Altars and Altercation
In the years before the English Civil War, ecclesiastical architecture became a subject of powerful conflict between the rival wings of the Church. Edward Swift, winner of the 2006 Royal Historical Society/History Today Undergraduate Award, looks at the patronage of John Cosin, a leading supporter of Archbishop Laud in County Durham.
The charges in Smart’s sermon were considered so serious that he was immediately called before a church commission headed by Cosin himself. Smart refused to be cowed by his superiors in rank, however, claiming to be bound by duty to the true soul of the Church of England. Smart continued his indictment unrepentant, appealing for a court of the king to hear the real facts of the case.
To some extent, this disagreement bore all the hallmarks of a personal vendetta – Cosin was young and ambitious, and had the support and kudos of the new court of Charles I. But the Cosin v. Smart affair hinted at something far deeper: the intensity of disaffection bubbling beneath the surface of the early seventeenth-century Church – a disaffection that stemmed from the difficulty of accommodating Puritans and the followers of William Laud, future Archbishop of Canterbury (from 1633), under one roof.
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