Explain why the PresbyterianExperiment of the 1640's and 1650's largely failed

The Presbyterian movement began with high hopes, the Ordinances of 1643 & 1644 ordered the removal alter rails, crucifixes, crosses and all images of the trinity, angles and the Virgin Mary.  The use of Fonts, roods, organs and surplices were forbidden and there were fines established for those that drank or attended parties on the Sabbath.  The Presbyterians closed the ecclesiastical courts and banned the Book of Common Prayer along with the 39 Articles but at the centre of this ‘reform’ the debate about Church Government was raging and the question about who in the place of Anglicans had ultimate disciplinary power was never satisfactorily answered.  Divided reformers lead a somewhat divided church. Oliver Cromwell talked freely about ‘God’s people’ (the Presbyterians, independents and Baptists) envisioning a ‘godly nation’, a nation bound together by the Unity of its believers.  He seemed to be under no allusion that the Godly people were in the majority but he rationalised that God now looked directly to the minority to evangelise and reform the rest of the nation. Morrill notes that the essence of Sectarianism was the rejection of a state church and of an educated and professional clergy which was of course a direct challenge to the much favoured ideal of parochial unity prevalent at this time.  I believe that this lack of a centralised coercive power in the weak ecclesiastical framework supported by Cromwell cost the Presbyterians dearly, for                                                            they had little or no authority and this coupled with little advancement in teaching and discipline paved the way for an ignorant and restive nation.

R.Baille a Scottish Presbyterian minister complained that due to the slowness of reform to establish a compulsory Presbyterian Church, English people had been given dangerous liberties thus leading to an abundance of heretical views. Baille tried to establish the culprits of this and he blamed the Anabaptists (or Baptists) a sectarian group who believed in a liberty of conscience and total separation of Church and State.  Their total rejection of a compulsory system, demonstrated by the idea of an Adult baptism, proved threatening to Presbyterians, Independent and Anglicans alike which is Ironic for it was the dispute between these main factions that allowed the Baptists (and others) to flourish with little restriction. Thomas Edwards a Presbyterian lecturer and pamphleteer, active in London in the 1640’s put forward in his Gangraena a ‘hefty catalogue of prurient horror at the supermarket of Zany sects’  present in London by 1644. Although organised dissent was a minority movement its impact far outweighed its size and the strength of some of these sects proved to be a vital factor in the failure of Presbyterianism in England.  The Fifth Monarchists were a group of fundamentalists whose aim was to rule in the name of ‘king Jesus’   Although condemned as Anarchists there were no major uprisings and although their threat was mainly verbal, it was greater than might first appear.  They launched propaganda campaigns and negotiated with other dissatisfied groups to form a wide front of unified opposition. Their threat to the State was a direct threat to the institutions that had both elevated the Presbyterians to the forefront of English Religious matters and maintained their pre-eminence.  However, the sect which perhaps posed the biggest threat to Presbyterianism was the Quakers who had, by 1670, an impressive following of around 40,000 members.  Growing tension helped to intensify dissatisfaction, forcing a more conservative religious settlement, providing a ‘shot in the arm to the reaction which in 1659-60 ended in the restoration of Charles the second’

No matter the strength of any individual sect, together they still constituted only a small proportion of the population.  Records show that during the 40’s and 50’s less than a third of English parishioners lost their ministers through sequestration, continuity seeming to be the norm. ‘The Presbyterians attempt on Anglicanism was less than successful’  By Examination of the Church wardens accounts for this period, which recorded purchases of communion bread and wine, Morrill demonstrates the survival of such banned festivals  as Christmas and Easter.   The English prayer book was by this time part of a way of life to the English and popular attachment to its pages demonstrated in 1641-1642 by a wave of petitioning.  Morrill also notes that possession of the prayer book was wide spread, which did not bring about any recorded prosecutions which perhaps would have been expected for such ownership.

The Loyalty to the Old established church does not seem out of the ordinary.  The ‘anarchy of private conscience’  that the revolution set lose must have made a strong case for a stable and organised Church.  The attacks on tradition in the form of lay preaching, adult baptism and ‘anti-scripturians’ must have despaired those who fought for a ‘moral’ revolution and alarmed those who did not. I conclude that from the very beginning of the Presbyterian experiment it was fighting a loosing battle with both an Anglican church already well established in people’s hearts and with the emergence of so many sects in direct opposition to it.  However, I ascribe the main failure to the fact that these threats were not properly recognised nor countered.  The Presbyterians had a decentralised Church with clerical discretion and local variety, such hierarchy making it all but impossible to create a centralised Presbyterian nation, culminating in a ‘dispirited trek back to Egypt rather than a journey to the promised Land’.