Writing just twenty years after the death of his subject, the early biographer of Peter Heylyn, George Vernon, was distressed to find that Heylyn’s funeral monument in Westminster Abbey had been attacked. ‘His Monument has, since the erection of it, had violence offered it by some rude and irreligious hand’, he recorded.¹ Few monuments in the abbey have been publicly attacked in this way, and it provides an indication that the animosity that Heylyn had generated in his lifetime continued after he was dead. Other critics restrained themselves to words, but were hardly less hostile. Samuel Coleridge could only exclaim,...

Where do Laudians come from? The origins of puritans seem relatively easy to grasp. There is an established typology of the conversion experience, whereby previously ungodly individuals were spiritually reborn, which is replayed in a whole series of contemporary puritan biographies, culminating in Samuel Clarke’s enormous compilations of godly lives.¹ By contrast, there appears to be no simple model of where a committed Laudian should spring from. There is sometimes an assumption that, given the antagonistic relationship between Laudian policies and the predominant religious culture of the age, a future Laudian enthusiast should have been evident in their early years,...

Writing to Sir Gervase Clifton in 1637, one of his correspondents remarked on the outbreak of what he called ‘the civill warres amongst the Clergy, whose pennes are their pikes and so they fight dayly between the Table and the Altar, whose severall battayles are set forth in diverse books’.¹ Contemporaries were struck by the violence and acrimony of the religious pamphlet disputes of the 1630s. These were civil wars that pre-dated those of the laity in the 1640s, and were fought with pens rather than swords, but nevertheless they were exchanges whose content spilled over into the religious debates...

Heylyn’s publications were the most obvious source for contemporaries to go to for an explanation of the rationale and justification of the religious policies of the 1630s. While Laud’s speech at the censure of Burton, Bastwick and Prynne offered a brief self-defence, and Francis White wrote defending the Book of Sports, there were no other apologia of the policies offered by any prominent member of the ecclesiastical establishment, whether bishop or dean. Other minor authors wrote to defend royal policy on the altar (Pocklington, Mede) and the sabbath (Dow, Pocklington, Ironside, Primerose, Sanderson), and against the broader charges of Burton...

Preaching from the pulpit of Westminster Abbey on 13 December 1640, Heylyn could hardly have failed to notice that among the congregation, listening intently to his sermon, was the dean, John Williams, newly released from the Tower and bent on revenge. Three days earlier, when they had met in the Jerusalem Chamber, Williams had given Heylyn ‘a freindly compliment’ that ‘he had me now fast enough’. As Heylyn now preached his sermon in front of his adversary he was suddenly interrupted by Williams, who jumped up, knocked on the pulpit with his staff and exclaimed ‘No more of that point!’...

The execution of the king sent shock waves through the royalist community. But it also posed important questions for the route that royalists should now take. With Charles II an absent and uncrowned monarch, and no prospect of negotiations with the newly created English republic, royalists faced a difficult dilemma as to what their course of action should be. Through its offer of the Engagement the new regime presented royalists with a means of affirming their loyalty to the new regime, while the 1652 Act of Oblivion pardoned all treasons and felonies committed before 1651.¹ Charles II’s attempted alliance with...

The coronation of Charles II in Westminster Abbey – on St George’s Day 1661 – was a splendid occasion that marked not only the restoration of the monarchy, but also the restoration of the Church of England. And in the abbey ceremony itself, presenting the new king with his sceptre before the eyes of the political nation, was the indomitable figure of Peter Heylyn.¹ This in some sense represented the final triumph for Heylyn, and for his understanding of the intimate link that could and should exist between church and state. And yet it was in many ways a mixed triumph. Whatever...

As a writer, Peter Heylyn seems impervious to doubt, ambiguity or change. Never less than emphatic in his views, he was often scathing in his attacks on more neutral or impartial authors. He was the spokesman for a body of ideas which are often perceived as fixed and intolerant – those of Laudianism and hard-line royalism. It is therefore easy to take him at his word – as an unquestioning upholder of what were for him unchanging verities. As the bogeyman of liberal and progressive thought, Heylyn has been depicted as an irredeemable bigot, expounding an extreme but coherent ideology which he...