'Until Such Time as He Be Confirmed': The Laudians and Confirmation in the Seventeenth-Century Church of England

Until 1662, the rubrics of the Book of Common Prayer stipulated that one must be confirmed in order to receive communion in the Church of England. In effect, this requirement created a two-tiered membership structure, separating the merely baptized members from those who were both baptized and confirmed. In doing so, it elevated the confirmation ritual to a place of great importance - in theological terms, confirmation was not a sacrament, but it nevertheless distinguished full members from junior members within the church. Yet despite this formal emphasis on the ritual of confirmation, the church actually applied a very different test for full membership. The test used was word-centred, or logocentric, based more on didactic knowledge than on the completion of the ritual of confirmation - at least until the heyday of the ceremonialism, rubrical exactness, and anti-Calvinist theology associated with William Laud. In the 1630s and 1640s, Laudian bishops undertook to enforce the prayer book rubric that demanded confirmation. They did not succeed, however, in making confirmation a normative part of each Christian's experience, and the enforcement effort did not last, ending with the civil war and failing to be revived in the Restoration. This effort at enforcement is a telling example of several aspects of the Laudian programme in general: the Laudian tendency to enforce the smallest letter of the rubric; the ways in which the Church of England had actually moved far beyond its prayer book into a theology and piety based in the Word, not in rite; and the limited impact of Laudian efforts on the church.1Ostensibly, the Church of England balanced word- and rite-centered standards for adult membership in the church. The confirmation rite in the 1549 Book of Common Prayer included a final rubric that insisted that confirmation was the gate to the sacrament of the altar: 'And there shall none be admitted to the Holy Communion, until such time as he be confirmed.'2 The ceremony of confirmation was the thing that distinguished full from partial members: only those who had completed the rite would be eligible for full participation in the life of the church. In the 1552 revision, the final rubric was altered, adding ability to say the catechism as a requirement of would-be communicants.3 This change placed catechizing alongside the completion of the ritual of confirmation as twin prerequisites for full, participatory membership in the church. Still, the protestant Church of England, through its prayer book, ostensibly insisted on a rite-centered prerequisite for communicants.The mechanisms that enforced prayer book rubrics as well as church canons did not, however, treat confirmation as the gate to communion in the early days of the reformed Church of England. In the reign of Edward VI, visitation articles, which formed the means by which bishops set norms and queried compliance within their dioceses, largely ignored confirmation. By contrast, the articles did reflect an effort to impose a basic test of doctrinal knowledge before admission to communion.4 Of the surviving queries, only Nicholas Ridley's of 1550 asked whether communicants had first been confirmed.5Inattention in enforcement was matched by inattention in practice. The Devonshire rebels of 1549 complained that bishops did not confirm their children soon enough, and that some died before confirmation. They were apparently not reassured by the prayer book's assertion that such children's salvation was not imperilled.6 The Worcester Chronicle complained, 'This year 21 June [1552] Bishop Hooper came to Worcester with his wife and daughter ... in all his time were no children confirmed.'7 Early English protestants did not bother with confirmation.It was in the Elizabethan church that confirmation emerged as an important theological concern among protestants, when the church hierarchy found itself defending its use of confirmation against those who felt the church to be insufficiently reformed. …