The Lord’s battle: Preaching, print and royalism during the English Revolution

By William White

This book explores the preaching and printing of sermons by royalists during the English Revolution. While scholars have long recognised the central role played by preachers in driving forward the parliamentarian war-effort, the use of the pulpit by the king’s supporters has rarely been considered. The Lord’s battle, however, argues that the pulpit offered an especially vital platform for clergymen who opposed the dramatic changes in Church and state that England experienced in the mid-seventeenth century. It shows that royalists after 1640 were moved to rethink earlier attitudes to preaching and print, as the unique potential for sermons to influence both popular and elite audiences became clear. As well as contributing to our understanding of preaching during the Civil Wars therefore, this book engages with recent debates about the nature of royalism in seventeenth-century England.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Apr 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9781526164698

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The Lord’s battle

POLITICS, CULTURE AND SOCIETY IN EARLY MODERN BRITAIN

General Editors

Alastair Bellany, Alexandra Gajda, Peter Lake,

Anthony Milton, Jason Peacey, Abigail Swingen

This important series publishes volumes that take a fresh and challenging look at the interactions between politics, culture and society in early modern Britain and beyond. It seeks to counteract the fragmentation of current historiography by encouraging a variety of methodological and critical approaches to this period of dramatic conflict and change that fundamentally shaped the modern world. The series welcomes volumes covering all aspects of sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth century history, including the history of Britain’s growing imperial ambitions and global reach.

To buy or to find out more about the books currently available in this series, please go to: https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/series/politics-culture-and- society-in-early-modern-britain

The Lord’s battle

Preaching, print and royalism during the English Revolution

William White

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © William White 2023

The right of William White to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 6470 4 hardback

First published 2023

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: Wenceslaus Hollar, ‘Satire on the Laudian Canons’ (detail), etching c. 1640, © The Trustees of the British Museum

Cover design: riverdesignbooks.com

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

For my parents and for Tash

Contents

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Introduction: ‘These times are preaching times’

1The pulpit and public politics, 1640–2

2Royalist preachers and the First Civil War

3Preaching, peace and providence at royalist Oxford

4Sermons and the politics of counsel, 1646–51

5Resisting the republican regime

6Apostacy, loyalty and the Interregnum pulpit

7‘If the king will not comply’: 1658–62

8Hearing and reading royalist sermons

Conclusion

Bibliography of manuscript sources

Index

Acknowledgements

I have received a huge amount of support while researching and writing this book and have many people to thank. I am indebted first and foremost to Grant Tapsell for more than a decade of guidance, good humour and friendship. The origins of my interest in the English Revolution can be traced directly back to his undergraduate tutorials and he has remained a wonderfully supportive mentor ever since. Particular thanks are also due to Richard Serjeantson for first introducing me to the ‘joys’ of seventeenth-century preaching and to Anthony Milton for his exceptionally generous advice and encouragement in more recent times. I have over the years benefited from discussions with Robert Armstrong, Alex Beeton, Richard Cust, Hannah Dawson, Leif Dixon, Ken Fincham, Alex Gajda, Jeremy Fradkin, Vivienne Larminie, Hannah Dongsun Lee, Ed Legon, Judith Maltby, Sarah Mortimer, Jon Parkin, Jason Peacey, David Smith, Laura Stewart, George Southcombe, Matt Ward, Thomas White and Lucy Wooding. Several of the chapters that follow were first trialled at seminars and conferences: the Early Modern Britain and Britain in Revolution seminars at the University of Oxford; the Religious History of Britain seminar at the Institute of Historical Research; the Anglo-German Doctoral Workshop at the German Historical Institute in 2018; and the Holy War and Sacred States conference at Queen’s University, Belfast, in 2019. I thank all the participants for their many helpful questions and comments.

I could not have begun this book without generous financial support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. I could not have finished it if I had not been appointed to an Early Career Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust and the Department of History at the University of York. I must also acknowledge the many librarians and archivists, from London to Los Angeles, who have dealt with my queries and requests along the way. I am particularly grateful to Helen Kemp at the marvellous Thomas Plume Library in Maldon for opening the library to me outside of public hours and for assistance with the collections. Many thanks are due to Meredith Carroll at Manchester University Press for overseeing the production process and to both the series editors and readers for insightful suggestions that have greatly improved the final book.

Lastly, I am hugely grateful for the support of my friends, my siblings, my parents and, most of all, Tash.

Abbreviations

For all printed works, the place of publication is London unless otherwise stated.

All dates are given in the Old Style Julian Calendar, but the year has been taken to start on 1 January.

Introduction: ‘These times are preaching times’

On 28 June 1660, William Creed ascended the pulpit at St. Mary Woolchurch, London, to preach a sermon of thanksgiving for the recent return of Charles II. Creed invited his audience to marvel at the ‘strange Revolutions we have lived to see’ and rejoiced at the final ‘deliverance of our David’ after so many ‘sad and fatal turnes of state’.¹ He now looked forward to a long period of peace and prosperity, as the king’s subjects once again learned to ‘serve and submit themselves to him’. The sermon concluded with a prayer giving ‘Thanks unto the Lord’, since ‘He is the Tower of Salvation for his King’.² But Creed’s sense of relief was tempered by a lingering bitterness against those ‘Statists and Usurpers’ who, he claimed, had instigated a ‘levelling [of] all, both in Church and State’.³ Across the city at Whitehall, meanwhile, Gilbert Sheldon was tasked with preaching before the king himself. While praising his ‘gracious Prince’ in exalted terms, the future archbishop of Canterbury also betrayed a certain unease. ‘Our great sins’, he reminded the royal court, had brought God’s ‘great judgements upon us’ and this should serve as ‘a warning to us hereafter’.⁴

The mixed emotions of these two churchmen in the immediate aftermath of the Restoration are understandable. The previous two decades had been a profoundly dark and disorientating time for clergymen who shared their royalist and episcopalian sympathies. They had watched in horror as parliament resisted, defeated and finally executed the king, while at the same time systematically dismantling the government and liturgy of the established Church. The Book of Common Prayer was proscribed by parliamentary ordinance in 1644 and the formal abolition of episcopacy followed two years later. Cathedrals and chapels were routinely vandalised by marauding Roundhead troops during the Civil Wars, with episcopal lands sold off to finance this unlawful insurrection against God’s anointed. Significant numbers of parish clergy found themselves ejected and even imprisoned by parliamentarian committees for supporting the king or retaining traditional religious practices. Both Creed and Sheldon had been among those removed from their Oxford fellowships by a parliamentary visitation in 1648.⁵ Still more troublingly, the commitment of the Church’s supreme governor to pre-war religious forms seemed to falter at the precise moment it was most needed. Between his initial defeat in the First Civil War and his death, Charles I flirted periodically with assenting to the institution of presbyterianism in England as the price of regaining his throne. Charles II would go still further and actually agree to this bargain, swearing the Solemn League and Covenant in return for Scottish military support in 1650.

This book examines one crucial way in which clergymen like Creed and Sheldon responded to these ‘strange Revolutions’ that shook the English nation during the mid-seventeenth century: the preaching and printing of sermons. It argues that the upheavals of the 1640s and 1650s forced royalists to reassess earlier habits and practices in relation to sermon culture. Preaching came to be recognised as an especially vital means of defending, shaping and propagating the king’s cause. As the nation descended into civil war, therefore, the clergy sought to influence both popular allegiance and elite decision making from the pulpit. But sermons were also particularly well suited to negotiating the conditions of censorship and persecution with which royalists were confronted as their opponents began to gain the ascendancy. These clergymen resisted from the pulpit not only the constitutional changes enacted by the Long Parliament and its successors but, just as importantly, the deconstruction of an episcopalian Church in which many fellow royalists were deemed to be complicit. At the same time, the pulpit was essential to the king’s lay supporters in these decades too: preachers were commissioned by military commanders to frighten neutralist townsmen into compliance during the Civil Wars; employed by Charles I to manage his truculent Oxford Parliament; and sought out by despondent laymen in Interregnum London. ‘These times’, acknowledged one royalist minister in the mid-1650s, ‘are preaching times’.⁶

Royalism and the Church of England

In making this case, the book advances our understanding of royalist politics, religion and print culture, while simultaneously contributing to a growing interdisciplinary literature on early modern preaching. Where historians of the Church of England during the revolutionary period once tended to foreground the ‘suffering’ of loyalist churchmen, concentrating on those ejected from their livings or forced into exile, a wave of important scholarship in the last two decades has painted a very different picture. The work of Judith Maltby, Anthony Milton and Kenneth Fincham and Stephen Taylor in particular has revealed the diverse responses of episcopalian churchmen to the problems posed by disestablishment and regicide.⁷ Some, to be sure, chose to wait patiently for a Stuart restoration, wary of rocking the boat, or were forced to do so by sequestration and ejection. Others were even willing to comply and actively collaborate with the new regime. But many remained doggedly combative even during the darkest and most dangerous moments of the revolution, finding creative ways to signal their ongoing opposition to successive puritan regimes.

These differing responses partly reflected the broad range of positions taken by episcopalians on the question of ecclesiastical reform. It is no longer tenable to regard the king’s supporters as simply the conservative guardians of ‘Anglicanism’ in these decades, assiduously preserving the rites and forms of the pre-war Church of England until they could be reinstituted with the return of Charles II. For one thing, as Anthony Milton has pointed out, what exactly constituted the doctrine and government of the Church had itself been fiercely contested since the Reformation. Moreover, Milton has shown that many episcopalians were much more open to some measure of ecclesiastical reform than was once supposed and did not simply seek to maintain the Church as it had existed prior to 1640. Some also took the opportunity afforded by religious upheaval to experiment with new theological ideas and possibilities, particularly in the 1650s, when the absence of a supreme governor or an episcopal hierarchy rendered authority and orthodoxy harder to locate. The English Revolution was in this respect a time of intellectual innovation and adaptation on all sides, and this includes those who continually cleaved to (some measure of) episcopacy, the prayer book and the royal supremacy.⁸ As Kenneth Fincham and Stephen Taylor argue therefore, episcopalian identity between 1640 and 1660 should be understood ‘not as mere survival, a defensive response to radical change, but rather in terms of processes of formulation and reformulation’.⁹

If historians are increasingly rejecting the notion of a fixed, static episcopalian identity, much the same is true of royalism. Recent years have seen so many valuable publications on royalism produced by both historians and literary scholars that it is thankfully no longer necessary to lament the comparative neglect of the king’s party.¹⁰ Much of this work has emphasised the complex and variegated nature of royalist politics, experience and identity. In the process, it has superseded older paradigms that either portrayed the king’s supporters as a homogenous, monolithic grouping or else constructed simplistic taxonomies that divided them into, for instance, ‘constitutional royalists’ or ‘absolutists’.¹¹ In an especially significant essay, David Scott has suggested that the salient divisions between elite royalists were in fact ‘political and tactical rather than ideological’. They centred on questions such as whether to push for peace or continue war with parliament; which foreign alliances, if any, the king should solicit; and how he could best retain the affection of his subjects once restored to his throne.¹² Crucially for this study, throughout the 1640s and beyond, the clergy were assertive participants in these intra-royalist debates. As Milton argues, they were not ‘mere cheerleaders for an existing royalist position’ but rather ‘people trying to make a pitch for what the royalist position would be, seeking to address, instruct, warn and make demands on their own side’.¹³ Indeed, this assertiveness could occasionally bring them into conflict with lay royalists and even the king himself: recent work has stressed the tensions inherent in the relationship between Stuart royalism and the Church of England during the revolutionary decades, a theme that likewise runs through Jacqueline Rose’s study of the politics of the royal supremacy in Restoration England.¹⁴

But it remains important that, in their focus on the dynamics of elite politics at the royal court, historians do not neglect the questions of how ordinary men and women were persuaded to aid the royalist war effort and how the king’s party engaged with a nascent ‘public sphere’. The studies by Jason McElligott, Lloyd Bowen and Erin Peters, which have examined different aspects of royalist print culture during the revolutionary and early Restoration years, are therefore particularly valuable. By carefully reconstructing the production and circulation of pamphlets, proclamations and newsbooks, these scholars have begun to challenge the longstanding assumption that royalists were uniformly hostile to print and popularity.¹⁵

Preaching in revolutionary England

While none of this ground-breaking recent scholarship has addressed directly the significance of preaching culture to royalists and episcopalians, many of its findings point to the fruitfulness of further research on this question. For instance, it is now clear that significant numbers of royalist clergymen were actively ministering and preaching during the 1640s and 1650s, struggling to make their voices heard amid the clamorous public debate. Furthermore, it has been argued that, ‘in a national Church without an ecclesiastical hierarchy, the parish clergy became even more central figures’.¹⁶ It is surely important therefore to examine more closely what, exactly, these churchmen were saying – and doing – when they mounted the pulpit or put a sermon through the press in these years, and how their words might have been received by their congregations. Likewise, if, in the crucible of civil war, episcopalian royalists were more open to religious adaptation and innovation than has been assumed, how far and in what ways did this extend to their preaching practices?

A study of royalist preaching is aided by a voluminous recent literature on the early modern sermon, which has greatly enhanced our understanding of how preachers operated and were understood by lay audiences. Studies by Mary Morrissey, Peter McCullough, Lori Anne Ferrell and Arnold Hunt – to name just a few – have highlighted the importance of analysing the sermon as an event rather than simply a text: an oral, even theatrical, performance in which the audience as well as the preacher participated.¹⁷ Taking a genuinely interdisciplinary approach, these scholars have stressed the need for sensitivity to the immediate context, audience and location in which a sermon was originally delivered when reconstructing its meaning, and to be alive to discrepancies between sermons as they were preached from the pulpit and as they subsequently appeared in printed form. In doing so, we become more attuned to the sophisticated rhetorical strategies and techniques that enabled preachers, not least those at the royal court, to engage with contemporary political or religious debates. Indeed, as Hunt and Kevin Killeen have both shown, ostensibly anodyne theological or scriptural discussion was often employed to communicate controversial messages in the pulpit while simultaneously maintaining the deniability that might protect a preacher from official censure.¹⁸

Since these recent accounts deal almost exclusively with the decades prior to 1642, however, there is an opportunity to extend their insights to the Civil War context. This lack of coverage is surprising, not least because contemporaries on both sides consistently pointed to the pulpit, as well as the press (on which much more has been written), when it came to explaining how the nation had descended into armed conflict.¹⁹ Preaching, contemporaries realised, had the potential to mobilise support for king or parliament, to engage the public and thereby shape patterns of popular allegiance. Reflecting on the causes of the English Revolution in his Behemoth, for example, Thomas Hobbes singled out presbyterian preachers for particular criticism. ‘Had it not been much better’, he asked in characteristically uncompromising fashion, ‘that those seditious Ministers, which were not perhaps a thousand, had been all killed before they had preached?’²⁰ Parliamentarians and royalists alike charged their opponents with perverting the office of preaching and using the pulpit in new and illegitimate ways, radically altering established homiletic forms, structures and styles. But they were also only too willing exploit the possibilities afforded by the sermon themselves. As a result, the volume of published sermons increased dramatically in the years between 1640 and 1660, part of a wider print ‘explosion’ that saw an unprecedent outpouring of cheap, topical publications from the nation’s presses.²¹ A revolutionary political situation, the collapse of ecclesiastical government, unprecedented developments in news and print culture – all served to accelerate the evolution of early modern preaching, changing, in some cases forever, who was able to preach, what they preached, where and how.

Sermons were not, of course, the only way in which clergy could intervene in the national political situation. Some published other kinds of pamphlets and treatises. Others contributed money directly to the king or parliament. Many will have tried to cajole their parishioners with informal conversations that cannot now be recovered.²² But sermons had particular reach and significance. Until 1689, attendance at a Church of England service was compulsory by law and thus for most of the seventeenth century the entire adult population was, officially at least, expected to hear a sermon on a regular basis. Preachers had traditionally claimed a unique authority as ‘Christ’s ambassadors’ – ‘a special tier inside the greater body of Christendom’ – and their task required not only explicating the words of scripture but applying its doctrines directly to the lives of their hearers.²³ This inevitably meant that, when in the pulpit, clergymen felt justified in pontificating on contemporary political or religious questions, even if audiences sometimes reacted unfavourably to a sermon that strayed too far into the ‘secular’ realm.²⁴

Where Civil War preaching has been discussed, it is the fast-day sermons delivered before the Long Parliament that have elicited by far the most scholarly attention. It is telling that the single chapter devoted to the English Revolution in the recent Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon is concerned with ‘Preaching and Parliament’.²⁵ The incendiary, bloodthirsty discourses of Stephen Marshall and his fellow puritan ministers, inciting MPs to holy war and religious reformation, featured heavily in the twentieth-century works of Michael Walzer, Christopher Hill and Stephen Baskerville.²⁶ In these studies, sermons were ‘source-mined’, to borrow Mary Morrissey’s phrase: invoked for what they could tell us about the character of ‘revolutionary puritanism’, rather than being studied as a phenomenon in their own right. By contrast, in the 1960s both Hugh Trevor-Roper and John F. Wilson produced accounts that placed the fast sermons more precisely in the context of the parliamentary debates and factionalism of the 1640s.²⁷ The focus on these fast-day sermons reflected, and helped to strengthen, the assumption that only those ministers opposed to Charles I were willing to intervene in politics and to stoke the fires of conflict.²⁸ Historians, observes Margaret Griffin, have often ‘written as if they believed that parliamentarians had a premium on religion and piety during the English Civil Wars’.²⁹

That there were sermons – indeed fast-day sermons – being delivered by those close to and loyal to the king has only been acknowledged far more recently.³⁰ Jacqueline Eales, for example, has examined the sermons given in provincial settings by both royalists and parliamentarians in the early 1640s, arguing that ‘preaching helped to break down the reluctance both sides felt to embarking on civil warfare’.³¹ Lloyd Bowen has suggested that Charles I had begun exploiting the parish clergy to generate public support further back still, during the Bishops’ Wars of 1639–40. Elsewhere, Bowen has traced the preaching career of the Laudian Alexander Griffith in Wales during the 1640s and 1650s, providing another example of episcopalian willingness to work with the puritan regimes.³² In his study of the politics of providentialism, meanwhile, Geoffrey Browell has drawn on sermons, along with other kinds of texts, to explore the ways in which providential thinking shaped the decision making of elite royalists during the Civil Wars and their aftermath.³³ Together, this work has demonstrated the potential for sermon literature to deepen understandings of royalist politics and print and to shed new light on how religious ideas informed (and qualified) support for the Stuarts.

Aims and arguments

This book, then, builds on and seeks to develop a vibrant recent literature on preaching, royalism and the Church of England during the English Revolution. By focusing exclusively on the royalist pulpit, it helps to redress a longstanding historiographical imbalance and to achieve a more holistic, dialectical perspective on Civil War preaching. At the same time, there are reasons for studying the phenomenon of royalist preaching in its own right. As we have seen, unlike their parliamentarian counterparts, these clergymen constituted a persecuted and defeated group, forced to contend with censorship, imprisonment and ejection in their attempts to preach and print sermons. Moreover, many had been deeply hostile to the perceived populism of puritan preachers in the decades immediately preceding the Civil War, while some had resented too the sermon-centred piety that had come to predominate in English Protestantism by the end of the sixteenth century. The ways and extent to which they negotiated these constraints and recalibrated their prejudices regarding the pulpit at a time of unprecedented upheaval are, in this respect, of especial interest.

A central argument of the book is that that royalists after 1640 were moved to rethink earlier attitudes to preaching, print and popularity. Seeing the effectiveness with which their adversaries employed the pulpit to further their seditious ends, clergymen resolved not just to mutter disapprovingly but to employ precisely the same tactics. There was in this respect an inherently dialogic dimension to preaching in these years, with royalists learning from, and responding to, parliamentarian preachers – and vice versa. Furthermore, after defeat in the Civil Wars, the king’s supporters found themselves a persecuted minority, opposed to the ruling powers. They therefore increasingly mimicked the homiletic techniques more often associated with early Stuart puritans: offering ecclesiastical counsel to the monarch and challenging royal policy in court sermons; engaging in ‘veiled’ criticism of authority through scriptural parallel and the deft deployment of theological commonplaces; and – in the case of the laity – practising the kinds of sermon ‘gadding’ that had been anathema to early Stuart conformists. All this would ultimately have a lasting impact on the character of the Restoration Church of England.

The book shows therefore that preaching played a critical role for both sides during the English Revolution and not just through the familiar fast-day sermons delivered before the Long Parliament. The pulpit became an indispensable, if deeply contentious, tool in efforts to sustain public support for monarchy and episcopacy, first during the Civil Wars but also in the years following the Regicide, when the establishment of the republican regime threatened to consign both institutions to permanent oblivion. The homiletic conventions and themes around which the early modern sermon had traditionally been structured – scriptural exegesis, casuistic reasoning, providentialist and soteriological discourse – now helped to advance a partisan agenda, as preachers struggled to establish the legitimacy of, and consolidate allegiance to, these causes. Continued adherence to king and Church was presented as a divine imperative, a matter of conscience and salvation, that left no room for backsliding or compromise. The preachers studied in the chapters that follow claimed that their cause was ordained by God and that loyalists would be protected like the Israelites of the Old Testament, provided they remained steadfast in their allegiance and their piety. Sermons therefore called on soldiers, civilians and politicians to sacrifice their lives and estates rather than risk alienating the Almighty and endangering their own salvation through apostasy. This providentialist narrative became ever more central to pulpit discourse as royalist military fortunes began to wane from the mid-1640s.

At the same time, the book resists overstating the mobilising, propagandistic dimensions of these sermons. Royalist preachers often addressed socially, geographically and politically diverse audiences during the 1640s: for instance, we find a minister like William Haywood giving anti-parliamentarian sermons in his London parish church during 1642, but also preaching at the royal court at Newport six years later. Indeed, a sermon initially preached to an elite audience could in its final published form be intended for popular consumption, while the reverse is also true. Far from acting merely as pliant mouthpieces through which an ‘official’ royalist position could be articulated, these preachers were consistently willing to lobby and pressurise senior figures within the king’s party – most notably the king himself – with the aim of bringing royalist strategy into line with their own ecclesiastical priorities. In the process, they projected a distinctly episcopalian interpretation of what royalism was or should be, threatening and admonishing the king from the pulpit when his actions seemed to endanger their vision of an episcopal Church of England. Sermonising was in this respect a way of influencing, and not just amplifying, royal policy. Nor did preachers always speak with one voice: at certain moments they could adopt contrasting positions on questions like ecclesiastical reform or the king’s prerogative.

The book also pays close attention to the processes of publishing sermons throughout, considering the textual legacies of the sermon as well as its transient oral performance. Specifically, it shows how and why preachers chose to enter print in these years, while highlighting the extent to which processes of publication could transform the meaning of a sermon. It is argued that print was another key area in which royalist preachers were forced to recalibrate their pre-war attitudes and habits. Printed sermons had their own unique advantages in the Civil War context, enabling preachers to do certain things that were not possible before the small congregations they addressed physically in the parish church or at the royal court. They also offered a means of dispensing counsel to kings who were intermittently imprisoned, in exile or otherwise impossible to access in person. This analysis therefore contributes to our understanding of the ‘print explosion’ during the English Revolution, while also qualifying the recent scholarly emphasis on the oral dimensions of sermon transmission and reception. It corroborates Jennifer Clement’s contention that ‘studying sermons as printed artifacts adds more to our understanding of the genre than a tight and sometimes rather exclusive focus on performance and on original delivery allows’.³⁴ But equally, in tracing the impact of censorship on royalist preachers, the chapters that follow stress the limitations of printed sermons as historical sources during the Civil Wars and Interregnum.

Sources and structure

While drawing primarily on contemporary printed and manuscript sermons and hearers’ notes, the book employs a range of other primary material – letters, diaries, declarations, treatises, newsbooks and journals – to provide essential context. These latter sources also help us to get beyond the preacher’s words, crucial though they obviously are, and to see how contemporaries – both clerical and lay – thought about what preaching was and the role it was perceived to be playing in the conflict. Most of the sermons cited were printed at some point in the 1640s or 1650s, although sometimes those preached in these decades but not published until after the Restoration are used. While these, of course, have to be treated with some degree of caution, they are nonetheless extremely valuable, not least for their potential to throw light on the (self-)censorship of preachers across the period. Second-hand reports of a preacher’s words, for example as related in parliamentary debates or legal depositions, are frequently employed, though again these require that historians be alert to ulterior motives and agendas.

While this period as a whole saw many more sermons published than in previous decade, the exact number was prone to fluctuate. Particular moments during the 1640s saw a flurry of sermons printed in the space of a few weeks by royalist clergymen, while, at other times, months and even years passed with very few such sermons making it through the press. Similarly, some preachers were much more prolific than others in terms of their printed output. This inconsistency in itself raises interesting questions. Were their particular features of a sermon that made it more or less likely to be published? Were some preachers more enthusiastic about print than others? Why, to take one example, do we see five times as many sermons printed at royalist Oxford between January and August 1644 than in the whole of the previous year?

But the occasional patchiness of the evidential base also poses obvious problems, particularly in necessitating a certain amount of unevenness in terms of both chronological and geographical coverage. Chapter 6, for example, focuses primarily on the preaching career of Anthony Farindon during the 1650s, utilising several sizeable collections of his published sermons. But this immediately raises the issue of how the sermons of this episcopalian divine in London might differ from those delivered by clergy in provincial settings, who were less able – or willing – to enter print. The book therefore tries to be alive to the ways in which the printed record can create biases towards certain types of preacher or sermon, and where possible, uses manuscript sources to mitigate these. However, there is another important methodological reason for homing in on specific individuals or moments when preaching assumed a particularly significant role in royalist politics. Doing so allows for the kind of forensic reconstruction of context that scholars now agree is essential to interpreting early modern sermons – especially where censorship might have dictated the use of ‘veiled speech’. Achieving this kind of ‘thick description’, however, inevitably requires some compromises on chronological breadth.

The book is structured both chronologically and thematically. It begins by examining the ways in which clerical supporters of the king and established Church began (reluctantly) to reconceptualise their approach to sermon-giving in response to the partisan print, adversarial politics and vociferous public debate that increasingly characterised political culture after 1640. The second chapter then covers the years of the First Civil War, looking at how the pulpit was used to generate public support and resources for Charles I’s armies. It argues that the more famous parliamentarian divines like Stephen Marshall were far from alone in employing the language of holy war to mobilise local populations and counteract neutralist impulses. The emphasis in both chapters is on dialogue: the extent to which royalist clergymen responded to and were animated by the partisan preaching of their adversaries.

The next two chapters then shift focus away from mobilisation and public opinion to consider