Scandal and Religious Identity in Early Stuart England: A Northamptonshire Maid’s Tragedy by Peter Lake and Isaac Stephens (review)

Readers familiar with the work of Peter Lake will be aware of his long-standing interest in early Stuart murder pamphlets, as a means both of shedding light on the popular religious thinking of the period and critiquing the historiography of English Protestantism, the first fruit of which was an article in Midland History (1990): “Puritanism, Arminianism and a Shropshire Axe-Murder.” The present study, a brilliant work of history, written in collaboration with Isaac Stephens, begins with another murder, this time from Northamptonshire, which leads on to an investigation of the religious beliefs and practices of a selection of inhabitants drawn from one of the most divided English counties. In 1637 a local Puritan minister, John Barker, was executed at Northampton, along with his niece (Beatrice) and servant (Ursula), on a joint charge of infanticide. As with the earlier Shropshire murder case of 1633, where the perpetrator was an allegedly Puritan farmer, Enoch ap Evan, anti-Puritans sought to make religious capital out of the resulting discomfiture of the “godly”; in both instances the Calvinist doctrine of unconditional predestination was pilloried as a prime cause of the downfall of such self-deluded “elect.” But whereas the Shropshire Puritans responded by denying that Enoch ap Evan had ever been one of their number, the Northamptonshire Puritans, in the event, co-opted the condemned Barker as an edifying spectacle of gallows repentance. These rival polemics, so Lake and Stephens convincingly argue, are a genuine reflection of two very different varieties of popular Protestantism on offer at the time. Thus they are able to demonstrate that most of the views caricatured in the fascinating anti-Calvinist manuscript pamphlet The Northamptonshire High Constable really do feature in the extant sermons preached at the Kettering combination lecture, by the moderate Puritans Robert Bolton and Joseph Bentham. Such “public” teachings, of the kind purveyed by Bolton and Bentham, also serve to inform the “private” writings of Robert Woodford, a radical Puritan attorney and Steward of Northampton, and the godly gentlewoman Elizabeth Isham of Lamport in the same county. Lake and Stephens identify the author of The Northamptonshire High Constable as Peter Hausted, whose Ten Sermons (1636) include a number of closely related doctrinal and ceremonial themes. Hausted’s “private” counterpart is the Northamptonshire cleric and scourge of Puritans Robert Sibthorpe, a clutch of whose letters survive from the year 1639 as the “personal rule” of Charles I began to unravel. Here it is worth spelling out that the sermons of Bolton and Bentham had been licensed for publication by chaplains of Archbishop Abbot in the early 1630s, before the complete clampdown on Calvinist doctrine, whereas the very different notions of Hausted, his sermons licensed in 1635 by a chaplain of Archbishop Laud, were characteristic of the new Caroline dispensation. While Lake and Stephens rightly criticize present-day historians who dismiss vast swathes of the religious writing of the time as mere “polemic,” they also take to task those—often one and the same—who seek to collapse genuine and deeply held religious differences into a “consensual” Protestantism or Anglicanism. The idea of “Anglicanism,” they memorably write, “like Rasputin … seems impossible to kill” (p. 364), although their book certainly provides a formidable challenge to the sort of mythmakers they have in mind. At the same time, our two authors pay a heartfelt tribute to John Fielding, on whose first-rate edition of Robert Woodford’s diary they draw extensively. The present reviewer also wishes to join with them in expressing the hope that Fielding’s work on Peterborough diocese, much of it still unpublished, may yet see the light of print. Likewise publishing The Northamptonshire High Constable would be an eminently worthwhile task, since the manuscript encapsulates so many Laudian preoccupations, such as altars and bowing toward...