History of the Puritans under Elizabeth I

The reign of Elizabeth I of England, from 1558 to 1603, saw the rise of the Puritan movement in England, its clash with the authorities of the Church of England, and its temporarily effective suppression in the 1590s by severe judicial means.

Background, to 1559

The English Reformation, begun in the reign of Henry VIII of England, was initially influenced by a number of reforming movements on the continent: Erasmian, Lutheran, and Reformed, while the practice of the Church of England continued to display many similarities with Roman Catholicism. In the reign of Henry's son, Edward VI of England, the English Reformation took on a distinctly Calvinist tone. Shortly after Edward ascended the throne, the forces of the Schmalkaldic League were defeated at the Battle of Muhlberg by the forces of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, which led to a number of leading Reformed churchmen seeking refuge in England. The refugees included Peter Martyr Vermigli (who became Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University), Martin Bucer (who became Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge University), and John a Lasco (who became head of the stranger churches).

All three influenced England's leading Protestant reformer, Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer, the primate of the Church of England. On the issue of the eucharist (probably the most contentious theological issue of the day), Cranmer adopted the Reformed, rather than the Lutheran position. (At his trial, Cranmer said that he was influenced in this regard by Nicholas Ridley, Bishop of London, who said that he was most influenced that the Calvinists were correct through his study of Ratramnus.) Cranmer's views are important because he wrote his opinion into the Book of Common Prayer, which he revised several times during Edward's reign. The 1552 version, in particular, incorporated many of Martin Bucer's suggestions, as did the 1552 Forty-Two Articles. By 1552, the Church of England moved decisively towards the Reformed camp, although its worship still retained several elements which had been changed by the continental Reformed churches (including the keeping of Lent, allowing the baptism of infants by midwives, retaining the custom of the churching of women, requiring the clergy to wear vestments, and requiring kneeling at Communion).

The debate which would prove to have the longest staying power was about whether the clergy should be required to wear vestments. In his 1550 Lenten sermons before the king, John Hooper called for the elimination of vestments. Later that year, Hooper was to be appointed Bishop of Gloucester, but refused on the grounds that he would be required to wear vestments. Called before the English privy council, a deal was worked out whereby Hooper could be excused from wearing vestments, provided he allowed the clergy under him to wear vestments if they saw fit. Cranmer ordered Nicholas Ridley to perform the consecration  of Hooper as Bishop of Gloucester on the basis of the deal worked out in the Privy Council; Ridley, however, refused, on the grounds that such a consecration would violate the ordinal of the Book of Common Prayer, which, since it had been passed by the English Parliament  and signed by the king, was the law of the land. This disagreement led to an October 1550 debate between Hooper and Ridley which formed the basis of the Vestments Controversy  (also known as the "Vestiarian Controversy"). In December, Hooper was placed under house arrest for refusing to be consecrated as a bishop, a crime under the terms of the 1549 Act of Uniformity. In January 1551, Peter Martyr Vermigli visited Hooper to encourage him to wear vestments, and John Calvin  wrote him a letter saying that, while he agreed with Hooper's position on vestments, the issue was not important enough to justify his refusing the bishopric.

As such, in February, Hooper ended his resistance, and he was consecrated as Bishop of Gloucester in March 1551.

Throughout the reign of Edward VI, the Church of England had been moving toward the Reformed position. This halted in 1553, when Edward died and his Catholic half-sister assumed the throne as Mary I of England. Mary sought to end the English Reformation and restore the Church of England to full communion with the Church of Rome, and instituted a series of persecutions of Protestants known as the Marian Persecutions, which saw Thomas Cranmer, Nicholas Ridley, John Hooper, and many other prominent English Protestants burned at the stake.

As a result of the persecution, roughly 800 English Protestants went into exile. Unwelcome in German Lutheran territories, they established English Protestant congregations in Emden, Wesel, Frankfurt, Strasbourg, Zurich, Basel, Geneva, and Aarau. Most of these churches continued to follow the 1552 Book of Common Prayer, but the Frankfurt congregation, under the leadership of John Knox, felt that the 1552 Book of Common Prayer was insufficiently reformed, and therefore worshiped according to a liturgy drawn up by Knox, known as the Book of Common Order. Under this liturgy, the clergy did not wear vestments, which led to a renewal of the Vestments Controversy between the Frankfurt congregation and the other English Marian exiles.The congregation accured to not only the Frankfurt congregation but to the English Protestant congregation.

The Elizabethan Religious Settlement, 1558

In 1558, Queen Mary died, and her half-sister, Elizabeth became Queen of England. Elizabeth had been raised as a Protestant in the household of Catherine Parr  and upon her ascension to the throne, Elizabeth was determined to reverse Mary's policies and make England a Protestant nation. The first year of Elizabeth's reign was a difficult one: on the one hand, the Marian exiles on the continent returned to England, expecting to thoroughly reform the Church of England; on the other hand, a large proportion of the population and the political nation of England had supported Mary's Catholic policies. The result in 1559 was a compromise between the two positions, known as the Elizabethan Religious Settlement, which attempted to make England Protestant without totally alienating the portion of the population that had supported Catholicism under Mary. While the Elizabethan Settlement proved acceptable to the vast majority of the English nation, there remained minorities at either extremes who were dissatisfied with the state of the Church of England - deeply committed Catholics complained that the Church of England had strayed too far from the Church of Rome, while deeply committed Protestants complained that the Church of England retained far too many remnants of Roman Catholicism and was therefore in need of "further reform". This cry for "further reform" in the 1560s was the basis of the Puritan Movement.

The Church of England under Elizabeth was broadly Reformed in nature: Elizabeth's first Archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker had been the executor of Martin Bucer's will, and his replacement, Edmund Grindal had carried the coffin at Bucer's funeral. During the 1560s and 1570s, the works of John Calvin were the most widely disseminated publications in England, while the works of Theodore Beza also enjoyed immense popularity. As a result, the bishops who opposed Puritanism in the sixteenth and early-seventeenth century were themselves thoroughly Calvinist and it was only later that doctrinal Calvinism came to be particularly associated with Puritanism.

Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1559-1575

The Return of the Vestiarian Controversy, 1563-1569

At the first Convocation of the English Clergy  of Elizabeth's reign, held in 1563, the Puritan faction of the Church of England set out its desires for further reforms: 1) a reduction in the number of saints' days; 2) the elimination of vestments; 3) the elimination of kneeling at communion; 4) the elimination of "emergency baptism" of sickly newborns; and 5) the elimination of organs from churches. The Puritan faction achieved none of its goals at the 1563 Convocation, though many Puritan clergymen introduced these reforms in their congregations on their own initiative in the following years. For example, at Cambridge, William Fulke convinced his students not to wear their surplices and to hiss at those students who wore their surplices.

In this situation, Archbishop Parker published a set of Advertisements, requiring uniformity in clerical dress. The Puritan faction objected loudly, and appealed to the continental reformers to support their cause. Unfortunately for the Puritans many of the continental reformers felt that the Puritans were just making trouble - for example, in a letter to Bishop Grindal, Heinrich Bullinger accused the Puritans of displaying "a contentious spirit under the name of conscience". Grindal proceeded to publish the letter without Bullinger's permission. Theodore Beza was more supportive of the Puritan position, though he did not intervene too loudly because he feared angering the queen and he wanted the queen to intervene in France on behalf of the Huguenots. In response to clergymen refusing to wear their vestments, 37 ministers were suspended. In response, in 1569, some ministers began holding their own services, the first example of Puritan separatism.

The Admonition to the Parliament (1572) and the demand for Presbyterianism

Throughout the 1560s, England's return to Protestantism had remained tentative, and large numbers of the people remained committed to Catholicism and sought a return to Catholicism. Three inter-related events around 1570 led to a reinforcement of Protestantism in England: (1) The Rising of the North, when the northern earls revolted, demanding a return to Catholicism; (2) Pope Pius V issued the bull Regnans in Excelsis, absolving Catholics of their duty of allegiance to Elizabeth; and (3) the Ridolfi plot sought to replace Elizabeth with the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots. In response to this Catholic rebelliousness, the English government took several measures to shore up the Protestantism of the regime: (1) all clergymen were required to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles; (2) all laity were required to take communion according to the rite of the Book of Common Prayer  in their home parish at least once a year; and (3) it became a treasonable offense to say that the queen was a heretic or a schismatic.

In this pro-Protestant, anti-Catholic environment, the Puritan faction sought to push further reforms on the Church of England. John Foxe and Thomas Norton  presented a reform proposal initially drawn up under Edward VI to Parliament. Elizabeth quickly killed this proposal, however, insisting on adherence to the 1559 religious settlement. Meanwhile, at Cambridge, professor Thomas Cartwright, a long-time opponent of vestments, offered a series of lectures in 1570 on the Book of Acts in which he called for the abolition of episcopacy and the creation of a presbyterian system of church governance in England.

Puritans were further dismayed when they learned that the bishops had decided to merge the vestiarian controversy into the requirement that clergy subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles: at the time they swore their allegiance to the Thirty-Nine Articles, the bishops also required all clergymen to swear that the use of the Book of Common Prayer and the wearing of vestments are not contrary to Scripture. Many of the Puritan clergymen were incensed at this requirement. A bill authorizing the bishops to permit deviations from the Book of Common Prayer in cases where the Prayer Book required something contrary to a clergyman's conscience was presented and defeated at the next parliament.

Meanwhile, at Cambridge, Vice-Chancellor John Whitgift moved against Thomas Cartwright, depriving Cartwright of his professorship and his fellowship in 1571.

Under these circumstances, in 1572, two London clergymen - Thomas Wilcox and John Field - penned the first classic expression of Puritanism, their Admonition to the Parliament. According to the Admonition, the Puritans had long accepted the Book of Common Prayer, with all its deficiencies, because it promoted the peace and unity of the church.

However, now that the bishops were requiring them to subscribe to the Book of Common Prayer, the Puritans felt obliged to point out the popery and superstition contained in the Prayer Book. The Admonition went on to call for more thorough church reforms, modeled on the reforms made by the Huguenots or by the Church of Scotland under the leadership of John Knox. The Admonition ended by denouncing the bishops and calling for the replacement of episcopalianism with presbyterianism.

The Admonition to Parliament set off a major controversy in England. John Whitgift wrote an Answer denouncing the Admonition which in turn led to Thomas Cartwright's Replye to An Answere Made of M. Doctor Whitgift Agaynste the Admonition to the Parliament (1573), a second Puritan classic. Cartwright argued that a properly reformed church must contain the four orders of ministers identified by Calvin: teaching elders, ruling elders, deacons, and theological professors. Cartwright went on to denounce the subjection of any minister in the church to any other minister in the strongest possible terms. In a Second Replye, Cartwright was even more forceful, arguing that any preeminence accorded to any minister in the church violated divine law. Furthermore, he went on to assert that a presbyterian hierarchy of presbyteries and synods was required by divine law.

In 1574, an ally of Cartwright's, Walter Travers published a Full and Plaine Declaration of Ecclesiasticall Discipline, setting forth a scheme of reform in greater detail than Cartwright had.

The government moved against all three of these Puritan leaders: John Field and Thomas Wilcox were imprisoned for a year, while Thomas Cartwright fled to exile on the continent to avoid such a fate. In the end, however, the number of clergymen who refused to subscribe to the bishops' requirements proved to be too large, and a number of qualified subscriptions were allowed.

Edmund Grindal, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1575-1583

The reign of Edmund Grindal as Archbishop of Canterbury (1575�1583) was relatively tranquil compared to that of his predecessor, mainly because the movement had been so effectively stifled during Archbishop Parker's tenure.

The major issue during Grindal's archiepiscopate came in 1581, when Robert Browne and his congregation at Bury St Edmunds withdrew from communion in the Church of England, citing the Church of England's dumb (i.e. non-preaching) ministry, and the lack of proper church discipline. Browne and his followers, known as the Brownists, were forced into exile in the Low Countries. There, they were encouraged by Thomas Cartwright, who was now serving as minister to the Merchant Adventurers at Middelburg. However, Cartwright argued that while the Church of England might be flawed, the Brownists were incorrect in separating from it (i.e. he opposed separatism). Like the vast majority of Puritans, Cartwright advocated further reforms to the Church of England, while rejecting the separatism of the Brownists.

A second Puritan development under Grindal was the rise of the Puritan conventicle, modeled on the Zurich Prophezei (Puritans learned of the practice through the congregation of refugees from Zurich established in London), where ministers met weekly to discuss "profitable questions." These "profitable questions" included the correct use of Sabbath, a sign of the growth of the characteristically English Sabbatarianism of the English Puritans. The queen objected to the growth of the conventicling movement and ordered Archbishop Grindal to suppress the movement. Archbishop Grindal refused, citing I Cor. 14. As a result of his disobedience, Grindal was disgraced and placed under virtual house arrest for the rest of his tenure as Archbishop of Canterbury. However, because of his actions, the conventicles resumed after a brief period of suspension.

John Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1583-1604

As we saw above, John Whitgift had been a vocal opponent of Thomas Cartwright. He believed that the matter of church governance was adiaphora, a "matter indifferent", and that the church should accommodate its governance style to the style of government in the state in which the church was located. The Church of England was located in a monarchy, so the church should adopt an episcopal style of government.

Renewed calls for Presbyterianism

he years 1583-1585 saw the brief ascendancy in Scotland of James Stewart, who claimed the title of Earl of Arran. This period saw Scotland pass the Black Acts, which outlawed the Second Book of Discipline. As a response, many Scottish ministers, including Andrew Melville, sought refuge in England. These refugees participated in the English conventicles (as did John Field, now released from prison) and convinced many English Puritans that they should renew their fight to establish presbyterianism in England. As such, in the 1584 Parliament, Puritans introduced legislation to replace the Book of Common Prayer with the Genevan Book of Order and to introduce presbyterianism. This effort failed.

At this point, John Field, Walter Travers, and Thomas Cartwright were all free and back in England and determined to draft a new order for the Church of England. They drafted a Book of Discipline, which circulated in 1586, and which they hoped would be accepted by the 1586 Parliament. Again, the Puritan effort failed in Parliament.

Martin Marprelate, 1588-89, and response

In 1588-89, a series of virulently anti-episcopal tracts were published under the pseudonym of Martin Marprelate. These Marprelate tracts, published by Welsh publisher John Penry, denounced the bishops as agents of Antichrist, the strongest possible denunciation for Christians. The Marprelate tracts called the bishops "our vile servile dunghill ministers of damnation, that viperous generation, those scorpions."

Unfortunately for the Puritans, the mid- to late-1580s saw a number of the defenders of the Puritans in the English government die: Francis Russell, 2nd Earl of Bedford in 1585; Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester in 1588; and Francis Walsingham in 1590. In these circumstances, Richard Bancroft (John Whitgift's chaplain) led a crackdown against the Puritans. Cartwright and eight other Puritan leaders were imprisoned for eighteen months, before facing trial in the Star Chamber. The conventicles were disbanded.

Some Puritans followed Robert Browne's lead and withdrew from the Church of England. A number of those separatists were arrested in the woods near Islington in 1593, and John Greenwood and Henry Barrowe were executed for advocating separatism. Followers of Greenwood and Barrowe fled to the Netherlands, and would form the basis of the Pilgrims, who would later found the Plymouth Colony.

1593 also saw the English parliament pass the Religion Act (35 Elizabeth c. 1) and the Popish Recusants Act (35 Elizabeth c. 2), which provided that those worshiping outside the Church of England had 3 months in which to either conform to the Church of England or else abjure the realm, forfeiting their lands and goods to the crown, with failure to abjure being a capital offense. Although these acts were directed against Roman Catholics who refused to conform to the Church of England, on their face they also applied to many of the Puritans. Although no Puritans were executed under these laws, they remained a constant threat and source of anxiety to the Puritans.

The drive to create a preaching ministry

One of the most important aspects of the Puritan movement was its insistence on having a preaching  ministry throughout the country. At the time of the Elizabethan Religious Settlement, less than 10% of the 40,000 English parish clergy was licensed to preach. (Since the time of the repression of the Lollards in the 14th century, it had been illegal for an ordained parish priest to preach to his congregation without first obtaining a license from his bishop.) Elizabeth herself had been no fan of preaching  and preferred a church service focused on the Prayer Book liturgy. However, many of Elizabeth's bishops did support the development of a preaching ministry, and aided by wealthy laymen, were able to dramatically expand the number of qualified preachers in the country. For example, Sir Walter Mildmay founded Emmanuel College, Cambridge in 1584 to promote the training of preaching ministers. Frances Sidney, Countess of Sussex similarly founded Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge in 1596. Emmanuel and Sidney Sussex became the homes of academic Puritanism.

Although the number of preachers increased dramatically over the course of Elizabeth's reign, there were still not enough preachers to go around. A layman who wanted to hear a sermon might have to travel to another parish  in order to find one with a preaching minister. When he got there, he might find that the preaching minister had shortened the Prayer Book service to allow more time for preaching. And, as a trained minister, when he did pray, he was more likely to offer an extemporaneous prayer  instead of simply reading the set prayer out of the Prayer Book. Thus we see two different styles developing in the Church of England: a traditional style, focused on the liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer; and the Puritan style, focused on preaching, with less ceremony and shorter or extemporaneous prayers.

The rise of "experimental predestinarianism"

Following the suppression of Puritanism in the wake of the Marprelate Tracts, Puritans in England assumed a more low-key approach in the 1590s. Ministers who favoured further reforms increasingly turned their attention away from structural reforms to the Church of England, instead choosing to focus on individual, personal holiness. Theologians such as William Perkins  of Cambridge continued to maintain the rigorously high standards of previous Puritans, but now focused their attention on improving individual, as opposed to collective, righteousness. A characteristic Puritan focus during this period was for more rigorous keeping of Christian Sabbath. William Perkins is also credited with introducing Theodore Beza's version of double predestination to the English Puritans, a view which he popularized through the use of a chart he created known as "The Golden Chain".

In 1970, R. T. Kendall labeled the form of religion practiced by William Perkins and his followers as experimental predestinarianism, a position which Kendall contrasted with credal predestinarianism. Kendall identified credal predestinarians as anyone who accepts the Calvinist teaching on predestination. Experimental predestinarians, however, went beyond merely adhering to the doctrine of predestination, but in fact taught that it was possible for individuals to know experimentally that one is saved, a member of God's elect predestined for eternal life. (The credal predestinarians believed that only some group was destined for eternal life, but that it was impossible in this life to identify who is elect and who is reprobate.) Puritans who adopted Perkins' brand of experimental predestinarianism felt pressure, once they had undergone a religious process to attain knowledge of their election, to seek out like-minded individuals who had undergone similar religious experiences.

In time, some Puritan clergymen and laity, who increasingly referred to themselves as "the godly", began to view themselves as distinct from the regular members of the Church of England, who had not undergone an emotional conversion experience. At times, this tendency led for calls for "the godly" to separate themselves from the Church of England. While the majority of Puritans remained "non-separating Puritans", they nevertheless came to constitute a distinct social group within the Church of England by the turn of the seventeenth century. In the next reign, "the Puritan" as a type was common enough that playwright Ben Jonson could satirize Puritans in the form of the characters Tribulation and Ananais in The Alchemist (1610) and Zeal-of-the-land Busy in Bartholomew Fair (1614).

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