PART III - DUSK

Summary

Efforts to reform church and state unravelled on both sides of the Atlantic. However, the sunset of godly hegemony looked different in Old and New England. These divergent, though related, histories of loss differently impacted the religious history of England and what would become the United States of America. In the 1650s, four interrelated factors precipitated the unravelling of godly power in the British Isles: religious division, political disappointment, military disappointment and political division. As previous chapters illustrated, successes proved unsustainable, partly because providential interpretations were unstable. As time wore on, defeat and victory contributed to the fracturing of the godly. The cleavage was most pronounced between Scottish Presbyterians and English Independents. However, an increasing number of splinter groups formed, and some were violently suppressed. The godly untuned the string of civil and political authority, and, hark, what discord followed: Anabaptists, Antinomians, Levellers, Diggers, Quakers, Fifth Monarchists and more. Each splinter group called into question the godliness of the godly party. They were a parable about uncontrollable reformation. The people of England could only handle so much theological innovation, and religious instability made the order provided by established churches seem attractive.

There was also a profound political disappointment. Many felt the government squandered the fruits of peace. On 12 September 1654, an exasperated Cromwell rebuked parliament: ‘We hoped for light, and behold darkness, obscure darkness! We hoped for rest after ten years’ Civil wars, we are plunged into deep confusion again’. In a 22 January 1655 speech before parliament, he again voiced theopolitical disappointment: ‘When I first met you in this room, it was … the hopefullest day that ever mine eye saw … I met you a second time here; and I confess at that meeting I had much abated my hopes’. Deprived of hope in man, but not in God, he dissolved parliament. He was particularly frustrated by those who would not submit to the providentially fluid nature of government: ‘the Lord hath poured this nation from vessel to vessel, till he poured it into your lap’. These motions were nothing but the ‘revolutions of Christ himself, upon whose shoulders the government is laid’. Cromwell was disappointed by politics, but he had not yet been defeated in battle.