Elizabeth I and Religion 1558-1603

Susan Doran

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134906321
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Susan Doran describes and analyses the process of the Elizabethan Reformation, placing it in an English and a European context. She examines the religious views and policies of the Queen, the making of the 1559 settlement and the resulting reforms. The changing beliefs of the English people are discussed, and the author charts the fortunes of both Puritanism and Catholicism. Finally she looks at the strengths and weaknesses of Elizabeth I as royal governor, and of the Church of England as a whole.

1
Introduction

On the death of Mary I there was a surprisingly smooth transition to the accession of her half-sister Elizabeth. Despite the Catholic view that she had been born out of wedlock, neither the Pope nor Philip II of Spain challenged the new queen’s legitimacy and right to rule, and the English Catholics in power made no move to resist her succession by force of arms. None the less most politicians were conscious that the reign of Elizabeth would not be so smooth but on the contrary would bring about major upheavals in religious and political life. As De Feria, the Spanish ambassador, told Philip II soon after Elizabeth’s accession: ‘things are in such a hurly-burly and confusion that fathers do not know their own children’. Few doubted that Elizabeth, as the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, would rescind England’s ties with the Papacy, and some expected her to return the religion of the country to Protestantism.

The marriage of Elizabeth’s parents had been the occasion, if not the cause, of the original break with Rome and Henry VIII’s declaration of the royal supremacy. By the Act of Supremacy of 1534, parliament had recognized the king’s title as Supreme Head of the Church and his power ‘to visit, repress, redress, reform, order, correct, restrain and amend all such errors, heresies, abuses, offences, contempts, and enormities, whatsoever they be’. For the remainder of the reign, Henry had used his assumed rights to expropriate ecclesiastical property and reform the Church.

Church reform under Henry was both tentative and moderate; it was ordered that English bibles be placed in churches, certain ‘superstitions’ were condemned and the Litany (part of the Morning Prayer) was translated into English. Catholic doctrines, however, remained largely intact. Consequently, in the 1540s men and women were still being burnt as heretics for denying transubstantiation (the Catholic doctrine that the wafer and wine were transformed into the body and blood of Christ after their sanctification by the priest at the mass).

At Henry’s court, however, an unofficial reform group continued to have influence. Some members were Protestant, but others are better described as ‘evangelicals’ as they tended to be orthodox or unclear in their doctrinal views, although they wished to see the removal of ‘superstitious’ practices and a greater emphasis on the Scriptures. At the death of Henry, members of this reform group seized power, and as a result the reign of Edward VI saw the first stage in the Protestant Reformation of England.

On the Continent the Protestants had splintered into many different confessional groups, each owing allegiance to the doctrines, liturgy and ecclesiastical order devised by its own theologians. The three most important theologians were Luther, Zwingli (who had been killed in 1531 but whose influence continued through his successor at Zurich, Heinrich Bullinger) and Calvin. By the late 1540s, however, the Zwinglians and Calvinists had reached some agreement on a joint confession of faith, while quarrels were developing among the Lutheran theologians, especially after their leader’s death in 1546. It is, therefore, most convenient (though a simplification) to talk of two main Protestant confessions: the Lutheran and that of the Swiss Reformed Churches, comprising the Zwinglians and Calvinists. They differed in their doctrines on predestination and the Eucharist, in their liturgy, in their approach to discipline and in the organization of their churches.

On predestination, the Swiss Reformers emphasized double predestination; that is to say they believed that all men and women were predestined by God before their birth either for election (salvation) or reprobation (damnation). They also affirmed that the elect were assured of their salvation even if they lapsed in their moral behaviour, just as the reprobate could never earn salvation by carrying out good deeds.

On the Eucharist, the Swiss Reformers denied the corporeal (physical) presence of Christ’s body in the bread and wine at the communion service; but while the Zwinglians emphasized the commemorative significance of communion (that the service was essentially a memorial to the Last Supper), the Calvinists spoke of the spiritual presence of Christ at communion. Their agreed disbelief in a corporeal presence, however, led all the Swiss Reformers to object to the use of an altar and vestments (the colourful priestly dress), both of which signified the sacrifice of Christ’s body in the ceremony of the Eucharist.

Liturgically, the services of the Reformed Church were austere, with ritual kept to a minimum; kneeling, genuflexion and crossings were scorned as superstitious, while organ music and choral singing were thought unnecessary and distracting. Similarly, the interiors of their churches were simple, lacking decoration and colour; since the presence of images was condemned as idolatrous, carvings, sculptures and stained-glass windows were removed and wall-paintings obliterated by whitewash.

Finally, the Swiss Reformers moved away entirely from the hierarchical organization and clerical dominance of the Catholic Church and developed their own system of government, which is known as Presbyterianism. Their local churches were run by a three- or four-fold ministry: pastors chosen by their congregations to preach the Word, lay elders to be responsible for correcting the moral faults of the community, lay deacons to care for the poor and organize parish finances, and in addition doctors to preserve pure doctrine. Representatives were sent from individual congregations to meet in regional and national assemblies, called synods. England under Edward VI was exposed to both Lutheran and Swiss Reformed influences, but as the reign progressed more and more English theologians came into contact with Swiss Reformed refugees from the Continent, and began to share their vision of a truly reformed Church.

Central parts of the first Edwardian Prayer Book of 1549 were more Lutheran in inspiration than Swiss Reformed. Its communion service ‘commonly called the mass’ expressed belief in the corporeal presence of Christ in the bread and wine, and its rubric on ornaments laid down that vestments should be worn by the minister. Swiss Reformed theologians residing in England therefore made criticisms of the Prayer Book to Archbishop Cranmer, who incorporated their proposed amendments into a second Prayer Book, authorized by parliament in 1552. The communion service of the Second Edwardian Prayer Book denied the corporeal presence in the bread and wine, forbade the use of vestments and ordered the replacement of the altar by a communion table to be placed east to west in the church rather than north to south, like a traditional altar. Swiss Reformed influence could also be seen in the official outbreaks of iconoclasm (the attack on religious images as idolatrous).

During the Edwardian Reformation there were undoubtedly many sincere conversions to Protestantism, but the evidence (unsatisfactory though it is) suggests that a majority of the population remained Catholic or conservative in their beliefs during the six years of the king’s reign. As a result, from 1553 onwards Mary I had little difficulty in restoring many Catholic devotional practices in most parts of England, although it was proved impossible for her to extirpate Protestantism from the realm (Duffy 1992).

Mary’s heresy laws forced committed Protestants into semiconformity, exile abroad or secret membership of underground congregations; in addition, several hundred Protestants became martyrs, burnt at the stake for their beliefs. These experiences of the brief English Counter Reformation left their mark on the Protestants who survived and influenced the nature of the Elizabethan Church. Seventeen of Elizabeth’s first generation of bishops and a significant number of her councillors, officials, clergy and academics had been exiles under Mary, and most of them found refuge in the Swiss Reformed centres of Europe, where they built up personal contacts with theologians like Heinrich Bullinger and Peter Martyr. There, they saw for themselves churches which had been torn from their papal past and had thoroughly reformed their theology, liturgy and discipline. Faced with these more advanced ideas, the exiles based in Frankfurt quarrelled among themselves about the form of worship and church government they should follow. One group, under the leadership of Richard Cox, was determined to keep to the Second Edwardian Prayer Book and ‘do as they had done in England’, but others, led by John Knox, preferred to follow the Calvinist model of reform. When they returned to England, all the exiles brought back with them the common ideal of uprooting popery from the Protestant Church and spiritually revitalizing the English people, but divisions remained between those who were content with a return to the 1552 Prayer Book and those who hoped for a more thorough reformation.

The smaller and less influential group of Protestants who remained in England but stayed away from their parish churches under Mary were no less affected by their experiences. Many of them had attended covert independent congregations and some had even devised their own forms of Protestant worship, under lay leadership. As a result, they had developed a radical and uncompromising approach to their religion which was to create problems for the ecclesiastical authorities under Elizabeth.

The Marian burnings too had an influence on religious attitudes in Elizabeth’s reign. While their unpopularity under Mary has perhaps been exaggerated, there can be little doubt that, through the vivid accounts in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments or Book of Martyrs, published in 1563, the martyrdom of bishops, like Cranmer, and of ordinary men and women helped create strong anti-Catholic sentiment in Elizabethan England. In addition, Foxe’s book helped form an English Protestant identity. Originally, Protestantism had been suspect as a foreign import, but the Book of Martyrs told the story of English heretics being burnt by a half-Spanish queen, through the influence of her Spanish husband and on behalf of a foreign pope. Foxe also used the sufferings of the martyrs ‘under the great persecution and horrible troubles’ of the Roman Catholic Church to vindicate the English Church as a true church in the eyes of God and men. In his narrative, English Protestants were re-enacting the story of the Old Testament, and like the children of Israel they came through their time of trial to ultimate triumph. For Foxe and his readers, therefore, the English Protestants were God’s chosen people or ‘elect nation’ (Collinson 1988).

When Elizabeth came to the throne in November 1558, therefore, the religious situation was very difficult and complex. The country was not only divided between Catholics and Protestants, but also the Protestants themselves had different views about the nature and character of a reformed church as a result of the varied experiences of Mary’s reign. Any decision made by the new regime on the religious future of the country would bring its own problems.

2
Elizabeth’s religious views

Few historians today would agree with A. F. Pollard, in his history of England published in 1919, that Elizabeth ‘was sceptical or indifferent in religion’; on the contrary most now accept that throughout her adult life she was a committed and conventionally pious Protestant. As an impressionable adolescent, she had been educated by the humanists, William Grindal and Roger Ascham, and immersed in the atmosphere of the evangelical households of Sir Anthony Denny and Queen Katherine Parr, Henry VIII’s last wife. During the latter years of her father’s reign, she had spent months in translating three pious works of an Erasmian or mildly Protestant nature into different languages: a French version of Erasmus’s Dialogus Fidei, an English copy of Marguerite de Valois’s Mirror or Glass of the Sinful Soul, and a version in French, Italian and Latin of her stepmother’s composition, Prayers or Meditations. In the reign of her half-brother, she was noted for her ‘godly zeal’, an image that she was keen to cultivate. Throughout Mary’s reign, she was a suspected heretic and continued to use the English Bible, even though she obeyed the law and attended the Catholic mass. Once queen, she not only regularly attended morning service in the royal chapel but in addition used private prayers, probably composed by herself, for daily worship (Haugaard 1981).

As soon as she was proclaimed queen, Elizabeth made clear to her subjects that she intended to introduce a Protestant Church Settlement. Her new streamlined Privy Council had a decidedly Protestant complexion, and her most important minister, Secretary William Cecil, had previously withdrawn from public life in 1553 rather than publicly endorse Catholicism. Before the end of 1558, Protestants who had been deprived of their livings or had gone into exile under Mary were invited to preach on public occasions, while Catholic preachers were harassed or arrested. For example, on the Sunday after her accession Elizabeth allowed Dr William Bill, a Protestant who had been ejected from Cambridge during the previous reign, to preach at St Paul’s Cross, yet she arrested the bishop of Chichester for preaching a rejoinder the following Sunday. Even before her first parliament met, liturgical changes were introduced, first in her chapel and then in the realm. Proclamations of 27 and 28 December ordered the use of the Epistles, Gospels, Lord’s Prayer, Creed and Litany in English until parliament decided on ‘matters and ceremonies of religion’. On Christmas Day Elizabeth displayed her disbelief in the doctrine of transubstantiation when she walked out of her chapel service after the officiant, Bishop Oglethorpe, refused to obey her instructions not to elevate the host (the consecrated bread). At her coronation in January 1559, there was no elevation of the host, nor were the bread and wine consecrated by the priest. When parliament eventually met some three months after the accession, the Lord Keeper, acting as governmental spokesman, called upon the members to consider the ‘well making of laws for the according and uniting of the people of this realm into a uniform order of religion’, which was a clear indication that Elizabeth intended to introduce a Prayer Book and a uniformity bill (Jones 1982).

For these reasons, few historians today would accept the view expressed by Sir John Neale in 1953 that Elizabeth only wanted an interim Church Settlement in 1559, one which would return England to the religious situation on her father’s death – Catholicism without the Pope – and that she only changed her mind as a result of pressure from Protestant MPs during the first session of the 1559 Parliament (Haigh 1984). But while there is now a general consensus that Elizabeth intended to go further than her father and impose the Protestant religion on her subjects, historians still disagree about the exact form of Protestantism she wanted. Some, like William P. Haugaard, argue that she would have preferred the reintroduction of the more conservative 1549 Prayer Book of Edward VI, had her lay and clerical advisers agreed to it (Haugaard 1970). On the other hand, Winthrop Hudson and Norman Jones are convinced that she planned the settlement which finally emerged, one based on the Second Edwardian Prayer Book of 1552 (Hudson 1980; Jones 1982). There is, however, no clear answer to this dispute, since so many records relating to the formulation of the 1559 Church Settlement have not survived and Elizabeth’s own statements about her religious preferences were so ambiguous.

None the less, whichever Prayer Book Elizabeth would have preferred, it is certain that she was anxious to retain some Catholic ceremonial and traditions within her Church for both personal and political reasons. She personally disliked the idea of a married clergy, had a love of elaborate church music, and refused to accept that all images were idolatrous and proscribed in the Bible. At the same time, she was aware of the importance of persuading the Catholic powers, especially Spain, that her Church was little different in external appearance from theirs, in order to prevent a papal crusade against her and Spanish diplomatic support for Mary Stuart, the Catholic claimant to the English throne. She also needed to convince the Lutheran princes of Germany that she was a follower of their Augsburg Confession (the Lutheran statement of doctrine which had been drawn up in 1530) so that they would agree to a defensive alliance with England. Outward Catholic signs, such as the use of vestments, crosses and candlesticks, would serve to reassure both Lutherans and Catholics that England was an acceptable friend and had not entered the despised Calvinist ca...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• In the same series
• Foreword
• Time chart
• 1: Introduction
• 2: Elizabeth’s religious views
• 3: The parliament of 1559
• 4: The elizabethan church settlement
• 5: The puritans
• 6: Separatism
• 7: Catholicism
• 8: Assessment: strengths and weaknesses of the elizabethan church
• References and further reading