War and Peace in the Puritan Tradition

American Society of Church History

War and Peace in the Puritan TraditionAuthor(s): Timothy GeorgeSource: Church History, Vol. 53, No. 4 (Dec., 1984), pp. 492-503Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Society of Church HistoryStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3166119 .

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War and Peace in the Puritan Tradition TIMOTHY GEORGE

Between 1640 and 1660 the English nation experienced a political, social, and religious upheaval which in retrospect can only be called a revolution. So profound was this crisis, epitomized by the public execution of a duly anointed king, that not even the restoration of the Stuart monarchy could reverse the long-term effects of those turbulent decades. Historians long have noted the religious purpose and zeal which moved so many of the king's subjects, egged on by their ministers, to resort to insurrection against their lawful sovereign. For example, Stephen Marshall, parliamentary preacher, spoke to the House of Commons in February 1642 on the impending civil war: "If this work be to avenge God's church against Babylon, he is a blessed man that takes and dashes the little ones against the stone."' In August of the same year William Carter told the Commons that God sometimes com- manded brother to fight against brother: "God hath put into your hands, a work of his, the greatest that hath been on foot for God in these islands for many hundred years ... God hath called you to the purging of the land of those locusts and caterpillers."2 Two years later, the war against the king still unconcluded, Edmund Staunton declared: "There is a fire of civill war kindled in England, still burning in the bowels of it ... but two bloods will

quench it, the blood of Christ and that of his desperate enemies."3 Such statements, while prompted by the revolutionary stirrings of the 1640s, must be set in the larger context of Puritan theories of war and peace. From the 1570s when Puritanism emerged as a distinct party of reform within the Church of England until 1641 when the Long Parliament convened, English Puritans developed a considerable body of literature dealing with the nature, purpose, and limits of warfare. The purpose of this article is to examine in this literature what might be called a Puritan theology, or perhaps better, spirituality of warfare in prerevolutionary England.

In his celebrated article, "Congregationalism and the Puritan Revolution from the Just War to the Crusade," first published in the middle of World War II, Roland Bainton distinguished three main attitudes of Christian

1. Stephen Marshall, Meroz Cursed (London, 1642), p. 10. This sermon was based on Judges 5:23.

2. William Carter, Israels Peace (London, 1642), pp. 23-25. 3. Edmund Staunton, Phineas Zeal in Execution of Judgment, or, a Divine Remedy for

Englands Misery (London, 1645), sig. D4v. This sermon was preached originally to the House of the Lords, 30 October 1644.

Mr. George is associate professor of church history and historical theology in the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky.

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involvement in war: nonparticipation (pacifism), reluctant participation (the just and mournful war), and hearty participation (crusade). Bainton claimed that during the revolution the Puritans, especially the Independents, no longer able to justify their rebellion as a just war, turned to the more incendiary rhetoric of holy war or crusade.4 Bainton's typology has been criticized by James T. Johnson as too rigid to account either for the diversity of English thought on warfare or for the conviction of the Puritan "crusad- ers" that they stood squarely within the just war tradition.5 I believe that Bainton's distinction between crusade and just war is valid, though they need not be regarded as divergent normative positions or "ideal types." Frederick H. Russell has shown how easily distinctions between crusade and just war were glossed over in the Middle Ages: "In the heat of combat and controversy belligerents forsook the more restrained just war for the holy war. At the moment a just war was deemed necessary, it easily became a holy war that pursued the supreme goals of the belligerents."6 The thesis of the present article is that a similar shift in Puritan thought was already well advanced in the prerevolutionary decades of the seventeenth century.

Puritanism, insofar as it was "the Anglo-Saxon branch of a Continental movement" (Knappen), inherited from earlier Protestant reformers an already well-defined concept of Christian warfare.7 The views of Henry Bullinger and John Calvin were among the more popular Reformed perspectives which informed the Puritans. Bullinger's sermon "On War," found in the Second Decade, is an exposition of the commandment, "Thou shalt not kill." Appealing to the Old Testament prototypes Joshua and Judas Maccabeus, Bullinger offered a rousing defense of holy war: "The Lord commandeth that every city ... which departeth from God and the worship of God, should be set on with warriors, and utterly rased, if it revolted not from idolatry betimes."8 In the New Testament, too, Bullinger found support for

4. This article first appeared in the Andover Newton Bulletin 35 (April, 1943): 1-20, and was reprinted in Studies on the Reformation (Boston, 1963), pp. 248-274.

5. Compare his Ideology, Reason, and the Limitation of War: Religious and Secular Concepts, 1200-1700 (Princeton, 1975), esp. pp. 81-146. Johnson treats holy war rationale as a variant of just war theory, not as a distinct category of its own. By pointing to the wide variety of holy war attitudes in seventeenth-century England, he does offer a helpful corrective to the less nuanced studies of Bainton and Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge, Mass., 1965). However, he tends to undervalue the religious component in Puritan holy war thought. For example, he describes the difference between the "Politique" Francis Bacon's advocacy of religious war for reasons of state and Puritan William Gouge's espousal of holy war as "mainly one of tone" (p. 91). Compare the review of Johnson's book by J. J. Murray, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 423 (1976): 164-165.

6. Frederick H. Russell, The Just War in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1975), p. 2. 7. M. M. Knappen, Tudor Puritanism (Chicago, 1939), p. 4. 8. Thomas Harding, ed. The Decades of Henry Bullinger (Cambridge, 1849), p. 377.

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holy war in the Apostle Paul who "did war in Cyprus against Elymas the false prophet" by striking him with blindness.9

Calvin also recognized the legitimacy of holy war, although his endorse- ment is more cautious and less sanguine than that of Bullinger. He notes, for

example, that while God did allow the children of Israel to exterminate the Canaanites, this permission was "far distant from perfection"; it was rather a concession to the "ferocity" of the Jews who "would hardly have suffered the

perfection of equity to be prescribed to them."'? In the Institutes as well Calvin calls for restraint and humanity in war, reminding the magistrates to have pity on "the common nature in the one whose special fault they are punishing."" Thus Bullinger and Calvin with varying degress of emphasis transmitted to the Puritans elements of both just war and holy war theories. There is in fact a noticeable drift in prerevolutionary Puritan thought from

just war to holy war rationale. Puritan discussions of war reveal an awareness both of its nobility and its

degradation, its grandeur and its misere. William Ames declared that war by itself, "nakedly and entirely considered is a kind of evill," albeit a necessary evil.'2 The barbarity of war was recognized fully. Erasmus's Querela pacis was quoted as supporting evidence for the calamities of war. The devastation of the Thirty Years War served as a contemporary reminder of human

suffering wrought by war: "Behold all you that passe by, your mournful sisters Bohemia, and the Palatinate, with their torn hair about their eyes, their vail taken away, their crown fallen, their sanctuaries defaced, their

people slain, their land laid wast, young, old, Priest, and people, exposed to the immane and bloudy cruelty, the beastly filthiness, and Ishmaelitish mockerie of the cruel enemy.... And what is the immediate cause of all this evill? Even bloudy warre, thou art the cause of all."" Still, the Puritans

recognized the necessity of civil coercion and accepted the mainline Protestant

9. Ibid. Johnson records Bullinger's influence on English holy war thought, noting that by order of the Archbishop of Canterbury every minister with a university degree was required to possess a copy of the Decades. Johnson, Ideology, p. 110.

10. John Calvin, Commentaries on the Four Last Books of Moses, trans. Charles W. Bingham, 4 vols. (Grand Rapids, 1950), 3:53.

11. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill (Philadelphia 1960), 4.18.12 Calvin's famous "ephors" passage (4.20.31) is often said to have influenced Puritan resistance theories. Peter Heylyn writing in 1680 claimed that Calvin's "darling doctrine," that is, his allowance of resistance on the part of inferior magistrates, was an important factor in prompting many Puritans to revolt against the king. See A. F. Scott Pearson, Church and State: Political Aspects of Sixteenth Century Puritanism (Cambridge, 1928), p. 77, n. 1. For a critique of this theory, especially Walzer's use of it, see the argument of Quentin Skinner which points to the scholastic origins of resistance theory in early modern Europe, "The Origins of the Calvinist Theory of Revolution" in After the Reformation: Essays in Honor of J. H. Hexter, ed. Barbara C. Malament (Philadelphia, 1980), pp. 309-330.

12. William Ames, Conscience, with the Power and Cases thereof, Divided into Five Books (London, 1643), p. 184.

13. Alexander Leighton, Speculum belli sacri; or the looking-glasse of the holy warre (n.p., 1624), p. 4.

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view of war as expressed in the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of

England: "It is lawfull for Christian men, at the commaundement of the

Magistrate, to weare weapons, and serve in the warres."14 Within this context William Ames among the Puritans offered the most

consistent defense of just war theory. In a book on casuistry, or case-divinity, he presented war as a possible "case of conscience" for the individual Christian. In listing the conditions which are requisite to make a war lawful, Ames deals with both the ius ad bellum, the right to make war, and the ius in bello, the proper mode of fighting in war. Concerning the former he lists three conditions which must be met: (1) a just cause, that is, some "great and heynous injury," which cannot be redressed through peaceful means; (2) a just authority which means for him the supreme civil power; there is no hint of a just war invoked by the authority of a lesser magistrate; (3) a right intention, that is, with a view toward restoring peace and tranquility.15

Calvin's note on moderation in warfare is picked up in Ames's treatment of the ius in bello. Nothing in war must be done contrary to the law of God or "the received Law of Nature."16 Only the guilty party may be damaged lawfully in warfare. Noncombatant immunity must be observed. Neither "children nor ordinarily Women or any other quiet men should be hurt."17 Ames recognized that, of course, legitimate military operations, an assault on a ship or city for example, might result in injury or death for noncombatants. Yet even here "the Warre [should] bee so managed as the innocent may bee as little damnified as possible."'8 Significantly, Ames condemned the Israelite slaughter of the children of Benjamin (Judg. 20) as an act of wanton violence. The same text will emerge in later Puritan writings as a locus classicus for holy war, including especially holy civil war.19

While not abandoning the formal framework of just war theory, Puritan discussions on warfare move markedly in the direction of holy war justification. This trend is exemplified in the treatises of Thomas Adams, Thomas Sutton, Alexander Leighton, Thomas Barnes, and William Gouge, among others.20 All of these writers agree in exalting the calling of soldiers as a worthy vocation. Moreover, they argue that war derives not merely from the sinful condition of humanity (as it had for Ames), but also from the very nature of God. The bellicose nature of God is affirmed in scripture: Jehovah

14. From Article 37, Creeds of Christendom, ed. Philip Schaff, 3 vols. (New York, 1877), 3:513.

15. Ames, Conscience, p. 186. Similar arguments for just war are set forth in John Everard, The Arriereban: A Sermon Preached to the Company of the Military Yard (London, 1618).

16. Ames, Conscience, p. 186. 17. Ibid., p. 190. 18. Ibid., p. 191. 19. Ibid., p. 190. Compare Leighton, Speculum, p. 40; Staunton, Phineas's Zeal, passim. 20. Thomas Adams, The Souldier's Honour (London, 1617); Thomas Sutton, The Good Fight of

Faith (London, 1624); Leighton, Speculum; Thomas Barnes, Vox Belli; or, an alarm to warre (London, 1626); William Gouge, Gods Three Arrowes: Plague, Famine, Sword (London, 1631).

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is a Man of War (Exod. 15:3). God has soldiers in heaven, soldiers on earth, even soldiers in hell that fight under his press.21 In determining the ius ad bellum then, the most important factor is that the soldiers fight on the side of God. The cause not only must be just; it must be holy. It is true that God by his general providence supervenes in all conflicts of war. Yet the Christian soldier must be sure of God's particular providence in the undertaking. "Let us never cease nor give the Lord rest till wee have his familiar presence with us."22 Only then can we know that God himself will be with us, for us, as our captain. If the cause of the conflict is unsure, God sits on the sidelines, as it were, engaging himself on neither side: "But in his peoples wars the cause is otherwise .... Such warres are Gods warres, the battels of the Lord which he can and will prosper."23

God is seen most clearly to be a Man of War in the battles waged by his ancient people the Jews. The Puritans did not hesitate to find a clear analogy to their own situation in the biblical accounts of Jewish exploits: "Our case and Israel's is much alike."24 The Bible, while admittedly not "an Encyclope- dia of all the particulars of every Science," was nonetheless a document of primary importance in determining the holiness of a particular war. "God is an excellent Man of War ... his book the best handbook on war."25 It is of course the Old Testament rather than the New which provides more obvious support for holy war activity. The Puritans were sensitive to the charge that they were making too much out of the Old Testament to the neglect of the New. William Gouge declares, "The Old Testament is as truly divine as the new."26 It contains many things which pertain to all ages of the church to the end of the world. The scarcity of New Testament loci on holy warfare is explained as a matter of biblical balance: because the Old Testament has so much to say about war, it was not needful for the New Testament to repeat these injunctions. Also, the church in the New Testament period had no "outward setled state" as it enjoyed under the ancient kings of Israel or, presumably, under the godly monarchs of Stuart England.27 Still, the traditional Anabaptist arguments against war are considered and answered: in accepting the Roman centurion as a disciple, Jesus approved his vocation;

21. Adams, Honour, p. 9. Compare Henry Ainsworth's paraphrase of Exodus 15:3: "This is my God and for his sake I will an habitation make;/God of my father is this-same, and I will highly-him-preferre./Iehovah is a man of warre: Iehovah, his renowned name." Annota- tions upon Genesis (n.p., 1616), sig. Liv.

22. Leighton, Speculum, p. 48. 23. Ibid., p. 290 (my italics). Compare also p. 305: "It is a great advantage to know our enemies,

but a greater encouragement to know that our enemies are God's enemies." 24. Ibid., p. 110. 25. Ibid., p. 100. 26. Gouge, Arrowes, p. 209. 27. Ibid., p. 210. The Puritan concern to find a New Testament basis for warfare is reflected in

Article 23 of the Westminster Confession of Faith (1647): Christians "may lawfully, now under the New Testament wage war upon just and necessary occasion." Schaff, Creeds of Christendom, 3:652.

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the Sermon on the Mount was addressed to individuals, not public authorities-one may love and kill one's enemy simultaneously (!); the Apocalypse describes many wars waged by the children of God.

Indeed, the movement from just war to holy war in Puritan thought owed much to a biblical hermeneutic which lessened the distance between old and new covenants and, in fact, gave priority to the former in defining a normative

pattern of Christian conduct in civil society. The only notable pacifist to

emerge from among the Puritans prior to the Quakers was John Smyth, the famous Separatist-Baptist, who eventually embraced an Anabaptist, apoliti- cal view of the state. He justified this position by appealing to the example of Christ as revealed in the New Testament. He insisted that a soldier who desired to follow Christ must, quite literally, deny himself as a soldier. He must love his enemies, not kill them. He must in fact "suffer persecution and affliction with Christ, and be slandered, reviled, blasphemed, scourged, buffeted, spit upon, imprisoned, and killed with Christ ... which things he cannot possible doe, and reteyne the revendge of the sword."28 The Quakers would later come to a similar conclusion by elevating the Spirit of the New Testament over the standards of conduct set forth for the people of God in the Old Testament. However, for most Puritans the New Testament, while

containing a precise pattern of ecclesiology, did not address sufficiently the mundane questions of governance and order in civil society. As a document from Puritan New England expressed it: "Whatsoever Ordinance of the Old Testament is not repealed in the New Testament ... is to be counted the revealed will of God in all ages, though it be not particularly and expressly mentioned in the writings of the New Testament.... The Scriptures of the New Testament doe speake little in these cases; onely the Scriptures of the Old Testament doe give direction, and light about them."29

As God had provided a blueprint for holy war in scripture, so he had disposed his ministers to interpret his word in matters of war and peace. According to Alexander Leighton, the minister serves a twofold function in

regard to war. He is first an adviser to the civil authorities: "In war princes need to be hedged in by the Lord's husbandmen, with the pale of the word."30 Leighton, an advocate of divine-right presbyterianism, felt that lack of proper deference to the ministers had brought England to the brink of disaster, in

28. W. T. Whitley, ed. The Works of John Smyth, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1915), 2:748. For Smyth's development from Puritan to Separatist to Anabaptist see Timothy George, "Between Pacifism and Coercion: The English Baptist Doctrine of Religious Toleration," Mennonite Quarterly Review 58(1984): 30-49.

29. An Apologie of the Church of New England (1643), quoted in John F. Wilson, Pulpit in Parliament (Princeton, 1969), p. 143. The hermeneutical presuppositions of the Puritan appeal to the Old Testament are set forth by R. S. Paul, "Social Justice and the Puritan 'Dual Ethic,' " in Intergerini Parietis Septum: Essays Presented to Markus Barth on his Sixty-fifth Birthday, ed. D. Y. Hadidian (Pittsburg, 1981), pp. 251-284.

30. Leighton, Speculum, p. 109.

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contrast to Scotland, "the very paragon of true reformation." where the preacher's voice was heard and heeded. "It is a mad conceit of many in this age," he lamented, "that they know as much as the Minister."31 Beyond offering counsel to the chiefs of state on the advisability of war, the ministers are also to serve in the camps themselves, preaching the word to the troops, exhorting courage on the eve of battle, and leading in prayers of repentence or thanksgiving, depending on the outcome of the conflict. In the wilderness the priests and Levites were quartered around the tabernacle, next to the holy place, and were thus the first to move in the march. They were essential to the

fighting enterprise. An army without a sufficient contingent of godly chaplains is as ill-prepared militarily as if the infantry or cavalry were

lacking. Puritans, of course, were not the only ones who stressed the importance of

military chaplains. Barnaby Rich, a professional soldier writing during Elizabeth's reign, had advocated an active role for ministers in the army. "A Generall must not be without learned Preachers and Ministers of Gods word, which must instruct and teach the Armie...."32 During the revolution the armies of both sides were equipped with chaplains. Indeed, the Articles of War published by King Charles required every regiment to have a chaplain who would read prayers daily and preach every Sunday or holy day.33 However, the Puritan ministers who served with the parliamentary forces

appear to have exerted a greater influence on their troops. A vivid description of their activity comes from John Vicars, who was something of a war

correspondent at the crucial battle of Edgehill. He informs us that during the battle: "The reverend and renowned Master Marshall, Master Ashe, Master Mourton, Masters Obadiah and John Sedgwick, and Master Wilkins, and divers other eminently pious and learned pastors rode up and down the army through the thickest dangers, and in much personal hazard, most faithfully and courageously exhorting, and encouraging the soldiers to fight valiantly and not to fly, but now, if ever, to stand to it and fight for their religion and laws!"34

During the revolution a new genre of literature emerged to assist the Puritan ministers in their work. The Christian Soldier, or a Preparation for Battle as well as The Soldier's Catechism and the Soldier's Pocket Bible were

designed to help the field chaplain inculcate the rudiments of religion into the soldiers under his charge. The Soldier's Catechism, written by a Puritan minister, Robert Ram, goes so far as to sanction the iconoclasm for which Cromwell's forces were to become famous. While warning that nothing should be done in a tumultuous manner, it nonetheless declares that since

31. Ibid., p. 120, 109. 32. Barnabe Rich, A Path- Way to Military Practise (London, 1587), sig. Elr. 33. Compare C. H. Firth, Cromwell's Army (London, 1961; original ed., 1902), p. 311. 34. Ibid., p. 313.

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"God hath put the sword of Reformation into the soldiers' hand, it [is] not amiss that they should cancel and demolish those monuments of superstition and idolatry, especially seeing the Magistrate and the Minister that should have done it formerly neglected it."35 Puritan divines may have been well pleased when their soldiers smashed images and upturned altars in the parish churches, but they hardly can have rejoiced when other soldiers, moved by an equally fervent religious zeal, carried matters much further: when, for example, at Yaxley in Huntingdonshire, in order to stop an infant baptism, a troop of parliamentary soldiers barred the way to the church and then (according to the report sent to Thomas Edwards) entered the sanctuary, "pissed in the font, and went to a gentleman's stable in the town and took out a horse, and brought it into the church and there baptized it."36 Such tumultuous iconoclasm must have shocked Presbyterians and Independents alike. It represented the loss of ministerial control within the army and presaged the onslaught of even more drastic actions. In another sense, however, it was but the logical outworking of the "root and branch" theory of holy war advocated by the ministers themselves.

An essential aspect of the theory focussed on the personal sanctity of the soldier himself. Holy war demanded holy warriors. Or, as Leighton put it, "the Lord bids us to sanctify a war. By which phrase hee wills, that all that will war for him shoude be holy."37 The soldier should excel in true piety and not merely feign religious sentiments, as Machiavelli had suggested. "It is a shame for a Christian to play the Matchivilian."38

The Puritans recognized, of course, that not everyone enlisted for armed service would be a duly converted Christian. Thomas Barnes recommended military service precisely as an inducement to conversion. When is the danger of death and daily fear more stirred up in a wicked man than "when he is amongst the Pikes"?39 For this reason Barnes urged those charged with the office of pressing to enlist those "lewd livers, loytering fellows, stragling vagrants which doe swarme amongst us." He considered it far better that they be stationed in garrisons or fighting for a holy cause than "ranging our streets, haunting our tavernes, tipling in our tap-houses, fidling in faires, jetting on stages, and lying like burthens upon the shoulders of our State."40 In this sense Puritan military service was both a means of evangelism and a

35. Ibid., p. 328. 36. Thomas Edwards, Gangraena (London, 1644), pt. 3, p. 7. Quoted in Michael Watts, The

Dissenters (Oxford, 1978), p. 114. Richard Baxter, itinerant chaplain with the New Model Army, strongly disapproved of such excesses and blamed much of them on Cromwell who, he alleged, "by degrees had headed the greatest part of the Army with Anabaptists, Antinomians, Seekers, or Separatists at best." Matthew Sylvester, ed. Reliquiae Baxteria- nae, (London, 1696), 1.1.57.

37. Leighton, Speculum, p. 27. 38. Ibid., p. 10. 39. Barnes, Vox Belli, p. 15. 40. Ibid.

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form of social control. It provided an outlet for the disturbingly large number of "masterless men" whose vagrancy and lack of precise status within the social hierarchy posed a serious threat to the well-ordered, disciplined society envisioned by the Puritans.

The Puritan spirituality of warfare presupposed a direct link between the Christian life as a spiritual conflict and earthly soldiering. "We are all Soldiers, as wee are Christians," wrote Adams.41 Thomas Sutton is even more

explicit: "Everie good member of Christ must turne souldier, and become a defender of the faith."42 Every soldier must be a thorough student of scripture and a fervent warrior of prayer: "He that would overcome his enemies on earth must first prevaile with his best friend in heaven."43 However, let no one suppose that prayer alone will suffice. Always bent toward the practical, the Puritan fought with one eye tilted toward heaven, and the other eye firmly fixed on his earthly enemy: "Shall we beat the aire with our voices, and not their bosomes with our swords? only knock our own breasts, and not knock their heads?"44 Here we see the genius of the Puritan ideology: it combined the ancient monastic ideal of the militia Christi, a disciplined company of

spiritual warriors fighting against the invisible powers of darkness, with the

crusading ideal of the godly knight who wields the literal sword in a holy cause. To be sure, the transformation of the meaning of the militia Christi

already had been effected in the Middle Ages during the Crusades, especially with the monastic orders of crusading knights who fought, according to Bernard of Clairvaux, a double war: "first, the war of flesh and blood against enemies; second, the war of the spirit against Satan and vice."45 This

principle reappeared in the Puritan saints whose intense this-worldly asceticism and adherence to the priesthood of all believers led them to extend the ideal of double warfare to the whole community of faith: "Whoever is a

professed Christian he is a professed soldier, or if no soldier no Christian."46 The Puritan ascetic ideal also is transferred to the organization and

discipline of the military units. The camps should be pitched at some distance from the cities, warned one writer, that the soldiers be not enticed by the

41. Adams, Honour, Epistle Dedicatory. 42. Sutton, Good Fight, p. 27. 43. Adams, Honour, Epistle Dedicatory. 44. Ibid. Compare Leighton, Speculum, p. 210: "Men must not only pray, but they must also

fight against evil; they must not only speak, but they must also strike: Strokes and words will doe well together."

45. Quoted in Walzer, Revolution, p. 270. Compare also E. O. Blake, "The Formation of the 'Crusade Idea,' " Journal of Ecclesiastical History 21 (1970):27-29. Thomas Aquinas held that members of religious orders could engage in sacred, purposeful violence on the authority of the prince or the church: "Religious aliquae instituuntur ad militandum, non quidem ut militent auctoritate propria, sed auctoritate principum vel Ecclesiae" (Some religious orders are established for the purpose of waging war, not indeed on their own authority, but on that of the prince or the church.) Summa Theologiae 2/2 q. 188, a.4 (Madrid, 1963), 3:1127.

46. John Everard, The Arriereban (London, 1618), pp. 17-18, quoted in Walzer, Revolution, p. 279.

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manifold temptations therein. In the evening hours the soldiers should read the Bible, not the "prophane pamphlets, plaguie play-books or froathy complements of idle love, as soldiers now read."47 A Christian army must also be careful in fixing its colors and standards that no idol or badge of supersitition be displayed. How can God be expected to rout the wicked enemy when his own troops march under heathen banners? "Can God and idols joyn together?"48 Only the images of lofty animals such as the eagle should be emblazoned on the banners of a godly army, not the images of beasts associated with the strategems of Satan, the dragon, the frog, the serpent.49 Likewise, the Christian soldier is free to disregard the traditional strictures against fighting on certain holy days. He is free to fight on any day (including the sabbath if military necessity dictates it!) and at all seasons of the year. Here we have the removal of the last vestige of the medieval Truce of God-intended to limit the time for military operations-in the interest of an overriding religious purpose.

Much attention is given in this literature to the fate of the Christian soldier who dies fighting in battle. Since Protestant eschatology had removed the threat of purgatory, and the doctrine of justification by faith alone made moot the earning of special merits toward salvation, the Puritan theologians could hardly compete with their Catholic counterparts in commending the benefits of military death. Still, a valiant effort was made; the death of the Puritan soldier was seen as a form of martyrdom. As William Gouge put it: "There is much comfort in breathing out our last breath in Gods work. It is a kind of Martyrdome. For a souldier to die in the field in a good cause, it is as for a Preacher to die in a pulpit.... His soul shal be more than a conquerour, triumphing in heaven over all sorts of enemies."50

The Puritan rhetoric of holy war was developed during a period of great religious strife in Europe. Whenever the Puritans looked on the continent- in France, the Netherlands, the Palatinate, Sweden-their comrades in the faith were locked in a bloody conflict with the forces of the Romish Antichrist. They persistently appealed to their Stuart monarchs to intervene in the Thirty Years War on behalf of the beleagured Protestants. Alexander Leighton dedicated his Speculum belli sacri to Prince Charles, calling him (one year before he assumed the throne) "the Hope of Great Britain," and referring to him as a latter-day Charlemagne in reverse: "Charles the great made Rome great, And may not a greater Charles raze Romes greatnes?"51 Neither James nor Charles, however, proved eager to enter the lists against the Catholics on the continent so long as England itself was not immediately

47. Ibid., p. 101. 48. Ibid., p. 58. 49. Ibid. 50. Gouge, Arrowes, p. 217. 51. Leighton, Speculum, B3v.

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threatened. Doubtless this reluctance contributed to the growing sense of alienation and frustration felt by many Puritans during the 1630s.52

Puritan holy war rhetoric initially was directed against Catholics abroad, but with slight adjustment it also could be turned against Laudians at home. The possibility of a holy civil war, "blood against blood, self against self," was mentioned with dread by Englishmen of this time. Shakespeare has one of the kings in Henry the Sixth say:

I always thought It was both impious and unnatural That such immanity and bloody strife Should reign among professors of one faith.53

Already in 1631 William Gouge was answering the objection that war should not be waged against fellow Christians, but only against infidels, idolators, and open enemies of the church. He has a twofold response to this objection. First, there are many who outwardly profess the Christian faith but are in

reality as great enemies of God as plain infidels. The papists are a prime example of this category. More significantly for the English context, he reasoned that the cause of war was more important than the persons against whom it was waged. He goes so far as to say that "if Protestants should give just occasion for warre, warre might justly be undertaken against them."54 The biblical precedent for holy civil war was the Israelite slaughter of the tribe of Benjamin. Even though they were a part of the covenant community, they had to be destroyed since they had become "God's enemies and enemies of the commonwealth."55 As the Laudian campaign for enforced conformity intensified, the Puritan mood turned apocalyptic. Although God had for a time forsaken his inheritance in England, even though Babylonians were now

roaring and displaying their banners in the midst of the sanctuary, "yet God will return, and set his feet upon the Dragon, and require, with vengeance, the bloud of his Saints."56

It must be reiterated that the emergence of the Puritan doctrine of holy war in prerevolutionary England was developed in the context of just war theory. None of our writers was much concerned with the niceties of resistance

theory, already formulated by earlier Puritans such as Knox and Goodman and later to be taken off the shelf by the parliamentarians of the 1640s. Nor is

52. Compare Leighton's lament, ibid., p. 8: "Shall the Saints be slaine, and the soules under the altar cry still for revenge, and Christian Kings and Princes keepe their hands in their bosome?"

53. King Henry the Sixth, First Part, act 5, sc. 1. Quoted in George Clark, War and Society in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1958), p. 18.

54. Gouge, Arrowes, p. 213. 55. Leighton, Speculum, p. 40. 56. Ibid., p. 58. Compare the excellent study of Paul Christianson, Reformers and Babylon:

English Apocalyptic Visions from the Reformation to the Eve of the Civil War (Toronto, 1978), esp. pp. 132-178.

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the note of moderation in warfare, the ius in bello, completely ignored. Although the saints in arms may be called to drastic actions for which they are

equipped with "a special habit" of cruelty, they are not to engage in wanton violence indiscriminately or to rejoice in the spilling of innocent blood. Still, there is a noticeable drift in Puritan thought from justifiable war, mitigated by human compassion and waged under strictly prescribed conditions, to justified war, sanctioned by the holiness of its cause and the thorough elimination of its evil opposition. The move from just war to the crusade did not arise merely from the exigencies of the Civil War; it was prepared for already in Puritan sermons and treatises of the preceding generation.



War and Peace in the Puritan Tradition

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