Into the Wilderness: William Sancroft and the Laudian Church of England, 1633-93

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England's short seventeenth century (c.1630-c.1690) was given shape by the conflict between two different visions of the Church of England. Archbishop William Laud and his supporters decried what they saw as the deformation of the Church of England by those sixteenth-century reformers who had been too eager to reject all aspects of the medieval Catholic past. Puritans and their nonconformist descendants vehemently opposed the Laudian programme as representing nothing less than a staging-post back to Rome. The Laudians experienced two great periods of hubris in the 1630s and 1680s, followed by two fierce assaults by Nemesis: the civil wars of the 1640s and the revolution of 1688. The outcome of both of the climacterics was severe trauma and change for the established church and the nation at large. It will be the purpose of the proposed study to connect these profoundly important upheavals in English life by using the career of William Sancroft as an analytical tool. Sancroft went up to Cambridge as a student in 1633, the year that William Laud became archbishop of Canterbury, and died in 1693 whilst editing Laud's diary for publication. This exercise had become a form of consolation after being deprived of the archbishopric in the wake of a revolution that was for him very far from 'glorious'. During the intervening sixty years he had endured ejection and exile before rising rapidly through the clerical hierarchy of the restored Church of England. He was master of a Cambridge college (Emmanuel), and dean of two cathedrals (York and St Paul's) before unexpectedly rising to be metropolitan between 1678 and 1690. Besides this worldly success, Sancroft was also a dedicated scholar, amassing a private library of more than 6000 volumes which is still extant in Cambridge. For all these claims to historical attention, there has been no full-length published biography of Sancroft since 1821. Historians have plundered the vast archive of his correspondence that survives in the Bodleian Library, but been deterred from a study of the man by its bulk and complexity. The proposed study cannot hope to be a comprehensive account of Sancroft's life. Instead it will focus on his role in the politics of religion between the 1630s and 1690s. Its shape will be determined by the three key phases of Sancroft's career: his contribution to efforts to rebuild the Church of England in the 1660s and 1670s; his dominant position as archbishop of Canterbury in the 1680s; and his frustrated final years as the irascible senior cleric within a non-juring church that proved a persistent thorn in the flesh of those who had accommodated themselves to the new regime after 1688. Crucially, though, the thread that connects these phases of his life can be found in his life before the Restoration. The dominant intellectual milieu of the 1630s within which he grew up was Laud's vision of an orderly, powerful, and beautiful Church of England that would unite the king's subjects in dutiful obedience to God and his supreme governor on earth. The misfortunes of birth ensured that Sancroft took holy orders just before the start of the English civil wars in 1642. As a result, the world in which he had grown to maturity was abruptly turned upside down, forcing him to react to disestablishment and dejection. As metropolitan in the 1680s Sancroft would attempt to consolidate the re-establishment of the Church of England through a second Laudian programme of internal reform and vigorous persecution of dissent. The extent of both his success and failure would play a vital role in the revolutionary crisis of 1688/9 that saw his vision of the church swept away. In 1692 he reflected bitterly on the fact that he had been driven 'into the wilderness' for the second time in forty years.