This book has a simple goal: to shed new light on the still shadowy world of the interregnum Church, primarily the established Church in its 1650s incarnation.¹ It does so through a series of focused studies drawing on the contributors’ research that will, we hope, stimulate others to help answer the questions posed in Andrew Foster’s chapter. The established Church of the interregnum presents a unique challenge for historians. The abolition of episcopacy in 1646 triggered the collapse of the entire structure of ecclesiastical administration, supervision and discipline, and the records it had generated in earlier periods were no longer created. Parish registers and churchwardens’ accounts were still kept, if less systematically, and such accounts provide the basis for Rosalind Johnson’s chapter exploring patterns of worship in the south-west. We have the church survey of 1650, the records of the patchy Presbyterian classes, and data on the work of Cromwell’s Triers. But the absence of nationwide ecclesiastical institutions has made it impossible for historians to gain a clear picture of what was happening in the more than 9,000 parishes of England and Wales. To a remarkable degree, parishes were able to shape their own modus operandi, reflecting the tastes of the minister and leading parishioners. Local conflicts might have come to the attention of the central authorities, but most parishes handled their affairs with little outside scrutiny or interference. What is clear, however, is that the interregnum Church was able to contain former and future bishops and an archbishop, rigid Presbyterians, moderate puritans, strict Independents, and a handful of Baptists and Fifth Monarchists.² This was a very broad national Church or, more accurately, one that was flexible and localized.

Parliament’s attempt to establish a Presbyterian structure had limited success outside London and Lancashire.³ Even where classes were established, they operated on a voluntary basis, without power or much cohesion, and the system was plainly in decline as the 1650s advanced. In a national Church without an ecclesiastical hierarchy, the parish clergy became even more central figures, and they accordingly feature prominently in this collection. Control over appointments had undergone a massive change by the end of the 1640s. The patronage exercised by the crown and bishops was swept away, along with the rights of landowners sequestered as royalist malignants. In each case patronage was now transferred to the state, a theme explored in Rebecca Warren’s chapter. It was impossible for the Rump’s Council, or Cromwell as Protector, to give close attention to every vacant living. Cromwell played a very active role, but also relied heavily on recommendations by his chaplains and generally accepted suggestions from local petitioners. The ministers he appointed represented a range of religious positions, and only a minority were Independents. This was therefore a national Church that might satisfy the wishes of the parishioners, or at least the local godly, very well. They could hope to secure a minister to their taste, with little outside interference thereafter. In many parishes, this may well have been the case. Most contemporaries found the Cromwellian regime at least tolerable, in both its ecclesiastical and political incarnations. In many other places, however, the picture was less satisfactory or harmonious.

The clergy of the interregnum Church were a very heterogeneous body, as Maureen Harris and Helen Whittle demonstrate in their chapters on Warwickshire and Sussex. The Civil Wars had brought massive disruption. Ian Green has estimated that almost 3,000 ministers were ejected as ‘scandalous’ or ‘malignant’, mainly in the late 1640s, representing around twenty-eight per cent of benefices across England. Even that huge figure understates the scale of upheaval.⁴ John Walker, the Anglican cleric collecting data half a century later, naturally had no interest in recording puritan ministers ousted by royalist soldiers in the areas under their control, and he overlooked or chose to ignore many of the Presbyterians ejected later. These ministers, having supported parliament during the war, recoiled from the radical shift that followed. The first years of the Commonwealth saw a purge of Presbyterian clergy who had condemned the regicide from the pulpit and refused to take the Engagement, a pledge to live quietly under the new regime. A few dabbled in conspiracy, and one, Christopher Love, was beheaded for treason in 1651.⁵ In Wales, the purge of ‘malignants’ belongs mainly to the years of the Commission for the Propagation of the Gospel in Wales, 1649–53, and historians have confirmed contemporary complaints that it left many parishes bereft. Sarah Ward Clavier’s chapter explores their plight, and the anguish of those ejected.

The pattern of ejections in England varied from county to county. In London almost all livings were sequestered, and in several counties the figure exceeded fifty per cent, while in Lincolnshire it was only fifteen per cent. In areas predominantly royalist and anti-puritan, much depended on the presence of a nearby military garrison, while Trixie Gadd suggests in her chapter that factors related to the landscape and its impact on clerical incomes could also play a part.⁶ The majority of parish ministers nonetheless survived in post, even if, as Maureen Harris shows, many had to fight off attempts to displace them. Those with puritan sympathies would have welcomed at least some of the changes the wars had brought. Traditionalists, far more numerous, accommodated themselves to the new order out of a sense of pastoral duty or to save their families from financial ruin, or both.⁷ As a result, the interregnum Church contained many moderates who would have been at least equally happy to serve within an episcopalian Church, as indeed most were to do after 1660.

One consequence of the large-scale ejections during and after the Civil Wars was to leave many livings vacant, sometimes for many years. A survey of London in 1652 found that forty of the city’s parishes had no settled minister at that point. At Cambridge, two years earlier, only three out of fifteen parishes had a settled minister in post. Cobham, briefly the site of the Digger experiment, had no permanent minister for thirteen years. Several Cornish parishes remained vacant for five or ten years, or even longer.⁸ Another, and indirect, consequence was a high level of clerical turnover. Why did so many parishes find it hard to recruit ministers, and to hold on to those they did recruit?

Much of the answer clearly lies in the balance between supply and demand in these years. The Church needed to replace the hundreds of ejected ministers in addition to the normal wastage through deaths. Demand thus increased, while supply fell. The flow of new entrants to the profession was affected by the disruption the universities suffered during and after the Civil War, including the large-scale purge of Fellows in the parliamentary visitations. Many young men must have viewed the Church as a very insecure career. For some years there was no clear machinery for the approval and ordination of new ministers. A Cromwellian ordinance of 1654 established a national body, which became known as the Triers, for the approbation of ministers. Its members proved energetic, examining and approving some 3,500 candidates over the next few years. Cromwell was proud of its record.⁹ Ordination arrangements were less systematic. Many were carried out by Presbyterian classes, but very many new ministers preferred to be ordained clandestinely by one of the former bishops. Robert Skinner, formerly bishop of Oxford, claimed to have ordained between 400 and 500 over this period. Such activities cannot have escaped the government’s notice, but it chose to turn a blind eye.¹⁰

The shortage of parish clergy also helps explain the pattern of rapid turnover. An educated minister, encountering opposition and divisions, might well respond positively to an invitation to move elsewhere. Some men escaped a divided and acrimonious flock by becoming parish lecturers in London, or state-funded public preachers in a former cathedral such as Hereford or Worcester. In such positions they could fulfil their evangelical calling, freed from intractable pastoral dilemmas. Paradoxically, the shortage of ministers also proved a lifeline for many ejected episcopalian and presbyterian clergy. Several hundred subsequently found another parochial living, albeit usually one of lower value. Anthony Tucker, ejected from a Cornish rectory worth £200 a year, was later appointed to another living, worth only £50. Some of the ejected ministers had been pluralists, and contrived to hold on to one of their livings, usually the poorest.¹¹ Many of the Presbyterian hardliners eventually made their peace with the Protectorate regime, recognizing that Cromwell, for all his crimes, was determined to uphold the national Church and the tithes on which it depended, and shared their commitment to the reformation of manners.

The character of parish life in these years depended, to a large degree, on the relationship between minister and people. An intruded cleric often faced opposition from the ejected minister or his friends, or both. Some ejected ministers refused to give way or vacate the parsonage without a fight, and those who remained living close by became focal points for resistance. Many parishes contained inhabitants of strongly opposing views, on both religion and politics, and an intruded minister might find himself facing a sustained campaign to render his position impossible, not least by withholding tithes and fees. In one extreme case, the combative puritan Richard Culmer found himself struggling for years in a bitter war of attrition. At one point, his enemies seized the church key from the sexton, and locked him out. Culmer had to climb in through a broken window.¹² There were several other instances of radical preachers locked out of their own churches by hostile parish officers. With local society often deeply divided, few ministers could expect an easy ride, whatever their own position. Ministers could also come under fire from radical separatists, and lose parishioners to the Baptists, Quakers or other groups.

Another common feature of the interregnum Church was the dismay of idealistic young ministers at the level of ignorance and apathy they encountered in a rural parish. Richard Baxter’s correspondence is full of letters from disillusioned younger ministers, inspired by him and eager to follow his pastoral methods, but quickly disheartened. Many complained that their parishioners were ignorant and indifferent, and failed to send their children and servants to catechizing. Isolated and frustrated, they soon became restless.¹³ Ralph Josselin, vicar of Earls Colne in Essex, felt a stronger sense of pastoral responsibility towards his flock and remained in his post for over forty years. It is striking, nonetheless, that his diary records the concerns of only a handful of like-minded families in the parish, the rest of the parishioners remaining almost invisible. That reinforces the impression that many puritan ministers gave far more attention to the spiritual needs of the godly few than to those of the majority, a charge that some later admitted.¹⁴ Such an approach risked alienating parishioners, leaving some to drift away or turn to the separatists. Ministers could then find themselves fighting on three fronts simultaneously: against the traditionalists, the worldly and profane, and disruptive radicals, such as Baptists and Quakers. The religious freedom of the 1650s had the effect of creating a fiercely competitive ‘religious marketplace’. That led to the staging of several hundred public disputations, large and small, between champions of rival denominations, with such events swallowing up much of the time and energy of moderate ministers. For some of the auditors, these could be life-changing occasions; for many, they were exciting verbal jousts where they cheered their champions and jeered their adversaries, and for others the effect may have been to leave them confused and perhaps sceptical.¹⁵

Zealous puritan ministers were partly to blame for the troubles they encountered. Some brought wholly unrealistic expectations, while others showed little interest in reaching out beyond the godly to the less responsive majority. Such attitudes became painfully apparent in disputes over access to the sacraments. The Directory for Publique Worship (1645) recommended that communion services should be ‘frequent’, but left open the timing and arrangements.¹⁶ Abraham Pinchbeck, an Essex minister, decided that not one of his parishioners was worthy of admission to the sacrament. The ministers of Acton, Middlesex, similarly rigorous, decided that only two women in the town were sufficiently qualified – one of whom defected to the Quakers.¹⁷ Such a policy was deeply misguided in a national Church, and inevitably bred resentment. At Durham, Joseph Holdsworth was reported to be ‘generally disliked’ by the entire parish.¹⁸ Some independent ministers adopted a semi-separatist position, taking charge of a parish but creating a ‘gathered church’ of true believers within it. Thomas Larkham, who pursued this course at Tavistock, provoked bitter divisions among his congregation.¹⁹ Most parishioners viewed access to communion as a right not a privilege, and resented what they saw as high-handed clericalism. Some responded by withholding tithes or complaining to the authorities, or even brought prosecutions. Few were willing to be examined by their minister on their spiritual fitness and many ministers, perhaps most, excluded only the notoriously reprobate. But the godly might well refuse to communicate alongside those they considered worldly and profane, and a minister who brushed aside their objections would forfeit the trust and support of his natural allies. Ministers thus often found themselves facing fierce criticism whatever position they adopted. Some ducked the issue by not holding communion services at all, and some parishes went for five or even ten years without one.²⁰

Infant baptism proved similarly contentious. The Directory advised that baptisms should be public, at the close of Sunday morning service, but many Presbyterians imposed restrictions, insisting on examining parents they considered ignorant or profane, and refusing to baptize illegitimate children. Independents would baptize only the children of the godly, while a few radicals, such as William Dell, abandoned infant baptism altogether.²¹ Disgruntled parents sometimes looked for a neighbouring clergyman willing to perform the office.²² Access to the sacraments, moreover, was far from the only source of local contention. Another was bell-ringing ‘for Pleasure or Pastime’ on the Sabbath, a custom long opposed by puritans and banned by parliament in 1644. One Dorset minister who tried to suppress the practice received a death threat.²³

The character of regular Sunday services demands further research. Many parishes had been reluctant and slow to abandon the Book of Common Prayer, but there is little evidence that it was still widely used in public services in the 1650s. Despite isolated pockets of defiance, prayer-book services were now generally clandestine, often held in private houses. Rosalind Johnson notes services held in a disused church in Bristol. In many places, ‘prayer-book Protestantism’ had become, in effect, a household religion.²⁴ Many ejected ministers became domestic chaplains to royalist families, and a few followed in the steps of Elizabethan Catholic ‘hedge-priests’ by operating as itinerants, finding temporary shelter with such families. Lionel Gatford, a former royalist army chaplain, travelled around Norfolk, Kent and Middlesex for several years in the 1650s.²⁵ Far more common was for traditionalist ministers to smuggle passages from the prayer book into their parish services. Clement Barksdale was complimented on prayers he had taken from that source, which many of his listeners thought he had composed himself. Though others doubtless recognized the words, memories of the old liturgy were fading, and copies of the prayer book itself grew increasingly scarce. John Pelsant had to rely on a small pocket edition, and while Richard Kidder, a future bishop, was happy to see the old Church restored in 1660, it was another two years before he could secure possession of a prayer book.²⁶

The success of the Directory, intended to replace the prayer book, remains unclear. Only a quarter of parishes appear to have owned a copy, but it went through fifteen editions and most copies may have been bought by the minister rather than the parish. The Directory prescribed only the broad outline of services, and did not provide a liturgical text. Services were to consist of extempore prayers by the minister, readings from scripture, a sung psalm and a sermon. Ministers without the skill to extemporize would compose prayers borrowed from the prayer book or another printed source. Psalms proved contentious, for radicals rejected the use of any set text in worship. Some churches were even partitioned, and at Hull, rival congregations worshipped at the same time, one rejecting psalms, the other singing with enthusiasm. The Directory’s services were heavily clerical, and apart from psalms gave worshippers no scope to participate. Even the Lord’s Prayer, if used at all, was to be spoken by the minister alone.²⁷

A particularly unpopular change was the disappearance of services for marriage and burial. The Directory prohibited any religious ceremony at the burial of the dead, dismissing prayers and rituals as superstitious, and advised that a minister need not even attend. Many families found that deeply unsatisfactory, and some chose to use the forbidden prayer-book ceremony if they could find a minister to conduct it. Marriage underwent still greater transformation, with an act of parliament in 1653 making it now wholly secular. After public notice given by banns or proclamation in the marketplace, the marriage was to be conducted by a justice of the peace, without ceremony. Church marriage became illegal. Many couples doubted the legitimacy of the new procedures, however, and some arranged to be married twice, first by a magistrate to satisfy the law, and then privately by a minister, which alone they viewed as meaningful.²⁸ Other former ceremonies, such as confirmation and the churching of women after childbirth, vanished or, in the case of churching, survived only in clandestine form, in private households. The great festivals of Easter and Christmas were now prohibited, and churches remained locked on Christmas Day. Reformers condemned such festivals as relics of paganism and excuses for profane licence. Attempts to make Christmas simply another working day proved futile, however, and the prohibition of services had the paradoxical effect of turning Christmas into a secular holiday.²⁹

The interregnum also saw a wide-ranging campaign for moral reformation, addressing long-standing puritan concerns over the Sabbath, swearing, sexual promiscuity and drunkenness. Ministers campaigned on all these issues, but preaching was now almost their only weapon; the church courts had gone, and excommunication had lost its impact. Secular magistrates became responsible for driving forward the programme of moral reformation. The reformers enjoyed greatest success in urban contexts, operating through the borough courts and with individual justices also acting out of session. Cromwell hoped that his Major-Generals, appointed in 1655, would galvanize the work of reformation, and some did indeed share his sense of mission. Others had different priorities, and they all struggled to win the co-operation of suspicious local ministers and magistrates. Each had responsibility for a large area, making the overall impact patchy, and the new machinery survived for only a year and a half.³⁰ In Scotland, as Alfred Johnson demonstrates in his chapter, the kirk was able to continue disciplining offenders despite the presence of an English army of occupation.

Any assessment of the interregnum Church must also address the issue of church attendance. From 1650 there was no longer a legal requirement to attend the parish church each Sunday. Everyone was still required, in theory, to attend some place of worship, but there was no machinery of enforcement and no penalty for absentees. Some of the godly broke away to join the Congregationalists, Baptists or Quakers, though they may have numbered no more than five per cent of the population. Ministers complained that the worldly and profane simply stayed at home, and that England was sliding towards heathenism. A Newcastle minister complained that half the population spent the Sabbath drinking or idling. Such jeremiads were exaggerated. The Sabbath was more strictly enforced than ever before, limiting the scope for rival activities. Even on the eve of the Restoration, Samuel Pepys was unable to find an alehouse open in London in service-time. Levels of attendance may well have fallen, especially in the larger urban centres. But in smaller rural communities, informal pressure and old habit may often have proved effective even without any formal machinery of enforcement. In some Northamptonshire parishes, officers reported that there were no absentees at all. In a few rural parishes, churchwardens still felt able to levy fines for non-attendance, though they no longer had legal authority to do so.³¹

Many church buildings had suffered serious damage during the Civil Wars, and the interregnum Church lacked the financial and administrative resources to undertake significant restoration. In some places, the situation deteriorated further. Petitioners from Wells explained in 1656 that the city’s only parish church could not hold the 5,000 inhabitants, and that the cathedral, badly decayed, would soon be unusable. At Stow-on-the-Wold, the church could not be used in wet weather, and services had to be held in the schoolhouse.³² There was very little new church building. One notable exception was at Plymouth, where a new church begun in 1640 was finally completed in 1658. The project had begun with a petition to the king in 1634, and the new interregnum Church and parish became known paradoxically as the Charles.³³ One novel phenomenon, unthinkable before or after the interregnum, was for some parish churches to be shared by separatist congregations for their own worship. The parish clergy generally resisted such arrangements, which often had to be enforced by orders from central government.³⁴

As in all periods, the spiritual lives of ordinary parishioners remain largely hidden from us. The inner lives of the separatists, by contrast, are rather more accessible. Separatists were independent-minded people, almost by definition, and many led spiritually restless lives. The church-book of the Baptist congregation of Fenstanton, Cambridgeshire, offers many instances of members drawn away by Ranters or Quakers, while others questioned every received doctrine. One doubted that the Virgin Mary had ever existed, and rejected the idea that Christ had to die to satisfy God for the sins of mankind. Others defiantly married outside the faith, or drifted back to the parish church. One man asked for permission to attend both parochial and baptist services, striking testimony to the enduring pull of the parish church. John Blowes, a lay preacher, was disciplined in 1658 after missing a day of fasting and prayer to attend a football match, behaviour that was condemned as ‘foolish and wicked’. Blowes refused to acknowledge that he had done anything wrong.³⁵ Not all separatists shared the Quakers’ rejection of worldly pleasures.

Most of the chapters in this volume focus on rural parishes, so it may be helpful to look briefly here at the interregnum Church in the urban context. Leicester, a middle-sized town, and Norwich, a provincial capital, illustrate many of the challenges that faced urban communities, many with numerous small and poorly funded parishes. Leicester’s five parishes had a combined income of only £93 pa.³⁶ The pluralist ministers of St Margaret’s and St Mary’s had been sequestered, and satisfactory replacements proved difficult to find. The new minister at St Mary’s was twice seen drunk in the street in 1649 and a recruit for St Margaret’s, sequestered from a Worcestershire living, faced similar allegations.³⁷ By the early 1650s, all five parishes were vacant, with services provided ad hoc by ministers from the surrounding countryside. The veteran town lecturer, John Angel, who had served for over twenty years, was also forced to step down in 1650 after refusing to take the Engagement.³⁸ Reformation was unlikely to make progress unless the ministry could be placed on a sounder financial foundation. The corporation made genuine progress, merging the five parishes into four, and seeking augmentations from the government to boost their value. It was awarded an augmentation of £200, to be shared equally between St Margaret’s and St Martin’s.³⁹

Norwich faced a far greater challenge. The city had over thirty parishes, reflecting the economic status and religious practices of its medieval past but poorly suited to its seventeenth-century character. Most had no secure income above £10–£12 a year, and in 1647 over half had no settled minister.⁴⁰ Here too the corporation made progress in amalgamating small, poorly funded parishes. It was also energetic in promoting godly reformation, banning Christmas two years before it was abolished by parliament.⁴¹ The city’s magistracy included several fiery spirits such as Thomas Toft, who as sheriff had led zealots into the cathedral in 1643 to destroy monuments of superstition, smashing stained-glass windows and demolishing the altar. Toft became an alderman the following year and was chosen mayor in 1654.⁴²

In both boroughs, however, puritans were deeply divided. At Leicester, the mayor begged the Council of State to appoint a new lecturer, explaining that the corporation was too divided to agree on any candidate.⁴³ An invitation to William Barton to serve St Martin’s in 1656 also proved contentious. Barton, the author of a new version of the psalms, was described as ‘grave and moderate’, but quickly proved otherwise. The mayor complained that he had declared for the ‘Congregational way’, and was planning to bar everyone from the sacrament except those in church-covenant. Thirty-three leading parishioners joined the mayor in pressing for him to leave. They backed down when local MPs rallied to Barton’s defence, urging compromise, but resentment lingered.⁴⁴

Radical ideas had created divisions long before Barton arrived. George Fox, the future Quaker, visited the town in 1648 and joined in a rowdy public debate between Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists and ‘Common-prayer-men’.⁴⁵ The following year, the baptist Samuel Oates was prosecuted under the Blasphemy Ordinance of 1648 for inflammatory preaching. Even more radical ideas gained a foothold. In 1650, a search prompted by government alarm over the Ranter phenomenon turned up scandalous pamphlets by Jacob Bauthumley, a Leicester shoemaker.⁴⁶ The radicals’ activities inspired widespread fear and anger among the townsfolk. When Dr John Harding was invited to preach at St Martin’s in June 1649, there was uproar before he could even begin. Believed mistakenly to be an ignorant tub-preacher, he was dragged from the pulpit by rioters who called for him to be put in the stocks or thrown in the river. The Council of State, appalled, demanded that the offenders be prosecuted at the assizes.⁴⁷ By the later 1650s, however, Leicester’s magistrates had significantly improved clerical provision, and the radical voices had fallen silent. Young Dixie, a moderate puritan, now served St Margaret’s and earned such respect that the corporation tried hard to retain him after the Restoration.⁴⁸ The lecturer’s place had been filled very satisfactorily, and William Barton had mellowed so far that he proved willing to conform in 1660.⁴⁹

At Norwich, by contrast, divisions persisted. The reformers initially had grounds for optimism, with a group of very active puritan ministers, especially the veteran John Carter at St Peter Mancroft, and John Collinges, minister of St Saviour’s from 1646.⁵⁰ On the key issue of Church government, however, the puritans were deeply divided. In June 1646, a group of eight ministers led by Carter urged the corporation to erect a Presbyterian system throughout the city, a plan that was thwarted by an alliance of Independents and anti-puritans. The Presbyterians also felt frustrated at the slow progress of reformation, and in 1647 Carter created uproar by a sermon berating magistrates for their failure to settle religion and curb profanity and vice.⁵¹ Anti-puritan feeling was growing, and helped trigger serious rioting in spring 1648.⁵² The Presbyterian clergy did not abandon their dreams, and enjoyed local success by erecting their model of Church government in St Peter Mancroft. Even there, however, they faced strong opposition, and in 1653 Carter’s enemies forced him out by withdrawing financial support.⁵³ The successor they installed was of a very different hue. John Boatman, once a staunch Presbyterian ejected from Hull for refusing the Engagement, was now moving towards an episcopalian and royalist position. Attracting large congregations, he enraged the Presbyterians by celebrating communion on Christmas Day 1653, and inviting sinners to join in receiving the sacrament.⁵⁴ By 1655, the city’s leading Presbyterian ministers were either dead or marginalized, and the puritan voice was muted. John Collinges, forced out of St Saviour’s, lamented that most of the smaller parishes remained vacant, or were served by clergy hostile or indifferent to reformation, and with inhabitants still ‘seasoned with the old leaven of ignorance and superstition’.⁵⁵ It was Boatman and open ‘malignants’ who now dominated the city’s religious life.⁵⁶

Despite efforts to place the urban ministry on a sounder financial footing, religious divisions proved major obstacles to godly reformation in both Leicester and Norwich. While Leicester seems to have been moving towards accommodation, Norwich experienced continuing divisions and friction.

No simple model of the interregnum Church fits the entire country. The short-lived political regimes of the period all had a provisional flavour, and in the localities each had to work with whoever was willing to serve. Much the same was true of the interregnum Church. There was only a limited pool of committed puritan ministers, many of whom felt little affection for any of the interregnum regimes. While bishops and church courts had been swept away, the interregnum Church still needed the thousands of parish ministers who had remained in post and conformed, to varying degrees, and also had to draw on the services of many who had previously been ejected as scandalous or malignant. The result was a bewildering patchwork of parish and urban communities. In some towns and parishes reformation made significant advances. Puritans pointed proudly to the achievements of Richard Baxter in Kidderminster, Thomas Wilson in Maidstone, and to Rye, Exeter and Coventry. At Sedgehill, Staffordshire, Joseph Eccleshall was able to transform a community of coal- and lead-miners, and a new gallery had to be constructed to cope with the numbers.⁵⁷ In many other places, puritan reformation made little if any progress. Such contrasting outcomes reflected the interplay of several key variables: a community’s experience during the wars, a local tradition of puritan influence, and the presence of a capable puritan minister and/or magistrate, along with a core of influential parishioners to provide support. Puritan reformers made little headway wherever an intruded minister faced determined opposition from supporters of a sequestered predecessor. In parishes with no settled minister, godly reformation was plainly impossible.

In assessing the interregnum, we should also note the things that did not occur. English Catholics must have feared that the puritan triumph would usher in a wave of ferocious persecution. In the event, Catholics fared far better than they could have anticipated. Anti-Catholic paranoia had faded, with no longer any suspicion of popish influence in Whitehall, while fears of a secret army of popish plotters had evaporated in the Civil War. When Thomas Edwards warned in Gangraena (1646) of a rotting disease that threatened to destroy all religion in England, he was referring to sectarianism, not popery. Cromwell respected the rights of the individual conscience, and had no wish to persecute English Catholics living peaceably. In the aftermath of the royalist risings in 1655, Catholics became liable to heavy fines if they refused a new oath of abjuration, but enforcement appears to have been patchy. Within the Catholic community, the Blackloist group explored the possibility of reaching an accommodation with the regime, and the idea of toleration was growing within the regime itself.⁵⁸ Another striking non-event during the 1650s was the absence of any mass defection from the national Church. Levels of attendance may well have fallen, but most people continued to see the parish church as their religious home. Separatism appealed only to a relatively small minority, and old habits were reinforced by the elements of continuity within the interregnum Church.

We can only speculate how the Church might have evolved had the Cromwellian regime survived longer. The triumph of the post-Restoration Anglican model was by no means inevitable. It represented, as Judith Maltby has argued, only one strand within episcopalian thought in the 1650s.⁵⁹ The interregnum Church, for all its numerous shortcomings, was remarkably accommodating in both doctrine and practice, and would probably have evolved further towards a new Protestant via media. It could find room for Arminians like Richard Baxter and John Goodwin, and for anti-paedobaptists like John Tombes and William Dell. It also witnessed significant structural reform through the amalgamation of small urban parishes, the division of huge upland parishes in the north-west, and the augmentations awarded to poorly funded parishes to help attract and retain good ministers. Though it had no structures above the parochial level, except the Triers and Ejectors, the later 1650s saw the rise of voluntary bodies such as Baxter’s Worcestershire Association, where moderates met to discuss issues, and examine and ordain new ministers. Over time, such bodies might have evolved to provide an acceptable ecclesiastical structure serving many of the functions of the old episcopalian hierarchy. The associations also reflected a wider recognition among puritan ministers that they had devoted too much energy to polemics, and not enough to the needs of ordinary parishioners. One prominent puritan minister wondered if it might even be advisable to devise set forms of prayer for parish worship.⁶⁰ The personal journeys of men like Barton at Leicester and Boatman at Norwich are at least suggestive. Had Cromwell accepted the offer of a crown, there might have been a further shift back towards traditional forms. There was obviously no substance to the rumours that Philip Nye and John Owen, two of his favourites, were to become archbishops of Canterbury and York, but they suggest contemporaries’ sense of the direction of travel.⁶¹

The established Church of the interregnum was an odd institution. A paucity of committed puritan ministers, the absence of hierarchical institutions, and Cromwell’s tolerance in the operation of patronage resulted in what has been labelled ‘religious localism’, a situation partly accidental, partly deliberate.⁶² Presbyterians and many episcopalians were willing to serve in it, as we have seen, and recent research has shown that many moderate Congregationalists were also willing to accept state funding, either as lecturers or in parish livings.⁶³ This was not a Church to inspire enthusiasm, but it was one that made accommodation remarkably easy.