Puritanism: the early years

From the 1560s to 1625

The accession of Elizabeth to the English throne in 1558 had been both a great deliverance and a perplexing nuisance to those determined Protestants who wished for a clean break with England’s religious past. A great deliverance, because she replaced her deceased half-sister Mary, who had spent her five-year reign in a determined, persecuting, but ultimately fruitless attempt to reunite the English Church with Rome after its twenty-year separation under Henry VIII and Edward VI. A perplexing nuisance, because the newly re-separated Church of England which Elizabeth established seemed, in the eyes of many observers, to be barely Protestant at all. It was still far too conservative to long placate the zealous Protestants emerging from their exilic or troglodyte existences of the previous reign.

Indeed, to be an informed and discerning Protestant in the England of the 1560s was both a disturbing and a confusing experience. Those Protestants who were prone to naïveté partook of a more consoling existence than their less sanguine brethren — as they doubtless still do. They at least could continue to hope, during the 1560s, that the young Queen had meant what she appeared to imply in her 1559 Act of Uniformity.

According to this Act, the ornaments of the church and clerical vestments (so unsatisfactory from a Protestant standpoint) were to be enforced only “until other order shall be therein taken”. The Queen, surely, had introduced such a despicable Protestantism-and-water merely as an interim; once the bulk of the English population had grown to accept the permanence of the break with Rome and — what was harder for most peasants to accept — with the service of the mass, then the Reformation would be completed, and the Church of England become a more full-bloodedly Protestant affair.

On this view, then, the Reformation was a process, of greater or lesser duration, in which England would more nearly approximate itself to the Reformed paradise which those English Protestants who had spent the Catholic Queen Mary’s reign in exile in Zürich, Strassburg or (especially) Geneva believed themselves to have experienced.

It is this assumption which accounts for much of the rhetoric used in the first half of Elizabeth’s reign to describe England’s protestantisation. Many contemporaries commented on the slowness of the process, but all of them presupposed that the highest authorities, including the queen herself, actually wanted the church to follow through Protestant doctrine with more unambiguously Protestant practice — particularly in ceremonies — just as soon as this could safely be achieved.

Popular twenty-first-century misconceptions notwithstanding, English monarchs in the early modern period were unable to do exactly as they pleased in any sphere of policy. The only one to act on the hypothesis that they could was Charles I, who paid for his misunderstanding with the loss, not only of his life but, temporarily at least, of the institution of monarchy itself.

For Elizabeth I, who had come to the throne of England in November, 1558 following the death of her Catholic half-sister, the constraints were very much greater and entailed a vast weight of tradition, law and centuries-old vested interests, outside of which neither she nor any other monarch could sensibly act.

As the daughter of Ann Boleyn, and hence the very living symbol of England’s break with Rome, Elizabeth could hardly be an adherent of the church whose pontiff considered her birth to be illegitimate and her title to the English throne invalid. And yet Protestantism was a creed which had won the unconditional support of no more than a vocal minority of her subjects.

True, her sister’s policy of persecution had repelled many in the capital and the south-east of her country, and had in that sense at least alienated them from Rome. Mary’s attempt at re-Catholicisation had also been identified in the minds of many with her hugely unpopular Spanish marriage, which seemed to threaten the incorporation of the country within the Spanish empire. The unpopularity of such policies might also facilitate moves in a Protestant direction under her successor.

And yet antipathy to Rome and enthusiasm for Protestantism are two different things; amongst most English people the former did not necessarily entail the latter. Religious conservatism and attachment to the mass were strong, particularly amongst the peasantry who made up the vast bulk of Elizabeth’s subjects. The opinion of peasants counted only collectively, of course, and even then it was probably less important than the instincts of the ‘political nation’ — the landowners and officeholders in the shires without whom, and without whose families, the country could not be governed. These were more inclined, on the whole, to Protestantism — indeed, their purchase of confiscated monastic estates and property under Henry VIII, and of chantry lands under Edward VI, virtually guaranteed at least general anti-papal sentiments from them as a class. But even here there were exceptions, and the Protestantism of many of the remainder was moderate.

Elizabeth reserved the position of Archbishop of Canterbury for her chaplain Matthew Parker, a decided moderate who had spent Mary’s reign in seclusion in England, and so was uncontaminated by exposure to the Reformed utopias on the continent.

Nevertheless, she had been obliged to appoint a number of bishops from amongst the eight hundred or so returning exiles who were so urgently proffering her rather more Protestantism than she was happy to settle for. Many of these had hesitated to accept, appalled by the anæmic qualities of the church she wished to impose.

But the prospect of the positions being offered to more conservative men should they refuse — to say nothing of the subtle allure of holding senior office, no matter how unsatisfactory the circumstances — had persuaded most of them “not to desert our churches for the sake of a few ceremonies”, as Edmund Grindal, the new Bishop of London, later explained himself to his Zürich mentor, Bullinger.

Having accepted the posts, Grindal and his ilk found themselves obliged to impose, upon erstwhile colleagues for whom they had every sympathy, pragmatic regulations and popish rags for which they had little.

Elizabeth’s own predilections were also important. She was not personally very devout, and was given to hard swearing when the fancy took her. But she was an admirer of her father, and of her father’s religion, which inclined her also to a minimalist version of Protestantism.

The language prescribed for use at the celebration of communion was an exercise in studied ambiguity, allowing room for both ‘real presence’ and memorial doctrines. Worst of all for consistent Protestants, ministers were required to wear surplice and clerical vestments, making it possible for traditionalists to appear as ‘priests’ and for the communion service visually to resemble the Catholic mass. Indeed, the implied continuity was, from Elizabeth's point of view, quite intentional.

From a strictly pragmatic viewpoint, Elizabeth clearly judged the situation correctly. Her subjects were tired of incessant religious change, and would settle for a compromise between the old religion and the new. The vast majority of her subjects being peasants, who (like peasants everywhere) were attached to tradition for its own sake, the strictly visual, experiential aspect of church services needed to convey as much of a sense of continuity as was possible under the bewildering circumstances of the past quarter-century, during which period ecclesiastical polity had been changed continuously at the drop of a royal hat.

Whatever its theological demerits, the liturgy of 1559 achieved this. The Protestant intellectuals, however, were the only available source for her senior ecclesiastical office-holders, and these were weighed down with principles to a degree which Elizabeth could comprehend, but not share. As an olive branch to these, therefore, the official theology of the Church of England was tilted, moderately but very definitely, in the direction of Reformed theology. In the serene assurance that, now as then, theology was an arcane art which only the few would bother their heads with, it was a concession she could well afford.

The emergence of Puritanism

That said, troublesome intellectuals can be ... well, troublesome. And from the 1560s onwards, many of them chose to be so. By 1565 at the latest, the party that objected to clerical vestments was being dubbed “Puritan” by its enemies, a sarcastic reference to the purity of church ceremonies which they sought. The movement sputtered into life over a consuming drive to purify (hence its name) the Church of England from ‘the rags of popery’.

The ‘rags’ first referred to were the literal garments of priestcraft: protests began over the use of surplices. When some ministers refused to wear them — as a number were in the mid-1560s — they found themselves disciplined or even expelled from their livings by the bishops, some of which latter went through agonies of embarrassment, sympathising as they did with those whom their office required them to rebuke.

Episcopal embarrassment, however, has seldom been a morally impressive sight. Accusations of ‘turn-coat’ and ‘traitor’ blackened the air, as the unwilling ecclesiastical policemen sought to justify themselves by resorting to arguments that the garments were adiaphora, things indifferent which were “not unlawful in themselves”. (By a ‘thing indifferent’ both sides understood, not a matter of private judgment about which individuals might legitimately differ in opinion and practice, but an issue about which scripture is not explicit, with the prince therefore having every right to make up his (in this context, her) own mind — which ruling all were then obliged to accept for conscience’ sake (Rom.13:5).)

The Puritans (and, for that matter, the discombobulated bishops) could console themselves with the 'process' theory: the thought the contentious "rags" and ceremonies might soon be taken away by Elizabeth who, they were sure, was merely adopting a gradualist programme of weaning the population away from their religious conservatism. All measures were provisional, to endure only “until other order shall therein be taken”. In making such self-justifications, the bishops inevitably found themselves becoming more conservative in the process. Neither the pawns nor the bishops knew it, but this particular chess-game is called ‘divide and rule’, and its real winner was that consummate politician, the queen herself.

Radicalisation: the presbyterian movement

“We in England are so far off from having a church rightly reformed according to the prescript of God’s word, that as yet we are not come to the outward face of the same”: so opined one Puritan tract, The First Admonition to the Parliament, of 1572. According to its authors, Elizabeth’s preferred liturgy, the form of church government and the clerical garments which ministers were required to wear “are drawn out of the Pope’s shop ... antichristian and devilish”.

This intemperate fury had been a decade in building. By the early 1570s some of the more radical Puritans were switching the target of their attacks from individual bishops to the whole episcopal structure of church government itself. It began in 1570, when Thomas Cartwright, a tutor at Trinity College, Cambridge, gave a series of lectures on the Book of Acts, in which he pointed out that the early church had possessed a plurality of elders in each congregation, and that the distinction between presbuteros and episkopos was a later development.

Cartwright’s reward for this contribution to knowledge was the loss of his job, but others followed in his wake. By 1572, the presbyterians were a well-organised force within the Church of England.[1] Two of the principal organisers were John Field, a 27-year-old clerical firebrand who, the previous year, had been debarred from preaching for eight years, and Thomas Wilcox. It was this pair who orchestrated the petition to MPs known as The First Admonition to the Parliament.

As monarch, Elizabeth claimed the right to order church affairs herself. However, the combination of moderate price-inflation and the tradition of needing parliamentary consent for most taxation was giving MPs an increasing leverage over many aspects of royal policy — including religion. Back in the 1530s, Henry VIII had required the co-operation of the political classes gathered in Parliament in order to make legal his royal divorce from his wife and its concomitant ecclesiastical divorce from Rome. And Elizabeth’s own 1559 Act of Uniformity had also entailed considerable participation by both Lords and Commons — including, of course, their final assent. So lobbying MPs to bring about religious change did not seem a wholly unreasonable ploy to the presbyterians of 1572.

The result is more impressive if measured as a literary artefact than by its actual achievements — but the former is not to be despised. Rich in venom and ingenious in turn of phrase, the language of Shakespeare is clearly foreshadowed in its cadences and rhythms:

“This book [The Book of Common Prayer] is an unperfect book, culled and picked out of that popish dunghill the ... mass book full of all abominations. ... In all their order of service there is no edification, according to the rule of the Apostle, but confusion; they toss the Psalms in most places like tennis balls. ... Such [unscriptural officials and unworthy clergy] seek not the Lord Jesus, but their own bellies; clouds they are without rain, trees without fruit, painted sepulchres full of dead bones.”

The Archbishop’s court, which had been instrumental in disciplining so many Puritan agitators and expelling them from their livings, was “the filthy quake-mire and poisoned plash of all the abominations that do infect the whole realm”, whilst its junior counterpart, the commissaries’ court, was “but a petty little stinking ditch that floweth out of that former great puddle”.

What would have happened if the petitioners had stopped beating about the bush in this fashion and plainly spoken their minds, we may only conjecture. Even as it was, they were allowed to cool their heels in Her Majesty’s custody for a year before returning to the fray.

The limitations of Puritanism

The Puritan movement — including presbyterianism — was at its height during the 1570s and 1580s. It seemed to threaten drastic change to the forms of worship and government of the Elizabethan Church of England. And yet the storm was weathered, and the crisis, for the moment, passed.

Public opinion was indeed slowly moving in the Puritans’ direction, but they were far too far in advance of it, and represented too small a minority (however voluble and well organised) to bring about the decisive changes they wished.

They were also divided among themselves. The moderates among them wished for little more than abolition of surplices and amendments to those aspects of the ceremonial which they found most offensive. A sizeable section, however, wanted the abolition of episcopacy and its replacement by a presbyterian system (that is, the supplanting of a hierarchy of office-holders with a hierarchy of committees, from parish presbytery or consistory, through local classis up to regional and national synods). The most radical fringe wanted Independency — that is, the self-government of each parish within a loose, national framework.

Many — perhaps most — wanted what they called ‘discipline’. According to the petitioners of 1572, this was one of the three “outward marks” of a true church. (The other two — “preaching of the word purely” and “ministering of the sacraments sincerely” — were uncontentious among Reformed Protestants of all kinds, but the third was more debatable.)

‘Discipline’ would have been the empowerment of clergy to act as religious policemen in their parishes, placing moral or spiritual offenders (the latter would have included those suspected of harbouring Catholic sympathies) under excommunication, with strong pressure on them to conform and amend. It was emphatically not a call for a ‘believers’ church’ nor anything like it; the Puritans’ Calvinism told them that they could not discern who was and who was not a ‘true believer’ in any case. Instead, it was a demand for the outward conformity of the whole population to the moral and spiritual requirements of biblical precepts.

This was the Achilles’ heel of Puritan popularity. Like most movements, whether political, social or religious, its greatest appeal came from antithesis — that is, from its ability to sling mud at the shortcomings of the status quo. (As has often been remarked of Luther at the outset of the Reformation, he had found it easier to convince the Germans that the pope was Antichrist than he had to persuade them that the just shall live by faith.)

As long as Puritans were criticising the very real lack of education of the older clergy who had served under previous dispensations, both Protestant and Catholic; as long as they were pointing out the evils of clerical non-residence; as long as they targeted many aspects of ceremonial as ‘popish’; as long as they were annoying bishops under almost any pretext: so far did they glean much popular support. But when they sought to arrogate to themselves the right to order the lives of their neighbours, at that point their popularity failed them, and they became, in the popular imagination, what their detractors derided them for all along: self-righteous kill-joys. The blustering defenders of the compromise that was the Elizabethan establishment; crypto-Catholics and traditionalists; tavern blasphemers and the religiously indifferent: all might combine at any moment to rain on the Puritans’ righteous parade.

Nor was this all. They constantly foundered on the rock of implacable royal opposition to their aspirations. Elizabeth’s church settlement may have been a quagmire of ambiguity and political pragmatism, but her personal Protestantism was quite principled in its own minimalism. She rejected popery, but she hankered after its trinkets, whether an ornamental cross in her private chapel or the maintenance of an unmarried clergy. (The legal status of clerical marriages remained in doubt during her lifetime, as Elizabeth was unwilling to give them unambiguous sanction.)

Above all, she could see that Puritan preaching led to widespread involvement of ordinary people in public discussion, that presbyterian principles undermined hierarchy in the church, and that both were injurious to stable monarchy.

The (first) decline of Puritanism

(It would rise again in the 1630s — and decline again after 1660.)

The Puritan high-tide during the 1570s and 1580s, therefore, was tolerated by her for reasons that owed more to her political needs than to her real preferences. England was in a state of war (or quasi-war) with Catholic Spain during this period, and the Puritans were her best nationalists and doughtiest anti-papists. On the English side, much of that warfare was run on principles of private enterprise. Many of the famous attacks by English sea-dogs on Spanish shipping, and especially upon the fleets bringing back bullion from the New World, were financed by Puritan merchant adventurer companies in London. Elizabeth could hardly press too hard upon a constituency whose support she so badly needed. So she humoured them and merely contained their demands for religious change.

After 1588, however, the danger peaked out and Elizabeth had a freer hand. The failure of the Armada in that year (with its attempt at a Spanish invasion of England) hardly dissipated the Spanish threat as a whole, but it did mark the high-water mark. After that point, the military crisis gradually ebbed. And, with it, receded Elizabeth’s need for Puritan support; she could thenceforward afford to be less placatory. Field died the same year, and so, shortly afterwards, did several sympathisers on the Privy Council (effectively the government of the country) who had protected Puritans from over-rigorous prosecution.

The scurrilous anti-episcopal tracts published during 1588-9 by one self-styled ‘Martin Marprelate’ were a shot in the foot for the presbyterian cause, its language being perceived by many as beyond the bounds of legitimate public debate. The bishops were thus given the excuse they needed to crack down on Puritans generally.

Hooker and Foxe

Thirty years into Elizabeth’s reign, the monarch had succeeded in outliving her first appointments to the episcopal bench, and the new breed was more genuinely conservative, less mealy-mouthed and embarrassed in its attacks upon Puritans, and less inclined to view them as close brethren and fellow-travellers. The vision of this second generation was summed up by Richard Hooker (1554-1600), in his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, a work which eschewed narrow biblicism and viewed the English religious settlement as something positive, a blend of Scripture, reason, hierarchy and tradition — rather than as a compromise fudge resulting from the politico-religious exigencies of 1559. The law of post facto rationalisation (that faithful friend of all religious institutions) was coming into play. After a generation of relative stability — or at least of absolute existence and continuity — the Church of England had come of age.

A further positive vision of English Protestantism was fostered by a book destined to have a far greater impact than Hooker’s. This was John Foxe’s (1516-87) Acts and Monuments of the Christian Church, more popularly and excitingly known as the Book of Martyrs. Ostensibly covering all martyrdoms through Christian history, its principal subject matter was English martyrs in recent times, and especially those Protestants who had been interrogated and executed for their faith during the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary (1553-8). In that respect, it conveyed English nationalism along with rabid anti-Catholicism.

Foxe himself was a moderate Puritan, and the second edition of his massive work, running to 2312 pages, was published in 1570. Further, even more expanded editions appeared in 1576 and 1583. Any further expansions were forefended by his death in 1587; clearly, these would have run the risk of collapsing under the weight of their own gravity, with goodness-knows-what consequences for the creation of bibliographic black holes and the sucking in of the lexical heritage of the universe.

Even as it was, the legacy of Foxe’s book is nearly as interesting, and just as apocalyptic. According to him, Elizabeth was a new Deborah (the prophetess of the Book of Judges), who was to lead the people of God (or England; it made little difference) on a crusade against the papal Antichrist. Elizabeth, of course, was far too realistic to do anything of the sort, but the idea was to have interesting consequences long after Foxe and his queen were both dead.

Foxe’s book was more widely read in England during most of the period covered by this present volume than any other work save the Bible itself. It was a principal agent of conveying virulent anti-Catholicism to the English mindset, teaching as it did that the Roman church was inextricably bound up with violent religious persecution, foreign influence and tyrannical rule. As with his implicit apocalypticism, these ideas were to be full of consequences in the century that lay ahead.

After Elizabeth

By the time of Elizabeth’s death in 1603, the Church of England was far from united, but was still more settled than it had been — or than it would be after the 1620s. The sheer length of her reign had made possible the progressive and solid protestantisation of the country. The Puritan movement continued to attract support, but was mostly moderate and politically quiescent; it no longer presented an imminent threat to the hierarchy.

This reality was underlined at the accession of Elizabeth’s successor, James VI of Scotland, who moved south from Edinburgh to take up residence in his new capital as James I of England. Puritan organisers took the opportunity of acquainting their new prince with the “particular griefs” of “the ministers of the gospel in this land” — by which they meant, of course, of the Puritan fraternity.

The Millenary Petition made requests (‘demands’ would be far too strong a term) so moderate in tone, and expressed in language so expectant of denial that the astonishment inflicted by acceding to any of them would have been almost cruel; the Lambeth Conference, which James convened the following year to discuss the Petition and to air his theological sophistication, rejected all the requests, though it did resolve to produce a new English translation of the Scriptures.

This Bible appeared in 1611, and is known as the famous King James (or Authorised) Version. Its paramountcy for English readers was only gradually achieved, having first to contend against the Bishops Bible (approved hitherto by the Elizabethan authorities) and the popular Geneva Bible (beloved of Puritans).

The new edition, which gradually supplanted these, borrowed very heavily from Tyndale’s translation of the 1530s. Its language and turns of phrase were to shape spoken English in countless ways during the following centuries, and even today are buried deep in the speech-patterns of the Jacobeans’ secularised descendants. The reasons for that influence are to be found partly in the merits of the translation itself, and partly in the deep, Bible-centred religiosity of the seventeenth century. The congruence of the two phenomena made innumerable biblical or quasi-biblical turns of phrase the unreflective resort of godly and ungodly speakers alike, until the English Bible became an unwitting (but hardly unspoken) partner in every mundane conversation.

Though James’ reign was rich enough in political incident, it saw few other important religious developments, though it did see the first stirrings of a movement that would cause large amounts of trouble in the years after 1625.

It should be noted that, hitherto, none of the Puritan concerns had touched upon matters of doctrine; until the 1620s, Puritanism was concerned almost exclusively with ceremonies and church government. The reason for this circumstance is that, on strictly doctrinal issues, the bishops and their Puritan critics had been at one: all had supported the Reformed theology of the Church of England’s Articles. When Peter Baro, a foreigner teaching at Cambridge, had had the temerity in the 1590s to oppose Calvinistic doctrine, the Puritans had immediately and successfully enlisted the support of the bishops to have him silenced. But this lacuna of calm was about to change. In the process, the Puritans themselves were about to be transformed from critics of ceremonies and forms of church government into champions of Reformed orthodoxy.

It was the early seventeenth century that saw the first beginnings of a new form of high-churchmanship which opposed Reformed doctrine and traditional Protestant practice. Its early adherents were few during James’ reign (though some were highly placed), and they wisely kept their heads down in order to stay out of trouble. Their most notable, learned and saintly adherent was Lancelot Andrewes, Bishop of Chichester. The immediate future belonged to the high-church party; the only question was whether, given its extreme turbulence, that future was worth the having.

---

[1] This point needs stressing. We need to ‘forget’ that the Presbyterians are a separate denomination; during this period, they were a brand of Puritan within the Church of England, who wanted that church to be governed along presbyterian lines.