the Conformist defense of the Prayer Book and its ceremonies led Bosher to rightly note that “the Anglicans, contrary to the generally accepted version, did entertain some hope of satisfying the more moderate Puritans.”^[19] It is the final revision of the Prayer Book by Convocation which quite clearly demonstrates this.

The ‘Exceptions’ of the Non-conforming representatives demanded that the 1552 rubric at the conclusion of the Communion Office “may be restored for the vindicating of our Church in the matter of Kneeling at the Sacrament.” The rubric was restored, defending kneeling to receive the holy Sacrament as a modest and fitting ceremony (with the revised words regarding the mode of the Lord’s presence in the Sacrament uncontroversial). The ‘Exceptions’ critiqued the signing with the Cross at Holy Baptism as a “Sacrament of human Institution” overshadowing the divinely instituted Sacrament. In response, a rubric was added to the Baptismal Office, enshrining in the liturgy the thirtieth of the 1604 Canons and its understanding of the ceremony: “no Part of the Substance of that Sacrament … not by any Power ascribed unto the Sign of the Cross … thus purged from all Popish Superstition and Error.” The ‘Exceptions’ called for the 1559 rubric at the conclusion of the rite of Confirmation to be revised: “We desire that Confirmation may not be made so necessary to the Holy Communion, as that none should be admitted to it unless they be confirmed.” The rubric was revised in this way. The ‘Exceptions’ desired the removal of the 1559 rubric requiring that those newly married “the same day of their marriage must receive the Holy Communion.” The rubric was significantly revised to remove this requirement.

Rather than dismissing these revisions as minimal and insignificant, they should be recognised as meaningful actions, responding to important demands of the Non-conforming representatives. The Sacraments of Baptism and Communion, and the rites of Confirmation and Matrimony, were significant aspects of parish ministry and parochial life. In each of these cases, the Book of Common Prayer was revised to enable “tender consciences” to minister according to its form.

The 1662 Act of Uniformity, in its requirement that clergy “assent and consent” to the Book of Common Prayer,^[20] required acceptance of a liturgical text which had undergone not inconsiderable revision in order to reconcile critics of its rites and ceremonies. What is more, no excessive claims were made for either rites or ceremonies beyond the authority given to the Church as recognized in Article XXXIV. The ceremonies of the Prayer Book had been devised by Cranmer, upheld by the Elizabethan Settlement, and required by the lawful authority of the Church and magistrate in the reigns of James VI/I and Charles I: no further ceremonies were added in 1662. The rejection of the 1662 settlement was, therefore, a rejection of old wine, not new. It was a rejection caused not by any innovation or change on the part of Conformists, but by Non-conforming clergy realizing that undermining from within the unity and accord of the Church of England would no longer be possible.

‘Truly called a Catholick Christian’? Baxter’s rejection of the 1662 Settlement

The Non-conforming representatives at Savoy were not declaring the surplice, kneeling to receive, and signing with the cross at Baptism to be impossible barriers to communion. If they were not to be abolished, the ‘Exceptions’ declared, there should be given “such a liberty, that those who are unsatisfied concerning their lawfulness or expediency, may not be compelled to the Practice of them, or Subscription to them.”^[21] In other words, the Non-conforming representatives stated that they would minister in a Church of England in which these ceremonies, while not required, were yet retained.

While admittedly Baxter stated he was “not satisfied” with the signing with the cross in Baptism, he was entirely content to to accept kneeling and to tolerate the surplice:

For my own part, as I would receive the Lord’s Supper kneeling, rather then not at all, so I have no Censure for those that wear the Surplice, though I never wore it.^[22]

In two ways, however, this illustrates how the Non-conformist position was hostile to what Cranmer described as the Church’s “unity and concord.” Firstly, Baxter’s admission that he “never wore” the surplice demonstrated his rejection of both ecclesiastical authority and the authority of the magistrate. The Canons of 1604 required that “Every Minister saying the Publick Prayers, or Ministering the Sacraments, or other Rites of the Church, shall wear a decent and comely Surplice.”^[23] Baxter, therefore, was – in the words of Article XXXIV – “he that offendeth against the common order of the Church, and hurteth the authority of the Magistrate, and woundeth the consciences of the weak brethren.”

Secondly, after having declared the surplice and kneeling to be ‘indifferent’ ceremonies, Baxter abandoned the communion of the Church of England, stating the requirement that such ceremonies be accepted as a cause for forsaking communion. It is this which must lead us to question Diarmaid MacCulloch’s near hagiographical account of Baxter as “the first of the Anglicans,” abandoned by the Restoration Church of England having “altered its latitude.”^[24] MacCulloch, indeed, approvingly quotes Baxter’s own assessment of his stance as “a Catholick Christian.” This surely begs the question: would “a Catholick Christian” abandon communion with other Christians because of lawful, ancient ceremonies which Baxter himself accepted could be retained in the Church of England?

In place of MacCulloch’s rather improbable description of Baxter as “the first of the Anglicans,” let us turn instead to Jeremy Taylor, excoriating Baxter’s exaltation of modest, lawful ceremonies over the sin of schism:

there are amongst us such tender stomacks, that cannot endure Milk, but can very well digest Iron; Consciences so tender, that a Ceremony is greatly offensive, but Rebellion is not; a Surplice drives them away as a bird affrighted with a man of clouts, but their Consciences can suffer them to despise Government, and speak evil of Dignities, and curse all that are not of their Opinion, and disturb the peace of Kingdomes, and commit Sacrilege, and account Schisme the character of Saints … to stand in a clean Vestment is not so ill a sight as to see men stand in separation, and to kneel at the Communion is not so like Idolatry as Rebellion is to Witchcraft.^[25]

Despite the revisions to the Prayer Book; despite the recognition – by Non-conforming clergy and Conformists – that ceremonies were in themselves adiaphora; despite the fact that these ceremonies had been required by lawful authority in the Church into which he was ordained; despite all this, Baxter refused to conform. He rejected the Cranmerian and Hookerian vision of “unity and concord,” the vision defended by the 1662 Act of Uniformity. He refused to follow the way of “a Catholick Christian,” regarding schism of less significance than conformity in a Protestant, orthodox Church which required its ministers to wear the surplice and make the sign of the Cross on the child’s forehead at Baptism. It was a confirmation of the Cranmerian and Hookerian understanding that acceptance of ceremonies was indeed necessary for the Church’s peace and unity; rejection of those lawful ceremonies brought disunity. As John Durel, addressing the Non-conformists, said in his defense of the 1662 Settlement:

take heed you do not ascribe to God such things as he never acknowledged for his, taking your own private opinions for his Laws, which is the greatest usurpation of God’s Authority, and in a manner to make yourselves your own Gods.^[26]

“Comely uniformity”: the ceremonies of unity and accord

Even before the introduction of the Act of Uniformity, the return of Charles II to his realm in May 1660 had heralded what John Morrill has described as “a spontaneity and responsiveness in the restoration of the old Church in most areas.”^[27] The Laudian Mark Frank, preaching in St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, rejoiced in the “comely Uniformity” that had returned to the Church with the monarch: “Offices to be performed, Officers to perform them, and Ceremonies to perform them with.”^[28] In place of “disorder and confusion” there had been a restoration of “the whole Service of the Church for days, for Forms, for State, for Beauty, for Order, for all Solemnity.” This he contrasted with “those enemies of Sion and Hierusalem, of peace and order, whether open or conceal’d ones” who invoked a “pretence of Christian Liberty.”

It was, however, not only those Laudians who had “borne the burden and heat of the day”^[29] who were found welcoming the restoration of the Prayer Book’s ceremonies. Simon Patrick, who had – like over 500 others, in defiance of Long Parliament’s abolition of the office and jurisdiction of bishops^[30] – received episcopal ordination in 1651, defended the “Latitude-men” in a 1662 pamphlet, insisting that they embraced the restoration of the Prayer Book’s ceremonies:

As for the Rites and Ceremonies of Divine worship, they do highly approve that vertuous mediocrity which our Church observes between the meretricious gaudiness of the Church of Rome, and the squalid sluttery of Fanatick conventicles. Devotion is so overclad by the Papists that she is oppressed and stifled with the multitude of her own garments … some of our modern reformers to make amends, have stripped her starke naked, till she is become in a manner cold and dead; The Church of England only hath dressed her as befits an honourable and vertuous Matron.^[31]

Patrick, as a leading Latitudinarian, would, after the Revolution, have a significant role in the proposed 1689 ‘Liturgy of Comprehension,’ which would have made the wearing of the surplice, kneeling to receive the Holy Communion, and the sign of the Cross at Holy Baptism optional. The failure of this attempt – it was abandoned in the knowledge that the Lower House of Convocation would firmly reject it^[32] – protected the unity and accord of the Church of England, ensuring that debates and agitation regarding the Prayer Book’s ceremonies would not be reintroduced into ecclesiastical life.^[33] Patrick’s later stance, however, does not detract from the significance of his 1662 pamphlet, with its acceptance of the decent and modest ceremonies of the Prayer Book indicating their role in giving expression to the identity and unity of the Church of England.

This was also seen in a 1703 work of the controversial Latitudinarian figure, Benjamin Hoadly. In ’The Reasonableness of Conformity to the Church of England,’ Hoadly offered an apologia for the ceremonies of the Prayer Book, declaring that “the Controversy between the Conformists and the Dissenters is not, Whether the established Church be perfect, but, Whether separation from it be necessary or reasonable.”^[34] Denying that separation was either “necessary or reasonable,” he stated that the Prayer Book ceremonies were “prescribed by a sufficient authority, an authority to which obedience in all lawful things was due.”^[35] Regarding the surplice, he repeated the long-standing Conformist argument that it was a decent via media between excessive clerical vesture and the lack of solemnity signalled by the absence of vesture:

We think the Behaviour, and Apparel, of the Minister who officiates, comes under the Care of the Governors of the Church; and Prescriptions about them are a Check to the Extremes, both of Indecency and superstitious Pomp. We think they have Authority to fence against these, and to impose Rules of Behaviour in order to it.”^[36]

Similarly, the requirements to kneel to receive Communion and use the Cross at Baptism were a legitimate and appropriate exercise of authority by “the Governours of the Church”, an authority necessary for the ecclesial peace and unity:

This authority, we say, they have, as they received the care of the Church from their Predecessours; as they are obliged to take the the most effectual methods for the preservation of Order and Decency in the publick worship of God; and as it results from the nature of all Societies, that the Governours of them should have a power of ordering what seems to them most for the beauty, and advantage of them; that they should be the judges of what conduces to this end, and should have a title to the obedience of the people under their care, in whatever does pot contradict the Laws of that Society by which they are all to be governed.”^[37]

Hoadly’s defence of these ceremonies might be compared to the work of Thomas Morton’s 1618 ‘A Defence of the Innocency of the Three Ceremonies.’ Morton, an exemplar of the Jacobean and Caroline ‘Reformed Conformist’ tradition lauded by Stephen Hampton,^[38] defended the ceremonies as both a legitimate exercise of ecclesiastical authority and as fitting practices. There is, however, a fundamental difference between the two works. Hoadly was addressing those outside the communion of the Church of England. Morton, by contrast, was (as least in part) addressing ministers within the Church of England, as indicated when he described “the Non-conformist” as one who “although he doth owe his spirituall birth unto the Church … yet neuerthelesse doth he defame his Mother’s religious worship [and] infringe her wholsome libertie.”^[39]

The context for Morton’s work further emphasizes the difference. In the 1603 Millenary Petition, ministers of the Church of England had sought the abolition of the sign of the Cross in Baptism and the surplice to be made optional. This agitation and refusal by clergy to conform continued for the decades following. Judith Maltby has demonstrated how laity were frequently forced to turn to church courts in the face of ministers who refused to administer the rites of the Church with the lawful ceremonies.^[40] As Bishop of Chester, in 1616, Morton himself had initiated proceedings in the Court of High Commission against ministers in his diocese who refused to conform.^[41] Despite the use of a similar defence of ceremonies, Hoadly’s context was profoundly different due to the 1662 Act of Uniformity. The context faced by Morton was unknown to Hoadly: he was not addressing recalcitrant ministers pursuing a divisive agitation within the Church of England.

The unity and accord bestowed by the Act of Uniformity, with its requirement to assent to and employ the ceremonies of the Prayer Book, also had significant influence in Anglicanism outside of England. For example, in low church, latitudinarian colonial Virginia, John K. Nelson’s research has indicated that the use of the surplice was normative:

Contrary to oft-repeated stories that Virginia’s Anglicans, either because of their low-church prejudices or their adaptation to frontier conditions, had forced their clergy to dispense with the surplice, they were in fact zealous in supplying, cleaning, and replacing surplices for their parsons.”^[42]

Louis P. Nelson, in his study of Anglicanism in colonial South Carolina, has noted that the Holy Table in the colony’s churches were, in the words of one contemporary, “decently railed in.”^[43] Communion rails, to facilitate the Prayer Book ceremony of kneeling to receive the Sacrament, were “a point of distinction between a church and a dissenting meeting house.”^[44]

This, we must remember, was also without a resident bishop in the colonies to uphold discipline and with vestries having an authority unknown in England. Despite this, the Prayer Book ceremonies were maintained, testimony to the significance and power of their role as expressions of unity and accord.

It is almost exactly one and a half centuries after the Act of Uniformity that we encounter the most potent evidence of its success in transforming the ceremonies which had been the focus of agitation and divisive opposition in the early 17th century into commonly accepted vehicles of unity and accord. In 1811, Charles Simeon, the profoundly influential leader of evangelicalism within the Church of England, delivered four sermons to the University of Cambridge on ‘The Excellency of the Liturgy.’^[45] Admitting that he did not “consider the Liturgy as altogether perfect,” Simeon proceeded to identify flaws. Or, to be more precise, a single flaw. He accepted that “a slight alteration in two or three instances would … be an improvement,” but the only flaw he explicitly referenced was the damnatory clauses in the Athanasian Creed.^[46] Kneeling to receive the Holy Communion and the sign of the Cross at Baptism were so uncontroversial that they were not even mentioned. As for the surplice, Simeon elsewhere stated – in words that echoed earlier Conformist defences of the vestment – that its use should remind the wearer “how pure and spotless they ought to be, both in their hearts and lives.”^[47]

On Saint Bartholomew’s Day 1662, Baxter and his associates abandoned the communion of the Church of England, refusing to accept the decent rites and modest ceremonies of the Book of Common Prayer. In 1811, Charles Simeon, the evangelical leader in the Church of England, rejoicing that “the compilers of our Liturgy were inspired with a wisdom and moderation peculiar to themselves,”^[48] declared, “the more any persons have considered the excellence of the Liturgy, the more are they attached to the Established Church.”^[49] Such was the unity and accord secured for the Church of England on Saint Bartholomew’s Day 1662.

Conclusion: “accepted and approved by all sober, peaceable, and truly conscientious sons of the Church of England”^[50]

Gibson concludes his study of the Church of England during the ‘long’ eighteenth century by suggesting that historians have been much too preoccupied with the well-publicized Anglican debates of the era. These debates, he states, “do not represent the generality of eighteenth-century Anglicanism.” They “were only ripples on the surface.”^[51] The claim of this essay is that this state of affairs flowed from the 1662 Act of Uniformity. On Saint Bartholomew’s Day 1662, the pillars were put in place to ensure a century and a half of unity and accord.

The Book of Common Prayer 1662, itself largely unchanged from the Prayer Book of the Elizabethan Settlement, was a unifying text for public worship and significant moments of domestic, communal, and national life, in addition to profoundly shaping private piety.^[52] The failure of the proposed 1689 revision and the mid-eighteenth century anti-Trinitarian attempts to revise the Prayer Book only emphasized its role and purpose in securing the Church’s unity and accord.

The moderate Reformed Catholicity of the Articles of Religion, in contrast to the doctrinaire Westminster Confession, enabled them to function as articles of peace, as the 1626 Declaration of Charles I had stated; “not to suffer unnecessary Disputations, Altercations, or Questions to be raised, which may nourish Faction both in the Church and Commonwealth.” The Articles were, as Bramhall stated, “for the preservation of unity among us.”^[53] Burnet’s 1699 commentary on the Articles (which would become a standard text throughout the eighteenth century) emphasized how on significant matters of dispute, such as Original Sin, the Articles gave a “liberty” so as “not to disturb the Peace and Union of the Church.”^[54] The early nineteenth-century episcopal charges of Samuel Horsley indicate how this reading of the Articles continued to shape Anglican understanding. In an 1800 charge, amidst renewed Calvinist-Arminian debates, Horsley declared that the Articles ensured “the Church of England in her moderation opens her arms to both.”^[55] An 1806 charge stated that the “Articles explicitly assert nothing but what is believed both by Arminians and by Calvinists.”^[56]

As for the Act of Uniformity’s requirement of episcopal orders, it was a particularly potent means of securing unity and accord. Hoadly – a stern opponent of high-flying episcopal claims – points to how this was so in his work addressed to Dissenting ministers:

They that will minister in this Church must be ordain’d by Bishops. The Church of England is indeed an Episcopal Church. We think we can demonstrate that in the Primitive times the administration of Ecclesiastical affairs was in the Hands of Bishops, who had Presbyters subject to them … Pardon us, if we cannot think, that this practice is agreeable to that desire of Peace and Concord you express … We may insist upon this, nay and ought, as long as we are an Episcopal Church.”^[57]

What, however, of the focus of this essay, the ceremonies of the Prayer Book required by the Act of Uniformity? Rather than regarding them as insignificant aspects of the 1662 settlement, this essay has sought to suggest that they functioned as key practices which both expressed and nurtured unity and accord. They embodied that Cranmerian and Hookerian wisdom which recognised that such practices were a ‘school of unity.’ As Gibson reminds us, while a minority of divines and clerics would be involved in the heated disputes within the eighteenth-century Church of England, “there were large areas of the country untouched by these divisions”^[58]: in which parson and parishioners experienced the surplice, kneeling to receive the Holy Communion, and the sign of the Cross at Baptism as common, shared, unifying markers of the Church of England. What is more, the fact that such unifying practices were required of all clergy and in all parishes would have contained the heated debates which periodically flared up, helping to ensure that they were “only ripples on the surface of the Church,” with a deeper, enduring unity and allegiance indicated by these practices.

The contemporary Anglican preference for a highly negative assessment of Saint Bartholomew’s Day 1662 is surely not unrelated to the challenge it – and the unity and accord to which it gave rise – presents to our incoherent accounts of ‘unity in diversity’ and what John Milbank has described as “almost ubiquitous liturgical chaos.”^[59] This is particularly true of the requirement to conform to the Prayer Book ceremonies, a cause of acute embarrassment for many contemporary Anglican commentators. These ceremonies, however, were a school for unity and accord, powerfully contrasting with the laissez-faire approach to such practices in contemporary Anglicanism, an approach which results in ceremonies (in some places multiplied,^[60] in other places rejected) signaling confusion and discord. Embarrassment, awkwardness, and lament should not characterize how we recall these events. Rather, we should recognize in Saint Bartholomew’s Day 1662 wise, sober, and reasonable means to ensure “unity and godly love”^[61] against divisive agitation and a destructive rejection of ecclesial authority. Not least amongst these means was conformity to the Prayer Book’s ceremonies, a measure which, to use words from Jeremy Taylor, was “the best conservatory of Charity and Truth and Peace.”^[62]

Notes:

1. J.C. Ryle Light from Old Times: Or Protestant Facts and Men (1891), from the Introduction and the chapter on Richard Baxter. ↑
2. A sermon by Archbishop Rowan Williams for the Service of Reconciliation, Healing of Memories, and Mutual Commitment for the Church of England and the United Reformed Church, Westminster Abbey, 7 February 2012. ↑
3. Healing the Past – Building the Future. The report of the Church of England-United Reformed Churchjoint study group on God’s Reign and Our Unity (2011). ↑
4. Ryle, op. cit. ↑
5. William Gibson, The Church of England 1688-1832: Unity and Accord (2001), p.24. ↑
6. The Book of Common Prayer 1662, ‘Of Ceremonies, why some be abolished, and some retained’. It was first published in BCP 1549. ↑
7. The Preface of 1662 reminds us that while the use of the Book of Common Prayer was discontinued during the Interregnum, it was “enjoined by the Laws of the Land, and those Laws never yet repealed”. ↑
8. Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, to the Privy Council, 7 October, 1552. ↑
9. Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, V.65.2. ↑
10. Ibid. ↑
11. LEP V.10.1. ↑
12. Ibid. ↑
13. LEP V.8.4. ↑
14. Constitutions and Canons Ecclesiatical of the Church of England, 1604, Canon VI. ↑
15. Ibid., Canon XXXVI. ↑
16. LEP, Preface, 8. ↑
17. See Reliquiæ Baxterianæ, or, Mr. Richard Baxter’s narrative of the most memorable passages of his life and times (1696), p. 316ff. ↑
18. For the response of the bishops, see Procter and Frere, A New History of the Book of Common Prayer, with a Rationale of its Offices (1955 edition), pp.172-189. ↑
19. Robert S. Bosher The Making of the Restoration Settlement: The Influence of the Laudians 1649-1662 (1951),, p.228. ↑
20. An Act for the Uniformity of Publique Prayers and Administracion of Sacraments & other Rites & Ceremonies and for establishing the Form of making ordaining and consecrating Bishops Preists and Deacons in the Church of England, 1662: ‘II. Parsons, Vicars, &c. publicly to read and declare their Assent to the Use of the same’. ↑
21. Reliquiæ Baxterianæ, p.320. ↑
22. Ibid., p.428. ↑
23. Canon LVIII. ↑
24. Diarmaid MacCulloch ‘The Latitude of the Church of England’ in All Things Made New: Writings on the Reformation (2016), p.237. ↑
25. From A sermon preached at the opening of the Parliament of Ireland, May 8. 1661 before the right honourable the Lords justices, and the Lords spiritual and temporal and the Commons, by Jeremy Lord Bishop of Down and Connor. ↑
26. John Durel A view of the government and publick worship of God in the reformed churches beyond the seas wherein is shewed their conformity and agreement with the Church of England, as it is established by the Act of Uniformity (1662), p.311. Cosin, while in exile in Paris, was instrumental in arranging for Durel to receive episcopal orders in 1650. ↑
27. John Morrill ‘The Church in England 1642-9’ in Morrill (ed.) Reactions to the English Civil War (1982), p.114. ↑
28. ‘A Sermon Upon St. Paul’s Day: Preached at St. Pauls’ in LI sermons preached by the Reverend Dr. Mark Frank … being a course of sermons, beginning at Advent, and so continued through the festivals (1672). ↑
29. Matthew 20:12. ↑
30. On this subject see Stephen Taylor and Kenneth Fincham ‘Vital statistics: episcopal ordination and ordinands in England, 1646-60’, English Historical Review CXXVI (2011), pp.319-344. ↑
31. Simon Patrick, A brief account of the new sect of latitude-men together with some reflections upon the nevv philosophy (1662). ↑
32. Procter and Frere, ibid., p.221: “it was quite certain that [it] should be rejected by the Lower House, who, in the appointment of their prolocutor, and in the debate on the address, evinced that they were opposed to the attempts now made by the Court and Bishops for the comprehension of Dissenters”. ↑
33. See John Walsh and Stephen Taylor, ‘Introduction: the Church and Anglicanism in the ‘long’ eighteenth century’ in Walsh, Haydn & Taylor (eds.) The Church of England c.1689-c.1833: From Toleration to Tractarianism (1993), p.51f: “If Anglicans differed in their politics and styles of churchmanship, they were united … in their fundamental loyalty to the Prayer Book and ultimate willingness to accept the Articles”. ↑
34. Benjamin Hoadly, The Reasonableness of Conformity to the Church of England, Represented to the Dissenting Ministers (1703), Preface. ↑
35. Ibid., p.84. ↑
36. Ibid., p.82. ↑
37. Ibid., p.67. ↑
38. See Stephen Hampton Grace and Conformity: The Reformed Conformist Tradition and the Early Stuart Church of England (2021), particularly p.268-275. ↑
39. From the dedication in A defence of the innocencie of the three ceremonies of the Church of England viz. the surplice, crosse after baptisme, and kneeling at the receiuing of the blessed Sacrament (1618). ↑
40. See Judith Maltby Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (1998), chapters 1 & 2. ↑
41. Hampton op.cit., p.268. ↑
42. John K. Nelson A Blessed Company: Parishes, Parsons, and Parishioners in Anglican Virginia, 1690-1776 (2001), p.66. ↑
43. Louis P. Nelson The Beauty of Holiness: Anglicanism & Architecture in Colonial South Carolina (2008), p.88. ↑
44. Ibid., p.89. ↑
45. The Excellency of the Liturgy: Four Discourses preached before the University of Cambridge, in November 1811. ↑
46. Ibid., Sermon III. ↑
47. See Simeon’s sermon on Numbers 15:37-41, ‘The Use and Intent of Fringes on their Garments’. ↑
48. The Excellency of the Liturgy, Sermon III. ↑
49. Ibid., Sermon IV. ↑
50. The closing words of the 1662 Preface. ↑
51. Gibson op.cit., p,242. ↑
52. See Walsh and Taylor op.cit., p.25: “Much of this literature, significantly, was based on the Book of Common Prayer, which was itself used not merely as a service book, but also as a manual for family and private devotions”. ↑
53. In Bramhall’s A Replication to the Bishop of Chalcedon’s Survey of the Vindication of the Church of England from Criminous Schism (1656), Chapter VI, iv. ↑
54. Gilbert Burnet An Exposition of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England (1699). See the commentary on Article IX: “In all that has been hitherto explained, the whole Church of England has been all along of one mind. In this and in some that follow, there has been a greater diversity of Opinion; but both sides have studied to prove their Tenets to be at least not contrary to the Articles of the Church”. ↑
55. See The Charges of Samuel Horsley, Late Lord Bishop of St. Asaph (1813), p.174. ↑
56. Ibid., p.217. ↑
57. Hoadly op.cit., p.4ff. ↑
58. Gibson op.cit., p.242. ↑
59. John Milbank ‘After Rowan: The Coherence and Future of Anglicanism’, 4th April 2012, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Religion & Ethics. ↑
60. Taylor’s exhortation to his clergy regarding conformity to the ceremonies might be usefully heeded: “but let there be no more introduc’d, lest the people be burdened unnecessarily, and tempted or divided”. See Rules and Advices to the Clergy of the Diocese of Down and Connor, For their Deportment in their Personal and Publick Capacities. Given by Jeremy Taylor, Bishop of that Diocese, at the Visitation at Lisnagarvey (1661). ↑
61. From the petition for the Church’s unity in the Prayer for the Church Militant. ↑
62. From A sermon preached at the opening of the Parliament of Ireland, May 8. 1661. ↑