Cromartie Alan. The Constitutionalist Revolution: An Essay on the History of England, 1450-1642 (Ideas in Context)

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Puritans and Anglicans 119

Elton’s assault on Neale’s interpretation was thus to some extent beside the

point.

The model is, however, too schematic in its suggestion that convinced

conformists were necessarily inclined to ultra-monarchism. Puritan invo-

cation of the law helped change the style of English politics, but the rela-

tionship of law to prospects for religious revolution was actually of some

complexity. The increasingly high claims of common lawyers made law

apowerful instrument for clever partisans, but they were also ultimately

fatal to any kind of clericalist programme, including the realisation of

presbyterianism; to the extent that common law deﬁned the common weal,

it was an obstacle to any doctrine that claimed a similar authority. In the

Elizabethan period, the hierarchy appreciated this; though they were nat-

urally keen to cast themselves as monarchy’s defenders, they were still, for

the most part, too prudent to abandon legal values.

Thus though the monarch’s preferences did, in the end, give shape to the

alignments of subsequent political history, the developments involved were

quite protracted. But by the time that James came south, the sheer longevity

of her settlement had brought about some cultural consequences that even

amore radical successor might have experienced difﬁculty reversing. In

other Protestant countries, the state ‘confessionalised’; it acquired a corps of

intellectuals united by the shibboleths of their ofﬁcial doctrine. In England,

this failed to happen, partly because acceptance of the Supremacy supplied

an adequate basis for consensus, partly because the likely orthodoxy, a

presbyterian high Calvinism, could be presented as a threat to English

institutions.

The result was a temptation to rationalise some oddly mixed arrange-

ments in terms that sat uneasily with Calvinist religion. Though, in the esti-

mation of its leaders, the Church was a full member of the Reformed camp

in the Protestant world, its semi-Catholic practices and purely Catholic

institutional shape created pressure for a drift towards Catholicism. The

Elizabethan hierarchy would have been horriﬁed at the suggestion that they

were pursuing a via media (though they might have agreed with their leading

defender John Jewel that they were saddled with a ‘leaden mediocrity’),

but the strange church that they presided over continuously allowed the

space for non-Reformed beliefs and practices. In time, as we shall see, the

lines of thought encouraged by these anomalies made lasting consensus

unsustainable.

The Zurich letters, ed. Hastings Robertson (Cambridge, 1842), 23.

120 The Constitutionalist Revolution

Under the circumstances of 1559,Elizabeth’s misfortune is simply

summarised: she wanted a Henrician church – no doubt a little modiﬁed in

aProtestant direction – but there were no Henrician intellectuals. The gov-

ernment would have liked co-operation from ﬁgures like Nicholas Heath,

the archbishop of York, who was initially retained upon the royal council,

and the veteran Erasmian Cuthbert Tunstall, who spent his ﬁnal days in

Lambeth Palace, more as a guest than as a prisoner.

The refusal of such

moderates to reject the papacy meant that the only group of English clergy

through whom the church could credibly be run were men of unambigu-

ously Reformed opinions.

Such people would probably not have accepted their posts if they had

seriously supposed that the surviving ceremonies would last indeﬁnitely.

The archbishop of York, Edwin Sandys, noted the famous ‘ornaments’

proviso by which the paraphernalia of worship were to be left as they had

been in 1548, but took this to mean ‘that we shall not be forced to use

them, but that others in the mean time shall not convey them away’.

Fewifany of these bishops, left to themselves, would have enforced the

surplice, especially as the objectors to the garment were disproportionately

found among the most impressive of the clergy. Nor would they have

followed Elizabeth in her occasional campaigns against the ‘prophesyings’,

gatherings of local ministers in which the queen herself discerned potential

for sedition, but most of her bishops saw only an innocent means of raising

local intellectual standards.

There was, of course, a rational case for her behaviour. An elderly William

Paget was still advising those prepared to listen of the supreme impor-

tance of sustaining the alliance with the Habsburgs.

At a time when

Calais had been lost and France had a presence in Scotland, his views

had only gained in cogency, especially as Cecil estimated that ‘scantly a

third’

of the country’s JPs could be relied on in religious matters. In

such a situation, there was a great deal to be said for being seen to be

conservative. The greater degree of ritual Elizabeth encouraged in her

chapel had the advantage, among other things, of giving this impres-

sion to Catholic nobles and ambassadors. Even much later in the reign,

when Protestants had become more numerous, there were compelling

Wallace MacCaffrey, The shaping of the Elizabethan regime (1969), 33.

Parker, Correspondence, 77–8.

Ibid., 65.

A collection of state papers ...left by William Cecill, ed. S. Haynes, 2 vols. (1740), i, 208–9.

Conyers Read, Mr Secretary Cecil, 321.

Puritans and Anglicans 121

reasons for accepting an undemanding standard of lay conformity. The

government’s anti-Catholic strategy was shaped by what had happened in

1570, when the emergence of a large-scale problem of principled refusal

to attend church services had coincided with the bull by which the Pope

attempted to depose the English queen. This made it sensible to stress

that recusancy was a form of temporal disobedience with minimal religious

justiﬁcation.

Elizabeth therefore resorted to moderate Henrician arguments, profess-

ing herself contented with ‘the authority . . . by the laws of God and this

realm always due to our progenitors’, authority that in some periods had

been ‘more clearly recognised by all the estates of the realm, as the like hath

been in our time’. She did not claim the right to settle doctrine, but she was

bound, she said, to see to it that God’s law was observed and ‘consequently

to provide, that the church may be governed and taught by archbishops,

bishops, and ministers according to the ecclesiastical ancient policy of the

realm, whom we do assist with our sovereign power’. No one was to be

troubled for ‘matter of faith’, so long as their behaviour was ‘not manifestly

repugnant and obstinate to the laws of the realm, which are established for

frequentation of divine service’.

There is some reason to believe that these arguments struck home; one

of the problems of the mission priests was the existence of good Catholics

who treated church attendance as a matter of civil obedience.

Not sur-

prisingly, then, the government stuck to its story, denying that its actions

represented a case of persecution for religion.

Useofcoercion was reserved

for those who declined to go to church at all or who assisted in the Catholic

mission, whether by sheltering priests or hearing Mass. Although, from

1581, such crimes were regarded as treason, there was never any question

of treating popery as heresy. In practice, intermittent non-communicant

attendance was perfectly acceptable to the authorities, even when the con-

formity involved was offered only by the head of an otherwise Catholic

household.

The advantage of these features of England’s settlement was that they

made available, to those whose consciences were solaced by them, a highly

conservative picture of the church. They also eased relations with Catholics

abroad; it was important to Elizabeth that she should be able to tell the

Queen Elizabeth’s defence of her proceedings in church and state, ed. W. E. Collins (1942), 42, 43.

Alexandra Walsham, Church papists: catholicism, conformity, and confessional polemic in early modern

England (1993), 53, 57.

[William Cecil], The execution of justice in England for maintenance of publique and Christian peace

(1583).

122 The Constitutionalist Revolution

Emperor that ‘we do not follow any new or foreign religions, but only

that approved by the mind and voice of the most famous Fathers’.

Essen-

tially Henrician arguments, appeals to the Fathers and to the scope of

‘things indifferent’, were thus inevitably a part of the defence of England’s

settlement.

This situation by its very nature encouraged general arguments for con-

tinuity. For example, a defender of the ceremonies could note ‘how much

our ancient fathers increased Christ’s Church by such godly policy. Hence it

was, they plucked not down all the Jewish synagogues and heathenish tem-

ples, but turned them to the service of God.’

The same proto-Anglican

writer pointed out that even Calvin had allowed some weight to the desir-

ability of decency and order and stressed ‘what difference there is now when

those things are set forth for comeliness and order, and the time when such

like were enforced as the service of God’. This was a Henrician distinction,

implicit (it has been suggested) in Cranmer’s policies, that had remained

available to anyone who wanted to invoke it.

During the reign of Edward,

Nicholas Ridley, then bishop of London, had turned it against his colleague

John Hooper of Gloucester, who had a proto-puritan objection to wearing

vestments at his consecration. Ridley had characterised St Paul as using cer-

emonies ‘to bear with [Jewish] weakness, and so to win them unto Christ’,

though he thought that such behaviour would be wrong ‘if so be he that

do the same...believeth that the thing is necessary to be retained’.

But though this line of argument was fairly well established, it was also

manifestly incoherent: if a conservative populace was being encouraged to

believe in continuities, then it was being encouraged to believe that the

importance of the ceremonies extended beyond comeliness and order; if

Mass had been idolatrous, then the surviving vestments were invitations to

idolatry.

This point was naturally felt most keenly by those with the greatest

attachment to the theology to which the church was notionally com-

mitted. For the next three generations, the major distinguishing feature

of ‘puritanism’ was the fanaticism and ostentation of its commitment to

ofﬁcial values: puritans were regarded as ‘zealous’, ‘precise’, and ‘busy’ in

demeanour; and their enemies paid tribute to their virtue by slandering it as

John Strype, Annals of the Reformation and establishment of religion and various other occurrences in

the Church of England during Queen Elizabeth’s happy reign, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1824), i–ii, 574.

A briefe examination for the time of a certain declaration lately put in print in the name and defence of

certain ministers in London (1566), n.p.

See above, 72.

The writings of John Bradford, M.A., ed. A. Townsend, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1848–53), ii,pp.392, 384.

Puritans and Anglicans 123

mere hypocrisy. Increasingly, and unsurprisingly, such Protestants regarded

the church’s hierarchy as a corrupting obstacle to their activities. There

was an evident absurdity in forcing the church’s most effective clergy, in

things admittedly ‘indifferent’, to act against their consciences or cease

their ministry. The scandal of the bishops’ role in the enforcement of the

ceremonies encouraged scepticism about their usefulness. It was entirely

understandable that ultra-Protestant dissatisfaction should take the form

of presbyterianism.

First-generation Protestant reformers, including John Calvin himself,

had been relaxed about the role of bishops, but his successor Beza notori-

ously took a stricter line. The fundamental reason for this shift in attitude

lay in a controversial aspiration for morally demanding government. The

bishops were seen as a hindrance to something that some writers saw as

vital to the church: the ‘discipline’ imposed by the free use of the spiri-

tual sword. It would be quite wrong to assume that this development was

inevitable. Wherever the claims of discipline were pressed, lay magistrates

were naturally suspicious, while even among the clergy this way of thinking

met with some resistance; as English conformists were able to point out,

the Zurich ministers who rejected it were just as Reformed, in their own

estimation, as Beza.

There was, however, an existing strand of English theological opinion

that was at least potentially receptive to a high view of excommunication.

The Strasburg theologian Martin Bucer (d.1551), who spent his last days

lecturing at Cambridge, was the earliest major thinker in the Reformed

tradition to put church discipline on a par with preaching of the Word and

the administration of the major sacraments. It was probably under Bucer’s

inﬂuence that Matthew Parker’s ‘Eleven Articles’, a formulary drawn up by

the archbishop at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, referred to the church

as ‘the spouse of Christ, wherein the word of God is truly taught, the

sacraments orderly administered according to Christ’s institution, and the

authority of the keys duly used’.

In 1563, Alexander Nowell’s standard cat-

echism held that ‘the chief and necessary marks of the visible church’ were

preaching of the word, invocation of God, and administration of the sacra-

ments, but he thought that the church’s well-being additionally demanded

‘such a form of ecclesiastical discipline that it shall not be free for any that

abideth in that ﬂock publicly to speak or do anything wickedly or in heinous

sort without punishment’; it was, it followed, most regrettable that the

Thomas Cooper, An admonition to the people of England (1589), 83–4.

Bray, Documents, 349.

124 The Constitutionalist Revolution

corruption of the times, especially among ‘the rich and men of power’ meant

that this salutary institution ‘can hardly be maintained in churches’.

This intellectual fashion was the natural terminus of one side of the

Reformation process; Reformers who demanded a truly disciplined com-

munity would treat their civil duties with religious seriousness, but they

were also likely to ﬁnd it obvious that spiritual means of coercion were

intrinsic to church life. The result was that even conformists attached sig-

niﬁcance to the belief that excommunication was an ecclesiastical procedure.

From a strictly Henrician standpoint, the act of excommunicating someone

was an expression of royal jurisdiction, which could, in consequence, be

exercised by anybody that the king entrusted with the task; but most of the

Elizabethan clergy rejected this unpalatable doctrine. Instead, they insisted

on a two-swords theory by treating the act of excommunication as prop-

erly a matter for the church, which drew authority, in this respect, from

Christ’s own institution. Thus even if the church was seen as coextensive

with the English people, it still enjoyed a type of power qua church that

was not owed to civil government. This apparently small shift was quite

important, because it opened up a gulf between the clergy’s teaching and

the assumptions of the laity.

Throughout the period between the Reformation and the civil wars,

most educated laymen distinguished jurisdiction in foro interno (that is,

whatever power over conscience was exercised by preaching or through the

sacraments) from jurisdiction in foro externo (that is, the visible exercise of

a coercive power). The former derived immediately from God; the latter

from the civil magistrate. But though lay attitudes remained unaltered,

the bishops quite quickly adopted a different standpoint. As early as 1566,

Robert Horne, the bishop of Winchester, presented a more complicated

doctrine. He chose to divide external (or what he called ‘cohibitive’) juris-

diction into two different types, of which one was delegated by the state,

while the other:

consisteth in the exercise of excommunication, and circumstances thereunto

required by Christ’s institution: the which power or jurisdiction belongeth to the

church only, and not to the prince, bishop, or priest, for no man hath authority

to excommunicate but the only church and those who receive authority thereunto

by commission from the church.

A catechism written in Latin by Alexander Nowell dean of St Paul’s together with the same catechism

translated into English by Thomas Norton, ed. G. E. Corrie (Cambridge, 1853), 175.

Robert Horne, An answeare made by Rob. bishoppe of Wynchester to a booke entituled the declaration

of such scruples (1566), 105v.

Puritans and Anglicans 125

A generation later, Hooker felt able to dismiss as nothing but ‘absurd’ the

idea that a lay monarch could excommunicate.

There was thus a near-consensus among the English clergy that any tol-

erably Christian church would be equipped with power to excommunicate:

apower doubtless exercised under lay supervision, and with the assis-

tance of the corporal pains that were provided by the magistrate, but

nonetheless inherent in the church as opposed to the state. To anybody

of this way of thinking, the state of the church’s court system, with

excommunication by lay civilians and large-scale crypto-papal dispensation

by the archbishop of Canterbury himself, was one of its most scandalous

shortcomings.

Even before the settlement of 1559, the leading proto-puritan Thomas

Sampson had believed that want of discipline in the church would be a

reason for refusing ofﬁce.

Not all continental Reformers were sympathetic

to this kind of scruple, but Sampson and others could rely on allies in

Geneva. As Calvin’s successor Beza wrote in 1566,‘Ionce thought that the

matter was only about caps and I know not what other externals, but I

afterwards understood that the controversy was of a far different character.’

He was particularly appalled at ordination by unaided bishops, at the light

use of excommunication ‘even on account of suits relative to money and

the like’, at the fact that English midwives were permitted to baptise, and

at the archbishop’s power of dispensation.

Nothing, it followed, could be less surprising than the emergence, in

the 1570s, of an explicitly presbyterian movement with great appeal to

intellectuals. A church with a rigorous system of excommunication by

lay elders was the best way to supersede transitional arrangements that

seemed to be inherently corrupting. The mystery, if anything, is why this

mechanism found so little lay support, and why the establishment of ‘the

discipline’ had dwindled, by the last years of the reign, into a distant radical

aspiration. The answer may be that abolishing the bishops was not, for most

people, an end in itself so much as an all-purpose cure for everything that

hindered the spread of godliness, but especially for the shortage of adequate

preachers. In consequence, the movement’s fatal weakness was the priority

assigned to maintenance of a public ministry. This doubtless explains why

some ‘moderate’ intellectuals turn out, upon closer inspection, to favour

presbyterian church order; while virtually no ‘extremists’ abandoned the

church to establish their own congregations.

The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, ed. W. Speed Hill 7 vols. (1977–98), iii,

422.

Zurich letters, 1.

Zurich letters, second series (Cambridge, 1845), 129.

126 The Constitutionalist Revolution

Commitment to the project of a national Reformation gave puritanism

an anti-sectarian bias. By 1585, the movement’s principal theorist, Thomas

Cartwright, was vigorously defending continued membership of the church

of England against the criticism of separatists.

As he carefully explained

to his enemy Whitgift, he thought it was ‘unlawful for any, in regard of that

which is to be reformed in it, by way of schism to depart from the unity of

the church’. Revealingly, he saw the intended further Reformation as the

fulﬁlment of existing law

it being ordained by statute of all the late princes of the land that have departed

from the church of Rome, that the canon law (by which this church is for the most

part governed) should by a number of learned and grave men be revised.

Cartwright’s appeal to law was not unique. One of the most effective of

puritan tracts took the form of An abstract, of certaine acts of parliament:

of certaine her Majesty’s injunctions: of certaine canons, constitutions, and

synodalles provinciall (1583) purporting to show that many conformist abuses

were actually illegal and uncanonical. In the short term, this tactic had great

promise, but such polemical victories were costly; they reinforced the power

of ideas and ways of thinking that ultimately favoured the conformists. The

density of government and the prestige of law provided a structure within

which to manoeuvre, but the same structure left no space for altogether

novel institutions. In Scotland, introduction of lay elders could seem an

attractive extension of local governance; in England, where both church and

state were much more vigorous, it threatened the existing mechanisms.

This was probably the underlying reason why puritanism, which seemed

so strong when it appealed for sympathy for conscience, attracted much

less lay support when it proposed signiﬁcant social changes. From 1571

to 1587, members of parliament who brought in bills designed to enact a

presbyterian programme were one by one arrested and imprisoned. Puritan

sympathisers on the council, who showed no hesitation in helping min-

isters against their clerical superiors, displayed much less enthusiasm for

the promotion of the broader programme to which their godly prot

were actually committed. Perhaps the best example of this inconsistency

was the Lord Treasurer Sir Walter Mildmay, the founder of Emmanuel

College, Cambridge, a college whose earliest Master, the formidable pres-

byterian Laurence Chaderton, created what was in effect a godly semi-

nary. Mildmay’s undoubted sympathy with puritan ideas did not prevent

him making a devastating speech against the so-called ‘Bill and Book’ of

Thomas Cartwright, Cartwrightiana, ed. A. Peel and L. H. Carlson (1951), 49–58.

British Library, Lansdowne MS 68,fo.139.

Puritans and Anglicans 127

1587, the last and bravest serious attempt to implement the presbyterian

programme.

Mildmay’s objections started with the general conservative point that

‘to make void so many laws, old and new, in one general short law, before

every one of them be considered is utterly unmeet’.

He went on to ask

a succession of practical questions: what would replace the function of

existing existing episcopal courts in suits about wills, marriages and tithes?

Would tithes indeed continue to exist? If not, how would the clergy be

maintained? What sanctions were to be attached to excommunication?

What would replace the various forms of clerical taxation, of which First

Fruits and Tenths alone (which were disproportionately raised from the

rich ofﬁces to be abolished) amounted yearly to

£20,000?

How could the

mechanism of election – ‘being mere popular’ – be expected to produce a

learned clergy, given that the same ‘will bring with it contentions, factions,

and confusions amongst the vulgar people’ and that ‘the lord or chief

of the town being evil given, the common multitude that depend upon

them [sic] either for love or fear, will choose none other than he shall

like of’?

The sheer complexity of the issues raised showed the extreme

unlikelihood, except in revolutionary conditions, of comprehensive changes

in the church’s government.

Butanadditional safeguard of the existing order lay in another type of

argument. Mildmay was troubled by the thought that

the pastors and doctors upon occasions rising amongst them may assemble them-

selves with the rest of the ministers in that country, or province, and so fur-

ther . . . assemble all in a synod or national council, and there make orders without

the licence, knowledge, or authority of the queen. How dangerous that will be, and

what inconveniences are like to ensue upon such meetings, all men of judgement

may see very apparently.

The remedy for any grievances was simply to appeal to the queen ‘for by

act of parliament made in the ﬁrst year of the queen there is left unto her

Majesty sufﬁcient authority . . . to reform, alter, add, or diminish so much

and in such sort as her Majesty by advice of learned and wise men shall

think convenient’.

Mildmay’s testimony is useful because he cannot possibly be thought to

have been biased against puritans. His colleague Sir Christopher Hatton,

who was committed to episcopacy, delivered a more aggressive speech

in which he ruthlessly drew out the discipline’s subversive implications.

Hartley, Proceedings, ii 345.

Ibid., ii 346–9.

Ibid., ii 348.

Ibid., ii 350.

128 The Constitutionalist Revolution

Hatton noted that ius patronatus was to be exercised by the lay elders,

‘which toucheth us all in our inheritances’ and, yet more seriously, that

‘weare bound to surrender out of our hands our abbey lands and such

other possessions as have at any time belonged to the church’. But the most

important part of his objections concerned the threat that he perceived to

the Supremacy, a threat deriving, in effect, from the revival of a two-swords

theory:

For although it be said . . . that the sovereign Majesty is placed by God in high-

est authority under him within their dominions over all persons and causes as

well ecclesiastical as civil, yet mark how the book interpreteth itself: for sooth

their dominion they speak of is this, that the sovereign must see and command

the ordering of them, as God hath appointed by his word. He must not make

any himself by his ordinary authority, but see others make them: which is not

asovereign authority in causas, but in personas; and is called potestas facti, non

iuris.

He went on to draw attention to a dismaying possibility:

For who knoweth how far they will proceed, if her Majesty do neglect their

excommunications? Is it not, think you, very well known what outrageous asser-

tions are made in your chief presbytery men’s books? Doth not her Majesty under-

stand what is set down hereof in these books, De iure regni apud Scotos, De iure

magistratuum in subditos, Vindiciae contra tyrannos?

From Hatton’s perspective, such presbyterians were just as pernicious as

Roman Catholics: ‘for I pray you wherein differ these men in this cause

from the papists? The Pope denieth the supremacy of princes, so do in

effect these. The Pope yieldeth unto them only potestatem facti, non iuris;

in personas, non causas:nomore do our reformers in this point.’

The difference between Mildmay’s views and Hatton’s was not in their

opinion of the foreseeable results of presbyterianism; they had identical

anxieties about the damage to the legal fabric involved in radical changes

to church order. They also felt a similar commitment to the established

principles of the Supremacy. But where Mildmay saw the godly as mis-

guided, Hatton thought of them as consciously subversive. Much the most

lasting legacy of intellectual presbyterianism was the conviction of the high

conformists that they were the intended prey of a conspiracy. In the end,

nothing the puritans achieved approached the practical effects of the anxi-

eties that they created.

Ibid., ii 336.

Ibid., ii 338.