A Confusion of Tongues: Britain’s Wars of Reformation, 1625-1642, by Charles W.A. Prior

Abstract

A Confusion of Tongues: Britain's Wars of Reformation, 1625-1642, by Charles W.A. Prior. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012. x, 257 pp. $125.00 US (cloth). At heart Charles Prior's new book seeks to reinsert politics into Britain's wars of religion. While it may have been religion that drove people into armed confrontation, it would be wrong, Prior maintains, to see religious sources of contention as neatly divorced from legal-constitutionalist ones, since the two were deeply entwined. He seeks to demonstrate this point through a detailed examination of the debates over ecclesiology--that is, conceptions of the ritual and governance of the church and the relationship between the church and the realm--that took place during the reign of Charles I prior to the outbreak of civil war in 1642. The major tension centred on the location of sovereignty in the church and who--whether the King alone, the King and bishops, or King in parliament--had the ultimate authority to declare and apply law in the ecclesiastical sphere. Thus, by definition, the religious was also political and the crisis that emerged in the early 1640s was both legal and ecclesiastical. Although disagreements over political ecclesiology were to prove bitterly divisive, they did not produce a straightforward polarization between binary ideological groupings; certainly the struggle was not simply between the Erastians and their clerical opponents. There was a diversity of viewpoints, with writers on all sides seeking to base their positions in concepts of law (though they failed to agree on their definition of law). Moreover, competing positions in the debate over the ritual and governance of church could evolve over time and be recast ideologically in the face of altered circumstances: in short, how one defended episcopacy in 1641, after Archbishop Laud had been dispatched to the Tower, might be different from how one did so during the Laudian ascendancy of the 1630s. Put like this, Prior's argument has much to recommend it, and he documents his case at great length--and with considerable more nuance and subtlety than the above summary conveys--through a careful evaluation of a difficult polemical literature. The book opens with a general overview of the politics of religion from the break with Rome through to James l's reign, and proceeds chronologically with chapters on the debates on ecclesiology in England in the 1630s, Scotland and the Covenants 1636-40, the English Canons of 1640, and Parliament and reform in 1641, before concluding with case studies on the Cheshire champion of episcopacy, Thomas Aston, and the parliamentarian propagandist, Henry Parker. The subject matter is challenging but the topic is of central importance and Prior's work will be essential reading for anyone interested in the early Stuart period. The book's readability, however, is not helped by a lack of clarity of exposition, stylistic quirks (the colloquial style for dates--the 16th of December--drove this reviewer to distraction), and syntactical slips: to cite one instance, Prior notes how Aston availed himself of the idiom of anti-popery and then states This he elided with presbyterianism (pp. …