In July 1661 representatives of the restored bishops and of the PresbyteriansFootnote 1 gathered for a ten-day conference in the lodgings of Gilbert Sheldon, Master of the Savoy Hospital in the Strand and, later, from 1663, archbishop of Canterbury. King Charles ii had commissioned them to reach agreement on revisions to the liturgy and worship of the Church of England. But their conference bore little fruit and the task of revising the Book of Common Prayer fell instead to the Canterbury Convocation, which offered the Presbyterians no meaningful concessions.Footnote 2 The Savoy Conference was a failure.Footnote 3
For this reason it might be suggested that the conference was also an insignificant sideline to discussions going on among players of far more practical importance and political clout. It is true that, as Paul Seaward observes, the restored bishops saw projects like the Savoy Conference only as interim measures ‘and a means of cooling presbyterian feeling’.Footnote 4 But the significance of the Savoy lies in a much longer historical trajectory than those shifts of political fortune from 1660 to 1661. It can be seen as the final instalment in a series of setpiece negotiations between Puritans and the leadership of the Church of England. This trajectory might begin with the 1572 Admonition to parliament and follow through the Hampton Court Conference of 1604 to the Westminster Assembly three decades later. We can discern a continuity of concern, not least with the Book of Common Prayer, and even a continuity of personnel. This is not to equate the Savoy Conference with the Hampton Court Conference, except in that in both cases the failure to fulfil Puritan hopes does not signal a lack of importance. Certainly Presbyterian Nonconformists looked back on the Savoy as a crucial moment of closure. It was the last formal opportunity for Puritan representatives to discuss the shape of the Church with those who oversaw it. Therefore, the Savoy matters, and so does its failure.
If there is one man who was blamed for that failure it is Richard Baxter. Writing in 1662, George Morley (one of Baxter's principal antagonists at the Savoy and the bishop of Worcester who prevented his return to Kidderminster) recalled that at one point the conference was heading towards ‘an amicable and fair compliance, which was wholly frustrated by Mr. Baxters furious eagerness to engage in a Disputation’.Footnote 5 In another contemporary account, Gilbert Burnet identified Baxter and Peter Gunning as the chief representatives of two parties at the Savoy. To Burnet they seemed a very poor choice indeed: they ‘were the most unfit to heal matters, and the fittest to widen them, that could have been found out … Baxter and he spent some days in much logical arguing, to the derision of the town, who thought they were a couple of fencers engaged in disputes, that could never be brought to an end, nor have any good effect’. Baxter was a poor strategist. He tried to gain the ideal ‘without considering what was like to be obtained, or what effect their demanding so much might have in irritating the minds of those [the restored bishops] who were then the superior body in strength and number’.Footnote 6
Generally speaking, historians have also blamed Baxter. E. C. Ratcliffe picks up on Baxter's lack of political instincts when he presented the bishops with a whole liturgy, entire and intact, to replace the one contained in the Book of Common Prayer. In doing so he ‘offered the bishops nothing which they were able to use’, forcing them to promote ‘a conservative revision of the Prayer Book’. ‘While, therefore, he sincerely desired accommodation with the bishops, he was not the most likely figure to bring it about, or promote it.’Footnote 7 Anne Whiteman's assessment is perhaps the most brutal:
It would be difficult to find a sadder example of misapplied zeal than Baxter's determination to strive with the Anglicans almost single-handed in these discussions … A man with a more flexible political sense must have grasped that whatever wider concessions might have been hoped for at an earlier stage in the negotiations, Anglican fortunes had now risen so decisively that there was no longer any question of attaining the Puritan ideal; it was merely a matter of what could be salvaged from the wreck of their hopes … Baxter's burning sincerity and indefatigable spirit, merits though they were, were less useful to the Puritans at this juncture than political suavity and finesse could have been.Footnote 8
This has been the consistent narrative of the Savoy Conference and it carries a great deal of truth. Baxter was utterly ill-suited to the art of politics. By his own admission he had ‘a strong natural inclination to speak of every Subject just as it is, and to call a Spade a Spade … which methinks is part of our speaking truly’;Footnote 9 and, like the proverbial dog with a bone, he very often could not let things go.Footnote 10 He possessed a haughty demeanour, certainly in print, ‘which is so Magisterial, and with that contempt, undervaluing and vilifying those he writes against, or that write against him, and sometimes with such exasperating and provoking language as very ill becomes him that pretends to be a Peace maker’.Footnote 11 That is Morley's assessment but Baxter's friends said much the same thing. John Humphrey cautioned him for being ‘too dogmaticall’ in his style, ‘so violent, eager, sowre, from the very first’.Footnote 12 This was not a man to win others over with easy words. Worse still, to put it crudely, he did not shut up.
Baxter's recollections in his autobiography, the Reliquiae Baxterianae, bear this out. At one point in the Savoy discussions he complained about Morley's constant interruptions. Baxter's contributions were complex affairs in which ‘the end and middle must be joyned to the beginning to make up the sence, and that as the End is first in the intention, but last in execution, so I usually reserved the chief part of what I had to say to the last, to which the beginning was but preparatory’. Such speeches clearly wore out Morley's patience. He protested ‘that I spake so long, and had so many things, that their memories could not retain them all, and should lose the first if they stayed till the last: and that I spake more than any other’. Baxter's response to that was another lengthy explanation with a predictable result: ‘all these words were cast away; and they had seldom Patience to forbear an Interruption’.Footnote 13 On another occasion Baxter was attempting to make a tangential and technical point about whether it was possible for a person to go for a certain amount of time without sinning. Morley interrupted him repeatedly, to the point where Baxter sat down in exasperation and allowed Morley the floor. While he carried on his address Baxter talked more quietly to those within earshot, explaining what he would have said if only he had been given the chance.Footnote 14 The picture of these two oblivious and dogmatic personalities both speaking at the same time in what was, presumably, a modest room to a small audience illustrates the near absurdity and pointlessness of these verbal exchanges – and Baxter was just as much at fault as anyone.
So those who blame him for the failure of the Savoy are not far wrong and I have no wish to challenge their narrative. But it is not the only story to tell. There is also Baxter's narrative that he offered in the Reliquiae Baxterianae, written in 1664–5 but published only after his death, in 1696. What it shows is that there is plenty of blame to go around. It is not that this has been ignored by historians.Footnote 15 For example, for all his criticisms of Baxter, Ratcliffe concedes that even if a compromise settlement had been achieved at the Savoy it would have been ‘stillborn’.Footnote 16 G. N. Clark agrees that Baxter ‘tragically lacked the qualities that were needed now’ but he also saw that ‘[a]gainst the hardened bigotry of the Anglicans he could do nothing’.Footnote 17 Likewise, for Robert Bosher, ‘Baxter's leadership was a grave handicap to the Puritan party’ but he still calls this the Laudian ‘recapture of the establishment’.Footnote 18 For all these recognitions, however, historians have generally not given Baxter's own perspective its due. It is just possible that no meaningful concessions came out of the Savoy Conference not because of Baxter's political infelicity but because the bishops never intended to offer any. Furthermore, all the Presbyterian leadership should share in the culpability, not least because the cause was already lost through tactical errors that they had made exactly one year earlier.
The Savoy Conference
At the beginning the tone set by the Declaration of Breda in April 1660 encouraged hopes of moderation and accommodation. Far from being vindictive, Charles promised to bring all his subjects together and declared ‘a liberty to tender consciences, and that no man shall be disquieted or called in question for differences of opinion in matter of religion which do not disturb the peace of the kingdom’.Footnote 19 He sent George Morley to England to reassure the Presbyterians of his goodwill and moderate intentions. Not long after his restoration the king appointed a number of leading Presbyterians (including Baxter) as his chaplains-in-ordinary. In a meeting with Presbyterian representatives in late June he expressed his determination to bring the two sides together by encouraging them both to meet in the middle, not by allowing one to coerce the other.Footnote 20 On 4 September the Presbyterians received a draft of the King's Declaration on Religious Affairs.Footnote 21 At first Baxter was downcast to read its contents, but the Presbyterians were allowed to propose amendments and when Baxter read its final form a few days later he felt that there was just enough in there for him to work with, and to encourage others to do the same.Footnote 22 At about the same time Baxter, Edmund Calamy and Edward Reynolds received the offer of bishoprics (only Reynolds accepted).
All of these developments reflected the king's intent to accommodate the Presbyterians, just as he did with secular appointments to his Privy Council, but within the space of just a few months the ground had shifted. Large swathes of the country chose not to wait for the formulation of a national policy and set about to recover parish worship according to the Book of Common Prayer within a reconstructed diocesan episcopacy.Footnote 23 The key test of the King's Declaration was whether or not it would be given the force of law. On 28 November 1660 the Convention Parliament voted not to do so, by a majority of 183 to 157. That was a fatal moment that indicated how far events had turned against the interests of the Presbyterians. At that point their defeat was only a matter of time.Footnote 24
Baxter viewed all of this with a jaundiced eye. The Declaration of Breda was only, if one read it closely, a willingness to approve any act that parliament put forward for liberty of tender consciences.Footnote 25 When Baxter met personally with Morley he observed how he spoke of moderation only in the most general terms, not specific terms.Footnote 26 All Baxter had to say about the appointment of Presbyterians as the king's chaplains was that they never received one penny for their services.Footnote 27 He suspected that the king's Declaration was ‘but a temporary meanes to draw us on till we came up to all that the Diocesanes desired’; that it ‘was but for a present use, & that shortly it would be revoked or nullifyed’, as indeed it was.Footnote 28 As far as Baxter could see, the diocesan party could scarcely have believed that they would have such an easy run when the king issued the Declaration of Breda, so they took their time to ‘feel whether the Ground were solid under them, before they proceeded to their Structure’. They made moderate proposals that were only temporary and never binding; they delayed any meaningful action until the power of the Presbyterians had unmistakeably eroded.Footnote 29
At one point in the Reliquiae Baxter describes the expectations of different groups just before the Restoration. If he located himself in any of those groups it was among those who said
you know not the principles or spirit of the Prelates, if you looke for any liberty in publike or in private, to be granted to any that do not conforme. We all looke to be silenced & some or many of us imprisoned or banished. But yet we will do our parts to restore the King, because no forseene ill consequence must hinder us from our duty: And if ignorant men be put into our places, & never so many souls perish by it, the fault is not ours, but theirs that do it.Footnote 30
The fact that he had seen this coming added to Baxter's bitterness and frustration. The disasters that followed the Restoration
were long foreseene by seing men, & they were told & warned of it yeare after yeare: They were told that a house divided against itselfe could not stand, & told that it would bring them to the halter & to shame, & turne a hopefull Reformation into a scorne, & make the land of their nativity a place of calamity & woe; And all this warning signifyed nothing to them.Footnote 31
This is not merely the benefit of hindsight. Writing in The reformed pastor, published in 1656, Baxter recalled the 1630s when England experienced ‘the silencing of most godly, able men, the persecution even of the peaceable’. When he came to examine ‘the late practices of some of our Brethren of the New Prelatical way’ he predicted that the same could happen again: ‘indeed by all this they plainly shew what a condition they would reduce this Nation into again’. They would set their sights on those same able, godly ministers and ‘silence them if they could: I think there is no doubt of that’.Footnote 32 In 1659 he addressed those men again who would have godly ministers ‘to be silenced and cast out. I do not think you will deny this to be your desire, and your purpose, if ever you should have power? And if so, what men are you? and what a case would you bring this nation in?’Footnote 33 That degree of urgency during the 1650s energised Baxter's desire to unite the moderate godly before it was too late. The eventual outcome of the post-1660 negotiations was, to his mind, a restoration waiting to happen. He would have taken no joy in the fact that events fell out in just the way that he feared they would.
Still, he was one of those who ‘will do our parts … because no forseene ill consequence must hinder us from our duty’.Footnote 34 When they had met with the king over the summer of 1660 Baxter and his Presbyterian colleagues had three requests.Footnote 35 First, they proposed that the ‘reduced episcopacy’ put forward by the late James Ussher, archbishop of Armagh, should be the model of episcopacy in the restored Church of England. Ussher's document setting out that ‘Reduction’ had circulated for many years in manuscript before it was printed in 1656 by his chaplain and biographer, Nicholas Bernard.Footnote 36 Ussher's scheme would have reduced the size of each episcopal see and limited the authority of a bishop to a single congregation, acting in concert with his presbyters and with only a presidential role over other churches.Footnote 37 It was not too far from Baxter's view that in the Early Church each congregation had its own bishop who exercised a role in teaching, worshipping and governing within that congregation.Footnote 38 And it made good strategic sense for the ‘Presbyterians’ to lay claim only to Ussher's model since it was not formally Presbyterian; it represented a simple, self-contained appeal to a genuine, if moderately minded, Episcopalian. According to R. Buick Knox, Ussher's ‘Reduction’ did not ‘surrender any vital Anglican position’, nor did it ‘dethrone the episcopate from its central place in the system’.Footnote 39 Baxter maintained that at no point did these ‘Presbyterians’ propose a Presbyterian model of church government,Footnote 40 though Elliot Vernon argues that they went beyond Ussher in ways that do look more Presbyterian.Footnote 41 In addition to Ussher's Reduction they requested that the Book of Common Prayer be revised and that such practices as kneeling to receive communion or making the sign of the cross in baptism should be left to individual consciences, as they had been in the 1559 Book of Common Prayer.Footnote 42
These three requests – church government, liturgy, ceremonies – gave a general shape to subsequent negotiations. In his Declaration the king promised to ‘appoint an equal number of Learned Divines of both Perswasions, to re-view the [Book of Common Prayer], and to make such alterations as shall be thought most necessary; and some additional Forms (in the Scripture phrase, as near as may be) suited unto the nature of the several parts of Worship, and that it be left to the Ministers choice to use one or other at his discretion’.Footnote 43 On 25 March 1661 he published his commission for a meeting of named representatives on each side who would gather at the Savoy within the space of four calendar months ‘to make such reasonable and necessary Alterations, Corrections and Amendments’ to the Book of Common Prayer as necessary to satisfy tender consciences and secure the unity and peace of the Church.Footnote 44
Thus the Savoy Conference was set in motion – slow motion. In Baxter's account the bishops did nothing to bring the conference about, putting all the initiative on the Presbyterians to make their case, doing nothing of their own to contribute to an equal meeting of minds, and letting the clock wind down until the allotted four months nearly ran out altogether.Footnote 45 In an unsatisfactory meeting on 15 April the two sides met to agree on terms. The bishops said that since the Presbyterians were the ones who wanted all the changes they alone should be the ones to propose them.Footnote 46 So over the next few weeks they developed several documents. Baxter created, in the space of just two weeks, an entire liturgy.Footnote 47 His colleagues, somewhat more slowly, drew up a list of exceptions against the current iteration of the Book of Common Prayer; apparently with time on his hands, Baxter crafted his own list of exceptions.Footnote 48 They delivered these papers to the bishops on 4 May, though Henry Ferne (nominated to the see of Chester later that year) said that the bishops did not receive Baxter's liturgy until early July.Footnote 49 The intended set of meetings at the Savoy looked to be turning into merely an exchange of documents. Even then, Baxter doubted that any bishops ever read them except for those who wrote the replies.Footnote 50
In regard to those bishops, Barry Till asserts that it is ‘generally thought that they did not necessarily start out with a negative, uncompromising attitude, but that their position had hardened by mid-June [1661], by which time they tended to become more dismissive’.Footnote 51 But they may have been dismissive much earlier than that if we follow the evidence of James Sharp, the agent of the Scottish Resolutioners who arrived in London on 13 February 1660 to act as a liaison between London and Scotland.Footnote 52 To the dismay of his former patrons, he became archbishop of St Andrews at the end of 1661. He had close links with Baxter's circle, not least with Roger Boyle (Lord Broghill) and John Maitland (the earl of Lauderdale). Lauderdale invited Baxter to come up to London to be ‘the great instrument of union in these Churches';Footnote 53 Sharp and Lauderdale met with Baxter on 13 April 1660, the day after he arrived.Footnote 54 So Baxter would have been well aware of Sharp's perspective, which meshed easily with his earlier fears about how the bishops would carry themselves if they ever returned to power in the Church.
Sharp sent regular reports, largely unnoticed by previous historians, to his Scottish patron, Robert Douglas. They reveal how the political landscape quickly changed in favour of the bishops and how they made effective use of that.Footnote 55 In March 1660 he felt that the ‘sectarian interest’ was on the wane, while what he called moderate episcopacy was on the rise.Footnote 56 He considered this ‘the next step into Episcopall Tyrannie, … [which] will appear very soon afterward, if that ground be once laid’.Footnote 57 On 7 April he reported that the ‘Episcopall party are making applications to the presbyterians for accommodations, but the presbyterians resolve to stick to their principles.’Footnote 58 In hindsight, the Presbyterians should have taken their chance to find a compromise while they retained the upper hand. By 2 June Sharp had given up any hope of a properly Presbyterian settlement, since the strategy of appealing to Ussher's moderate episcopacy had been settled.Footnote 59 Three days later he observed how ‘the Episcopallians dryve so furiously, that all Lovers of religion are awakened to look about them, and to endeavour the stemming of that feared impetuousness of those men’; he was ‘full of feare, that England shall lose this opportunity of settling religion’.Footnote 60 Concerned at ‘the high and furious drivings of the Episcopalians’, Sharp noted their strategy to delay the calling of a synod (some sort of national gathering of church representatives that might have provided for a settlement of religion) in order first to ‘settle their Way’.Footnote 61 All ‘discerning men’ could see which way the wind was blowing: ‘the course of prelacie is here carryed on without any opposition, so that those who were for the moderation thereof apprehend they have lost their game’.Footnote 62 By now the frustrated Presbyterians could do nothing but air their complaints in private. Episcopacy would be ‘settled to the height’ while the bishops ‘take all ways to strengthen themselves’.Footnote 63 In the space of three months their respective positions had reversed: ‘The Presbyterian Ministers are now Busy to get Terms of Moderation from the Episcopalians. There are Discontents and Grumblings, but the Episcopal Men have the Wind of them, and know how to use it.’Footnote 64
Sharp was critical of the tactics employed by the Presbyterians, not least their readiness to put their proposals in writing before the bishops offered any of theirs. In his view this was just another delaying tactic on the part of the bishops, who never had any intention of making concessions of their own, let alone in writing.Footnote 65 By now the friends of the Presbyterians were ‘very solicitous about the managing of this business, apprehending what is now done by Mr Calamy, Reynolds &c.’ could damage their cause by offering up what ‘cannot be retracted; that is, that if they first give in their paper of concessions, those will be layed hold upon, and made use of by the other party as granted, and yet remitt no thing of their way, and so brake all with advantage’.Footnote 66 By 7 July he could see that ‘the presbyterians are like to be ground betwixt two milstones’ (the bishops and that ‘sectarian interest’), a choice of metaphor later employed by Baxter.Footnote 67 More vividly, ‘I fear they have thereby given a knife to cutt their owne throats, and doe find that the Episcopalians prosecute their owne way.’Footnote 68 In Sharp's view the Presbyterians had played their hand in exactly the wrong way, giving valuable ground to the bishops early on and irreparably weakening any chance of an acceptable settlement.
And so, on 15 July 1661, exactly one year later and with only ten days left before the King's Commission expired, the two parties at last began to meet at the Savoy. After some considerable wrangling they decided to select three men from each side to carry on the debate: John Pearson, Peter Gunning and Anthony Sparrow represented the bishops; Baxter, William Bates and Thomas Jacombe represented the Presbyterians. Each side was allowed witnesses in the room but only the bishops chose to do so, which perhaps explains the involvement of George Morley: ‘it fell out that Bishop Morley and I were the busiest Talkers (except Dr. Gunning)’. All this was to no avail. As Baxter has it, ‘we spoke to the Deaf; they had other Ends, and were other Men, and had the Art to suit the means unto their Ends’.Footnote 69 When the Presbyterians reported back to the king they concluded that ‘wee seeme to have laboured in vaine’ and they obliquely criticised the bishops who thought it ‘not meete to yeild to any considerable Alterations to the ends expressed in your Majesties Commission’.Footnote 70
The reader of the Reliquiae will not miss Baxter's measured disdain for the bishops in his portrayal of the Savoy Conference, but what may be his harshest criticism is delivered in oblique fashion. It appears very early on in part ii (so there is as yet no obvious connection with the Conference) in a jeremiad on ‘the carnall, selfish & unsanctifyed (of what party or opinion soever)’. Baxter felt that he encountered such a carnal spirit in all the parties once they were in power, yet the language of his stinging rebuke fits the bishops most of all:
They want that Loue which is the naturall balsome for the Churches wounds: They are every one selfish, & ruled by selfe-intereste … Their designes are carnall, ambitious, coveteous, as worldly felicity is their Idoll & their end: God is not taken for their highest Governour, His lawes must giue place to the desires of their flesh: Their very Religion is but pride & worldlynes, or subject to it. They haue a secret enmity against a holy spirituall life, & therefore against the people that are holy: They loue not them that are serious in their owne religion, & that goe beyond their dead formality: This enmity provoked by selfinterest or reproofe, doth easily make them persecutors of the godly, if they haue but power.
It is hard to see how Baxter could be more scathing. It is also hard to see how, writing in 1665, he did not have the bishops in mind. True, there were ‘some graue, learned, godly Byshops’ in the Diocesan party but that was about it. As for the rest, ‘[t]hese Hypocrites in the Church, do betray its purity & peace, & sell Christs interest & the Gospell, for as small a price, as Judas sold his Lord’.Footnote 71
Such bitterness is entirely understandable when we consider the context in which Baxter wrote. By 1664 and 1665, when he wrote part i and part ii of what became the Reliquiae Baxterianae, he had passed through half a decade of crushing disappointment. That began with the downfall of Richard Cromwell in 1659, in whom he had placed such very high hopes,Footnote 72 and it culminated in the Act of Uniformity – a ‘Noble Revenge, and worthy of the Actors’ – and the subsequent ejection and heartless impoverishment of nearly two thousand ‘godly, able ministers’ whose gifts and sincerity the Church desperately needed.Footnote 73 As part ii of the Reliquiae headed towards its conclusion Baxter began to chronicle the plight of those ministers and their families, and the constraints on those who felt barred by legislation from lending aid.Footnote 74 Part iii would carry on that litany of woe. He saw how few people, if any, proceeded through the church courts on charges of drunkenness or licentiousness, but how many faced prosecution only for seeking to follow God in good conscience.Footnote 75 With droll irony he ticked off all the promises contained in the King's Declaration to demonstrate just how hollow they had proved to be.Footnote 76 So much for ‘Liberty to tender Consciences’.
Apportioning responsibility
The most important and detailed source of evidence for the Savoy Conference is the Reliquiae Baxterianae, in which Baxter blamed the bishops alone for its failure. In characteristic fashion he did not blame himself, nor did he blame his Presbyterian colleagues, but there are grounds for expanding the responsibility in precisely that direction. James Sharp's evidence suggests that the Presbyterian cause was lost not at the Savoy Conference of July 1661 under the leadership of Baxter, but precisely one year earlier under the leadership of Edmund Calamy. The Savoy was simply the bitter fruit of much earlier tactical mistakes. In March 1660 the Presbyterian leadership of Calamy and Simeon Ashe had done precisely what Baxter has been accused of doing – offering up an all-or-nothing Presbyterian settlement when a moderate settlement might have found wider political support.Footnote 77 And then, as they were forced to negotiate with the bishops, they gave away all their concessions, in writing, before the bishops offered theirs. The responsibility for that rests with the senior leadership that seems to have centred on Calamy, Reynolds, Ashe and Baxter. That changed at the Savoy when the negotiations were left in the hands of just three representatives: Baxter, William Bates and Thomas Jacombe. In the end Baxter was left completely exposed.Footnote 78 Calamy and Ashe were nowhere to be seen, and Reynolds had become a bishop. It is not clear why Baxter (with all his evident inadequacies as a politic representative) was given the leading role but if it was obvious that the cause had been given away in the previous year there was nothing left to lose. At least he could be relied upon to give the bishops a run for their money. And if the strategy was to deflect the blame away from the likes of Calamy and on to Baxter it was a very effective one, not least because he was such a willing victim. He was prepared to be the most vocal of the three Presbyterian delegates in order to bring down the ire of the bishops on himself alone: ‘I thought it a Cause that I could comfortably suffer for; and should as willingly be a Martyr for Charity as for Faith.’Footnote 79 He was put in the position of martyr, then, by his own inclinations; by his Presbyterian colleagues, who arguably let him down; and by the bishops.
Indeed, we need to recognise that the Presbyterian leadership was politically on the back foot almost from the beginning. Even in the restored Long Parliament, let alone in the two parliaments that quickly followed, there was no possibility of anything like a Presbyterian religious settlement. Such a project was always bound to fail. The groundswell towards restoration seemed inexorable; it carried the bishops along, and who were they to resist? Sharp's assessment of those bishops bears out Baxter's perspective in the Reliquiae. Their actions in 1660 were consonant with their carriage at the Savoy: they required the Presbyterians to take every initiative; they stalled and delayed while the clock wound down; they were rarely so foolish as to put anything in writing; and they never offered a single meaningful concession. They helped to engineer what was, in the words of Mark Goldie, ‘one long betrayal of Breda’.Footnote 80 To quote Michael Winship, the Restoration religious settlement enacted in the Clarendon Code ‘represented nothing more than a fragile statutory coup accomplished by the “prelatical party” within the Church of England as a result of that party's unprecedented and temporary dominance in the House of Commons’.Footnote 81 So the restored bishops played their hand well, and they played their opponents for fools. To quote Sharp once more, ‘the Episcopal Men have the Wind of them, and know how to use it’.Footnote 82 At the Savoy, to borrow the language of Rodney Stark, the church of piety (in the person of Richard Baxter) came up against the church of power (in the form of the bishops), and lost.Footnote 83 And for that, Baxter is not the only one to blame.
