A kingdom of many sects
The new king, Charles I, had been raised in feudal tradition and the social order of England, and he felt lost among the merchants and Puritans of London. The variety and intensity of religious opinion deeply troubled him. The right of individual judgment, which every creed had championed until it came to power, together with the spread of the Bible, had multiplied the denominations. One tract lists twenty-nine sects and another a hundred and eighty. Beyond the old quarrels between Protestants and Catholics, the Protestants were bitterly divided among Anglicans, Presbyterians and Puritans. The Puritans in turn split into Independents (who dreamed of a republican government), Quakers (who opposed war, violence and oaths), Fifth Monarchy Men (who awaited Christ's return to rule the earth), Antinomians (who held that God's elect are not bound by human laws), and others. A member of Parliament complained that artisans had set up pulpits and preached their faith with fervor, and that many of them wrapped their economic or political demands in the language of the Bible.
Besides these there were the Anabaptists, who baptized only adults, and the Baptists, who broke away from the Separatists in 1606 and divided in 1632 into General and Particular Baptists. The first group rejected Calvin's doctrine of predestination and the second held to it.
Doubt and the Deists
The multiplication of sects and their heated arguments led a small minority to doubt every form of Christianity. Bishop Fotherby grieved that the Scriptures had lost their meaning and were being taught in a manner fit only for the ignorant. The minister James Cranford said in 1646 that great numbers had turned to skepticism or atheism or believed in nothing at all. A pamphlet entitled The Gates of Hell Opened, a catalogue of the errors, heresies and blasphemies spreading in that time, listed the questions being asked: whether the Bible was a true and unforged text or a work of men, and whether it could show us a real God. Another daring view held that right reason ruled over faith, so that we should believe in Scripture, the Trinity, the incarnation and the resurrection only as far as they agreed with reason. Many skeptics did not believe in the resurrection or the divinity of Jesus.
A growing number of thinkers, called Deists, tried to find a path between skepticism and religion, proposing that Christianity be limited to belief in God and the immortality of the soul. Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, gave this proposal a philosophical dress in his remarkable treatise on truth (1624). Truth, he said, has nothing to do with the Bible, and neither the church nor any other authority can bestow it; its best witness is universal agreement. The best religion is therefore not a revealed one but a 'natural' one, limited to the principles that the different faiths generally accept. He held that there is a supreme being in the world, to be honored by living virtuously, and that good conduct is rewarded and bad conduct punished, in this world or after it. According to Aubrey, when the church declined to perform the last rites for Herbert, he died calmly.
Fear of Rome
Parliament worried more about Catholicism than about heresy. By the book's figure, English Catholics in 1634 may have made up a quarter of the population (a share that seems far too high), and despite the laws and the dangers some 335 Jesuit priests lived in the country. Powerful nobles clung to the old faith. George Calvert, Lord Baltimore, announced his conversion in 1625, and in 1632 Charles granted him the charter to found the colony later called Maryland. Henrietta Maria, the Catholic queen, sent a secret agent to Rome to obtain a cardinal's hat for an English subject. The Anglican king was ready to let a Catholic bishop reside in England if Pope Urban VIII would approve Charles's plan for a political marriage (1634), but the pope refused.
The Catholics asked for religious toleration. Parliament, however, had not forgotten the intolerance of Catholic rulers, St. Bartholomew's Day or the Gunpowder Plot, and it had no wish to open any inquiry into Protestant lands that had once been Catholic property. It demanded instead that the anti-Catholic laws be fully enforced. At this time feeling against the pope grew, especially in the middle class, which objected to the entry of Catholic priests and to the growing attachment to Catholic ways among supporters of the established church.
The established church and the voices of moderation
The established church had the full support of the state. Anglicanism was compulsory by law, and even the Thirty-Nine Articles became a law of the realm (1628). Anglican bishops claimed to have been appointed in succession from the Apostles, and they rejected the Presbyterian and Puritan claim that others besides bishops could ordain priests. Many Anglican clergy of the time were learned and well-meaning men. James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, was a real scholar, despite his famous calculation that God created the world on 22 October 4004 BC. That historical error was informally adopted when the Authorized Version of the Bible was reprinted. John Hales, chaplain to the English embassy in Holland, spoke about doubt, reason and toleration in these terms.
Only two roads lead to knowledge, he said: experience and logical reasoning. People who come to you and tell you what to believe and do, without giving the reason, are not physicians but leeches. The true strength of reason lies in being slow to believe. What we respect for being old was once new; if it was wrong then, the passing of time cannot set it right, for time has no value as such. It is our rebellious self, wanting everyone to think as we do, that troubles the church, and not the variety of opinions. If we did not abuse one another over our differences, we could unite from the heart. A true Christian has two marks, true faith and honorable conduct; the first is the more becoming and marks us as Christians, but the second will in the end bring the better result. There is no man, infidel or idolater, to whom Christian compassion does not extend.
Not all of the 'idolaters' answered Hales's generosity in kind. A Jesuit writing under the name Edward Knott published a tract called Charity Mistaken (the source renders the title differently), claiming that, accidents aside, no Protestant would be saved. William Chillingworth replied with The Religion of Protestants a Safe Way to Salvation, the leading religious treatise of that age, which promised the opposite to those Knott had condemned. He knew both camps: he had turned Catholic and then Protestant, and still accepted part of the old beliefs. In Clarendon's words, he was so used to doubt that in time he was certain of nothing and doubted the deepest mysteries of religion.
One of the most eloquent of the Anglican clergy in Charles's reign was Jeremy Taylor. His sermons, judged better than Bossuet's, can still be read, and even a Frenchman was stirred by them. Taylor was a firm supporter of Charles I and a chaplain in his army. When the Presbyterians and Puritans held a majority in Parliament and attacked the Anglican loyalists with zeal, Taylor published The Liberty of Prophesying, timidly calling both sides to moderation and toleration. Every Christian who accepts the Apostles' Creed, he said, should be received in love by the church, and Catholics should be left free unless they tried to prove the pope's sovereignty over England and its kings. In the civil war Taylor was arrested and imprisoned by the Parliament party, but after Charles II came to the throne he was made a bishop, and his enthusiasm for toleration cooled.
Laud
The growing pull of Catholic ways showed itself in a powerful member of the Anglican church. William Laud had firm opinions and a will of his own, and meant either to rule or to perish. He was also very devout, strict and unbending. Like a true priest, he took it as obvious that one religion is necessary for a successful government, and that an elaborate ceremonial is necessary for a religion that is to be effective and soothing. Against the wishes of the Presbyterians and Puritans, Laud proposed to bring art back into the service of the church: to adorn the altar, the pulpit and the font, to add the cross to the ceremonies, and to put the loose white surplice back on the clergy. One of his measures that offended many was the order to move the communion table, which had stood in the middle of the chancel (and had for a time served as a place to hang hats), behind a railing at the east end of the church.