Browse Theses

This thesis explores the sermons of royalist and episcopalian clergymen during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum. While contemporaries and historians have long ascribed a central role to parliamentarian preachers in fomenting rebellion, attempts to harness the power of the pulpit for conservative, loyalist purposes have gone largely unstudied. Despite this historiographical neglect, this thesis argues that those churchmen committed to both the king and the pre-war Church of England came to regard sermons as a vital means of responding to and negotiating the radical politico-religious changes with which they were confronted over the course of these two tumultuous decades. Both the pulpit and the printed sermon provided a platform from which different audiences – king, parliament, people – could be appealed to and influenced as changing circumstances dictated. These opportunities became ever more valuable for clergymen who found themselves steadily marginalised, by the king's supporters as well his opponents. Moreover, in their efforts to manipulate popular allegiance and direct the decision making of political elites at critical moments of the crisis, they exploited the traditional authority of preachers to interpret scripture and providence, and to adjudicate in matters of conscience. Although the royalist and episcopalian clergy have sometimes been presented as comparatively passive or moderate in these years, their preaching is here depicted as belligerent, divisive, and polarising, intimately involved with the processes by which violent conflict was driven forward and the attempts of successive regimes to 'heal and settle' undermined. Close attention is also paid throughout the thesis to practices of publication, and to the ways that rhetorical strategies and homiletic conventions evolved in response to the new print, political, and religious culture that emerged from the early 1640s. This thesis therefore enhances our understanding of royalism and episcopalianism; of the early modern sermon and its evolution; and of the interrelation between the religious and the political spheres in seventeenth-century England.