Laudianism
Laudianism, also called Old High Churchmanship, or Orthodox Anglicanism as they styled themselves when debating the Tractarians,[1] was an early seventeenth-century reform movement within the Church of England that tried to avoid the extremes of Roman Catholicism and Puritanism by building on the work of Richard Hooker, and John Jewel and was promulgated by Archbishop William Laud and his supporters.
[3] The Elizabethan Settlement of 1559, which set the tone for English religious policy until the rise of Laudianism, was theologically a mixture of Lutheranism, some pre-council of Trent Catholic doctrines, and some minor elements from Calvinism.
The 1633 edition of the standard Latin-English Dictionary, dedicated to William Laud, contained for the first time the word Praedestinatiani, who were defined as "a kind of heretic that held fatal predestination of every particular matter person or action, and that all things come to passe, and fell out necessarily; especially touching the salvation and damnation of particular men".
[8] After the Anglican Archbishop William Laud made a statute in 1636 instructing all clergy to wear short hair, many Puritans rebelled to show their contempt for his authority and began to grow their hair even longer their portraits)[9] These conflicts exacerbated the deep polarization within the Church of England, to the extent that Anglicans and Puritans could no longer be united in one church, which ultimaty led to the Great Ejection.
Upon his translation to the bishopric of Durham in 1617, Richard Neile had the communion table transformed into an altar at the east end of the cathedral and supported Laud (then under his patronage) in a similar action at the dioceses of Gloucester.
"[11] In November 1633, by act of Privy Council King Charles I established the precedent that all parochial churches should follow the by then general cathedral practice of placing communion tables altar-wise at the east end of chancels.
Laud was concerned with conformity in the Church and the Puritans who did not follow the services as written in the Liturgy found in the Book of Common Prayer were labeled Nonconformists.
[12] One reason was that bishops held a variety of non-religious roles which impacted all levels of society; they acted as state censors, who were able to ban sermons and writings, while ordinary people could be tried by church courts for crimes including blasphemy, heresy, fornication and other 'sins of the flesh', as well as matrimonial or inheritance disputes.
[14] Their removal temporarily ended censorship, and especially in London led to an explosion in the printing of pamphlets, books and sermons, many advocating radical religious and political ideas, like doing away with Bishops in favor of a Congregationalist or Presbyterian form of Church Polity.
[18] Within eight weeks of the opening of Parliament, the Houses were calling not for the restoration of the Anglican church, but the abolition of the entire ecclesiastical order and its reconstruction in a Puritan mold.
