Caps, Shrouds, Lawn and Tackle: English Bishops and their Dress from the Sixteenth Century to the Restoration

Abstract

The vestiarian controversies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England have attracted an extensive scholarly literature. This literature has tended to show the ways the Church of England could be condemned as inadequately reformed through attacks against its external trappings. Much less has been written about how the targets of attack — the clothing that bishops wore — could in fact be transformed into a means of defending the Church. This paper analyses George Hooper’s 1683 tract The Church of England Free from the Imputation of Popery, within the context of disputation concerning episcopal government. Hooper appreciated that attacks on vesture were part of more penetrating attacks against religious hierarchies. By turns mocking and serious, Hooper compared the Church of England to reformed confessions and the Church of Rome, arguing that far from being popish, the dress of bishops stood out distinctively as Protestant trappings and provided positive examples of how English bishops differed from their Roman counterparts.