A Brief History of Britain 1485–1660 Read online

  First, in the 1970s, historians realized that they could not agree upon who the Puritans were. To some, they were members of a small movement which appeared in the 1570s and challenged the structure of the Elizabethan Church, campaigning for it to be given a Calvinist church like the newly reformed Scottish Kirk. To others, they were simply ‘the hotter sort of Protestant’, those members of the reformed Church who were most zealous for the new faith. In the 1560s, however, there were no ‘cool’ Protestants among genuine converts to the new religion. There was a large minority of would-be Catholics and a majority of people who were neutral, confused and grudgingly conformist. Genuine Protestants represented another minority, all inherently enthusiastic. By either definition, the Puritans became a non-event: by the former, they were too few to matter, and by the latter, indistinguishable from Protestants in general.

  Then historians realized that they did not understand Elizabeth. It is clear that the settlement of 1559 was a rushed and unexpected compromise. Elizabeth had made it plain that she wanted a Protestant Church, led by her instead of the Pope and without monks or the mass. Beyond that her intentions and expectations are a matter of conjecture. She certainly expected most of Mary’s clergy to defect to serve her, and was shocked when all but one bishop, and hundreds of parish clergy – a fifth of those of London – refused to do so. That threw her back on the services of hard-line Protestants whom she had not expected to need, so that seventeen of her first twenty-five bishops had been men who had gone into exile under Mary. We also have a shortage of information for what Elizabeth herself was actually doing in this period, and when she made recorded comments we find that, like a wily politician, she was saying different things to different people. Experts in these events therefore cannot agree over whether she basically wanted a reformed Catholic Church like her father’s and was forced to have a more Protestant one, or whether she wanted a more Protestant kind of Church but was forced to settle for a more conservative one. The church that did result was certainly not Catholic, but represented a mixture of Lutheran and Calvinist elements imported from the Continent, of which the former had much more in common with Catholicism than the latter.

  We do have some insight into the queen’s religious attitudes. Susan Doran has studied her letters, and found that her most abiding commitment was to her own power over the Church, asserted against Catholic and Protestants alike. She certainly saw herself as a Protestant, serving a providential God, but was vague over matters of theological belief. That should have made her willing to accept further change and compromise in religious affairs; but here we hit another aspect of her nature, revealed in her actions rather than recorded statements of principle. This was her dislike of change, once a situation had become established and familiar. Whether or not she actually wanted the settlement of 1559, she obstinately refused to alter it after it had been established. This focuses attention on the settlement itself, and recent research has emphasized what a botched job it was. To judge from the reactions of contemporaries, it was the most imperfect Church which has ever existed. Everybody who supported it for the first century of its existence seems to have done so despite reservations concerning some aspect of it. The Elizabethan bishop, John Jewel, who wrote the first official defence of it, referred to it in private as a ‘leaden mediocrity’.

  Its core beliefs were supposedly defined by the legislation and Prayer Book of 1559 and the Thirty-Nine Articles of 1563. Among the points that these documents left confused or obscure were whether the Church of England was simply an improved version of the Church of Rome, or something completely different and opposed to it, associated instead with the continental Protestant Churches; whether human beings could save themselves from sin by their own efforts; whether the clergy had a sacred status which set them off from the laity; whether the royal supremacy over the Church was vested in the monarch alone or in the monarch as a part of Parliament; and whether bishops had either absolute power over the lesser clergy or any role in running the state.

  The Elizabethan Church therefore represented an ideological and administrative fudge, a stop-gap arrangement which for twenty years was regarded by virtually everybody as destined for inevitable alteration. This was, after all, how the Henrician and Edwardian Reformations had indeed proceeded, in instalments designed to achieve what was practicable at each moment. Only Elizabeth’s extraordinary personality prevented that from occurring, and committed English Protestants in general were shocked to find that no more reformation was actually going to occur. Absolutely none of them, with the exception of the queen herself, seems to have been content with the Church as settled in 1559. When they realized that the queen was going to stick with it, they were forced to choose between putting up with the situation or declaring open dissatisfaction. The term ‘Puritan’ is best applied under Elizabeth to those who refused to accept the settlement, however unwillingly, and campaigned for further reformation. This is the original meaning of the word, and it is one which has united recent historians. The distinction between the two types of Protestant first emerged in 1566, when the clergy of London found that the queen seriously expected them to wear the vestments prescribed by the settlement: the special dress for services which represented a vestige of that worn by Catholic priests. There is no sign that Elizabeth was especially fond of vestments themselves, but they were now in the rule book and she was responsible for maintaining the rules. The man caught between queen and clergy was the Bishop of London, Edmund Grindal, who himself grumbled about having to wear the vestments. Finding some of the best preachers in London unwilling to put on what they regarded as rags of popery, he relocated them to the provinces, where they were further from the queen’s eyes.

  The second clash began in 1571, after the defeat of the reign’s big Catholic uprising, of the northern earls. Many Protestants now felt that the time had come for a further purge of features of the Church that reminded them of Catholicism; and among them were most of the bishops and Privy Council, and a large party – perhaps a majority – in Parliament. This should have been an overwhelming combination, but Elizabeth simply refused to budge. Her stance persuaded some clergy to lose faith in the settlement altogether, and start campaigning for a wholesale revision of it, including the abolition of bishops. The outright battle between queen and Church came in 1577, over the issue of prophesyings. These were informal gatherings of clerical and lay Protestants in the provinces, to pray together and concert efforts to complete the conversion of their localities. As such, they compensated for the fact that the structure of the reformed Church, taken straight over from Catholicism, was simply not designed for evangelism. There was a yawning gap between the higher and lower clergy, and no provision for co-option of the laity: the prophesyings took care of both problems and, as such, they were supported by Grindal, now Archbishop of Canterbury, two-thirds of the other bishops, and most of the Privy Council. Elizabeth, however, detested them. Because of their informal nature, they were not under her control as the formal Church could be. Moreover, they encouraged people to think about religion for themselves instead of listening to what the regime had to say about it. Her instinctual hostility was turned implacable by two actually unrelated incidents, cases of physical assault by local religious fanatics which persuaded her that to encourage religious discussion led inevitably to disorder. Accordingly, she simply overruled the majority of her advisers and banned the prophesyings. Her action was too much for Grindal, who went into open mutiny and found himself suspended from his job for life. This had never happened to an Archbishop of Canterbury before, and was a stunning illustration of what the royal supremacy could actually mean.

  The true strength of Elizabeth’s position was that she was the only option that the Protestants had: there was no obvious Protestant contender for the throne, and the heir in blood was the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots. From now on, moreover, things at last began to swing her way, for two reasons which both derived from the fact that she had now reigned, successfully, for almost
twenty years. One was that the key objective of the English Reformation was at last being achieved, and the majority of the English converted into active support for Protestantism. This meant that those who privately preferred Catholicism now had no realistic prospect of it without a coup or an invasion. Some of them set to work actively to prevent further reform and to support the queen in hanging on to the existing Church. The key person here was probably Sir Christopher Hatton, a prominent courtier who deliberated recruited young clergy prepared to defend the settlement of 1559. He could do so because of the second consequence of Elizabeth’s survival: that after twenty years a generation of English had grown up who were used to the compromise of 1559 and did not regard it as ridiculous. They were, on the contrary, inclined to regard it as normal.

  The greatest of this generation was John Whitgift, whom Elizabeth promoted to Archbishop of Canterbury as soon as the wretched Grindal died. In 1583 he turned directly on the Puritans and did exactly what Grindal would never have done: demanded that the clergy accept the whole body of ceremonies prescribed for the church in 1559. Until now a lot of them had been getting along by ignoring those that they did not like, and Whitgift, supported by Elizabeth, was determined to flush them out. He did, so that in a short time almost 400 ministers were suspended from office. This, however, provoked such an outcry in both Parliament and the Privy Council that queen and archbishop were forced to back down. Elizabeth banned the further discussion of religion in Parliament, but Whitgift restored most of the suspended ministers.

  Royal policy now took three main forms. One was a persecution of Roman Catholics, which reinforced the regime’s Protestant credentials and delighted Puritans in particular, coupled with the opening of war with Catholic Spain. The second was a continued harassment of individual Puritans who made a public fuss about conforming to the requirements of the Church. The third was an encouragement of young protégés of Whitgift who began to extol the structure of the Church, with bishops and cathedrals, as one instituted by divine command, rather than a practical convenience. The government, and especially the queen, seemed to be vindicated by its defeat of the Spanish Armada, apparently the strongest possible indication that God approved of what it was doing. Buoyed up by this success, she and Whitgift felt able to take their policy a stage further, by arresting the leaders of the movement for the abolition of bishops. This spelled the final defeat of the Elizabethan Puritan movement.

  It was now the turn of Whitgift to receive a defeat, when he tried at last to tighten up the theology of the Church of England. What he aimed at, specifically, was a clarification of its doctrine of salvation. He came up with a formula designed to unite most or all English Protestants within the broad spectrum of belief held by continental Calvinist Churches. To his surprise, Elizabeth forbade him to publish it as orthodoxy. Typically, she did not made her reasons for doing so clear, but Whitgift’s plan very obviously ran counter to two of her most consistent instincts, as expressed in her letters. The first was, of course, her desire to keep control of her Church. The one thing that she clearly could not do in it, as a laywoman, was to make doctrine. For her archbishop to do so, although he apparently did have the right, by implication dismissed her authority. The other was her genuine confusion over what the rules of salvation really were. Her intellect and her knowledge of the Bible were both good enough to tell her that Scripture was imprecise in many matters of doctrine. Her main grudge against Catholicism, apart from the fact that it was led by somebody else, was that it attempted to specify what the Bible did not. She did not wish to fall into the same error.

  Elizabeth therefore ended her reign with what was in many ways a stunning victory. Her determination and resilience had preserved the settlement of 1559 against all opponents and created the most flexible and broadly based Christian Church in the world. She had secured to it at least the outward allegiance of 95 per cent of the population; but she had also left three potentially serious weaknesses in it. The first was that the Puritans were still there, and although they were a minority of clergy and laity they were quite a large and well-distributed one. Fortunately for the government it was divided. Some Puritans objected to the vestments of the national Church, some to its ceremonies, some to its cathedrals, and some to the lot. In general they were not a menace to other sorts of Anglican, or to the Crown, as long as they were left in peace to ignore such aspects of liturgy and dress as they found offensive. They would only produce serious trouble if a ruler appeared who was determined to enforce the rules upon them. In that eventuality, the trouble would be the worse in that English Puritanism had turned not simply into set of wish-lists for reform but a remarkably uniform religious subculture. It was distinguished by an intense preoccupation with personal salvation, a reliance on the authority of Scripture as absolutely paramount, and a belief that the majority of humans were predestined to damnation.

  The second weakness of the Church was that towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign a rival tendency was appearing within it, of members who were certainly not Catholic but wanted a religion that was more Catholic in some respects than that which was the norm in England by 1600. The loose definition of the Church actually allowed for such a reinterpretation within the limits of the law. If this movement began seriously to pull at the nature of Anglicanism, it would provoke the Puritans to haul more determinedly in the opposite direction. Before Elizabeth’s death, it had no collective name. In the early seventeenth century it acquired, from its opponents, that of ‘Arminianism’, after a Dutch Protestant heretic. Its roots in Elizabeth’s reign lay in a series of independent and largely disconnected initiatives. One was an attack on the Calvinist theory, popular among the majority of committed Elizabethan Protestants, that the identities of that minority of humans who were going to get to heaven had been decided from the creation of the world. From the 1580s onwards, some English Protestants – especially at Cambridge University – began to suggest that humans might have a general potential for salvation, as Catholics preached. Another initiative, associated particularly with Richard Hooker, was to portray the Church of England as a home-grown improvement of the medieval church, rather than as one wing of a Continent-wide resistance movement to the evils of popery. Alongside these developments was a growing reaction at parish level, of people who wanted more physical beauty and ornamentation in their churches, and more emphasis on ceremony. Collectively, all these trends represented a growing challenge to mainstream Elizabethan Protestantism, from the opposite side to that of Puritanism. Together, they were turning the English Church into the most dynamic, internally variable and unstable in the world.

  The third weakness was that the process of reformation had left the English provinces a patchwork of different types of Anglicanism. West Sussex was very resistant to Puritanism; East Sussex was very Puritan. The East Riding of Yorkshire was very conservative in its Protestantism; the West Riding very radical. York itself was a notable centre of conservatism, but the county’s biggest port, Hull, a notable centre of Puritanism. Lancashire was the most Catholic county left in England, but had a Puritan corner around Manchester. Herefordshire was a very conservative county, but was developing a Puritan enclave in the north-west, around the Harley family. Even at village level, Puritans could represent a distinct group among parishioners. If religious tensions were seriously to increase in England, this would mean that the fracture lines would run not between regions, but within county, town and even village communities. The situation held the potential for a civil war much more dreadful than anything known before.

  In 1600 such a catastrophe was still unlikely, and would remain so if English rulers behaved with sufficient wisdom. None the less, Elizabeth had created the situation from which it might develop. There have been in the history of human affairs few rulers who seem to have cared less than she did about what happened after her death. This is largely because there have been very few who, like she, had no children, no surviving siblings, distrusted their cousins and were also very dynamic,
strong-willed and able. In the last analysis, the Elizabethan Church Settlement was unique, and problematic, because so was the queen who presided over it.