The Elizabethan Puritan Movement

Patrick Collinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000223453
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia britannica

Originally published in 1967, this book is a history of church puritanism as a movement and as a political and ecclesiastical organism; of its membership structure and internal contradictions; of the quest for 'a further reformation'. It tells the fascinating story of the rise of a revolutionary moment and its ultimate destruction.

Part 1
Puritanism and the Elizabethan Church

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1 The Church of England and the English Churches

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'To the true and faithful congregation of Christ's universal Church, with all and singular the members thereof, wheresoever congregated or dispersed through the realm of England.'

(Dedicatory address in JOHN FOXE'S Acts and Monuments, 1570 edition)

IN THE THIRD YEAR of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, a certain William Ramsey, a preacher then residing at Chard in Somerset, addressed himself to a collection of old friends in and around the little market town of South Molton, on the southern edge of Exmoor. His letter was quaintly modelled on St Paul, an Epistle to the 'Moltonians' which conveyed pious exhortation and messages of personal encouragement to leading members of the local community by name. Ramsey's adoption of an apostolic style was not altogether incongruous, for he seems to have been one of the 'apostles' or roving preachers who first carried the protestant gospel to this obscure corner of the West Country. 'Early and late, privately and openly, as cause required and occasion served,' he had shepherded and taught the scattered protestants of north Devon in the 'perilous time' of Mary's reign. Now, in happier days, his letter was not only intended for the people of South Molton, where it was to be read 'to all your holy congregation'; copies were to be distributed to the 'other congregations dispersed here and there abroad', where the preacher's apostolate had taken him.¹

John Wesley might have written such a letter two centuries later, rejoicing, like Ramsey, at the news of a sinner 'lately turned to the Lord'. But the 'Epistle to the Moltonians' opens an unsuspected window into the religious world of Elizabethan England. At this time, or so we are told, no one, or almost no one, supposed that the Church of God was constituted by the congregation of fervent Christians in gathered companies, 'here and there'. Rather it was understood to take in the whole of society, for, as Hooker understood the matter, 'there is not any man of the Church of England but the same man is a member of the Commonwealth, nor a member of the Commonwealth which is not also a member of the Church of England.' If we can reconcile that celebrated pronouncement with the impression left by Ramsey's Epistle, we may succeed in providing what must be basic to any history of the Elizabethan puritan movement: a definition of what is meant by a puritan.

With the repudiation of foreign, papal government, the Church of England had no distinct existence apart from the political community of England. In an age which could describe Christ Himself as 'a godly nobleman',² that community was conspicuously hierarchical in form, consolidated by differences of degree and the mutuality of privileges and responsibilities. Even William Ramsey's correspondents were named in descending order of rank, headed by Sir John Chichester, a substantial gentleman whose staunch protestantism counted for more in north Devon than the opinions of hundreds of lesser fry. For centuries yet to come, Chichester's kind would be, in William Wilberforce's words, 'the nerves and ligatures of your political body',³ and the mainstay of the Church as well. It was more significant still that Chichester's friend and patron, Francis Russell, earl of Bedford, was a sincere adherent of the new religion, for Bedford's standing in the West Country was all but viceregal. In an age of volatile opinion, the ownership of land on a large scale by such 'nurses of religion'⁴ as a Bedford could stabilize the religion of half a shire, both directly, through the right of presenting the parish clergy which the nobility and gentry exercised in so many churches, and indirectly in a hundred less definable ways. When the central government maintained the old faith, in Mary's reign, it enabled the protestant religion to survive the persecution, just as under Elizabeth it would retain for catholicism whole tracts of Lancashire and sizeable enclaves in such counties as Sussex and Hampshire.

If the 'natural' leadership of the nobility still counted for much in the sixteenth century, the Tudor monarchy discovered a far greater potentiality to determine the religious allegiance, and even the religious persuasion of the whole nation. In the 1530s, Henry VIII and his chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, had given precise, legislative expression to the claim that the government of spiritual, no less than of temporal, affairs was the exclusive concern of the Crown. In the ensuing decades, Henry and his children, in association with Parliament, and, to a lesser extent, with their clergy represented in the Convocations, had employed this enlarged sovereignty to dictate the forms of religion which their people were to practise and even the doctrines which they were to profess. When those who governed the country in the name of Edward VI publicly embraced protestantism and enjoined the universal use of new forms of service, there was a sense in which the Reformation was enacted, and England became protestant by a constitutional process; by the same power of statute, the country was brought back to the old religion under Mary, only to undergo yet another upheaval with the accession of her half-sister Elizabeth. To an extent, the formula cuius regio, ejus religio applied to the English scene, where acts of parliament controlled the direction and pace of religious change, although royal policy could never be insensitive to private initiatives.

For the most part, the country adjusted itself to these successive 'settlements' with a resilience which historians have found remarkable. But alongside and among those who merely acquiesced in religious change, protestantism was performing its own work. Lively, rather than formal faith was generated by preaching, regarded by protestants as 'the ordinary means of faith', and by the printing presses which dispersed the new English versions of the Bible and a variety of other, more pointed protestant propaganda; as well as by the personal persuasion of one man by another, of husbands by wives, of whole households by their masters. No sixteenth-century government could hope to have these spontaneous forces wholly at its command, and in England they were gathering strength throughout and beyond the years conventionally assigned to the Reformation by the textbooks. 'I beseech God bless my good Uncle Brent,' wrote an Elizabethan preacher, forty years after Henry's Act of Supremacy, 'and make him now to know [that] which in his tender years he could not see... And the Lord open His gracious countenance... unto my aunt, that she may also make a blessed change.'⁵ No account of the English Reformation will suffice which is so confined by statutes and prayer books that it ignores the 'blessed change'.

Left to itself, and without respect for tradition and existing institutions, the reception of the new gospel might have led to the birth of a new kind of Christian church. 'All men do know by experience', wrote a group of Leicestershire ministers, 'that sticks of fire scattered can give no such piercing heat as when they are laid together, neither yet lights, far dissevered and separate, have the like power as near joined.'⁶ It was the experience of all the early protestants as they came together for the exposition of 'the word of God' from the Bibles of Tyndale and Coverdale, and, presently, the new Bible from Geneva; and to receive the mutual encouragement and correction of which they read in the New Testament. On the engraved title-page of John Foxe's famous 'Book of Martyrs' we see them sitting under the preacher with Bibles open on their laps: these are the godly-minded Elizabethans who are the subject of this book.

Every godly protestant who knew what it was to exercise a lively faith must have felt the inclination to define the Church in a sense which excluded the more formal profession of those he knew as 'the common sort of Christians'. Catholics who complained of the low standards of protestant behaviour were told that none were accounted 'true friends of the gospel but such as do yield and show their obedience thereunto, and express the doctrine thereof in their conversation. How small so ever the number of such seem unto your bleared eyes for to be ... they are the true Church of God ... '⁷ In the days of popery there was no doubt that the true Church existed as leaven in an otherwise evil lump. When the prince was not 'godly', and the parish churches were given over to popish masses, 'Christ's approved churches' were to be sought among those whom Foxe called 'the secret multitude of true professors'. Under Mary, as in the France of Francis I, sincere protestants separated themselves in 'privy churches', of which William Ramsey's congregation at South Molton may have been an example. In a rare account of the organization of the secret congregations in Marian London, we are told that they admitted to communion only those who 'were kept pure from popery' and from evil conduct, or who repented in the presence of the assembly. Unlike the inchoate lollard conventicles of pre-Reformation days, these were fully organized churches whose members kept themselves apart from the parish churches and ministered their own sacraments.⁸ Others with the requisite means went abroad into a voluntary exile. There, in the reformed cities of Switzerland and the Rhineland, from Emden, through Frankfort and Strasbourg to Basle, Aarau, Zürich and Geneva, the future leaders of English protestantism gathered their churches and enjoyed the rare and exhilarating experience of inventing and quarrelling over liturgies and church constitutions. In the course of five years, many of the habits and attitudes that belonged to life in an established Church – the habits of centuries – were temporarily discarded.

But the accession of protestant Elizabeth at once revived deeply-rooted notions of the Church as a great public corporation, one with the Commonwealth, and presided over by royal governors. 'Wherefore now is our season if ever any were of rejoicing', wrote Catharine Bertie, the dowager duchess of Suffolk, as she returned from her own remarkable travels. 'For if the Israelites might joy in their Deborah, how much more we English in our Elizabeth, that deliverance of our thralled conscience.' At once, the imaginations of protestants were transported from the conditions of apostolic Christianity to the godly Commonwealth of Israel As the separatist Henry Barrow would later complain: 'All this people, with all these manners, were in one day, with the blast of Queen Elizabeth's trumpet, of ignorant papists and gross idolators, made faithful Christians, and true professors.' But for most, that day was a source of deep gratification, not merely on account of the deliverance of their own 'thralled consciences', but in the universal establishment of true worship and, presently, of sound doctrine. Laurence Humphrey, an original leader of Elizabethan nonconformity, congratulated the queen 'for tender cherishing and renewing the Church, by God's singular mercy and providence; for restoring religion from exile (as it were) to her ancient sincerity and primitive pureness; for the merry quiet and clear calm, ensuing the tossings and troublesome storms of later times.' John Foxe believed Elizabeth to be a second Constantine, the inaugurator of the last, peaceful age of the Church, and the image was conveyed to a wide audience through his vast and schematic panorama of Christian history, Acts and Monuments of the Church.⁹

Elizabethan protestants might distinguish between the public, visible Church and the invisible company of God's elect, concealed within it. But election itself was more commonly an inclusive than an exclusive concept. By a kind of charitable assumption, the whole nation, however ignorant, however lacking in faith, was deemed to be 'the people of the Lord'. For the Church was constituted, not by the Christians of whom it was composed, nor by the sincerity of their profession, but by the purity of the doctrine publicly preached and upheld by authority, and by the sincere administration and reception of the sacraments, safeguarded by the exercise of church discipline. The Church of Rome was fake, not because all or any of its members stood outside God's grace, but because the tyranny of the papacy had perverted its doctrine, sacraments and discipline. Where these essential 'marks' or 'notes' were to be found, the presence of any number of what the puritans called 'cold statute protestants' could not invalidate the Church. For religion was a public duty, not a private opinion or a voluntary profession. The gospel was good news of salvation; but it was also to be obeyed, and obeyed universally. Consequently, when the puritans attacked the imperfections of the Elizabethan religious settlement, it was not so much to request a toleration of their own consciences as to demand the imposition of true reformation, as they understood it, on the whole Church and nation, by public authority. Their complaint was not that religion was made a matter of compulsion, but that the law failed to conform to the pure model which they had set before the queen's eyes. For as the separatist Barrow noted: 'These men still would have the whole land to be the Church, and every parish therein a particular congregation of the same.'¹⁰

Yet while the comprehensive, established Church was not in itself offensive to protestant opinion, no one, friend or foe, was likely to confuse the minority of convinced and fervent protestants with the general mass of those who merely conformed to the queen's religion. The difference was apparent between 'the godly', 'the scripture men', 'such as run to hear preaching', and those characterized by the preachers as 'neuters', such as 'quietly enjoy the world, they care not what religion come', commonly supposed at the time to make up the bulk of the population.¹¹ Although the godly for the most part attended their own parish churches and rubbed shoulders with the not so godly, they were united among themselves by a closer bond. Their preachers, and at first only a minority of the Elizabethan clergy were preachers, were equally conscious of their membership of a select brotherhood. Among the puritan ministers it would later be common doctrine that only parishes supplied with an acceptable preaching ministry were in any proper sense churches at all. Certainly sincere, instructed protestants constituted the Church 'more fully'. 'If God have any Church or people in the land, no doubt the title is given them.'¹² In Elizabeth's reign, the godly only rarely and in exceptional circumstances carried their implicit dissent to the point of open separation. Yet to their neighbours they were men of 'singularity', marked by the voluntary religious exercises to which they were addicted, as well as by peculiarities of moral and social behaviour. Both were soon to be branded without discrimination as points of 'puritanism': 'Oh, say the scorning railers, now this holy man will go to heaven in a hay-barn, now these puritans flock together.'¹³

So far it has been suggested that the puritans were identified by all that separated real from merely formal protestants, and that the distinction was as much sociological as theological. But what, it may be objected, of the real protestants, many of them men of learning and responsibility, who were in no sense puritans, and who on occasions directly opposed the puritans? Something must be now said about the ideological differences which arose between English puritanism and what we are almost forced, in spite of the anachronism, to call Anglicanism. These were differences of degree, of theological temperature so to speak, rather than of fundamental principle. 'The hotter sort of protectants are called puritans', explains an Elizabethan pamphleteer,¹⁴ innocent of the sophistication of later discussions of the problem. Consequently the terms puritan and Anglican are elusive and intangible, limited in their usefulness to interpret the complexities of English church history between the Elizabethan Settlement and the Civil War. The English Church of this age was a spectrum, in which the ultimate extremes of colour are clear enough, but the intermediate tones merge imperceptibly; or, to change the image, it resembled the French Chamber rather than the English House of Commons, with almost imperceptible gradations towards the left and the right, but no sharp polarity of government and opposition.

But a polarity there was on those occasions, not necessarily very frequent, when those in authority made demands with which the more extreme or, to use the parlance of the time, 'precise' protestants felt unable to comply. Like Luther at the Diet of Worms, these 'precisians' in their lesser causes withheld conformity on the grounds that their consciences were constrained by the word of God. At such times it would appear that something more fundamental than the relative intensity of their protestant convictions divided the nonconformists from conformable Anglicans. The Bible, either in its explicit teaching or in what one puritan divine calls 'the constant sense of the general tenor of scripture' and Tyndale 'the whole course of the scripture'¹⁵ – this was the only authority which the puritan acknowledged in matters of religion. Where human authority failed to conform with even the general implication of scripture, as expounded and applied by the preacher, it must be resisted. Within eight years of Elizabeth's accession it was said that 'the authority that princes have over the churches is a service to defend it, and to seek the profit thereof, rather than a prerogative to burden it with superfluous and hurtful ceremonies at their pleasure.'¹⁶ The queen was executrix of a law which she could neither make nor unmake, which she could not even interpret, b...