‘Where ruine must reforme’?

Abstract

Chapter 4 sets John Denham’s response to the renovation of St Paul’s Cathedral in light of widening religious divisions among English protestants in the 1630s and early 1640s, reading Denham’s Coopers Hill (1642) alongside Denham’s other works from 1641–2, including his play, The Sophy. The chapter establishes that Denham’s ‘anger’, in Coopers Hill, at the monastic dissolutions under Henry VIII is best interpreted in light of Denham’s reaction to the threatened dissolution of cathedrals under reforms proposed by the Long Parliament in 1641. Denham’s anger at the monastic dissolutions has been dubbed Laudian, even ‘anti-Protestant’, but the chapter argues that his reaction is in fact a characteristically protestant response to the excesses of reformation iconoclasm, as first practised under Henry VIII, and, in the early 1640s, under Long Parliament presbyterianism. The chapter roots Denham’s pity for the monasteries within an English reformation tradition—stretching back through Herbert to Spenser—that was at once anti-catholic and anti-iconoclastic, and it shows how Denham’s praise for Laud’s cathedral restorations is derived from his understanding of the Caroline church as the rightful heir of the sobrieties of the Elizabethan religious settlement, as this settlement had been lauded by Spenser, Herbert, and other writers before him. Denham therefore uses ruined abbeys and restored cathedrals to represent two possible futures for the established church, at once celebrating the status quo and demonstrating the ease by which the violence of the early reformation could turn inwards, against the edifice of English protestantism that Laud had laboured to restore.