Dennis Potter with Graham Fuller

1993

[Dennis Christopher George Potter was an English television dramatist, screenwriter and journalist. He is best known for his BBC television serials Pennies from Heaven and The Singing Detective as well as the BBC television plays Blue Remembered Hills and Brimstone and Treacle.

Born: May 17, 1935, Berry Hill, United Kingdom

Died: June 7, 1994 (age 59 years), Ross-on-Wye, United Kingdom

Books: The Singing Detective, Karaoke and Cold Lazarus.]

GF: How did you first transmute into a writing career the despair you felt about your illness*, your departure from the Daily Herald and the end of your political ambitions?

 

DP: I remain sufficiently a Christian to know that despair is, in the old words, a very great sin. My first television play was called The Confidence Course, and I now understand, in retrospect, why and how it came about. It is really about the self-motivation courses run by bodies like the Dale Carnegie Institute, which I covered as a newspaper reporter at one of their so-called free sessions. The Herald wouldn’t use the article because Dale Carnegie was advertising in the paper.

A group of people gathered together in a hotel conference room – some of them were planted, I believe. The speakers were hustling and bustling people up to the front, where they’d let them speak for three minutes, then describe how they could have done it better, how they should impress people – standard pop psychology. They’d show you how to have a better memory by blindfolding someone who would recite a list of twenty objects they had just seen. I thought this was so theatrical – an attempt to pull certain types of social skills out of people -and phony. I was just there as an observer, because of the piece I was writing, but I could see it was like the chapel again, except that the chapel was about something. It used a series of vivid metaphors to give a perception of purpose, beauty and danger – they were perilous metaphors, too. What interested me was why those people were there, what sort of anxiety had brought them to that hotel. But something deeper was worrying me about it, and that was this so-called confidence factor. This was about self-functioning at a time when I was beginning to feel I couldn’t self-function. The people running it were saying, ‘We can give you confidence.’

 

GF: in The Confidence Course you invoke the figure of the early nineteenth-century essayist William Hazlitt as a disruptive stranger. I notice you refer to Hazlitt, perhaps more than any writer, in interviews and conversation. It made me wonder if he was the most profound influence on your own work.

DP: I think Hazlitt’s argumentative, springy, rhetorical essays represent the peak of a certain kind of English prose. He was an odd combination of very progressive- to the extent that we still haven’t caught up with him – and quite reactionary. He would prefer an old book to a new book, an old thing to a new thing; you also see that, though I think to a lesser degree, in someone like George Orwell.

  I am interested in the tension in oneself between the instinct that cherishes order, tradition and discipline, and what, in general terms, might be called a concatenation of right-wing emotions underneath or interlaced with radicalism, where your mind tells you other things. This tension – which I think is evident in Hazlitt and Orwell – is intrinsically dramatic, because it means you’re on your guard against the facile optimism and brutal idealism of the left, even though intellectually you respect and indeed share in it; at the same time, you pay due attention to the things that would normally be called ‘right-wing.’

   Coleridge and Wordsworth made the journey within their own lives from an adulation of the French Revolution to a kind of High Toryism. And there is that element in the Conservative Party which I quite respect – that Old Tory, Dr. Johnson element, if you like, as opposed to the canting humbug of the left. Obviously, I could never bring myself to vote Conservative, and I suppose it would be accurate to say that I am on the left, but many of my feelings are what would commonly and crudely be called right-wing. Emotionally, I believe the greatest danger to the human race is lack of order. That doesn’t necessarily imply a sanctioning of hierarchies, but it does imply a belief in law. It’s complicated. I deliberately don’t write explicitly about politics because I prefer the tension between these two poles within myself – what in Marxist terms would be called a dialectic, I suppose – to be implicit. I don’t like political drama because I think the way to argue politics is through the essay or prose discourse. Obviously, your feelings and aspirations – social, religious and political – inform what you write. But I don’t think you should write on their behalf; you shouldn’t fly those flags.

 

GF: No, but all characters, because of their social background, their aspirations, are perforce political.

 

DP:  Yes, they can be, but if you don’t set out to make them representatives or mouthpieces for this or that ideology or political stance, you retain the possibility of surprising yourself about how complicated they are. For example, the Denholm Elliott character – I suppose he is the villain- in Brimstone and Treacle is so far to the right that he has subscribed to the National Front. And yet, as I was writing him, he recoils when the idea of real evil, of the consequences of his thought, is put to him by the visitor, and in the act of recoiling manages to say things like, ‘All I want is the England I used to know . . . I just want it to be like it used to be.’

   That sort of idiotic nostalgia has profound emotional springs for people, as you can see now with the break-up of the Soviet Union. It is too easy to dismiss those collections of feelings as stupidly right-wing or fascist. Human beings are more complicated than that; their aspirations are curiously entangled with the past and with this nostalgia.

 

GF:  You’ve said that nostalgia is a second-order emotion. That implies that the past is inevitably a bitter or painful place.

DP: It’s not so much that it’s bitter or painful, because it’s also a very funny and bitter place. The thing about it is that it isn’t necessarily behind you, but can, if you turn the corner, be standing fully armed and implacable in front of you. There’s an obsession with the minute-by-minute sensation, with what you think you are now, but by definition ‘now’ is just the last few seconds of decades of experience. Nostalgia is a means of forgetting the past, of making it seem cozy, of saying, ‘It’s back there -look how sweet it was.’ But you can use the power of nostalgia to open up the past and make it stand in front of you. This is why I used popular songs. Often the initial reaction is, ‘Oh, how sweet to hear that thing again!’ but then the very syncopations can bear in things that have been knocked away by the present and that are important, that tell you what you are, why you are doing what you are doing, and why every act that a person does has some sort of significance. The ripples never quite die away.

 

*psoriatic arthropy, the hereditary illness he suffered from the age of twenty-six and which he bequeathed to Philip Marlow, the hospitalized hero of his masterpiece, The Singing Detective.

 

 https://youtu.be/vI10_bFyqig?si=pUOhijtMACNiQIlq

 

The Revanchism of Archbishop Laud

 

 

I.  AI Overview

 

William Laud was an Archbishop of Canterbury under King Charles I who implemented Arminian and High Church policies, emphasizing liturgical conformity, ceremonial rituals and the authority of the Bishops, which was opposed by Puritans who viewed the changes as ‘Popish’. His strict enforcement of conformity and attempted imposition of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer on Scotland provoked opposition, escalating into the (2) Bishop’s Wars. Eventually impeached by the Long Parliament, Laud was imprisoned and executed for treason in 1645, becoming a controversial martyr for his policies.

 

II.  Some of what Trevor-Roper wrote about Laud:

 

Thus, in England, the experimental system of government (without parliament), which had begun in 1629 continued to work, not indeed with great efficiency, nor with any great popular support, but with no obvious threat of danger from within. Since it’s an inception, the success with which it had continued to work, had made it less self-conscious: the reforming activity of the earlier years had died down; and the most strenuous exertions of the government were directed towards maintaining its own continued existence by the exercise of economy, and a submissive judicature. ‘Government enterprise’ there was none, for its chief exponents had been gradually extruded from the control of government, – Wentworth to Ireland, Laud to the barren regions of theological forms. Neither of the vigorous reforms which Wentworth carried through in Ireland, nor the tyranny which they were held to justify, were for England; and the social policy of Laud, which, however imperfectly thought out and unwisely applied, may be allowed to justify his ecclesiastical rigidity, was also a failure. With every apparent victory he had in fact been more surely removed from the control of policy, and was left with nothing in his hands but a damning certificate of unreal power. The first few years of the personal government of Charles I may have allowed some play in the forces of Thorough: but with Wentworth absent and Laud, easily out maneuvered in Court and Council, the ultimate victory was with Lady Mora*. [ signifying the spirit of dilatoriness, procrastination and venality: Francis Windebank, Lord Portland, Secretary of State].

 

Politics had become petrified, and the initiative of the administration dead. By the promotion of dependable judges to issue decisions justifying the actions of government, and by the restriction of commerce through Monopoly, a static system was secured: and all whose interest or ambitions were frustrated by this system, seeking, as men naturally see, an ideal region, in which to reclaim their satisfaction, directed their attack upon the religious institutions, which seemed to justify the system. 

 

Reader, here you will plainly see

 judgment, perverted by these three, – a Priest,

a Judge, and a Patentee

 

ran the libel of the time of the Long Parliament, joining in an excretable trinity the types held to represent recent government of Charles I. The priest we can see did but unwillingly  associate himself with the government, which represented the corrupt form of his own ideal; but necessity forced him to identify himself with it, and his surrender was shown when the office of the master of the roles was put up for auction, and the highest bidder, Sir Charles Caesar, “a man unthought of, and a very ass”, borrowed 10,000 pounds towards the cost of the promotion from the money earmarked for the repair of Saint Paul.

Quoting Britain in Revolution 1625-1660 By Austin Woolrych; Oxford 2002

 

To this writer the least plausible of recent interpretations is one which contends that Charles and Laud were simply resuming the efforts of Whitgif and his successor Bancroft to secure conformity to an Anglican church order and ethos that went back to the Elizabethan settlement; in other words, they introduced no essential change, other than to end the laxity of Abbot’s archiepiscopate. This flies in the face of abundant evidence that the most educated contemporaries were aware of very considerable change, beginning before Charles’ personal rule and intensified in the course of it, with the result that when the Long Parliament at last had a chance to address the grievances of the realm. most members gave priority to the religious ones. But this should not be attributed, as it often used to be, to ‘a rise of puritanism’, or interpreted as a straightforward conflict between puritans and Anglicans. “Anglican’ was a term virtually unknown to contemporaries, and mainstream puritanism was (as has been argued) a strain of piety within the established church, which accommodated it reasonably comfortably during most of James’ reign. A much- favored recent interpretation has identified the Laudians rather than those that they call puritans as the innovating party, thanks to a partnership between the king and the leading members of the hierarchy, and has substituted for the rise of puritanism ‘the rise of Arminianism’. This is much nearer the mark, but as a label, it lays too much emphasis on doctrine. There certainly was a controversy over doctrine, of course, but by no means all those stigmatized as Arminians shared the same beliefs of Arminius, and the doctrine was not the main concern of most people involved– least of all the king, whose initiative in the ecclesiastical policies of his reign until recently has been underestimated.

 

Perhaps the mainspring of the change in direction was the reaction against the prevailing evangelical, lay orientated, ethos of the Jacobean church. Some leading clergy, especially the Durham House group, and the disciples of Lancelot Andrewes, felt that the emphasis on preaching, at the expense of prayer and the sacraments, was distorting the character of the historic Church of England. They wanted to reaffirm its unique identity, and to check the tendency to align with the reformed churches in other countries. They felt a need to reassert the priestly nature of their calling, and to reinstate the sacrament, especially holy communion, as the main channel through which Grace was conveyed to believers. Lay influences, they believed, had gone too far; they aimed to restore the authority and independence of the clergy and especially of the episcopate. Their insistence that the bishop’s office was jure divino proved particularly obnoxious, not only to the puritans; indeed, the divine right of bishops was a much more contentious issue under Charles I then the divine right of kings. They sought to restore a sense of the inherent sanctity of consecrated churches, which were tending to be regarded just as preaching- houses. Laud presided over a much -needed to drive to repair dilapidated churches and to provide the many that lacked them with decent furnishings.

More controversial was the aim of Laud and his bishops to re-dignify the church’s worship, and especially the celebration of the sacraments, with reverent ritual and priest-like vestments. They insisted that services must be performed, according to the letter of the Book of Common Prayer, and clamped down on those puritan clergy who abridged the liturgical part to make time for longer sermons, or substituted extemporaneous prayers for the prescribed forms. Many, though not all, of the clergy who promoted these policies were Arminians in the loose sense that was current after the Synod of Dort, in that they deplored the harsh literalness of the Bezan doctrine of double predestination and believed Christ had died for all. Lancelot Andrewes exemplifies the link between their more liberal theology, and the outward forms that Charles sought  to impose on all Anglican worship, for it was as the Dean of the Royal Chapel that he introduced the prince (as he then was) to a raised and railed-off  communion table, placed like an altar at the east end of the chancel and to those rituals like bowing at the name of Jesus which were to become so contentious in the 1630s. Charles’s continued promotion of Arminian divines to bishoprics, deaneries, and headships of colleges, changed the whole balance in the episcopate, even before Abbott’s  long awaited death enabled him to advance Laud to Canterbury in 1633.*

 

All but one of the Caroline bishops stood quite firm on the differences of the doctrine and ecclesiastical policy that separated England from Rome, and on the superiority of the Ecclesia Anglicana, but whereas most of the previous generation emphasize, it’s affinity with the reformed churches abroad, they sought to present it as an alternative and purer embodiment of a catholic apostolic church, a via media between the corruptions of Rome and the excesses of Geneva. Calvin had less authority for them than the early fathers and the practice of the early church, whose traditions they sought to recover. Unlike the majority of Elizabethan and Jacobean Protestants, who had identified the papacy with Antichrist, they regarded Rome as a true church that have become tainted through the ages by erroneous doctrine, superstition, and false political pretensions. They were therefore objectionable to the broadly, Calvinist sector of English protestants on three grounds: they failed to recognize the utter falsity and iniquity of popery; they were suspect on those doctrines which had longer been touchstone of the differences between the reformed churches in Rome; and their ritual practices smacked of popish superstition. In particular, their placing of the communion table where the pre-reformation alter stood, their raising above the level of the chancel and shutting it off with rails, and their insistence that communicants should kneel at the rail to receive the sacraments, all offended the Puritan view of the Lord’s Supper as essentially an act of commemoration by suggesting the Catholic belief that the celebrant was reenacting the sacrifice of Christ’s body. Thus, Arminianism came to be seen as a kind of creeping popery, even as a part of a design, in partnership with Catholics and crypto Catholics in high places, to lead the national church back by degrees into the Roman fold. This was as unjustified as the attempt by some, so-called Arminians to brand their opponents as puritans merely for upholding doctrine, especially predestinarian doctrine, which had not only been permissible in the established church, but had until lately predominated in it.

 

With these changes came a sharp contradiction of the de facto toleration that had characterized Abbott’s long archiepiscopate. the new authoritarianism in the drive for uniformity owed at least as much to the king as too Laud and his fellow bishops. Charles’ support for the Arminians was based less on a preference for their doctrine than on growing hatred of puritans, who he thought were bent on subverting his own royal authority. Church and state, he believed, needed a parallel assertion of discipline and hierarchy. Convinced that kingship itself was sacramental in character, he sensed a strong affinity between the reverence, ceremony, and mystery with which the Arminian sought to endow religious worship, and the deference and ritual with which he surrounded his own presence. For laymen to challenge the one was as bad for the disrespectful subjects to prevent profane the other. “Popular reformation’ in his words was “little better than rebellion” and as he said to Archbishop Neile in 1634, “The neglect of punishing Puritans breeds papists”. He forbade public preaching and discussion concerning the points of predestination, not because he himself had strong views about them, but because they were “too high for the peoples understanding”. There was no total ban on the publication of theological and devotional works upholding Calvinist doctrine, but all books had to be licensed by the bishop of London (or his officials) or by one of the two universities, and after the transformation, wrought by Charles‘s wholesale promotion of Arminians it was undoubtedly easier to contain licenses for writing of their school than for those of strongly predestinarian standpoint.

 

Charles had a deep distrust of unregulated preaching, and especially of lectures, supported or endowed by laymen. The instructions that he issued in 1629, based on the document prepared by archbishop Harsnett of York, went much further than his father’s 1622 ban on public controversy over predestination. The only lecture that they sanctioned were clergy holdings livings in the town concerned, or in the near neighborhood, and all the lectures were required to read divine service, wearing surplus and hood before they preached. Afternoon sermons with which Puritans had widely supplemented the morning one (if it was preached at all), were to be replaced by catechizing, according to the strict form prescribed by the Prayer Book. The Instructions also sought to put a stop to the practice of many of the gentry who kept unlicensed clergymen in their households as domestic chaplains or as tutors for the children, for they restricted the keeping of chaplain to those- mainly the peerage- who were specifically qualified by law to employ them. Not long after, Charles and Laud put an end to the venture that had been launched in 1625 by twelve Londoners, who had formed a trust to collect charitable donations in order to buy up tithes that had fallen back into lay hands and church livings whose right of presentation had become lay property. In the next half dozen years these Feoffees for Impropriations raised considerable funds, and many bequests, and applied them in endowing lectureships, supplementing the stipends of inadequately paid preaching ministers, and acquiring the right of presentation to many livings. This was undoubtedly a Puritan enterprise, though a moderate one, and Laud saw it as a cunning conspiracy to overthrow established church government. In 1630 to the Attorney General prosecuted the Feoffees in the Exchequer court as illegal corporations; next year they were dissolved by its order, and their assets confiscated to the crown.

It was essentially Charles’ decision to reissue his father’s Book of Sports in 1633, and to require beneficed clergymen to read it out in his church. He disliked strict observance of the sabbath, which he regarded as a specifically puritan tenet – wrongly, because it had been enjoyed by churchmen of all colors in James’s reign. It was almost certainly his personal decision in the following year, though Bishops Wren and Piers probably advised it, to order that communion tables must be kept at the east end during the communion service, and that communicants must kneel at the rails to receive the sacrament. Even Laud had reservations about this, and did not enforce the instruction in rigidly; indeed, only three bishops imposed it really strictly, including Wren and Piers. Significantly, enforcement was to be most rigorous in much of East Anglia, which was to be the most strongly parliamentarian region of rural England, whereas royalist support was to be the firmest in dioceses where receiving at the rail was not insisted upon.

 

But if Laud had to carry the odium for some policies which were really more the king’s, there were others for which he more than shared responsibility. He was a complex character, which comes over much more sympathetically in his diary and his letters to his friends than in his public actions and pronouncements. He was utterly upright, dedicated to an ideal of a purified church, and punishingly hard-working in pursuit of it. He was as keen as any puritan to recover for the church the impropriated tithes and other assets that had fallen into lay hands and apply them to the maintenance of an educated and devoted parish clergy, but he could not abide lay initiative in the work, and the clergy he supported had to be conformist. Though deeply authoritarian, he was not at heart inhumane or tyrannical. But he had a brusque, forbidding manner and a fiery temper, which he frequently lost, not least at meetings of the privy council. On one famous occasion the Lord Chief Justice, Sir Thomas Richardson, acceded to a petition from some JPs in Somerset and issued an order for the suppression of church ales and wakes in the county. Unfortunately, he went beyond his powers by requiring it to be published in local churches. Furious at this encroachment on ecclesiastical authority, Laud had him summoned before a committee of the privy council and so savaged him there that this most senior judge complained that he had ‘been almost choked with a pair of lawn sleeves.’ Laud was a somewhat lonely figure at court, not only because of his hectoring manner and total lack of court graces, but because of the conspicuous gap between his social origins (his father had been a clothier in Reading) and the pomp he assumed as archbishop. When he rode out from Lamberth Palace, forty or fifty mounted attendants accompanied him, and ushers roughly cleared the way for his cortège.

Laud’s drive for stricter regulation reached its peak between 1634 and 1637, when he revived a pre-Reformation procedure and instituted a ‘metropolitan visitation’ of the whole province of Canterbury.  Armed with a voluminous questionnaire concerning the fabric and furniture of churches, the behavior and garb of the clergy, the precise conduct of services, sermons, catechizing, and a great deal else, his Vicar-General Sir Nathaniel Brent traversed the whole of England south of Trent, interrogating parsons and churchwardens on every point. Needless to say he uncovered many disorders, many evasions of the strict letter of the Prayer Book, and much equivocation over the controversial ‘ceremonies.’ Laud’s own preference was to secure conformity by persuasion rather than coercion, and fewer clergymen were suspended or deprived than might have been if his and the king’s instructions had been enforced with full vigor, but pressure to conform was keenly felt. Some bishops applied it more high-handedly than Laud himself. And behind the diocesan judicial machinery stood the Court of High Commission, which acquired a new unpopularity in the 1630s- an unpopularity that rubbed off on the crown, since it ultimately derived its authority from the royal prerogative. It was used not only to discipline errant clergy but to prosecute noblemen and gentlemen for moral offenses, and to harass them into making ever more of their impropriated tithes to the maintenance of the clergy.

Laud also bears much responsibility for making the other great prerogative court, Stat Chamber, unpopular as it had never been before. The most notorious case tried there, in 1637, was that of William Prynne, John Bastwick, and Henry Burton, who had committed the unpardonable crime of attacking in print the whole order of bishops. They were sentenced to be branded, to have their ears cut off, to stand in the pillory, to pay fines of £ 5000 each, and to suffer life imprisonment. Their prosecution proved to be one of Laud’s and Charles’s worst mistakes, for the oppressive proceedings (little laxity provided for defense) and the savagery of the sentences recoiled against their accusers; branding, mutilation, and the pillory were not penalties to be imposed on gentlemen. The demonstrations of sympathy that greeted the victims addresses from the pillory and accompanied them to their place of imprisonment gave them a moral victory. It was quite an achievement to make martyrs of men as unlovable as Prynne and Burton but Laud believed that people who attacked the principle of hierarchy in the church could be no loyal subjects of the king, and Charles agreed with him. Preaching at the opening of parliament in 1626, Laud said:

They, whoever they be, that would overthrow sedes ecclesiae, the seats of ecclesiastical government, will not spare (if they ever get power) to have a pluck at the throne of David. And there is not a man that is for parity, all fellows of the church, but he is not for monarchy in the state.

 

This was of the same order of extravagance as the belief of Laud’s opponents that he and his fellow-Arminians were hand in glove with papists in a design to bring the Church of England back to Rome.

Not everything that Laud attempted was unpopular, and endeavors that were dislike by some were probably well taken by others. The firm pressure that he put on patrons of livings to bear their share in repairing dilapidated churches may have been resented by the gentry who felt it, but welcome enough to their humbler fellow-parishioners.  Squires doubtless complained at the enforced removal of their high-sided pew boxes, whose privileged position often cluttered the chancel, but ordinary worshipers must have been glad to get a proper view of the services for the first time. The reverent rituals, the fuller observance of the church’s festivals, and the enhancement of worship with what Laud called ‘the beauty of holiness’ all offended puritans, but may well have been liked by simple countryfolk, and not only by them. When the Long Parliament tried to outlaw the Prayer Book rites and services after the Civil War, it encountered a deep and widespread popular affection for them. Even the bitterly opposed altar rails cannot have been universally unpopular, for many parishes restored them spontaneously on the eve of the Restoration, before the Anglican order was formally reinstated. Laud’s efforts to make well-to-do Londoners pay tithes may have done more to heighten anticlericalism than to raise clergy’s living standards, but it was an honest attempt to redress the unfair share of the tithes burden that small countrymen bore. Laud labored hard to recover all sorts of ecclesiastical assets that had been quietly appropriated by the laity, and to apply them to improving the incomes of th clergy, but his achievement was very limited, because of all his major aims this was the one in which he had the least support from the king . .  .

The swing from a predominantly Calvinist to a predominantly anti-Calvinist theology had begun before Charles’s accession, but his weighting of the scales in the Arminians’ favor and the relative difficulty with which strict predestinarians could preach, publish, or find preferment raised fears that the church’s protestant faith was under threat. Absurd though the charges were that Charles and Laud were heading the country back to Rome, these changes did amount to what can be fairly called a catholicization of the Church of England, a kind of counter -reformation in a minor key. They shifted it away from sisterhood with the Reformed churches of Europe, and claimed it as the true daughter of the catholic apostolic church of early Christian centuries.