Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History (29 page)

Nevertheless, Lord Robert, who was promoted to be earl of Leicester in 1564, remained a favorite of the queen until his death in 1588. In the meantime, Elizabeth’s Privy Council, Parliament, and people urged her repeatedly to get herself married. Elizabeth, again like her father, learned to use the possibility of matrimony as a diplomatic trump card or, more crudely, as bait: after all, marriage to the queen of England would be a peaceful and inexpensive way for Spain or France to win that country into an alliance and, perhaps, even back to Catholicism. Throughout the first half of the reign, and especially during foreign policy crises, she entertained a steady stream of French princes and German dukes, all of whom offered undying love – and diplomatic alliance. Unlike her father, however, she knew that marriage was a card that she could play only once. Once played, her freedom of maneuver and, with it, that of her country, would be virtually eliminated. Instead, she preferred to play potential suitors against each other in a brilliant game of amorous, albeit duplicitous, diplomacy.

In the end, Elizabeth never played the marriage card. Instead, she made a virtue of her single state. By the 1580s she would embrace the image of a “Virgin Queen,” wedded not to some foreign prince or courtly fop but to her first and greater love, the people of England. In 1599 she would refer to her subjects as “all my husbands, my good people.”
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Elizabeth, unlike Mary born of both an English mother and an English father, seems to have felt real affection for her people. Certainly, she had the common touch, frequently going out amongst them on summer-long cross-country progresses, or being carried in an open chair through the streets of London. At such moments Elizabeth played to the crowd, ordered “her carriage … to be taken where the crowd seemed thickest, and stood up and thanked the people.”
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Back at court, she encouraged artists, poets, and playwrights – for example, Edmund Spenser (1552?–99) in his
Faerie Queene
(1596) – to celebrate her as Diana, Belphoebe, Astraea, or Gloriana, not only her people’s bride, but a sort of benevolent goddess to them as well. Indeed, in a country which had largely given up the Catholic devotion to the Virgin Mary, the Virgin Queen came to represent a Protestant alternative: a softer, gentler, more feminine face of power. Above all, the image of Gloriana allowed Elizabeth to portray herself as above faction, an impartial symbol of love and veneration for the entire country. But this image developed slowly and came to fruition only in the 1580s. In the meantime, she had to rely on other means to compose disagreements between Cecil and Dudley and between Catholics and Protestants.

The Religious Settlement

As we have seen, English men and women were divided about religion in 1558. They looked anxiously to the new queen and her advisers to settle these difficulties. Whatever solution they chose would have tremendous implications beyond the walls of England’s churches. For many people in England, Roman Catholicism was too closely associated with Mary’s cruelty and a domineering Spanish Empire to be acceptable. But the embrace of full-blown Protestantism would jeopardize Spain’s friendship, invite the hostility of the other great Catholic power, France, and prove equally unacceptable to the queen’s more conservative subjects. In the first years of her reign, Queen Elizabeth and her advisers had to walk a tightrope in the area of religion.

Fortunately, the new queen’s personality and experience fitted her well for balancing acts. Unlike Edward or Mary, she had not yet publicly committed to one religious view or the other. Rather, as princess she had been careful to keep her own religious devotions secret. With hindsight, it is pretty clear that she considered herself a Protestant in theology but loved hierarchy and ritual in a way that seems Catholic. Above all, she was, by contemporary standards, practical, tolerant, and even somewhat secular. For example, her Privy Council contained fewer churchmen than had her predecessors’. More importantly, Queen Elizabeth, “not liking to make windows into men’s hearts and secret thoughts,” was not particularly concerned that every English man and woman accept fully the doctrines and practices of one perfectly consistent religion.
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What she wanted was obedience and loyalty. What she needed was a religious settlement that most people could mostly accept. To get it, she would have to find a compromise between her Protestant beliefs and Catholic structures and practices.

That compromise was found, but not without struggle. When Parliament met in the spring of 1559, the queen and her advisers proposed an Act of Supremacy undoing Mary’s restoration of papal power, but the Catholic bishops in the House of Lords opposed and almost defeated it. In the end, they had to be neutralized by detention in the Tower, with the result that no churchman voted for the new religious settlement. Even then, passage was only secured by making concessions to conservatives: for example, the Act named Elizabeth Supreme Governor of the Church, not Supreme Head as Henry VIII and Edward VI had been. It further required the clergy and government officials to swear an oath of allegiance to the Supreme Governor, but, in a second accommodation to religious conservatives, it placed no such obligation on the laity. Elizabeth wanted to avoid anything that forced her people to choose between their queen and their beliefs. After much infighting, Parliament also passed another Act of Uniformity which required all of the queen’s subjects to attend church on Sundays and holy days on pain of a 12 pence fine. Services were to follow a revised version of the second (1552), more Protestant, Book of Common Prayer introduced under Edward VI, but with the reinsertion of an ambiguous sentence from the 1549 Prayer Book leaving room for the Catholic belief in transubstantiation. In 1563, Parliament passed a new Treason Act making it a capital crime to express support for papal jurisdiction or (in another attempt to ease pressure on Catholics) to
twice
refuse to swear the Oath of Allegiance. Finally, that same year produced a new statement of doctrine, the Thirty-Nine Articles of Faith, adopted by Convocation and enshrined in statute in 1571. These, too, were essentially Protestant, even Calvinist. They embraced justification by faith and predestination and denounced Catholic beliefs such as Purgatory and the sacrificial nature of the mass. But the new Protestant beliefs were to be enforced by an episcopal hierarchy that was structured much like the old Catholic one (minus the pope, of course); and the new services were to be conducted by clergy wearing colorful vestments that were also reminiscent of the Old Faith.

So the Church of England as established in 1559 was a compromise: Protestant privy councilors and those sympathetic to reformation got their way on doctrine; religious conservatives got theirs, apart from the actual texts of the Book of Common Prayer, on ceremony and hierarchy. Put more simply, to paraphrase the historian Conrad Russell, the genius of the Church of England was and is that it thinks Protestant, but looks Catholic.
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This juxtaposition was, in fact, perfectly designed to win over the vast majority of the English people. Protestants loved the Word as contained in Scripture. For many of them, the new Church doctrine outlined in the Thirty-Nine Articles was sufficiently consistent with the Word to be acceptable, despite the wearing of vestments and other rituals they found scripturally suspect. Catholics loved those rituals and the sense of paternalistic community provided by a hierarchical framework. For many of them, the new liturgical practices and Church structure as laid out in parliamentary legislation and the Book of Common Prayer were close enough to the old, despite the abandonment of Latin for English, to be inoffensive. A few kept up a low-grade protest, mumbling during the reading from the Book of Common Prayer, for example. But such “Church papists” were a declining bunch and most Englishmen and women were probably tired of religious controversy and violence by the 1560s. Finally, the generally low level of religious literacy and enthusiasm that some historians have detected in the late sixteenth century may also have contributed to the widespread acquiescence in the new settlement. Many people may not have understood or cared.

Admittedly, there are no surviving census records for early modern England in which its inhabitants checked off their religious beliefs. Nevertheless, it seems reasonable to assert that, by the 1580s, the vast majority of the population had accommodated itself without much difficulty to the Church of England as established in 1559–63. Still, the tension between Protestant theology and Catholic ceremony rankled. There were two groups, one nominally within the Church, the other outside of it, who resisted the new settlement. As we shall see, their discontents and the tensions generated by and between them would dominate not only the religious history of England, but its political and social history as well, for over a century.

The Puritan Challenge

Though a compromise, the religious settlement of 1559–63 was, by and large, one that leaned in a Protestant direction: after all, there was no pope, no mass, no monasteries, no Purgatory or indulgences. But that is not to say that committed Protestants were entirely happy with the new dispensation. Marian exiles, in particular, chafed at its accommodations with Catholicism. The Marian exiles were staunch Protestants who had fled to the continent during Mary’s reign to preserve their faith and their lives. These men and women had nearly lost everything for Protestantism and they cherished the memory of the martyrs who had, in fact, made the ultimate sacrifice. They spent Mary’s reign studying, translating, and listening to continental preachers – imbibing the latest Protestant thought at the very well-springs of the Reformation. Many tended to be strict Calvinists. At Mary’s death, the exiles returned to England expecting to establish a “godly” settlement of Church and State, by which they meant one consistent with their interpretation of Scripture. They could only agree to the settlement of 1559–63 as a temporary half-measure. In their view, the serious business of godly reformation should continue, purging or purifying the English Church of the last vestiges of Catholic practice. By the 1570s their opponents were beginning to label anyone so inclined a
“Puritan.”

Unfortunately, the term “Puritan” is highly controversial. While many contemporaries may have thought that they knew a Puritan when they saw one, the fact is that there never was a specific religious organization with a uniform code of beliefs called “Puritanism.” Because the beliefs of those labeled Puritans varied from individual to individual and over time and place, some historians have abandoned the term in favor of “reforming Christians” or “the more enthusiastic sort of Protestants” or something similar. For simplicity’s sake, and because the term did have a meaning, however imprecise, to contemporaries, we will continue to use it.

Early Puritans did not want to form a church separate from the Church of England. Rather, they sought to “purify” that Church from within, to make it less Catholic and more Protestant, less of “a mingle-mangle” of the two faiths. Specifically, and perhaps the one goal to which all those labeled Puritan would agree, they wanted their Church to conform to Biblical beliefs and practices. Anything not found in Scripture was to be abandoned. Indeed, the more extreme Puritans, opposed to any distinction between Church and State, convinced that the last days foretold in revelation were coming sooner rather than later, sought to apply Biblical law and practice to every aspect of English government and society: thus in 1563 one former Marian exile urged the House of Commons to make adultery and Sabbath-breaking capital offenses. But most controversies between Puritans and mainstream churchmen took place over religious doctrine, government, and ritual.

The first area of disagreement came over the seemingly innocuous matter of what the clergyman should wear at Sunday services. Puritans associated richly decorated vestments with Catholic practice, in part because they suggested distance between the ordained priesthood and the congregation. Therefore, they insisted upon plain black dress. In 1563, Convocation considered a petition to abolish the compulsory wearing of the surplice, as well as the use of the organ in church services, the sign of the cross, and the remaining holy days. In 1565, the queen, provocatively and perhaps unwisely, issued an unequivocal defense of ornate vestments and demanded that the bishops enforce their use by suspending clergy who refused. This created a new target for Puritan reformers. In 1570 Thomas Cartwright (1534/5–1603), a Cambridge divinity professor, presented a series of lectures criticizing the Church of England and, especially, the bishops’ role in it. Cartwright was removed from his professorship and a pamphlet war ensued. Some of Cartwright’s defenders argued that the Church should not be organized hierarchically; rather, congregations should be directed by local “presbyteries” of teaching elders (ministers) and ruling elders (laymen). Superior guidance for these congregations would be supplied by representative councils or synods (at the lowest level, a regional presbytery, at the highest level, a general assembly). This was, in fact, the model of Church government being gradually adopted in parts of Scotland from the 1560s. It was also a logical extension of Protestant theology. If the Bible is the only reliable source of the Word of God, and if that Word “shines clear in its own light” (i.e., is unequivocal in meaning and accessible to all), who needs bishops? Who needs a hierarchical structure to tell Christians what to think and do?