Charles II: Conformity, Controversy & St Clements

The Church under Charles II: conformity, controversy and St Clement’s Sandwich

The inaugural John Drury Lecture in honour of the mayor of Sandwich slain in the great attack of 1457.

Professor Fincham explores the challenges facing Charles II, the bishops and Anglican loyalists to settle religion after the upheavals of the Puritan Revolution of the 1640s and 1650s. An intolerant religious settlement in the early 1660s did not confer peace and stability, with a sizeable body of protestant dissenters rejecting the newly modelled Church of England. Flashpoints were ceremony and the railed altar, and disputes in St Clement’s Sandwich in the early 1680s illustrate these tensions within church and society.

Kenneth Fincham

Kenneth Fincham is Emeritus Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Kent. He has written extensively on English religion and politics in the period 1547-1700, including Prelate as Pastor: the Episcopate of James I (1990); has co-authored, with Nicholas Tyacke, Altar Restored: the Changing Face of English Religious Worship (2007); and has edited three volumes for the Church of England Record Society, most recently The Further Correspondence of William Laud (2018). He is currently worked on the Hampton Court conference of 1604, The Return of the Church of England in 1660-3 and the creation of Anglicanism c.1620-c.1750. He is a co-Director of the Clergy of the Church of England database project; and is a former Vice-President of the Royal Historical Society. He is also Chair of the Canterbury branch of the Historical Association since 1993.