Despite the revisionist stress on the religious causes of the British civil wars, there has been surprisingly little attempt to synthesize our understanding of mid-seventeenth-century religion since William Shaw in 1900. Modern scholars have written single chapters, often within a longer chronological study, or provided a narrower focus. Anthony Milton's ambitious and deeply researched monograph addresses this gap. As Milton indicates, sectarianism, as an efflorescent phenomenon, is over-emphasised in most histories, despite having few adherents, while Catholicism, and to a lesser extent the Church of England, which is his main focus, have been neglected [8; Michael Braddick, God's Fury, England's Fire (London: Penguin, 2009), 344]. Christopher Hill's Marxist approach tended to equate sectarian belief with economic and class interest. Milton, in contrast, privileges the superstructure, the religious thought of the period, in relation to expressed ideals of how the English Church ought to function in an era remembered as the “times of Reformation of all things” [Fiona McCall, Baal's Priests (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013), 300].
Central to Milton's thesis is the concept of a long English Reformation. The contention that intense debate continued after the Elizabethan settlement on the practice and future of the Church is not new. John Morrill described the early-seventeenth-century church as a “vinaigrette” of immiscible elements; Diarmaid McCulloch argued that the Church was enriched by the interplay between them. Ambiguity over the Church's fundamental doctrines and practices, due to competing authorities and contradictory elements within its settlement, allowed churchmen of all persuasions to believe that their proposed reforms were bringing to fruition the objectives of earlier reformers. Most significantly, the authority of parliament over religious policy was highly contentious and never resolved (507).
Milton contends that the 1640s and 1650s, while habitually depicted as a “temporary intermission” in the Church's trajectory, were in fact a crucial period in its development, involving a “highly contentious reimagining” of the established church, from all sides of the religious spectrum, conservatives included, with arguments often framed as a “revolution” in its original sense of a return to the past (63). No one relished being thought of as an “innovator,” but would-be reformers differed in their choice of periods of religious antiquity to emulate (62). Emphasising their interrelationships, Milton gathers all mid-century reform programs together as one “second Reformation,” although, as his structure makes clear, this was a set of competing impetuses toward reform in different aspects and direction of policy, and a set of responses and tactical negotiating positions, of uncertain levels of sincerity, toward them. Commencing with the emergence of Laudianism in the 1620s, Milton then examines the “abortive” attempts at moderate reformation in 1640–1642, the inconclusive “Westminster reformation” of the mid-1640s, the radical “Cromwellian” reforms introduced and envisioned in the 1650s, and the “Caroline reformation” of 1662.
There is much detail to assimilate here and, even for religious historians, much to learn. Milton's command of his source material, including tracts, state papers, and correspondence, is assured, often comparing published arguments with earlier manuscript versions. He provides a thorough examination of proposals for reforming the ecclesiastical hierarchy made by Archbishops Ussher and Williams in the early 1640s, and of the Uxbridge and Newport negotiations, where royalists under duress had to decide between adopting (temporarily if they could) a Presbyterian system that would appease the Scots and many in parliament, and a settlement with the Independents and the army which would permit traditional practice to continue, but introduce tolerance of sectarian beliefs. The emphasis is on the possibilities presented via the process of intellectual exchange, taxing the reader to grasp the degree to which such ideas gained political traction. Further explanation of theological concepts and the context of authorship would have been helpful; for such an academic text, the lack of a bibliography is an omission.
In line with Judith Maltby, Milton shows how, from the English perspective if not the Scots, the abrogation of the set forms of the liturgy was the least desired of the puritan reforms, and just how contentious, even amongst the Westminster Assembly, was the introduction of the Directory of Public Worship to replace it [231–234; Judith Maltby, “Petitions for Episcopacy and the Book of Common Prayer on the Eve of the Civil War, 1641–1642,” in From Cranmer to Davidson: A Church of England Miscellany, ed. Stephen Taylor (Church of England Record Soc., 7, 1999), 103–167]. He dismisses the common fallacy that the prayer book enjoyed a defacto toleration, using evidence from Episcopalian debates on the permissibility of contriving the “[s]ubstance of it into a prayer of their own making” or, like Jeremy Taylor, experimenting with “new forms” altogether (329–330). This fits with Milton's key contention that all sides were willing to contemplate change; with a lack of clear arbiters for what constituted orthodoxy, there was much creative new thinking, often from surprising quarters, such as the celebrated “Caroline” divines Henry Hammond and the Laudian Taylor. This could have resulted in quite different practices from the “eclectic” 1662 church settlement eventually achieved.
Milton is rather modest in his claims for his research. He carefully delimits his scope, stating that “recapturing the full religious experience of the 1650s,” “on the ground,” is beyond it (359). This leads to some conclusions that might be challenged by a ground-level perspective. For example, he places relatively little stress on opposition to the Solemn League and Covenant, yet dozens of clergy lost their livings by refusing to take it; Ralph Verney left the country rather than take it (246; ODNB, [Susan E Whyman, Verney, Sir Ralph, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/28233]). Milton surely also places too much emphasis on fears that royalist clergy would convert to Catholicism (316–318). Vanishingly few did: most remained in England where popery was anathemized and had families to support [A. G. Matthews, ed., Walker Revised (Oxford, UK, 1948)]. Among the laity in exile the incentives were stronger. But what Milton offers here is largely a clericalist perspective on church history. Claire Cross summarized the “battle” in question as one between the clergy and laity [Claire Cross, The Church in England: Triumph of the Laity (Hassocks, 1976), chapter 9]; Milton himself refers to parliament's “audacious power-grab” for authority over religion (136). Thus we need more consideration of how ideas for church reform were received by all sectors of society. This becomes particularly clear when discussing the Restoration settlement, driven by the “vengeful” lay members of the Cavalier parliament. A fuller discussion of the implications of interregnum religious thought among the wider public and beyond the Restoration would have strengthened Milton's otherwise well-argued central contention that the dynamic religious thought of the period mattered to the Church's longer-term history.
