Laudian and Royalist Polemic in Seventeenth-Century England: The Career and Writings of Peter Heylyn

TLDR: Milton as discussed by the authors presents a full-scale treatment of the career and writings of Peter Heylyn, an ardent royalist and defender of the pre-civil war Church of England who became an outspoken and aggressive controversialist during the 1630s, '40s, and '50s.

Abstract: Laudian and Royalist Polemic in Seventeenth-Century England: The Career and Writings of Peter Heylyn. By Anthony Milton. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012, Pp. xii, 255. £15.99, paper.)Peter Heylyn was an ardent royalist and defender of the pre-civil war Church of England who became an outspoken and aggressive controversialist during the 1630s, '40s, and '50s. Coleridge called him a "bitter Factionary," and others have seen him as a kind of "hired gun" of contemporary political and ecclesiastical parties. Anthony Milton, in this absorbing and illuminating book, the first full-scale treatment of Heylyn's career and writings, presents a different picture. He shows that Heylyn was a gifted and effective polemicist and a significant, though biased, historian. Heylyn was, moreover, an independent-minded writer, sometimes at odds with those who shared his fundamental beliefs. Indeed, he was sometimes at odds with himself, expressing contradictory views in books published in close proximity to one another.Born into "a reasonably prosperous provincial family" (8), Heylyn was educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was a fellow in the 1620s. His controversial instincts were evident early in his career, when he maintained in a disputation at Oxford in 1627 that the church was always visible and was not able to err, thereby suggesting that the Church of England had been the vehicle of orthodox belief. This led to a confrontation with John Prideaux, the Calvinist theologian who was then the university's vice-chancellor. Heylyn soon became acquainted with King Charles I and William Laud, the bishop of London, who became archbishop of Canterbury and primate of the English Church in 1633. Heylyn was appointed royal chaplain in 1629. During the 1630s, when the king ruled without Parliament and Laud pursued a policy against nonconformists and promoting liturgical and architectural changes in the church, Heylyn became one of the chief defenders in print of royal and Laudian policies. The 1640s provided Heylyn opportunities to attack enemies of the king and the struggling established church. He defended episcopacy, edited the royalist newsletter Mercurius Aulicus, and stressed the independence of the church within the national polity. In 1645 Heylyn escaped the royal headquarters at Oxford. If 1637 had been the year of his greatest triumph, then 1645 was surely the year of his greatest defeat: Archbishop Laud was executed, the king faced victorious parliamentary armies, and he himself was forced to seek refuge, bereft of his parsonage and his library.During the 1650s, after Charles I's trial and execution, Heylyn was not, according to Milton, closely associated with the circles of those who "worked to preserve the ideological unity of the [royalist] clergy in the face of the pressures of the Interregnum" (148). …