Bishop Williams among the Puritans, 1621–1640

In 1627 the bishop of Lincoln, John Williams (1582–1652), was accused by a group of his diocesan subordinates of showing favour to Puritans. Williams was, however, no Puritan himself. A court bishop, Williams was fond of liturgical music and comfortable in elaborately decorated churches, and had regularly indulged in the anti-Puritanism fashionable in high government circles in the late 1610s and early 1620s. Thus in 1627, after being told that Williams had turned Puritan, the Lords of the Privy Council supposedly replied that ‘they might believe many things concerning that man, but would never believe that’. This article explores Williams’s decades-long flirtation with Puritanism. It reconstructs Williams’s work as the late Jacobean regime’s most influential theorist of religious politics, and shows how the bishop, after his 1625 fall from favour, turned his ‘politic’ tools to his own account. Using local records from Lincolnshire and Leicestershire, the article explores how and why Williams began to cultivate credit among the godly. Underwriting Williams’s strategy, the article argues, was a conviction that the Laudian reforms associated with Charles I’s Personal Rule (1629–40) were fragile, and that a Puritan reaction was predictable. Williams’s hope was to ride that reaction back into power and influence. Exploiting both little-used and newly discovered sources, this article puts Williams back where he belongs: at the centre of early Stuart religious politics

Conviction · Government (linguistics · Power (physics · Underwriting · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Scottish History and National Identity