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

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Puritans and Anglicans 129

The strength, and the great weakness, of puritanism was the simplicity of

its arguments; to be a puritan was to believe that God’s instructions were

perspicuous, at least in the sphere of church government and worship. The

essence of their case thus needed no development; there was little to be said

to an opponent who disregarded the plain sense of scripture. There were, to

be sure, two different types of reason for wanting further Protestantisation.

Some radicals thought that any non-scriptural practice was a presumptuous

instance of ‘will-worship’. More moderate spirits centred their objections

upon the inappropriateness of given ceremonies to a particular pastoral

situation; their views were really based upon a judgement that English

culture was too Catholic for Catholic survivals to be wholly innocent. But

neither position demanded much intellectual work. Both groups could

concentrate upon their mission of converting the ungodly, secure in the

knowledge that no one conscientious was likely to challenge their ultimate

objectives.

Conformism, by contrast, was unstable; it rationalised a number of con-

tinuing processes, each of which tended, in the end, to lead the hierarchy

away from a conventional Reformed position. The nature of these processes

is relatively easy to discern, but their chronology is controversial, in part

because the scholarship of the last generation has seen an understandable

reaction against an Anglo-Catholic stress on continuities. The quite correct

insistence that nobody respectable was looking for a via media has tended

to obscure the mechanisms that actually promoted such an outcome. In

consequence, it has tended to obscure an event of great importance to wider

intellectual history: the birth of the conservative rationalism that in the end

transformed the national culture.

Oneobviously important inﬂuence was the survival, virtually unscathed,

of the church’s governmental apparatus. To be a bishop was to have a com-

plex social role involving privileges and obligations that were not necessarily

affected by adopting a Reformed theology. Bishops had lands and courts

and even troops at their disposal (there were separate episcopal militias)

and they could quite legitimately feel that these advantages assisted them

in the promotion of the true religion. One reason that episcopacy had less

appeal in Scotland was that the bishops were so weak that they facilitated

‘sacrilege’, that is, diversion of the church’s wealth for wholly non-religious

purposes; a bishop could be just a ﬁgurehead enabling local aristocrats to

take his episcopal income. In England, there were transfers from the bish-

ops to the crown, but the high status of the church’s leaders was generally

130 The Constitutionalist Revolution

an asset to the clergy. In any case, it was seriously argued that clerical wealth

was spent on worthy causes, especially the public good of hospitality.

From the perspective of an active bishop, some other apparent abuses

seemed quite defensible. Laymen were shocked at excommunication for

trivial offences; a bishop might retort that the sheer triviality of the dis-

putes involved made disobedience inexcusable. Laymen were critical of

pluralism; a bishop might see an arrangement of this kind as an irregular

but useful means of ﬁnding income to support a preacher.

Such bishops

could identify with predecessors with analogous problems, in the antiquar-

ian Matthew Parker’s case by sponsoring a lavish publication: a volume

made up of biographies of all his predecessors whose very form implied a

myth of continuity.

Even at the high-water mark of English Reformation, in the last years of

the reign of Edward VI, the urge to defend the resources of the institutional

church was capable of creating bitter conﬂict between the Protestant bishops

and Protestant laymen. This was the principal reason for a setback with far-

reaching consequences: Northumberland’s decision to veto Cranmer’s code

of canon law, the Reformatio legum ecclesiasticarum,acode which would have

stopped church dignitaries from making lengthy leases of church lands.

This episode was a foretaste of the future, for Cranmer’s Reformatio was

not (as some puritans later supposed) a revolutionary document; though

it incorporated some Protestant doctrinal principles, the law it sought to

codify was largely derived from traditional canonist sources.

It was an

illustration of the fact that a Reformed position could nonetheless go hand

in hand with institutional conservatism.

Throughout the Reformation period, the church courts operated their

inherited procedures, and the professional learning of their lawyers and

ofﬁcials continued to draw upon manuals produced by continental col-

leagues.

Those who administered the church were thus quite likely to be

sceptical about the grander claims of common lawyers. As early as 1565, the

impeccably Protestant Sir Thomas Smith (who as Professor of Civil Law

at Cambridge had been a leading trainer of such people) had echoed Gar-

diner’s argument that church courts, being royal courts, could not commit

Felicity Heal, Of prelates and princes: a study of the social and economic position of the Tudor episcopate

(Cambridge, 1980), 220–1.

Hartley, Proceedings, ii 51–2.

Matthew Parker, De antiquitate Britannicae ecclesiae et privilegiis ecclesiae Cantuariensis (1572).

MacCulloch, Cranmer, 533.

Gerald Bray (ed.), Tudor church reform: the Henrician canons of 1535 and the Reformatio legum eccle-

siasticarum (Woodbridge, 2000), lxvi–viii.

Helmholz, Roman canon law, esp. 121–57.

Puritans and Anglicans 131

the crime of praemunire.

By the early 1590s, Richard Cosin, Whitgift’s

principal legal adviser, was boldly maintaining, on similar grounds, that

Magna Carta had no application to the procedures of church jurisdic-

tions.

The situation of the hierarchy thus tempted them towards some argu-

ments that drove a wedge between them and the Protestant laity. It also

drove them to associate with dubiously Protestant allies, for though the

church’s leaders were mostly unambiguously Reformed, the same was not

yettrueofthe bulk of its clergy. There did exist some forces in the church

prepared to argue, from whatever motives, for a more moderate form of

Protestantism. The Convocation of 1563, which drew up the Thirty-Nine

Articles of Religion, entrusted Article 28 ‘Of the Lord’s Supper’ to Bishop

Edmund Guest of Rochester. The article that he drafted was later criti-

cised for omitting the 42 Articles’ denial of ‘a real and bodily presence’. By

his own account, the doctrine formulated ‘did not exclude the presence of

Christ’s body from the sacrament, but only the grossness and sensibleness

of the receiving thereof’.

There are ways of understanding this doctrine as

Reformed, but it was certainly conciliatory. The same assembly reafﬁrmed,

against Bullinger of Zurich and Calvin of Geneva, that Christ physically

descended into hell;

and tinkered with the Article about predestination

and election so as to give more prominence to the statement that ‘we must

receive Christ’s promises in such wise as they be generally set forth to us in

Holy Scripture’ (a shift that may have been an accident, but which in the

end encouraged the rejection of theories of limited atonement).

Perhaps

most interestingly, the Lower House rejected a proposal to make it optional

to wear the surplice that may have enjoyed at least tacit support from several

of the bishops.

Conservative forces in the church were thus not negligible. Their position

was considerably strengthened by the debating strategy adopted by the

church’s most admired theologian. John Jewel’s ‘Challenge’ sermon, ﬁrst

preached in November 1559, denied that a long list of Catholic claims

could be supported from patristic writings of any of the ﬁrst six centuries.

From a logical point of view, this hardly implied an endorsement of every

Smith, De republica Anglorum, 143–4.

Richard Cosin, An apologie for sundrie proceeding by jurisdiction ecclesiastical (1593), 102.

R. W. Dixon, History of the church of England from the abolition of the Roman jurisdiction 6 vols.

(Oxford, 1902), v, 400–1n.

Strype, Annals,I519.

Bray, Documents, 295.

David Crankshaw, ‘Preparations for the Canterbury provincial Convocation of 1562–3:aquestion

of attibution’ in Susan Wabuda and Caroline Litzenberger (eds.), Belief and practice in Reformation

England (Aldershot, 1998), 60–93.

132 The Constitutionalist Revolution

aspect of patristic practice (it was the Catholic attitude towards the primitive

church that made Jewel’s claims polemically useful), but even at the time a

certain disquiet was expressed, on the grounds that his tactics encouraged

an inappropriate reverence for the Fathers. His puritan biographer Laurence

Humphrey regretted that he weakened his position by turning away from

scriptural evidence.

Uncertainty about the Fathers’ status continued to be a source of difﬁ-

culty. In a pamphlet that he wrote in 1580, the Jesuit Edmund Campion

caused some embarrassment by an evocative memory of 1560s Oxford. He

asked his close friend the Protestant Toby Matthew ‘that he would plainly

tell me, whether he that so diligently read the Fathers, could be of that

side, whereunto he laboured to allure his audience. He replied [no], if he

both read them and believed them.’ Campion felt sure that ‘neither he now,

nor Matthew Hutton, who as I hear is a famous man, and bent much to

study the Fathers, nor any of the adversaries which do the like, do other-

wise think’.

It says much about the nature of the clerical elite that the

two friends he chose to name both ended their careers as archbishop of

York.Italso says something important about the way that English thought

developed that Matthew’s frank admission would subsequently have been

unthinkable.

When the high Calvinist William Whitaker replied to Campion the fol-

lowing year, he found himself reduced to saying lamely that ‘in private and

familiar conference we say many things, which we would not have further

reported or dispersed’.

By 1589, the learned Thomas Cooper, bishop of

Lincoln, had come to a carefully worded formulation that shifted the bur-

den of proof, in matters of doctrine, to those who wanted to reject patristic

evidence. ‘What comfort is it’, he afﬁrmed,

to any church to have the grounds of their faith and religion so established upon

the holy scriptures that for the interpretation of the same they have the testimony

and consent of the primitive church, and the ancient learned fathers. From which

consent they should not depart either in doctrine or other matter of weight unless it

so fall out...that we be forced thereto, either by the plain words of the Scriptures,

or by evident and necessary conclusions following upon the same, or the analogy

of our faith.

In time, this respect for the Fathers became the major cause of the Catholi-

cising drift among the clergy’s leaders.

Laurence Humphrey, Ioannis Juelli Angli Episcopi Sarisburiensis vita et mors (1573), 212.

William Whitaker, An answere to the ten reasons of Edmund Campian the Jesuit,tr. Richard Stock

(1606), 122.

Ibid, 146.

Cooper, An admonition, 69.

Puritans and Anglicans 133

But whatever the longer-range impact of patristic scholarship, the short-

term future of the church was shaped by a political disagreement. It was

political theology that drove otherwise conventional reformers into alliance

with Platonists, church papists, Lutherans, and cultural conservatives. It is

anachronistic to assume that this involved the trumping of religion by

merely secular considerations. A judgement commonly made of sixteenth-

century conformist writings is that their stress upon obedience involved

them in a certain spiritual aridity; but the basis of this judgement is a

modern attitude to the delimitation of the sacred. A better way of thinking

about conformism (to the extent that it was principled) would stress the

positive appeal of reverence for civil government.

At the beginning of the reign, this reverence was still ‘republican’ both

in its character and its expression. Thus Matthew Parker’s private corre-

spondence reveals a cautious attitude to extra-legal power. Parker accepted

that the queen both had, and ought to have, a power that enabled her

to act outside the law, but his attempts to think about the church’s situa-

tion led him towards some interesting distinctions. As he was well aware,

he was particularly vulnerable to godly criticism when wielding his power

of dispensation, a power (it may be remembered) conferred on him by a

Cromwellian statute. As he explained to Cecil in 1569,‘Iwill not dispute of

the queen’s absolute power, or prerogative royal, how far her highness may

do in following the Roman authority.’ He nonetheless felt some uncertainty

if any dispensation should pass from her authority to any subject, not advouchable

by laws of her realm made and stablished by herself and her three estates, whether

that subject be in surety at all times for afterward: specially seeing that there be

parliament laws precisely determining causes of dispensations. Wherein, I have

heard say, King Henry himself did use that authority in some of his own private

causes.

Parker acknowledged there would be occasions when there was no alterna-

tive to royal intervention: in those cases where unusual circumstances had

made existing rules inapplicable ‘I leave them to my prince, as I ought.’ But

his strategy for protecting his own authority involved exclusive stress upon

the statute. The problem with invoking the royal absolute power was the

long-term uncertainty created: ‘during the prince’s life, who shall doubt of

anything that may pass from that authority? But the question is, what will

stand sure in all times, by the judgement of the best learned?’

At the end of his life, in 1574,hewrote a further letter, again to Cecil,

in which he explained his legalistic standpoint. Like most conformists,

Parker, Correspondence, 351.

Ibid., 351–2.

134 The Constitutionalist Revolution

he denied he cared ‘for cap, tippet, surplice, wafer-bread or any such’;

it was only ‘for the laws so established I esteem them’. The corollary of

this emphasis on laws was an unwillingness to go beyond them. He noted

that ‘her princely prerogatives in temporal matters be called into ques-

tion of base subjects’ and that ‘whatsoever the ecclesiastical prerogative

is, I fear it is not so great as your [Cecil’s] pen hath given it her in the

injunction’.

Butatthe time he wrote these words, his moderate and

careful position was becoming less attractive. The period’s nascent pres-

byterianism, with its stress on collective government of churches, struck

Parker himself as politically subversive, for presbyterians did not just ‘cut

down the ecclesiastical state, but also give a great push at the civil policy’,

so much so, he feared, that ‘we evidently see ...apopular state to be

sought’.

It was the existence of such fears that doomed his unfortunate successor,

Edmund Grindal (1519–83). In a notoriously ill-judged letter, despatched

in December 1576 though possibly composed a little earlier, Grindal set

out to challenge the royal policy of acting to suppress the ‘prophesyings’.

To someone whose priorities were primarily evangelical, these gatherings

of ministers for public discussion of scripture seemed unambiguously ben-

eﬁcial, serving to raise the standards of the ministers themselves and to

inform and edify lay hearers. At earlier and later periods, they generally

involved a sermon or sermons followed by private clerical discussion,

but

the prophesyings complained of in the 1570s appear to have been public

disputations; Grindal himself described them as ‘in effect . . . all one with

the exercises of students in divinity in the universities; saving that [they

are] done in a tongue understood, to the more edifying of the unlearned

hearers’.

It was these ‘unlearned hearers’ that made them vulnerable; Elizabeth was

probably suspicious of any unnecessary meetings of her church’s ministers,

but the serious case against the prophesyings rested upon the airing of

controversial views in the presence of uneducated laymen; Thomas Cooper,

for example, was a defender of the institution who was opposed to the lay

audience.

Unfortunately, Grindal felt committed to every aspect of these

gatherings. Although his public statements stressed the good that they did

to the clergy, he privately saw ‘no reason why the people should be excluded,

especially seeing that St Paul giveth great so commendation to that which

Ibid., 478–9.

Ibid., 434.

Patrick Collinson, ‘Lectures by combination: structures and characteristics of church life in

seventeenth-century England’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 48 (1975), 182–213.

The remains of Edmund Grindal, ed. W. Nicholson, 385.

Add. 29,546,fo.42.

Puritans and Anglicans 135

was used in the primitive church, especially for the beneﬁt that groweth

thereby to the hearers’.

Still more unfortunately, he chose to defend his position by the more

general claim that

When your Majesty hath questions of the laws of your realm, you do not decide

the same in your court, but send them to your judges to be determined. Likewise

for doubts in matter of doctrine or discipline of the church, the ordinary way is

to refer the decision of the same to the bishops, and other head ministers of the

church.

Although the queen was not averse to appealing to the authority of bishops,

especially when they were, in fact, just following her instructions, she could

not let such claims be used against her. Faced with a challenge that attacked

her power of controlling religion, she had no real option but to punish

the archbishop; it is a mark of her timidity, in the face of the foreseeable

disapproval of most of her immediate followers, that she procrastinated for

ﬁve months before she actually suspended him.

It was noticeable, however, that though the English hierarchy unani-

mously regretted the suspension (which had a disastrous practical effect),

not all of them supported the primate’s position. At least three senior

bishops opposed the prophesyings, while the newly appointed bishop of

London, John Aylmer, believed that Grindal had been misinformed.

do not know John Whitgift’s attitude, but it seems most unlikely to have

been positive. Whitgift became archbishop in 1583.During his lengthy

tenure (he died in 1604), a fear of ‘popularity’ eclipsed concern for mission-

ary endeavours, and the defenders of the church began to see the merits of

a vulgar monarchism.

iii

Whitgift’s ecclesiastical career exempliﬁed the logic of the drift to Anglican-

ism. During the 1560s, his views had been impeccably Reformed. Although

his Cambridge patron, Andrew Perne, was one of the few prominent cler-

gymen who might legitimately be called an Anglo-Catholic, his doctoral

thesis argued that the pope was Antichrist, and he felt sure that Zwingli’s

works were preferable to Luther’s.

As late as 1566,hehad opposed the

Patrick Collinson, Archbishop Grindal 1519–1583: the struggle for a Reformed church (1979), 247.

Grindal, Remains, 387.

Collinson, Grindal, 247–8.

Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan puritan movement (Oxford, 1990), 195.For a list of those con-

sulted, see Collinson, ‘Lectures by combination’, 202n.

Strype, Whitgift, i15, 64.

136 The Constitutionalist Revolution

surplice, and even in his maturity, he personally disliked the use of wafers,

on the grounds that ‘it were to be wished, for the avoidance of superstition,

that common and usual bread were used’.

He nonetheless presided, as

archbishop, over a transformation in the church’s self-perception.

The pivotal event in Whitgift’s life was his polemical exchange with

Cartwright, which began in 1570,inCambridge, when Whitgift was Master

of Trinity and Cartwright was his most distinguished Fellow. Whitgift had

the advantage, in this conﬂict, that his opponent thought it obvious that

the ideal church polity was mixed:

Forinrespect of Christ the head, [the church] is a monarchy; and, in respect of

the ancients and pastors that govern in common and with like authority amongst

themselves, it is an aristocraty, or the rule of the best men; and, in respect that the

people are not secluded, but have their interest in church-matters, it is a democraty

or a popular estate. An image whereof appeareth also in the policy of this realm; for

as in respect of the queen her Majesty it is a monarchy, so, in respect of the most

honourable council, it is an aristocraty, and, having regard to parliament, which is

assembled of all estates, it is a democraty.

This conventional view, the view of Smith and Aylmer, encouraged the

incautious observation that ‘as the hangings are made ﬁt for the house, so

the commonwealth must be made to agree with the church’.

Whitgift’s ideas were rather different. He held that governments were

named after the part which ‘beareth the greatest sway’ and that a popu-

lar government was ‘the worst kind of government that can be’.

Armed

with this preconception, he found Cartwright’s stress on mixture sinister,

remarking that ‘the reasons that you use for popular or aristocratical gov-

ernment of the church, when they come among the people, will be easily

transferred to the state of the commonweal’. Not surprisingly, he pounced

on Cartwright’s innocent remark that ‘the commonwealth must be made to

agree with the church’.

He also adopted a near-Henrician view about the

authority enjoyed by ‘Christian magistrates, who have the chiefty, power,

the making of laws, and government, not only in profane matters but also

in divine’.

The problem with Bezan presbyterianism was that

it giveth unto [the prince] only potestatem facti, not juris,asthe papists do; for the

prince must maintain, and see executed, such laws, orders, and ceremonies, as the

pastor with his seniors make and decree; but in making and appointing orders,

and ceremonies he may in no case meddle.

Patrick Collinson, Godly people: essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism (1983), 325–33; The

works of John Whitgift, D.D., ed. John Ayre, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1851–3), ii, 84.

Whitgift, Works, i 390.

Ibid., iii 189.

Ibid., i, 393, 467.

Ibid., ii 239, 264; iii 192, 211.

Ibid., iii 171.

Ibid., iii 210–11.

Puritans and Anglicans 137

More strikingly, he was ready to afﬁrm that Christian princes had authority

‘in deciding of matters of religion, even in the chief and principal points’.

Whitgift had every reason to appeal to an increasingly high monarchism.

It is, however, unfair to regard him as nothing but a royalist authoritarian or

to assume that his ideas were necessarily unpopular. To begin with, his bark

was considerably worse than his bite. At the start of his two decades as arch-

bishop, he chose to adopt a policy of ‘subscription’, that is, of demanding a

statement from beneﬁced clergy to the effect that nothing in the Articles or

Book of Common Prayer was actually against the law of God. It would be

difﬁcult to show, however, that he expected to reduce the puritans to full

conformity. As he himself protested, ‘my proceedings are neither so vehe-

ment nor so general against ministers and preachers as some pretend’.

practice, a vague undertaking to use the Prayer Book appears to have been

enough to save a man from deprivation.

During the 1580s, this moder-

ation probably arose from political weakness, but in the 1590s, when his

position had become much stronger, he seems to have stuck to the same

policy. He took decisive action against the separatists (including executions

for sedition), but there is little evidence of new pressure on people who

were merely scrupulous.

During the ﬁnal decade of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, the most striking

single feature of the religious scene was the completeness of his victory.

He had, to be sure, some invaluable help from the lunatic fringe of the

godly; the genius who wrote the scurrilous Marprelate tracts (1588–9) and

the millenarian prophet William Hacket (who was put to death for treason

in 1591)were probably both instrumental in alienating moderate opin-

ion. But the passivity of his opponents is nonetheless quite difﬁcult to

account for; in a period in which printed controversies were frequently

uselessly lengthened by a love of the last word, the large-scale treatises of

his supporters – most notably William Bridges, Matthew Sutcliffe, and

Richard Hooker – went virtually unanswered by their targets. In the par-

liament of 1593,hemanaged to criminalise perfectly orthodox worship if

it was deemed to have taken place outside the Church of England. There-

after, his control of church affairs seems not to have been seriously chal-

lenged. Unlike the more divisive William Laud, he had relatively cordial

relations with other members of the hierarchy. Perhaps most tellingly, he

was a friend of the country’s greatest Protestant military hero, Elizabeth’s

favourite the earl of Essex; though Essex had in most respects inherited

the earl of Leicester’s role, he seems to have been indifferent to presbyteri-

anism.

Ibid., iii 306.

Strype, Whitgift, iii 108.

Collinson, Puritan movement, 264.

SirGeorge Paule, The life of the most reverend and religious prelate John Whitgift (1612), 57, 69.

138 The Constitutionalist Revolution

The curious collapse of political puritanism is a signiﬁcant pointer to

the movement’s character. Its underlying impulse had always been a righ-

teous indignation at policies that seemed to slow the process of conversion.

But ministers whose over-riding purpose was the salvation of their godless

neighbours were relatively easy to control; they would always, in the end,

subordinate their hopes of institutional reform to the short-term require-

ments of a public ministry. Their unremitting focus upon preaching was

also a more subtle handicap; it tended to encourage an indifference to

ideas – even, to some extent, towards theology itself. Their greatest the-

ologian, William Perkins (1558–1602), acquired a European reputation, but

his rigidly predestinarian system directed the reader’s attention to what his

younger followers would soon call ‘practical divinity’. His ‘supralapsarian’

position – he held that the decision to reject the reprobate was logically

prior to God’s knowledge of the Fall – was really a summons to godly intro-

spection. The Perkinsite believer was primarily concerned with what one

of his most famous tracts had called A case of conscience, the greatest that ever

was; how a man may know whether he be the child of God or no (1592). This

practical bias was probably one of the reasons why puritans paid fatally

little attention to arguments discovered by their subtler enemies. Martin

Marprelate’s annihilating title Oh read over D. John Bridges, for it is a worthy

work may well have ensured that few if any did, but it also left conformists

in possession of an important type of battleground.

Even John Whitgift’s own ideas encountered oddly little criticism. This

was quite fortunate for the archbishop, for though his stated doctrines were

Reformed, there are traces in his thinking of a religious style that had entirely

different implications. A Reformer of John Jewel’s generation would hardly

have ventured the statement that ‘there is no man of learning and modesty

which will without manifest proof condemn any order, especially touching

the government of the church, that was used and allowed during the time of

the primitive church, which was the next 500 years after Christ’.

Whitgift

also adopted a positive view of ceremonial worship, rejecting a proposal

to muster his cathedral’s vicars choral on the grounds that they were ‘such

as were occupied in the daily service of God’.

He thought that it was

‘most untrue that God so severed his people from the Egyptians or other

nations near adjoining that they had nothing in common with them, or

no ceremonies like unto theirs’, since it was clear that Israelite religion had

very similar ‘external rites’. There were, he added, ‘divers learned men’ who

thought that ‘God did prescribe unto the Israelites that solemn manner and

Whitgift, Works, ii 182.

Strype, Whitgift, ii 425.