Aspects of Piety 05

Latter days It is difficult to explain the abrupt disappearance from public view that follows. Much of Adams’ preaching would have been distasteful to Laud, Bishop of London by 1628, and Archbishop of Canterbury from 1633. He increasingly worked to silence any suspected of Puritan leanings. It may be significant that Adams’ friend and patron, metaphysical poet John Donne (1572-1631), died in 1631. Donne had been Dean of St Paul’s since 1621. His removal may have diminished Adams’ standing.
[Donne, ‘England’s greatest love poet’ and leader of the metaphysical school, is also noted for his religious verse, treatises and sermons. Adams dedicated The Barren Tree, preached at Paul’s Cross, 1623, to Donne. Daniel Doerksen (‘Milton and the Jacobean Church of England’, Early Modern Literary Studies 1.1, 1995) helpfully points out how in the 1620s ‘ … there was no great divide between moderate conformists like John Donne and moderate or even fully conforming puritans.’ He notes that Donne was not only Adams’ friend but had been able to ‘satisfy the benchers at Lincoln’s Inn, where his predecessor and successor as reader in divinity were the moderate puritans Thomas Gataker and John Preston.’ He says ‘There is good evidence to show that … Donne … was not essentially a Laudian, but identified strongly with the rather Calvinist Jacobean Church.’]

At the same time, Adams’ staunch defence of the monarchy and ecclesiastical hierarchy must have counted for something. Perhaps it was his strong Calvinism, his view that matters of ceremony were ‘indifferent’, his fierce criticism of the popish ‘idolatry’ that threatened to creep back in and his popularity, that combined to bring about his disappearance from public view.
For evidence of Adams' Calvinism see Angus, Works 3, pp xxvii, xxviii. In a piece of unwarranted hyperbole, Angus says ‘Adams is as fair a representative of Calvinistic doctrine as Calvin himself.’!

Thinking on the Jacobean church has altered greatly since the 19th Century. It is no longer acceptable to posit the idea that Anglicans and Puritans were distinct and coherent groups, with no middle ground. It is incorrect to suppose that there were no moderate or non-separatist Puritans or that only Puritans were Calvinists and interested in doctrine and preaching. Doerksen says that Milton’s high esteem for Calvin was probably shared by most leaders of the Jacobean church. Anti-popish sentiments abound in Adams. To complaints of excess he answers ‘I can often pass his door and not call in; but if he meets me full in the face and affronts me, for good manners’ sake, … I must change a word with him.’ (Works 1, p 203).
Ironically, he had few friends on the Puritan side and their rise to power in the 1640s would not have helped him either. Phrases such as this could have been seized upon ‘The unicorn – that is, the hypocrite – the foul-breasted, fair-crested, factious Puritan hath but one horn; but therewith he doth no small mischief,’ ‘And there be bawling curs, rural ignorants; that blaspheme all godliness under the name of Puritanism.’ (Works 2, pp 118, 119). He was denounced in a 1647 Puritan tract as ‘a known profane pot-companion, ... and otherwise a loose liver, a temporising ceremony monger, and malignant against the parliament.’ (Cf Baker, Dictionary of Literary Biography)
His loyalty to the king, tolerance of ceremony and support for episcopalian church government would have made him objectionable to many. Unable to escape the political vicissitudes of his times, Adams, may well have been sequestered as were many clergy unsympathetic to the Parliamentarian cause. (Cf Angus, relying on Newcourt’s Repertorium, Works 3, pp ix, xiii). Angus is sceptical and suggests that other factors may have brought the living to an end. By 1642 he was probably no longer Rector of St Benet’s, though probably remaining in the rectory.
Stowell and Angus helpfully speak of Adams as a ‘Doctrinal Puritan’ in order to emphasise that although he was Calvinistic, Anti-papist and a preacher of the Word, he did not make a stand on issues of rites, forms and ceremonies from the church’s Roman past. ( Cf Angus, Works 3, p xiii; Stowell, p xiv). Adams prized unity and often railed against the schismatic tendencies of some in the Puritan party. (He speaks of Anglican efforts to deal with Roman ceremonies by reducing them ‘for their number to paucity, for their nature to purity, for their use to significancy’. ‘Separate we not then from the church’ he says ‘because the church cannot separate from all imperfection’. Works 2, p 156.)