“Twelve defiant Puritans were locked in a hotel room with twelve irritated Episcopalians …” It sounds like the start of a strange joke that requires the presence of a duck to pull off the punch line, but it actually happened.
Charles II, the king just-returned from exile, issued a proclamation on October 25, 1660, calling for a meeting of “learned divines” to decide the fate of the Book of Common Prayer. Their numbers were drawn from two opposed camps: the ranks of the moderate Puritans and presbyterians who wanted to remain within the Church of England but loathed the Prayer Book, and the Anglicans, represented by the surviving Bishops of the Church which the king’s return had just freed from fifteen years of persecution (by the Puritans they were now called to sit down with). Not only were the Bishops determined to preserve the Prayer Book; they wanted to force the Puritans to digest it whole. The King ordered the Commissioners “to advise upon and review the Book of Common Prayer, comparing the same with the most ancient liturgies, which have been used in the Church in the primitive and purest times.”
To the Puritans and presbyterians, who had no desire to bring the Prayer Book more in line “with the most ancient liturgies,” the king’s words weren’t promising. They wanted not the “ancient liturgies” but the liturgies most recently concocted and approved in Geneva, the mother-city of Calvinism. Of course, some of the Puritans wanted no liturgy at all, seeing any set form as “an enemy to the spirit of true and godly prayer.”
The King’s Letter Patent called for the appointed Commissioners (twelve Bishops and twelve Puritan and presbyterian clergymen, each side to have nine assistants called "coadjutors") to “meet together within the space of four calendar months now next ensuing, in the Master's lodgings in the Savoy in the Strand.” They weren’t locked into a room (though from the descriptions left to us of the meetings of what we now call the Savoy Conference, some of them felt as if they were) and the only ducks present were those that arrived already cooked on dinner plates, but for four months the Commissioners did battle for the future of the Book of Common Prayer.
The results were a foregone conclusion, though the Puritans seemed blithely unaware of the fact. The Book of Common Prayer authorized by the king’s martyred father had already been restored to use throughout the country. Before the Conference held its first session, Oxford printers complained to the king that “uncouth men of all sortes” were engaged in unlicensed printing of the “Old Book.” Before the “new book” was authorized in 1662, five licensed editions of the old appeared in London bookshops. Meeting with some Puritan clergy about the upcoming Conference, the king answered their concerns saying he would “never, not in the least degree, allow the good old order of the Church in which he had been bred" to be disparaged. The Commissioners were told their work would require the approval of “the Archbishops, Bishops and Doctors” of the Church of England, as well as the Parliament—the Parliament now sitting, crowded with the survivors of the unlamented late Lord Protector Cromwell and his Puritan allies. Only blind men could fail to see the outcome.
The Conference opened on April 15th, 1661 and met in the rooms of Gilbert Sheldon, the Bishop of London (where the Savoy Hotel now stands). Bishop Sheldon called on the Puritans and their presbyterian partners to present their objections and criticisms of the Prayer Book. They were prepared. They laid before the Bishops almost 200 hand-written pages of what they called “Exceptions” to the book. From these pages a London printer produced a 35 page pamphlet. The Puritans prefaced this with a l-o-n-g letter, addressed not to the the Commission but to the King, summarizing their grievances with the “Church once in this realm established.” Since the topic of the Commission was limited to The Book of Common Prayer and “ancient liturgies,” the Puritans used the Preface to complain about all the other things about the Church they found “contrary to God’s Word.” Worst of all were Bishops, Priests and Deacons and the “papistical notions and corruptions” of the church they embodied (small wonder they addressed their opening letter to the King rather than the Bishops who sat across the table from them).
All in all, it set the tenor for the proceedings of the next four months. Somebody should have brought a duck.
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