Royal policy throughout 1628 had been influenced by Charles's hopes for his third Parliament. The collapse of those hopes, the dissolution of the second session in March 1629 and the decision thereafter to rule without Parliament removed constraints on the court. This final chapter will review the licensing of books and the control of preaching in order to ascertain the thrust of policy during the personal rule.

Licensing policy

Until 1633, Abbot and Laud shared the responsibility for censorship, but most authorizations in that period were the work of Jeffrey, Buckner and Austen, all chaplains to Abbot. An early incident which demonstrates how far the results of licensing policy were from ‘suppressing Calvinism’ is the story of J.A.'s A Historical Narration, told at length, with considerable pride at his own part in it, by William Prynne. According to Prynne the author was John Ailward, ‘not long before a Popish priest’, whose intention was ‘to prove the martyrs and first reformers of the Church to be Arminians, and Arminianism the established doctrine of our Church’. It was, he claimed, ‘the greatest affront and imposture ever offered to or put upon the Church of England … of the first discovery whereof God made him the only instrument’.

In reality, the book was almost entirely a republication of an early Elizabethan tract written to clear the unknown author from accusations of Pelagianism. Prynne claimed that it was the work of John Champneys; that it had been answered by both John Veron and Robert Crowley; and that the republication had been licensed by Laud's chaplain Edward Martin, ‘a professed Arminian’.