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

英国短暂的17世纪（1630年至1690年）是由英国教会两种不同观点的冲突所塑造的。大主教威廉·劳德（William Laud）和他的支持者谴责16世纪改革者对英格兰教会的扭曲，这些改革者太急于拒绝中世纪天主教的所有方面。清教徒和他们不墨守成规的后代强烈反对劳德计划，认为它不过是一个回到罗马的中转站。1630年代和1680年代，劳德派经历了两段自大时期，接着是两场宿敌的猛烈攻击：1640年代的内战和1688年的革命。这两个高潮的结果都给教会和整个国家带来了严重的创伤和变化。这将是拟议的研究的目的，以威廉桑克罗夫特的职业生涯为分析工具，将这些深刻的重要的动荡在英国生活中联系起来。1633年，桑克罗夫特作为一名学生来到剑桥，这一年威廉·劳德成为坎特伯雷大主教。1693年，桑克罗夫特在编辑劳德的日记准备出版时去世。在一场革命之后，他被剥夺了大主教的职位，而这场革命对他来说远非“光荣”。在这期间的60年里，他经历了驱逐和流放，直到在复兴的英国国教的神职阶层中迅速崛起。在1678年至1690年出人意外地成为大主教之前，他曾是剑桥大学一所学院（伊曼纽尔）的院长，两座大教堂（约克大教堂和圣保罗大教堂）的院长。除了这个世俗的成功，桑克罗夫特还是一个专注的学者，他积累了一个超过6000册的私人图书馆，这个图书馆至今仍保存在剑桥。尽管这些主张引起了历史的注意，但自1821年以来，桑克罗夫特就没有出版过一部完整的传记。历史学家们掠夺了保存在牛津大学图书馆的大量他的信件档案，但由于信件的数量和复杂性，他们无法对他进行研究。拟议中的研究不能指望全面描述桑克罗夫特的一生。而是关注他在1630到1690年间在宗教政治中的角色。它的形态将由桑克罗夫特职业生涯的三个关键阶段决定：他在1660年代和1670年代为重建英格兰教会所做的贡献；1680年代坎特伯雷大主教的统治地位；最后几年，他在一个没有宣誓的教会中担任暴躁的高级神职人员，这对那些在1688年后已经适应新政权的人来说是一根刺。重要的是，连接他人生各个阶段的线索可以在复辟前找到。1630年代，他成长的主流思想环境是劳德对有序，强大，美丽的英格兰国教会的愿景，它将国王的臣民团结起来，忠诚地服从上帝和他在世上的最高统治者。不幸的出生使桑克罗夫特在1642年英国内战爆发前接受了圣职。结果，他成长到成熟的世界突然发生了天翻地覆的变化，迫使他对混乱和沮丧做出反应。作为1680年代的大主教，桑克罗夫特试图通过第二次劳德内部改革和对异见者的大力迫害来巩固英格兰教会的重建。他的成败在1688年至1689年的革命危机中发挥了至关重要的作用，他对教会的愿景被彻底摧毁。1692年，他痛苦地反思自己四十年来第二次被“逼入荒野”的事实。

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.