3 - The (puritan) view, from the inside looking out

Summary

Thus far we have been viewing Northamptonshire puritanism from the remorselessly hostile perspective provided by the The Northamptonshire high constable. And for all the apparent accuracy of that tract's rendition of the Barker story, its gloss thereon might well be thought to tell us far more about the Laudian and Arminian views of its author than it does about the realities of puritan life in Northants during the 1630s.

Unfortunately, no works from Barker survive, but we do have the next best thing – extensive printed versions of sermons preached at the Kettering lecture at which Barker himself preached, by two leading local puritans, Robert Bolton and Joseph Bentham. Bolton was the vicar of Broughton until his death in 1631, after which he was succeeded by Bentham. Neither man was a firebrand. Both were conformists and both protégés and chaplains of the eminently respectable Lord Montague, a major patron of the godly in his part of the shire. As we shall see, Bolton deprecated those members of the godly who paraded their own stiff-necked rectitude on the issue of (non-) conformity. Bentham took a moderate stand in relation to Laudian ceremonialism that was by no means typical of Northamptonshire puritanism and ended up sequestered as a royalist. As for his patron, Montague, he was arrested in 1642 for trying to enforce the Commission of Array.

The works with which we shall be concerned here were all preached at the Kettering lecture during the 1620s and 1630s, a gathering which took place under the aegis and protection of Lord Montague. The Kettering lecture has been identified by John Fielding as one of the more moderate puritan exercises in the county. We have here therefore precisely the nexus between godly minister, godly magistrate and a combination lecture that the author of The Northamptonshire high constable identified as constitutive of puritanism, and in the connection between the lecture and the likes of Bolton, Bentham and Montague precisely the strand of moderate puritanism that Collinson regarded as constitutive of The religion of protestants and Ryrie has made central to his account of Being protestant in post-Reformation England.