The Luck of the English

Abstract

When the Church of England set itself to revise its forms of worship Auden’s was the sharpest comment. ‘Why’, he asked, ‘Spit on your luck?’ The word is apt: the Book of Common Prayer you might say, happened more by luck than judgement. For, as it emerged, in 1662, as a Schedule to the Act of Uniformity, it was clearly not the product of a single intention, or a single mind, not even Cranmer’s, or indeed of a single generation. It was evolved over and out of a century and a half of political conflict and bloodstained theological controversies for whose shibboleths it was written and rewritten, in turn legally enforced and legally proscribed. Its authors and sponsors, and in the seventeenth century its revisers, lived often on the edge of martyrdom — at best, exiled or deprived of their preferments; at worst, beheaded or burnt — and they were not, in that situation, consciously concerned with the literary merit of their new Prayer Book. With the headsman closing in on him, a man’s preoccupation is not usually with the quality of his style. Indeed, the image of the Prayer Book as a baroque masterpiece, a proper setting for the eloquence of Jacobean and Caroline divines, is grossly misleading.