Charles I: Personal Rule and Political Breakdown, 1629–40 (AQA A-Level History): Revision Notes
Personal Rule: Religion and the Church
Why religious conflicts intensified during the Personal Rule
During Charles I's Personal Rule (1629-40), religious tensions escalated to dangerous levels. Without Parliament in session, opponents had no legitimate forum to voice concerns about the religious changes Charles and his Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, imposed on the Church of England. The reforms Laud introduced from 1633 onwards appeared to many Protestants as a deliberate move towards Catholic practices, threatening the very foundation of England's reformed religion. These changes, combined with growing evidence of Catholic influence at Court, created widespread alarm and opposition that would eventually contribute to the breakdown of royal authority.
The Personal Rule refers to the period when Charles I governed without calling Parliament. This meant that traditional channels for expressing grievances and concerns about royal policy were effectively closed, forcing opposition underground and increasing tensions across the kingdom.
The Laudian reforms
In 1633, William Laud became Archbishop of Canterbury and immediately issued new instructions requiring bishops to enforce uniform practices across all dioceses. Preaching was restricted to Sunday mornings and evenings only, replaced in the afternoon by teaching of the Catechism – the outline of doctrines and creeds set out in the Anglican Prayer Book, taught as questions with learned responses and appearing as set prayers in certain services. This substitution symbolised Laud's emphasis on authority and communal worship over the intensely personal, Bible-based faith encouraged by Puritan preachers.
The Catechism was a formal teaching tool that presented Anglican doctrine as a series of questions and answers to be memorized. By replacing sermons with Catechism teaching, Laud was shifting emphasis from individual interpretation of Scripture to official Church doctrine – a change that alarmed those who valued personal Bible study and preaching.
Weekday lectures were banned entirely, removing a practice favoured by Puritans that had provided preaching opportunities for ministers who objected to ceremonies and sacraments required by the Prayer Book. Laud launched a legal challenge against the Feoffees – a group of Puritan trustees empowered to raise money and purchase impropriated parishes to install good preaching ministers for them. Established in 1626, they had gained control over approximately thirty parishes and were seeking to extend their work through buying advowsons (see Chapter 2, page 21). When Laud banned them, he took over the parishes they had bought, though his action offended Puritans and many others as an attack on property rights.
Churches were to be decorated and music encouraged. In Hull, for example, the Church bells were restored to Holy Trinity Church despite objections from the Mayor and Corporation. The plain communion tables occupying the centre of many churches were removed to the east end and covered with richly embroidered cloth, reminiscent of the Catholic High Altar, railed off from the ordinary lay members of the congregation. Orthodox Anglican or Arminian views would be appointed to them, ensuring that only those who accepted neither extreme Puritan nor Laudian Catholic beliefs held positions of religious authority.
Intentions and reactions
From Charles and Laud's perspective, these changes established order and beauty in the Church. Replacing preaching with set prayers and ceremonies reduced the scope for individuals to express controversial views and avoided disputation. Music, decoration and ritual encouraged reverence for God and joyful worship, a celebration that appealed to the emotions rather than the intellect alone. Catechisms of the public reading of official confessions of faith expressed the unity of a harmonious Christian community. Protecting the altar from abuse by placing it behind rails marked respect for holy things. Charles and Laud were fulfilling their duty in caring for the Church and ensuring that others did the same. Laud himself articulated this policy:
Laud's Defence of Ceremonial Worship:
'The inward worship of the heart is the great service of God ... but the external worship of God in his Church is the great witness to the world, that our heart stands right in that service ... Now, no external action in the world can be uniform without some ceremonies; and these in religion, the ancienter they be the better, so [as long as] they may fit the time and place ... And scarce anything hath hurt religion more in these broken times than an opinion in too many men, that because Rome had thrust some unnecessary and many superstitious ceremonies upon the Church, therefore the Reformation must have none at all; not considering therewhile, that ceremonies are the hedge that fence the substance of religion from all the indignities which profaneness and sacrilege too commonly put upon it.'
This quote reveals Laud's view that ceremonies protected true religion and that rejecting all ritual simply because Catholics used it was throwing out the good with the bad.
Unfortunately, Laud's instructions were interpreted in very different ways by many of the ministers and laity upon whom they were imposed. They thought that restrictions on preaching did the devil's work by leaving people in ignorance and darkness, and that rituals and ceremonies encouraged a mechanical and superstitious emphasis on appearances at the expense of inner faith. They also believed that decorations and statues encouraged the worship of symbols, and that the new placing of the altar recalled the Catholic Mass in which, it was claimed, the communion bread and wine were miraculously transformed into the actual body and blood of Christ (Transubstantiation). For many people, not only of the Puritan faction, this was a return to superstition and idol-worship, attacking the heart of the Protestant faith. It was particularly controversial and also particularly obvious to the ordinary layman, who saw the physical evidence of the change in his own parish church.
The Transubstantiation Controversy
Transubstantiation was the Catholic doctrine that the bread and wine literally became Christ's body and blood during Mass. For Protestants, this was a dangerous superstition – they believed communion was symbolic remembrance, not literal transformation. When Laud's reforms made altars look like Catholic altars and emphasized the sacred nature of communion, many feared he was reintroducing this rejected Catholic belief, threatening the very foundation of Protestant faith.
There were also other associations. If the altar was railed off and approached only by the clergy, then this emphasised the status of the clergy as a separate order, above the laity. What was, for Charles and Laud, an attempt to improve the quality of religious provision by creating uniform standards and raising the quality and status of the clergy, appeared to many laymen to be a renewal of the clerical pretensions associated with the Catholic Church. In this context, the presence of bishops on the Privy Council, the claims that they derived their authority from Christ himself, handed down through the Catholic Christian tradition, the emphasis on authority and the special status of the clergy all came together to create fear of absolutism and Catholicism.
The Catholic threat
The growing evidence that Catholic influence was tolerated at Court increased these fears. The Queen practised worship as a Catholic according to her marriage terms, and her priests and confessors sought to gain converts where possible. Catholicism became fashionable in Court circles, and several Privy Councillors, such as Lord Treasurer Weston, were Catholics. In 1637 Charles welcomed an ambassador from the Pope, George Con, and their shared appreciation of art encouraged a growing friendship. Many suspected the King of Catholic sympathies, and even those who accepted that neither he, nor Laud, held Catholic beliefs, feared that by indulging High Church attitudes they were allowing secret Catholics to enter and undermine the Anglican faith. In an era when the Pope was identified as the Anti-Christ, the head of a vast international conspiracy supported by Spain and dedicated to the destruction of true religion, such fears and suspicions isolated the King from many of his subjects.
Why Catholic Influence Mattered
In 17th-century Protestant England, Catholicism was not just a different religion – it was seen as an existential threat. The Pope was widely believed to be the Anti-Christ leading an international conspiracy to destroy Protestant nations. The memory of the Spanish Armada (1588), the Gunpowder Plot (1605), and ongoing religious wars in Europe made these fears very real. When Catholics appeared to gain influence at Charles's Court, it confirmed many people's worst suspicions that the King was betraying England's Protestant identity.
Enforcement and punishment
As with other areas of government, there was little that could be done to prevent the changes being made. Ministers who refused to accept the new rules risked losing their livings and Laud ensured that the bishops carried out regular visitations to enforce the King's will. Serious acts of defiance were brought before the prerogative court of High Commission, which also imposed censorship through the licensing of books and pamphlets. In more extreme cases, those who defied the law could be brought before the Star Chamber. In 1637 three Puritans named Burton, Bastwick and Prynne, who had published a series of pamphlets attacking Laud and the Queen, were brought to the Star Chamber accused of sedition (encouraging unrest). Burton was a physician, Bastwick a preacher, and Prynne was a lawyer – all university men of gentry status. Despite this, they were sentenced to be placed in the pillory, branded on the cheeks and to have their ears cropped. Such mutilation was rarely inflicted on men of their status, and the sentence was carried out before a shocked and horrified crowd, who sympathised with both their views and their sufferings.
The Punishment of Burton, Bastwick and Prynne (1637)
The case of these three men demonstrates the severity of Charles and Laud's enforcement:
The Accused:
- William Prynne – lawyer and polemicist
- Henry Burton – court preacher
- John Bastwick – physician All were educated men of gentry status
Their Crime: Publishing pamphlets attacking Archbishop Laud and criticizing the Queen's Catholicism
The Sentence:
- Pilloried in public
- Branded with hot irons on both cheeks
- Ears cropped (partially cut off)
- Heavy fines and imprisonment
The Impact: This brutal punishment of respectable gentlemen shocked public opinion. The crowd that gathered showed sympathy for the victims rather than supporting the government. Instead of deterring opposition, the punishment created martyrs and increased resentment against Charles and Laud's religious policies.
Growth of opposition
Faced with this kind of action, those who opposed Charles and Laud on religious grounds reacted in one of two ways. Within the lower ranks of society there were already a few more radical Puritans who had come to believe that a state Church was, in itself unacceptable, and that a true Church consisted of a body of believers joining in a voluntary association and governing its members by its own rules. The persecution carried out by Archbishop Bancroft in the early years of James's reign (see Chapter 2) had led to small congregations taking refuge in Holland, where some of them came into contact with Baptist and Millenarian ideas. In 1616 the first English Baptist church was established by an exiled minister named John Smyth. A few years later, another such group, later termed the Pilgrim Fathers, set off to sail to the colony of Virginia in search of religious freedom, and being blown off course, established the first English colony in New England. There they were joined by others whose separatist views made life in England dangerous and by the mid-1630s there were a number of such colonies.
Emerging Religious Groups
The term Separatist covers a number of religious groups who had developed ideas of their own within the broad category labelled 'Puritan'. Although there were variations, the common factor was their desire for the right to establish independent and self-governing religious groups, organised according to their own reading of the Bible.
Baptists practised adult baptism by total immersion as a symbol of membership, based on the story of Jesus being baptised by John the Baptist at the start of his ministry.
Independents or Congregationalists simply emphasised the need for voluntary membership and self-government of each individual congregation.
Millenarians adopted ideas based on the Book of Revelations, arguing that in time all earthly monarchies would be swept away to allow for the return of Jesus himself, to inaugurate a thousand years of rule by the Saints.
The events of the 1640s would bring about an upsurge of all these ideas, and in time the intense radicalism of the radical Puritans and their belief in spiritual equality would convert into new and highly subversive political ideas.
Little is known of the separatists within England at this time, since they were, of necessity, scattered and secretive, but there was a brief glimpse of their potential in the actions of John Lilburne, a protégé of Dr Bastwick, who was arrested in 1638 for attempting to smuggle copies of Bastwick's sermons into England from Holland, where they had been printed without licence. Brought to trial and sentenced to be pilloried, Lilburne used his public moment to harangue the populace of London on the evils of bishops and was promptly imprisoned. He remained in prison until after the calling of the Long Parliament, when a sympathetic intervention by the MP for Cambridge, Oliver Cromwell, secured his release.
Both Lilburne and Cromwell would play a more substantial role in the growing crisis in later years, but during the 1630s the radicals and separatists remained a small and isolated minority. In the short term a far more noteworthy reaction came from the more moderate Puritans who were, and wished to remain within the Anglican Church. Nevertheless, they were deeply resentful of the Laudian bishops and feared that both the religious and political aims of Charles and his advisers posed a threat to England as they knew it. Fear of Catholicism, resentment at the pretensions of the Laudian clergy and a sense that the King was willing to override both law and Parliaments in pursuit of his perception of royal government, combined to convince some that he was seeking to create an absolute monarchy. In 1637, faced with Hampden's failure to challenge Ship Money, the prospect that financial independence would enable Charles to dispense with parliaments completely (and the example of Burton, Bastwick and Prynne to show what could happen to those who resisted), leaders of the Puritan interest like the Earl of Bedford considered emigration to New England as a way out. This proved unnecessary because neither Charles's intentions nor his effectiveness were quite what they seemed.
Key dates: religion and the church
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1633 | Laud appointed Archbishop of Canterbury; new injunctions issued laying down rules and changes in the Church |
| 1635 | William Juxon, Bishop of London, appointed as Lord Treasurer |
| 1637 | George Con, Ambassador from the Pope, welcomed at Court and took up residence; Star Chamber trial and punishment of Bastwick, Burton and Prynne |
Key Points to Remember:
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Laud's reforms from 1633 emphasised ceremony, decoration and uniformity over preaching, appearing to many as a dangerous move towards Catholic practices.
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The restriction of preaching and promotion of rituals alienated Puritans and ordinary laypeople who saw these changes as attacking the heart of Protestant faith.
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Evidence of Catholic tolerance at Court (the Queen's worship, George Con's welcome in 1637) intensified fears of a Catholic conspiracy.
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Enforcement through High Commission and Star Chamber, including the brutal punishment of Burton, Bastwick and Prynne in 1637, created martyrs and increased opposition.
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While radical separatists remained a small minority in the 1630s, moderate Puritans within the Anglican Church grew increasingly resentful, fearing Charles sought to establish absolute monarchy and override both law and Parliament in pursuit of his religious vision.