Conclusion

Abstract

This chapter opens with a case study, assessing the impact of a century of protestant reforms on the layout and liturgy of the parish church of All Saints’, Bolton Percy, in the early 1650s—a time when both the poet, Andrew Marvell, and his patron, the former lord general of the parliamentary army, Thomas, third lord Fairfax, were parishioners. The chapter explores how Thomas Fairfax had helped preserve the stained glass and other features of Bolton Percy church, in spite of parliamentary ordinances directing the destruction of church idols and images, including those in windows. Yet Fairfax’s distaste for forms of protestant iconoclasm nevertheless co-existed with his presbyterian beliefs—a conjunction that may seem surprising, were it not for the fact that this study has uncovered a similar ambivalence towards religious violence and ruin creation in other avowedly puritan writers, from Spenser to Marvell. The chapter goes on to explore the Laudian apologist, Peter Heylyn’s identification with the religious conservatism of the Elizabethan church, arguing against the conventions of reformation historiography by suggesting that it was by no means only Laudians who sought to slow the pace of reformation and return the seventeenth-century church to the sobrieties of the Elizabethan settlement. The ambivalence of writers across the early modern period towards forms of reformation violence points rather to an anti-iconoclastic tradition that was indigenous to English protestantism in its formative century—suggesting that Laudian opposition to protestant iconoclasm was less ‘avant-garde’ than reformation historians have hitherto suggested.