THOMAS SAMPSON WAS APPREHENSIVE. HEARING in 1558 of the death of Mary Tudor and her stepsister Elizabeth’s succession to the throne, he rejoiced that Protestantism would return as the state religion of his native England, which he had fled in 1554. Even so, he was anxious about the practice and policies of a newly reborn church. When rumors reached him that a bishopric awaited, he told a leader of the Reformed international that the office had no warrant in Scripture. He objected to the office for another reason, the fact that bishops were not chosen by the consent of the people as happened in the “primitive” churches described in the New Testament. He worried, too, about being asked to wear any of the vestments the Church of England had inherited from Catholicism. Some months later, he told the same friend that, having seen how the new queen was acting, he and others were “afraid lest the truth of religion . . . should either be overturned, or very much darkened,” citing Elizabeth’s decision to keep a crucifix on the altar in her private chapel. The more he realized that an “entire reformation” aimed at “the right ordering of all things according to the word” was in jeopardy, the more he anticipated a crisis that would pit obedience to the Word, or “conscience,” against loyalty to the new queen and the church over which she presided.1
Sampson was a nonconformist before there was conformity, someone who knew at the very beginning of Elizabeth’s reign that he would have to choose between conscience and state-imposed rules and regulations. A friend and fellow exile, Thomas Humphrey, felt the same way even though he accepted a professorship of divinity at Oxford. Called before the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1564 to answer complaints about their behavior, the two men pleaded “tender consciences” and offered half a loaf: they would stop criticizing the rule about clerical dress but never wear the surplice, the name for a garment associated with Catholic practice.2 Half-loaves were theirs thanks to vacillation among the bishops and the influence of the two men’s lay patrons. Yet was half a loaf what Christ expected of his disciples? For the rest of the queen’s reign, the doubts voiced by Sampson in 1558 would trouble the laypeople and clergy who wanted an “entire reformation.”
A similar intermingling of high hopes and frustrations characterized the reformation in Scotland. For John Knox, whose vision of thoroughgoing reform had been sharpened during his years as an exile in places like Geneva, the process of reform in his homeland seemed on the verge of eliminating all “idolatry.” “There is no realm this day upon the face of the earth, that hath them [the sacraments] in like purity,” he declared in the history he wrote of the Scottish Reformation. This Knox regarded himself as a prophet of the same kind as those described in the Old Testament. Yet he was almost useless when it came to the day-to-day negotiations on which reform depended. Inevitably, he and like-minded reformers settled for something less, although agitating for more.3
With Protestants in power in both countries as of 1560, Knox yearned for bridges between Scotland and England, a truly British reformation that would strengthen the Protestant cause in both places. Instead, the Church of Scotland went in one direction and the Church of England in another. How this happened for England is described in this chapter; how reformation unfolded in Scotland in the next.
A backward glance at the English Reformation will set the stage for the emergence of the Puritan wing of the state church. After Mary Tudor died in November 1558 and Elizabeth ascended to the throne, England’s state religion officially passed overnight from Roman Catholicism to Protestantism. An erratic transition of this kind had already occurred during the reign of Mary and Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII. With the consent of Parliament, Henry had renounced the authority of the papacy over the Church of England and approved or, toward the end of his life opposed, other means of making the state church fully Protestant.4
When Henry’s nine-year-old son Edward VI succeeded to the throne in January 1547, a government headed by the Duke of Somerset endorsed major changes of the kind Henry had resisted, and the pace of reform quickened anew under the Duke of Northumberland, who came to power in 1549. Between them, these two governments eliminated much of what remained of institutional Catholicism. By mid-1550, a zealous Protestant was exulting that “never before in our time has there been such hope of the advancement of the pure doctrine of the Gospel, and of the complete subversion and rooting up of anti-christian ceremonies and traditions.” During the first fifteen months of Somerset’s regime, the government ordered the destruction of all “shrines, paintings and pictures of saints and all images which had been offered to or had candles burned before them” and forbad the worship of relics, the ritual of pilgrimage, and the celebration of certain traditional ceremonies.5 Subsequently, Parliament or the bishops recast the theology of the Eucharist, a step that included replacing altars with communion tables, substituting ordinary bread for the wafer, and simplifying the distinctive dress of the clergy who, from 1549 onward, were free to marry. Simultaneously, the government was abolishing guilds and chantries and expropriating their wealth. Once these disappeared, the practice of intercessory prayer for the dead lapsed, deemed no longer necessary since the Catholic concept of purgatory had been abandoned.6
Some of these changes, together with much that was carried over from Catholicism, made their way into a liturgical text, the Book of Common Prayer (1549)—common in the sense of enabling laypeople to participate in an English-language liturgy. Publicly endorsed by the Crown, it was followed by a second, more vigorously Reformed version (1552) that severed English worship from Catholic practice by emphasizing the place of Scripture in church services, subjecting the church to the same authority, and affirming a more distinctively Reformed understanding of Holy Communion. Even so, some in England regarded it as falling short of “entire perfection,” one problem being the rule, too Catholic for someone such as Sampson, that communicants kneel instead of sitting when they received the sacrament. In some printed versions, the 1552 prayer book included a specially inserted “black rubric” denying that the practice of kneeling to receive the sacrament signified the real presence of Christ in the bread and wine.7 Despite its imperfections, the 1552 version seemed to justify the reputation for Reformed-style Protestantism that Edward was acquiring. In the eyes of his admirers, he was a veritable Josiah, the last of the righteous kings of Judah (sixth century BC). Like his Old Testament predecessor, the boy king was intent on cleansing the church of “all monuments of idolatry.”8 Then, to the dismay of the reformers, Edward died in 1553, leaving Mary Tudor next in line for the throne.
Most of the Edwardian program was unwound once Mary succeeded to the throne in August 1553, for she had guarded her Catholic faith. The wheel turned anew: the Roman mass was restored, the authority of the papacy reaf-firmed, and celibacy required of all clergy. We may marvel that a country could pass from Protestantism to Catholicism so rapidly, but it was almost unthinkable to question the legitimacy of Mary’s claim to the throne and, in everyday life, the adjustments were not as wrenching as we may suppose. Nonetheless, Mary’s regime found plenty of Protestants to pursue, executing nearly three hundred at the stake between February 1555 and the queen’s death in late 1558.
Now the fate of the Reformation rested in the hands of Elizabeth and her advisors.9 Would she take on the mantle of Josiah and resume a vigorous program of reform? This was the counsel of the English exiles who prepared the “Geneva” translation of the Bible. In an opening “Epistle to the Queen,” they reminded her of the Old Testament examples of the temple builder Zerubbabel and idol-destroying kings such as Josiah and Asa, who pursued “the utter abolishing of idolatrie.” The corrective to idolatry was to “embrace the word” and bind everyone to “obey” it, an argument fleshed out with allusions to Christ as the “cornerstone” of the church and someone who, in Scripture, “left an order . . . for the building up of his body.” Other advisors emphasized the difference between “true religion” and any mingling of old and new, Catholic and Protestant.10
Elizabeth waited until the first Parliament of her new regime met in early 1559 to solidify her authority over the church and give explicit recognition to Protestantism. Hoping to preserve peace with Spain and anxious to conciliate those who continued to prefer Catholicism, some of them still serving as bishops and clergy, she wanted to move slowly. But the first of her Parliaments was impatient. Not without close votes in the House of Lords on key matters, Parliament reenacted a law from Henry VIII’s reign naming the monarch the “only supreme governor of the realm, as well as in all spiritual and ecclesiastical things or causes, as temporal,” a modest reworking of Henry’s title as Supreme Head that pleased those Protestants who regarded Christ as the true head of the Church. An Act of Uniformity allowed people to receive both bread and wine during the administration of the Eucharist, and another endorsed the prayer book of 1552. When it was reprinted, however, the “black rubric” had been eliminated and language added to the liturgy suggesting something closer to the Catholic doctrine of Christ’s presence in the bread and the wine, steps in keeping with the new queen’s sympathies. Moreover, ministers in the church were to continue wearing the surplice and other “ornaments,” a rule that (apart from the surplice) reversed what had been specified in the 1552 version of the Book of Common Prayer. In the aftermath of these measures, Catholic-minded bishops resigned rather than accept the Act of Uniformity. In came a fresh crop of bishops, some of them former exiles who would continue to seek advice from friends within the Reformed international.11
The tasks that awaited the new leaders of the state church were many and, without fresh resources of money and personnel, virtually impossible to accomplish. Foremost among them was infusing an evangelical spirit into an institution that encompassed everyone from Catholics to the nominally Protestant. Some of these leaders had a second goal, to resume the process of reform in a church “haunted by its Catholic past.”12 To this end, bishops began to instruct parish councils and local officials known as church wardens to discard the apparatus of Catholic ceremonies and whitewash the inside walls of their churches. Books that taught Protestant doctrine or abetted Protestant-style worship were quickly made available: Sternhold’s The Whole Booke of Psalms, revised and expanded by John Hopkins and others; an English translation of the Bible known as the Bishops Bible; sermons refuting Catholic doctrine; and by 1570, an official catechism for ministers to use in instructing laypeople.13 Matthew Parker, who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1559, called for the destruction of “images and all other monuments of idolatry and superstition” and told church wardens to arrange a “comely and decent table” around which to celebrate Holy Communion. Shortly after moving from a post as bishop of London to the diocese of Yorkshire, a region in which Catholicism was widely favored, Edmund Grindal ordered his church wardens to acquire the Book of Common Prayer, the psalter, and the Bible in English, telling them as well that they must “utterly” destroy any altar and prohibit “superstitious ringing” of church bells during funerals. Grindal also emphasized the duty of weekly catechizing and its bearing on access to the sacraments: local clergy and wardens should bar people above the age of twenty from participating if they could not “say by heart” the Ten Commandments and other parts of the catechism.14
Meanwhile, steps were being taken to reeducate and strengthen the clergy now that preaching had become a principal means of grace. In the short run, Parker and his fellow bishops endorsed the practice of allowing laymen to read from the prayer book as a substitute for sermons. Ministers deemed unprepared to preach on their own could fall back on an officially endorsed collection of sermons, or Homilies. These were pebbles cast into a sea of spiritual darkness. Year after year, church leaders complained that the state church lacked a corps of effective ministers. “Many there are that hear not a sermon in seven years, I might safely say seventeen,” a bishop remarked in 1588, adding that “their blood will be required at somebody’s hands.” What was needed was much better funding and, at Oxford and Cambridge, a stronger commitment to training evangelical preachers. Neither was forthcoming except by fits and starts.15
To men of Sampson’s temperament, the pace of progress was frustratingly slow. By contrast, the reformers in Scotland were doing much better. “The Scots have made greater progress in true religion in a few months, than we have done in many years,” a former Marian exile wrote friends in Europe.16 What would it look like to further the Gospel in England? This question dominated the first Convocation (1562–63) of church leaders in Elizabeth’s reign. Beforehand, a small group drafted a substantial agenda of reform and worked hard to get these proposals adopted. Of uncertain membership, it included Parker, Grindal, Sampson, and other former exiles, all of them expecting that the Elizabethan Settlement was a way station on a journey that would conclude when the state church had become emphatically Protestant. These men and their allies wanted the church to curtail or eliminate the long-established practices of clerical pluralism (allowing a single minister to hold multiple positions) and nonresidency (when a local priest lived elsewhere and delegated his pastoral responsibilities to a person of lesser rank and, often, lesser capacities). Reasoning that, without changes of this kind, no program of evangelization could succeed, the reforming party also recommended several steps to improve the financial situation of the state church. As well, they hoped to dispose of certain residues of Catholicism: ministers were not to wear “vestments, Copes and Surplesses,” the sign of the cross in the service of baptism was questioned, kneeling would become optional or “indifferent,” church bells would be silenced, the number of holy days curtailed, and “some few imperfections” remedied in the Book of Common Prayer.17
The tone and the substance of these proposals echoed the politics of some of the Marian exiles and the martyred bishop John Hooper, who, before entering the episcopate in 1550, had objected to the surplice and Catholic phrasing in the liturgy of the Eucharist. When the exiles were organizing congregations of their own in cities such as Frankfurt, Emden, and Geneva, some decided to replace the 1552 version of the Book of Common Prayer with an order of worship much closer to what was used in Geneva. Others insisted on keeping the prayer book but seemed willing to consider eliminating the surplice, kneeling at communion, saints’ days, the sign of the cross in the liturgy of baptism, and confirmation by bishops. Argument was fierce within the English congregation in Frankfurt, where the more moderate proposals eventually prevailed. In Geneva, which attracted the largest number of exiles, the English church, which included some of the Scottish exiles, agreed to replace the Book of Common Prayer with an English translation of the Geneva order of worship. There and elsewhere, the exiles created congregations that enjoyed a de facto autonomy at odds with a bishop-centered state church.18 This experience, together with what they had learned about Reformed practice and principle, nurtured the ambition of the reformers of 1562–63 to unsettle the Elizabethan Settlement. For the moment, its allies were few and its critics, many.19
The Convocation seemed ready to adopt the reforms the group recommended. Indeed, it came close to abolishing the surplice. Some in the Parliament of 1563 were also sympathetic. But Elizabeth was unwilling to go this far. She assented to a statement of doctrine known as the Thirty-Nine Articles (endorsed by Parliament in 1571), most of them copied from an earlier set of articles prepared by Archbishop Cranmer and based on Continental creeds, and she may not have noticed a few changes in the Book of Common Prayer.20 Otherwise, she dug in her heels. Had she sided with the reformers of 1563 or, in the next decade, supported Grindal after he became Archbishop of Canterbury, she might have helped fashion a broad-reaching consensus about the scope and nature of reform.21 Famously, the queen said no to the men who wanted to marry her. The no that resonates in this book is hers to a further reformation. From the moment Elizabeth ascended to the throne until her death some forty-five years later in early 1603, she rejected every plea, petition, and motion on its behalf whether broached in the Convocation, urged by some of her bishops, or endorsed by members of the Privy Council and the House of Commons.22
Enter the Puritan movement. No specific date was stamped on its birth certificate and no single manifesto spelled out its goals, most of which had already been voiced during the reign of Edward VI, with others emerging after 1558 in response to circumstances at home and abroad.23 Any summary description of the movement in the mid-1560s, when the word “puritan” was introduced by English Catholics, is of little value, for it cannot do justice to the complexities of a coalition that encompassed reformers who agreed on some matters and disagreed on others. Hindsight, too, is misleading, for it tempts us to focus on the more outspoken members of the movement but ignore those who hesitated to endorse every aspect of the program of 1562–63.24
The most serious mistake we can make is to accept what was said about the reformers by nineteenth-century “Anglicans” (a word that did not exist in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) who regarded Puritanism as a sickness that threatened an otherwise healthy state church, a sickness signaled by its “sectarian” understanding of the church and “seditious” refusal to abide by the authority of church leaders and the monarchy. In reality, all but a very few of those who criticized the Elizabethan Settlement endorsed the model of a comprehensive state church and a ministry-magistracy alliance. At its heart, the Puritan movement was as magisterial and corporate as its parent, the Reformed tradition. Thanks to these commitments, it was situated within a broad consensus on matters of doctrine and the responsibility of the Christian monarch to support true religion, to which it added a forceful emphasis on anti-Catholic evangelization, the visible church as a site of discipline, the authority of Scripture, and the insidious presence of idolatry, all of them arguments or themes that many within the state church were willing to endorse in the 1560s.25
What was wrong with things as they were? A much-reiterated complaint arose in response to the realities of 1560—and of 1600, for change was slow in coming. The state church had far too few ministers of any real competence as preachers at a moment when the doorway to salvation was shifting from a sacrament-centered theology to a theology of the Word. From parish to parish, financial resources were badly distributed, bunched in some places, virtually absent in others. Until this situation was remedied, the “dark corners” of the country would never be adequately evangelized. From parish to parish, moreover, the work of guarding the two sacraments of baptism and Holy Communion from the “unworthy,” a task endorsed by the Book of Common Prayer, was incomplete or ineffective. The heart of the matter was pastoral, the church’s betrayal of the people of God. Likening these people to “sheep” who, for want of proper food, were soul-starved, critics pleaded for action: something must be done, and done quickly, to weed out ineffective clergy and replace them with a cadre of real preachers. Who could disagree? All wings of the movement, together with many others who recognized the plight of the state church, wanted the queen and her bishops to undertake a program of this kind even though it would require her to overlook the disobedience or “non-conformity” of men such as Thomas Sampson. As a bishop pointed out to a member of the Privy Council at a moment when Sampson and others of his kind were being suspended, things could go from bad to worse—“many places . . . destitute of preachers”—if punishing Sampson-like dissidents pushed “worthy” ministers out of the church.26
Some men of high status endorsed this complaint, especially, perhaps, Henry Hastings, the third Earl of Huntingdon (d. 1595), who owed his Protestantism to his father but on a deeper level to the time he spent as one of the “young gentlemen surrounding Edward VI,” whose tutors vied to ensure that the boy king and his circle of friends added a firm knowledge of Scripture and Reformed theology to their training in Latin and Greek. From that point on, Huntingdon labored to ensure that Protestantism prevailed against its enemies, most especially those in England who continued to profess the old religion. A good many of the ministers he supported became nonconformists, and some had been among the most emphatic of the Marian exiles. At his domestic seat in the town of Ashby de la Zouch, he installed the former exile Anthony Gilby as the town preacher. Gilby honored his patron by including him in the title of a translation (1570) of Calvin’s commentaries on the book of Daniel, done (according to the title) especially for the use of the family of the right honourable Earl of Huntingdon, to set forth as in a glass, how one may profitably read the scriptures, by . . . mediating the sense thereof, and by prayer. Ten years later Gilby dedicated his translation of The psalms of David truly opened and explained by Theodore Beza to the Countess of Huntingdon, a book Beza had already given the earl in its Latin version. Others who entered Hunting-don’s circle included the Bible translator William Whittingham and Sampson; after losing his post within the state church in the mid-1560s, Sampson accepted the office of master of the local hospital in a town over which Hunting-don had considerable authority. Huntingdon reached out to Walter Travers (see below) in the mid-1580s, befriended the perennial nonconformist Arthur Hildersham, and sent his younger brother Francis Hastings to Geneva to study with Beza, a step in keeping with his strong support for Reformed Protestantism on the Continent. Thereafter, the younger Hastings remained close to Thomas Cartwright. As President of the Council of the North (1572–1595) the earl used his authority in five English counties to encourage godly preaching whenever and wherever he could, a goal Grindal endorsed while serving as Archbishop of York. In Parliament, the two brothers sided with the faction that complained of pluralism and nonresidency and called for stricter enforcement of the laws against Catholic recusancy. The third earl also aspired to fulfill the role of godly magistrate, an aspect of his Puritanism described more fully in chapter 5.27
For a smaller group, evangelism took second place to the story in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs of the faithful few at war with the many who succumbed to idolatry. According to this story, the purpose of Protestantism was to restore what had been lost during the centuries of Catholic domination, the simplicity of the “first times” when the earliest Christian communities adhered to the Word as divine law. To accomplish this mission of recovery and restoration, the faithful few would have to identify and eliminate every vestige of anti-Christian idolatry. Doing so would allow the true church to reemerge in all its glory.
Sampson, Humphrey, and many others also regarded the true church as endowed with a singular “liberty” rooted in the presence of the Holy Spirit and made manifest in the loving relationship shared by everyone in God’s household. Another way of describing this kind of church employed the analogy between church and house or temple and, taking this one step further, between temple and Christ’s body. Via this reading of Scripture, “edification,” a word St. Paul had used to describe the goal of his evangelism (1 Cor. 3:14; 2 Cor. 13:10) became important to the reformers. To them it denoted the church as “a living, growing thing,” a house or building constructed out of “living stones” made so by the Holy Spirit. Reading Paul’s words in Ephesians 4 and his letters to the Corinthians through the lens of Reformed theology, Sampson and his fellow reformers argued that, left untouched, the residues of corruption would “impede . . . edification” and thwart “our Christian liberty.” The liturgy of the state church failed this test, as did the argument of things indifferent (see below).28
Generously defined, these were themes that a surprising number of English Protestants could endorse. During his years as Archbishop of York, Grindal attempted a wide-ranging program of reform and, in private correspondence, indicated his affection for “some godly brethren, which do wish that such things as are amiss were reformed.” In the mid-1560s, most of the bishops continued to support aspects of the reform program of 1562–63, doing so notably during the Parliament of late 1566, which considered a series of bills relating to the Articles of Religion, Catholic nonconformity, nonresidence, the abuse of church property, and the capacity (or lack thereof) of the country’s clergy. The first of these bills, known as “A,” passed through the House of Commons and probably would been accepted by the House of Lords, where it was favored by the bishops, only to be halted by the queen.29
All the while, these efforts were accompanied by argument about the prevalence of idolatry and the implications of divine law. How precise was the Bible in describing the structure and practices of the true church? And was the Church of England really tainted with corruption? To men such as Sampson, the answers were obvious: the church of circa 1559 remained imperfect, still too close to Catholicism in certain respects and falling short of the biblical standard in others. As divisions began to emerge, the more radical ministers turned the rhetoric of Christian primitivism into a cry for immediate action: “The whole scriptures are for destroying idolatry, and every thing belonging unto it.” As Gilby would complain in the mid-1570s, the compromises of the Settlement of 1559 were akin to what the prophet Elijah had characterized (1 Kings 18:21), as a “crooked halting betwyxe two religions.” For the more zealous laypeople and clergy, therefore, it was imperative that the church undo the compromises of the Settlement of 1559.30
Conflict was inevitable. It was the queen who forced the issue. What aroused her to act in the mid-1560s was her preference for uniformity in matters of religion. When Elizabeth learned that Sampson and other ministers were refusing to wear the surplice, she was dismayed.31 Here was visible evidence of nonconformity among Protestant clergy alongside Catholic nonconformity of the kind that prompted the Act of Uniformity of 1559. Moreover, Protestant dissent was on the rise, becoming a source of much “contention.” Accordingly, she instructed Parker in January 1565 to apply the principle of uniformity to Protestants. He responded by issuing “Advertisements” requiring every minister in the church to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Book of Common Prayer, and the surplice, and threatening those who refused to do so with suspension or dismissal. In 1567 he summoned the parish clergy in London to meet with him and, on the spot, asked them to accept the Advertisements. Many conformed, but thirty-seven refused, as did others elsewhere in the country.32
The “vestarian controversy” was about conformity and who had the nerve to enforce or defy it. For those balked at agreeing to the Advertisements, the dispute turned on whether the church would accept “Gods holy word” as the only “rule . . . to measure his religion by.” Fully observed, this rule would mean eliminating all “traditions” stemming from Catholicism up to and including the surplice, which implied a Catholic understanding of the Eucharist. William Axton used a syllogism to drive home this point: “that which was consecrated by antichrist, and constantly worn by the priests of antichrist, in their idolatrous service, was one of the garments of antichrist. But the surplice was consecrated by antichrist, and . . . therefore, the surplice is a garment of antichrist.”33
In the same breath, critics of the surplice applied this reasoning about Catholicism and the Antichrist to the sign of the cross and other features of the Book of Common Prayer and, more tellingly, to the episcopal structure of the church. Sampson had already questioned the office of bishop. Critics asked if the office was lawful—that is, designated in Scripture—when, from their point of view, the churches described in the New Testament practiced a ministry of equals. A close reading of the apostolic letters suggested that “bishop” was a generic name for ministers who served a single congregation. Objections of this kind flowed from the men who were being pressured to accept the Advertisements, questions that struck at the very heart of the compromises the church was making. Ultimately, the issue was the Second Commandment and the prohibition of idolatry. Had the time come to take a stand against every example of the “superstitious invention[s] of men”? If England was sinking into “corruption,” should “Gods people” mobilize to ensure that its faults were “utterlie abolished”?34
And what about the royal supremacy? If the authority of the state was being used to prevent the church from cleansing itself of corruption, were faithful Christians entitled to act on their own? Did loyalty to Christ come before loyalty to the Crown? In an undated “Supplication” of circa 1561 detailing the miseries of the church, the queen was warned that, unless she acted promptly to provide the right kind of ministers, she could not expect people to obey her. As their response to the rule about wearing the surplice became more emphatic, some of the radicals began to dismiss Romans 13:2 and other biblical texts that enjoined obedience to rulers. For them, the authority of the Christian prince was trumped by the New Testament rule of “called unto liberty” (Galatians 5:13) and, at a deeper level, by the Word and the imperative of “edification” in the sense of ensuring that “Christ’s little ones” have their faith strengthened. Framing the conflict of circa 1565–67 in terms of “God” versus “man,” the radicals found it easy to justify their rejection of “Popish trash” no matter who—queen or bishop—commanded them to act otherwise.35
Language this stark was alarming, for it seemed to rule out any compromise. In response, Parker tried to change the terms of debate. To those who evoked the unwavering authority of Scripture, he responded by differentiating what the Bible explicitly authorized and the many topics on which it was silent or contained general rules the church was empowered to interpret. Hence his conclusion: “we deny there may be nothing in the Church which is not named expresslie in the Scriptures. . . . We deny that whatsoever the Apostles did not, we must not do.” For Parker and his allies, the principle of things indifferent (in Latin, adiaphora) was important because it validated the authority of the state church to decide how to interpret Scripture. Or, to say this differently, it endorsed the intervention of the queen in religious affairs in her role as arbiter of religious policy. To buttress this insistence on things indifferent, Parker cited letters from Reformed theologians who used the same concept at various moments. His ace in the hole was not these arguments but the royal supremacy itself. To challenge the authority of a bishop was to challenge the authority of the queen. Unlike Sampson and his colleagues, who invoked adiaphora on behalf of their liberty to dissent, Parker used it to affirm the authority of the state church and the monarchy in matters of religious policy.36
The holdouts countered by playing the card of conscience. If the surplice was truly a thing indifferent, then the church should allow clergy to practice what their conscience was telling them about idolatry. Conscience came first to men of the prestige of Sampson and Humphrey. And if conscience were recognized as authoritative, what basis was there for the queen’s role as governor of the church? Anthony Gilby asked this question as part of a more general critique of the deficiencies of the church: who should “do evil at the magistrate’s command”? To command acts of this kind was to betray the Old Testament example of Josiah and emulate a bad king such as Nebuchadnezzar: “You think it dangerous for subjects to restrain the prince’s authorities to bounds and limits. We think it as dangerous to enlarge the prince’s authority beyond the bounds and limits of holy Scripture.”37
Eventually, both sides gave way. Some of the thirty-seven London dissidents signed the Advertisements, a few bishops never enforced them and, pressed by high-placed civil leaders, several bishops, and local groups, Parker allowed several of the holdouts to preach after they had been suspended. Not long thereafter, troubles at home and abroad—a Catholic uprising in 1569, the pope’s excommunication of Elizabeth I in 1570—distracted the queen and her government. The initiative shifted to the other side, with Parliament as its focus because the Convocation was controlled by Parker and his fellow bishops. Some members of the Parliament of 1571–72 wanted to go much further in the direction of Reformed style ecclesiology, although willing to keep the office of bishop. The more daring proposals, one of them a bill calling for revision of the Book of Common Prayer, were dropped after others pointed out that the queen alone could decide such matters. Parker responded to this hostility toward his leadership by resuming the push for uniformity. After Parliament reconvened in the spring of 1572 and dissidents in the House of Commons proposed to legalize “the service used in the Dutch and French Church” as a way of exempting Protestant nonconformists from what was expected of Catholics—“conformity [is] not always necessary,” was how one member of the House justified the measure—the queen abruptly halted debate on such measures.38
Elizabeth intervened a second time in the mid-1570s to suppress a form of clerical training known as prophesying. She did so in the aftermath of a surge of arguments for reform by a new generation of activists linked with Cambridge University. For the first time, episcopacy was explicitly put in play in Parliament and, more daringly, in the court of public opinion. The opening salvo in this campaign was a brief book published in June 1572, An Admonition to the Parliament, followed some months later by A Second Admonition to the Parliament, each of them printed surreptitiously. The texts brought together in the first Admonition were the doing of two young Cambridge graduates, John Field and Thomas Wilcox, with help from others who may have included a layman, Job Throckmorton.39 The “first popular manifesto of English Presbyterianism,” which was quickly reprinted despite attempts to halt its distribution, the Admonition called on Parliament to abet the “abandoning [of] al popish remnants” in worship, ministry, and church discipline and ensure that they were replaced by “those things only, which the Lord himself in his word commandeth.” A reply was forthcoming, followed in turn by counterarguments and other manifesto-like statements. Collectively, these texts and the response of the authorities constitute the Admonition Controversy, an event that deserves close attention for what it tells us about a program contemporaries were beginning to characterize as “puritan.”40
The young Turks who launched the controversy were weary of hearing from their elders that anyone who wanted an “entire reformation” must “beare with the weaknes of certaine for a time.” For Field and Wilcox, the Catholic uprising of 1569 and the ineffectiveness of Parliament signaled the failure of a strategy of persuasion. “We have used gentle words to[o] long, and . . . the wound groweth desperate,” Field declared in defending the uncompromising language of the Admonition. Although there was a price to pay for speaking so bluntly, he and his collaborators agreed that the time had come to say what had not been said at the time of the Elizabethan Settlement: the Church of England should abandon episcopacy and adopt the system of governance and style of worship of the Reformed international. The two men were forcefully critical of the Book of Common Prayer, bemoaning its collection of liturgies as “culled & picked out of that popishe dunghil, the Masse booke full of all abhominations [sic].” What Field, Wilcox, and their allies wanted by way of a positive program was “a thorow reformation both of doctrine, ceremonies, and regiment [polity or governance]” as evidenced both in “the Word of God and example of the primitive Church, as also of Geneva, France, Scotland, and all other Churches rightly reformed,” a program—tied to the forming of parish-centered “consistories”—described in more detail in the Second Admonition. Compared with renewal and recovery in those countries, the progess in England was deplorable.41
Arrested and questioned repeatedly during the summer and fall of 1572, Field and Wilcox remained in prison until the following spring. Thereafter, the controversy expanded to include a long-running (1572–77) debate between John Whitgift, master of one of the colleges at Cambridge, who defended the church, and Thomas Cartwright, who argued on behalf of a “thorow Reformation.” Both had studied and taught at Cambridge. Too young to have caught the eye of Catholic authorities in the mid-1550s, Cartwright was in Ireland during the vestarian controversy. Returning in 1567 to Cambridge, where he became Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity in 1570, Cartwright relied on the framework of Christian primitivism in the inaugural lectures he gave that year. Unable to find the office of bishop in the New Testament, Cartwright called for major changes in the structure of the Church of England: bishops, although still permitted, should no longer appoint and ordain ministers (which, according to the rules of the Church of England, no one else could do), parishes should elect their officers, and local churches should be governed by a collective of ministers, or “presbytery.” By the close of the year, his outspokenness cost him his professorship. Leaving for the Continent in 1571, Cartwright spent some months in Geneva in the company of another Cambridge academic, Walter Travers; as well, he came to know Andrew Melville (see chap. 3) and Theodore Beza before returning to England in 1572. Five years later he was back in Europe, where he arranged to minister to an English mercantile group in Antwerp and secured the printing of his replies to Whitgift and a book by a fellow reformer.42
The emergence of a group so critical of episcopacy and the Book of Common Prayer altered the coalition of circa 1565 in ways that had long-term consequences for the meaning of the term “puritan.” Thereafter, the line between reformers and conformists or churchmen began to harden as new issues came to the fore. The back- and-forth between Cartwright and Whitgift is significant, for it revealed differences of opinion about six matters: (1) the authority of the Bible and its bearing on ecclesiology (church governance) and worship; (2) the understanding of “bishop” in Scripture and the earliest centuries of Christian history; (3) the “notes” of the true church and, beyond this, the nature of the church as a body of worshipping believers; (4) the validity of “things indifferent” to justify retaining certain Catholic practices, tempering the imperative of the Word, and allowing the monarchy a role in religious affairs; (5) the relationship between the royal supremacy and two-kingdoms principles; and (6) the form of worship. What the two men said in response to each other on these topics became an important moment of definition for the parties that were emerging within the state church.
Were we to rank these topics by their importance, worship would come first, as it did for the authors of the Admonition, who devoted a third of their manifesto to the faults of the Book of Common Prayer. For Field, Wilcox, and Cartwright, the ceremonies retained from the Catholic past were either innovations that contradicted Scripture or too evocative of Catholic doctrine and practice. Kneeling to receive Holy Communion was one such practice (at the Last Supper, the apostles had sat around a table), as was administering it without a sermon beforehand. Holy days, private baptisms, the sign of the cross in that rite, and prayers for the dead were other examples of idolatry or bad practice. The alternative to the Book of Prayer’s formality was preaching-centered worship and something closer to free-form prayer; instead of using “prayers invented by men,” prayer should be spoken by ministers “as the spirit moved them.” Relying on the benchmark of Christian primitivism, the radicals also called for eliminating church music other than psalmody. Moreover, the state church erred in allowing someone in the pulpit to substitute “bare reading” of printed homilies for lively preaching of the Word. The substance of right worship was the Genevan model as practiced by the Marian exiles in that city and favored by the radical party in 1550s Frankfurt, a sequence of practices centered on prayer, the singing of psalms, and sermons. In his response, Whitgift insisted on a genealogy of holy days and other rituals that pushed their origins back to the beginnings of Christianity and early church councils, to which he added examples of how worship was handled in some corners of the Reformed international. He also argued that preaching could include reading.43
What each side said about the authority of Scripture may seem similar, for Whitgift acknowledged its importance almost as fervently as his opponent. Yet he insisted that, at best, it provided “general” rules, to which he added an insistence on the principle of things indifferent, which he used to buttress the argument that God had empowered the civil magistrate “to govern the church” and guide the process of deciding how Scripture should be interpreted: “surely the magistrate hath authority . . . to appoint what shall be thought . . . most convenient, so that it be not repugnant to the word of God.” Whitgift had Calvin and Heinrich Bullinger of Zurich in his corner, citing them to good effect on the latitude that Protestants enjoyed (or wrestled with). Via such arguments, he and other apologists for the state church tempered the regulative principle or Scripture as law that Cartwright, Field, and others evoked to validate the authority of their scheme.44
Where the substance and rhetoric of the radicals’ agenda clashed with the Elizabethan Settlement most dramatically was twofold: the nature of the church and the royal supremacy. Field and Wilcox tied their understanding of the true church to three “notes”—sound doctrine, proper administration of the sacraments, and a Word-based ecclesiology or “discipline.” All three, but especially discipline, were seriously impaired—or absent!—in the Church of England to the point of jeopardizing its capacity to serve as the visible body of Christ. In effect, the church in England had crossed the line that divided the lawful from the unlawful. Ministry, too, was impaired in ways that called into question any role as evangelical heralds of the Gospel promise. The faults of the state church also included its failure to guard the sacraments from the unworthy and advance the process of edification among the faithful. Cart-wright was outspoken: a church that lacked an effective discipline could not provide what was “necessary to salvation, and of faith.”45
Whitgift was shocked. To impugn the validity of the Church of England as a means of redemption was to play into the hands of Catholics who challenged the legitimacy of the English Reformation. In response, he cited the official position of the Reformed international: the validity of a church was solely a matter of the two “notes” of “true preaching of the word of God” and the “right administration of the sacraments,” both of which were present in the state church. Not only did he say, with some warrant, that Cartwright and company were venturing beyond the boundaries of the Reformed tradition by adding discipline or church structure as a third note of the true church, he also painted them as Anabaptist-like because they blurred the difference between the visible and invisible church. As he pointed out, the visible church that encompassed an entire nation would inevitably include people of faith and others who seemed insufficiently Christian.46
Cartwright and his fellow reformers conceded that, here on earth, the church was not the same as the invisible church of the elect; theologically, the visible church was different from the community of the saints known only to Christ. Yet all of them wanted the church on earth to resemble the kingdom of God, an assumption these men owed to John Foxe’s emphasis on the faithful few, the Pauline concept of the church as continually advancing in edification, and Reformed theologians such as Calvin and Bucer. The authors of the Admonition insisted that, within a church that was properly organized, people grew in faith or were edified. As they put it, the visible church was a “company or congregatione of the faythfull called and gathered out of the worlde by the preachinge of the Gospell, who following and embracinge true religione, do in one unitie of Spirite strengthen and comforte one another, daylie growinge and increasinge in true faythe.” Cartwright amplified this description by citing St. Peter on the connections between Christ’s spiritual body and the “temple” constructed out of “living stones” transformed by grace and participating in the process of edification (1 Peter 2:5). Only through lively, unfettered, Spirit-touched preaching of the Word and a more effective system of discipline would parish churches become akin to Christ’s kingdom. Any such process depended as well on stricter rules about who could participate in Holy Communion, which should be offered only to those who “have made confession of their faith and submitted” to the “discipline” of the church. Another aspect of edification was structural. Every minister should serve a single parish, the reason being (aside from many others) that this would enable him to differentiate the worthy from the unworthy.47
A sanctified church would also entrust the power of the keys to each parish and, in some manner, share this power with laypeople. A fundamental text was Matthew 18:17, where Jesus seemed to describe how a congregation should deal with those who sinned. In Matthew 16:19, the word “keys” (as in keys of the kingdom) became a metaphor for the means of excluding people from the church or judging them worthy of remaining. Interpreting this term to signify the empowering of each parish church to supervise its members, the group associated with the Admonition defended an emphatically communal or collective understanding of church discipline, to the point of insisting that the “power of the keys” was shared in some manner between ministers and laypeople—only the worthy, however, not those who had never accepted the discipline of the Word.48
The twin principles of biblical authority and the church as community ever advancing in edification dictated a third, that Christ was the sole head (or king) of the visible church. Within English Protestantism this point had already served to justify the rupture with papal authority. Now Cartwright turned it against the authority of the queen. Sincere in professing his loyalty to Elizabeth I in her role as head of state and re-affirming her God-given mandate to protect the church from its enemies, Cartwright was no less earnest in reiterating the two-kingdoms theory of church and state proposed by Calvin and other Reformed theologians: “the godly magistrate is the head of the commonwealth, but not of the church.” Thanks to its singular relationship with Christ, the visible church could appoint ministers, decide all matters of doctrine, and administer the process of discipline. Although granted a role as “nursing fathers” (Isa. 49:23) of the church, the civil state had to observe “the rules of God prescribed in His word.” According to another reformer, William Fulke, the Christian prince was obliged to accept the advice of a council of clergy or, alternatively, receive instruction “by the word of God through the ministry of the preaching of the same,” a principle supported by more mainstream ministers on the basis of biblical examples. Using stronger language, Cartwright called on all civil magistrates “to subject themselves unto the Church to submit their scepters, to throw down their crowns before the Church.” Pointedly, he insisted that no Christian prince (meaning the queen) could be “excepted from ecclesiastical discipline.”49
His intention was not to subordinate civil to religious authority but to validate the autonomy of the church, which was “divine in a sense not applicable to the state.” As Fulke pointed out in A Brief and Plain Declaration, “The church of God was perfect in all her regiment before there was any Christian prince. . . . By which it is manifest that the . . . government thereof dependeth not upon the authority of princes but upon the ordinance of God.” The real difference between church and civil state (or magistrate) arose out of the relationship between the visible church and the history of redemption. Unlike any other institution, the church was awaiting the return of Christ and the ingathering of the elect, at which point it would be enfolded into Christ’s spiritual kingdom. This Christ-centered identity entitled the church to a distinctive freedom that no “prince” could impair. According to the Second Admonition to Parliament, “None is so high in the church as Christe, none to doe anything . . . but as it is appointed in his woorde.” Despite the many ways in which Cart-wright and his fellow reformers emphasized the close connections between church and state, their real goal was to limit the reach of the royal supremacy. In a passage as striking to read today as it must have been to its readers in the mid-1580s, Fulke characterized the royal supremacy as “a mist to dazzle the eyes of ignorant persons, that they think all things in the ecclesiastical state ought to be disposed by . . . the absolute power of the civil magistrate.” Echoing Cartwright, Travers insisted in his Ecclesiasticae Disciplineae, et Anglicanae Ecclesiae (1574) that civil magistrates “must as well as the rest submit themselves and be obedient to the iust and lawfull authoritie off the Officers off the churche.”50
No other aspect of the two-kingdoms framework would be as irritating to the political elite in England and Scotland, where the leaders of the state church were also insisting on this principle. Whitgift seems to have sensed that the experience of dealing with hostile bishops and an obdurate queen was pushing the radicals to imagine the church as sharply different from and threatened by the civil state.51 Responding to the assertion that certain aspects of the liturgy were tainted by their Catholic past, he reasoned that this genealogy became irrelevant when any such practices were put to Protestant ends. The more dubious genealogy was that of the reformers themselves. Were they not reenacting the errors of the fourth-century CE “Cathari” (in English, the “pure” or the “puritans”) and of sixteenth-century Anabaptists, who, as Whit-gift rightly pointed out, had adopted a strongly literal version of sola scriptura: “This name Puritan is very aptly given to these men; not because they be pure . . . but because they think themselves to be ‘more pure than others,’ as Cathari did, and separate themselves from all other churches and congregations.” Whitgift backed up this statement by citing a single sentence in the Admonition: the assertion that the Church of England was “so far off, from having a church rightly reformed, accordying to the prescript of Gods worde, that as yet we are not come to the outward face of the same.”52
Defending the royal supremacy was easier. From Whitgift’s perspective and undoubtedly from that of Elizabeth I, the two-kingdoms framework “utterly” overthrew “her authority in ecclesiastical matters.” Possibly the church that was yet to be—that is, a church enjoying a unique spiritual freedom—might exist. At the present moment, however, church and civil state remained coextensive, a “Constantinian” position based on the premise that the Christian commonwealth was more or less identical with the church of Christ: “I make no difference betwixt a christian commonwealth and the church of Christ.” Responding to the reformers’ objections to the principle of things indifferent, he used it to justify the policies of Elizabeth and her bishops on behalf of conformity: the church was entitled to resolve any and all disputes about liturgy or governance because its authority overlapped with the royal supremacy or, as he put it, the “christian magistrate.”53 Like Parker before him, Whitgift reiterated Elizabeth’s uneasiness about any mobilizing of “the people,” doing so by associating the reformers’ scheme of church governance with “popularity.” In a section entitled “Elections by the multitude for the most part disordered,” he characterized the people as lacking “judgement and discretion” and therefore incapable of a role in preserving “peace and good government.” Because the reformers ignored this reality and “despise[d] authoritie” (that is, the royal supremacy), they were rightly characterized as seditious, an epithet that implied their sympathy for the theorizing of John Knox and Christopher Goodman (see chap. 1) about resistance to ungodly rulers.54
He was onto something. As the twentieth-century historian A. F. Scott Pearson has pointed out, “the notion of an absolute sovereign State was alien to the mind of Cartwright,” for whom God (or Christ) came first. The reformers were almost as emphatic about the evils of allowing power within the church to be concentrated in one person’s hands. Cartwright made it clear that he wanted significant authority to be transferred from a centralized hierarchy to each parish, where power would be shared by clergy and laity alike. As he put it, “the consent of all” was imperative in situations where the common interest was involved. Papal “tyranny” was the extreme example of what could go wrong, but not far behind was the “imperious and pompous dominion” of bishops, and a Constantine-like monarchy. Within the scheme of the reformers, any such abuse of authority was checked by the rule of parity (all ministers having the same rank), an “eldership” that included ministers, deacons, and ruling elders, and the practice of “popular Election,” or empowering laypeople to participate in the “choosing and deposing” of their ministers and elders. Whether these rules amounted to a “republican” mode of governance, as historians have occasionally suggested, seems doubtful. True, the reformers insisted on the capacities of ordinary people, extolling them, in Cartwright’s words, as “wise as serpents in the wisdom especially which is to salvation.” In the same breath, however, they reiterated the truism that laypeople would need advice and supervision from the officers of the church.55
Meanwhile, Travers, Cartwright, and the authors of the two Admonitions were amplifying their conception of a fully reformed church, Travers doing so in Ecclesiasticae Disciplinae . . . Explicatio, which appeared in an English translation in Heidelberg in 1574. In the early 1580s, it was supplemented by a much briefer “Book of Discipline” that circulated in manuscript copies until printed in 1644 under the title A Directory of Church-Government. Never finalized, the text was reviewed and discussed by county-based or “classis” groups of ministers as late as 1589, when Travers was still attempting to incorporate various changes into the text.56 It may have been easy to agree on this book’s description of ministry, for it reiterated the Reformed model of that office as inherently collective, a “consisterie” in each parish of a pastor (responsible for administering the sacraments, and for connecting doctrine to the experience of redemption), a teacher (to handle doctrine), and the two lay offices of elder and deacon, the first charged with managing the process of discipline, the second with caring for the poor and managing parish finances. Bishops had no place in this system, which eliminated nonresidency and pluralism by requiring every minister to serve a single parish or congregation, an argument dating from the 1560s.57
In keeping with Reformed-style presbyterianism, the Directory outlined a system of “conferences” or national bodies to which all congregations were in some manner subordinate. Here, it seems certain that debate was vigorous and the outcome something well short of a hierarchical system of synods and assemblies empowered to supervise local parishes, for the Directory specified that “no particular Church [i.e., parish] hath power over another,” a statement modestly qualified by the assertion that “every particular Church of the same resort, meeting and counsel, ought to obey the opinion of more Churches with whom they communicate.” This emphasis on the strictly local may have prompted a rule prohibiting a minister chosen by and ordained within the context of a single parish from exercising his office elsewhere except for a limited time, and only if his home parish assented. Otherwise, the workings of a synod and presbytery-centered system of the kind that would emerge in the Church of Scotland (see chap. 3) remained vague. Cartwright seems to have wavered between two different interpretations of the word “church” in Matthew 18:17, taking it to signify the eldership or ministry but also open to the possibility that it referred to “the people.” What was said in the Admonition about the election of ministers requiring the “consent by the people” was subsequently rephrased as “election was made by the elders, with the common consent of the whole church.” Questions or uncertainties of this kind persisted throughout the 1580s, although usually voiced in private.58
What did matter to the young Turks of these years was making their case to the queen and her principal advisors and, beyond them, to a broader public.59 Hoping that a face-to-face encounter with Elizabeth or getting her to read their manifestos would convert her to the cause of a “thorough” reformation, the radicals had to settle for the support of a network of like-minded ministers and high-ranking laypeople—for Walter Travers, it was William Cecil (Lord Burghley), the most important member of the Privy Council, who employed him as a chaplain in 1581 and, a year later, arranged for his appointment to Temple Church in London. Addressing Burghley in an undated (c. 1574) letter, Sampson reminded him of a truism of Reformed political theology: he must exercise “the sword, which God hath put in the hand of Christian magistrates.” In December 1584 Burghley and other members of the Privy Council attended a disputation at Lambeth Palace at which Whitgift and Travers squared off alongside others.60 As well, strong words were spoken in the presence of the queen. When the young minister Edward Dering preached before her in 1570, he spoke bluntly of the “greatest duty” of the Christian prince “to maintain the gospel, to teach the people knowledge, and build his whole government with faithfulness.” Lest the queen miss his point, he called on her to emulate the “godly rulers and princes of Israel” who had kept “the sanctuary undefiled.” Dering wanted her to rid the state church of incompetent and non-resident clergy and replace them with a ministry committed to teaching “the difference between the holy and profane.” To ignore this agenda and persist in being “careless” would put all of England in danger from the workings of God’s providence: “We have fearful examples before our eyes to take heed of God’s judgments when we abuse his graces.” The aging John Foxe weighed in as well, tempering in later editions what he had written about Elizabeth in the dedication of the Acts and Monuments to indicate his dismay at her recalcitrance.61
Not that the authorities sat by and did nothing. Despite important friendships and family connections, Dering was suspended from preaching after he told the Privy Council that he favored the presbyterian program up to and including the principle that Christ, not the queen, was head of the church. Others, too, were suspended, deprived, or imprisoned unless, like Cartwright, they returned to Europe, where he remained until 1585.62 Yet in 1578 the Admonition was reprinted, and Gilby published a terse summary of A View of Anti-christ, his Laws and Ceremonies in our English Church, unreformed. Three years later, Field became a lecturer in a London church. Using his connections with the book trades, he secured the printing of partisan texts, including a letter by Calvin’s successor in Geneva, Theodore Beza, denouncing the office of bishop. Field also masterminded a national census of the state of the clergy designed to embarrass the bishops by showing how many “dumb dogges” (Isa. 56:10) were ministers, a document published in 1593, five years after his death, in A parte of a register, contayninge sundrie memorable matters, written by divers godly and learned in our time, which stande for, the reformation of our church; a parallel collection remained unpublished until the early twentieth century.63
Equally remarkable was Field’s success in nurturing local and national attempts to create the semblance of presbyterian-like practices within the church, as though an alternative to episcopacy could be constructed from beneath. Building on informal meetings of “ministers of the brotherhood” in 1570s London, events of this kind began to occur elsewhere by the early 1580s. By mid-decade, clergy and college fellows at Cambridge were getting together in conferences in several Sussex and Essex towns and also in Warwick, where Cartwright lived after returning from Europe. In September 1587 and again in 1588 and 1589, many of these activists gathered in or near Cambridge to discuss draft versions of the “Book of Discipline” and other matters. Of these conferences, one is well known thanks to the chance survival of its records, the Dedham “classis” of ministers and Cambridge University fellows (but apparently no lay elders) that met for several years to fast, hear sermons or lectures on the Bible, debate matters of pastoral policy, scrutinize draft versions of the “Book of Discipline,” offer counsel to one another about employment, and debate how they should respond to the campaign to suppress nonconformity that Whitgift, newly elevated to the post of Archbishop of Canterbury, initiated in 1584. Ever the organizer, Field advised the Dedhamites to “use what meanes yow can” to resist this campaign.64
Field’s greatest achievement may have been to pursue the tasks of “propaganda and organization” with such effectiveness that he transformed “the somewhat incoherent dissent” of the Cambridge radicals into “a purposeful and militant movement.”65 Notably, he had a hand in arranging petitions to Parliament and, when elections to that body were scheduled, in mobilizing votes for certain candidates. Although Elizabeth continued to insist that Parliament not address matters of religion, some members of the House of Commons attempted to do so in response to petitions that emphasized the importance of a preaching ministry. From one Parliament to the next, members of the House of Commons called on the church to overlook nonconformity in matters of dress and liturgy lest it lose some of its ablest preachers. Proposals of this kind had broad support that became almost universal whenever the House was considering stronger measures against English Catholics and, especially, against the priests who were filtering into the country. Still another tactic was to exploit an ever-present anticlericalism by introducing measures to curb the bishops’ privileges.66
Nonetheless, in 1584 it looked as though Whitgift held the winning hand. To help him in his campaign against Protestant nonconformity, he resurrected Parker’s “Advertisements” and demanded that every minister in the church assent to them. To intimidate those who were more radical, he began to employ a Court of High Commission or “prerogative” court (i.e., deriving its authority from the monarch) charged with enforcing the authority of the state in religious affairs and controversial for this and other reasons. Even so, the outcome was something of a standoff. Not only had the agitation of the ’seventies increased the number of ministers who refused to conform—in all, some three or four hundred ministers did so initially—but Parliament and the Privy Council had other priorities than those of the archbishop. In places such as Essex, where the support for a presbyterian-like program was unusually vigorous, Whitgift suspended as many as forty-three local clergy. When the dust had settled, all but one returned not only to preaching but, almost certainly, to some degree of nonconformity.67
Satisfying as this standoff may have been, the reformers inside and outside of Parliament wanted much more. Throughout the 1580s, bills were introduced in the House of Commons lamenting the “infamous” behavior of many of the clergy and the plight of laypeople who, because of Whitgift’s campaign against nonconformity, “have none who do break the bread of life unto us.” Urging the authorities to restore everyone who had been suspended, and encouraged by a series of tracts calling for changes so extensive as to be “revolutionary,”68 the session of 1586–87 was notably aggressive. Thanks to the networks Field had helped build, petitions and partisan documents poured in, all of them underscoring the shortage of zealous ministers and requesting that no one of this caliber be punished. In February 1587, a small group of Parliamentarians took the daring step of introducing a bill that would have required the church to replace episcopacy with “presbyteries” of pastors, doctors, and elders, adopt an alternative to the Book of Common Prayer based on the “Geneva Liturgie,” curtail the queen’s authority in matters of religion, and restore certain properties to the church. Simultaneously, Peter Wentworth argued that the House of Commons was entitled to review and correct what the bishops were doing. As happened whenever the state church was criticized, someone reminded the House of Commons that the queen interpreted the royal supremacy to mean that she but not Parliament was entitled to regulate affairs of religion. Nonetheless, some members of the House continued to complain that the state church was defective.69
One of the sponsors of the bill of 1587, a country gentleman named Job Throckmorton, had sided with Field and Wilcox during the Admonition Controversy and may have written the Second Admonition. Angered by the impasse of 1586–87 and back in the safety of his home to avoid being imprisoned for his outspokenness, he added his voice to a literary campaign that had been in full swing for several years thanks to Travers, Gilby, Dudley Fenner, John Udall, and Cartwright and, on the other side, to bishops and other high-ranking clergy, one of them the ponderous John Bridge, who spoke out on behalf of the policies of Whitgift. In substance and tone, these exchanges covered familiar ground: the meaning of “bishop” in the New Testament, the plight of a church that suppressed its best ministers, the benefits of stricter discipline, the proper handling of excommunication—a key issue because of its role in maintaining the church as a sanctified community—and, on the side of the presbyterians, the insinuation that Whitgift’s policies were enabling Catholicism to persist in England.70
The tone of these exchanges suddenly intensified when, in October 1588, the London printer and Puritan sympathizer Robert Waldegrave issued the pamphlet-length O Read Over D. Bridges, followed shortly thereafter by a second tract and, by the summer of 1589, five more, each with a false imprint and authored by the pseudonymous “Martin Mar-prelate.” Throckmorton was principally responsible for the series and his impatience the driving force behind them; as he remarked in Hay any Worke for Cooper (1589), “I saw the cause of Christ’s government, and of the Bishops’ antichristian dealing, to be hidden. The most part of men could not be gotten to read anything written in the defence of the one and against the other. I bethought me therefore of a way whereby men might be drawn to do both.”71 Conventional in how they referenced the presbyterian program, the Mar-prelate tracts were suffused with apocalyptic overtones and unprecedented in their sarcasm—most of it directed at the bishops and certain bishops in particular, all of them characterized as hungering for wealth and privilege and ignoring the pastoral needs of the people.72
The excitement was short-lived. Replies poured forth and, in the summer of 1589, the authorities hunted high and low for the press on which the tracts had been printed. From these investigations, Whitgift learned of the networks Field had helped create. The archbishop seized the moment. Knowing of the queen’s disdain for nonconformity and emboldened by changes within her circle of advisors that included his own entry to the Privy Council in 1586 and the disappearance of advocates of reform—a telling loss was the death in 1588 (the same year in which John Field died) of the queen’s sometime favorite Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, who worked behind the scenes to abet the presbyterian program—he initiated a new campaign against the radicals fueled by the accusation that their network of “conferences” was the staging ground for a conspiracy against the state. He had an ally in the ambitious clergyman Richard Bancroft, who rummaged through confiscated letters and manuscript treatises seeking evidence of the presbyterians’ disloyalty, much of which he publicized in Dangerous Positions and Proceedings (1593). Bancroft had already narrated a genealogy of the Puritan movement in A Survay of the Pretended Holy Discipline (1593) and savaged its politics in A Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse . . . 1588 (1589), in which he insisted that monarchy and presbyterianism were incompatible.73
Polemics of this kind marked a new stage in the making of anti-puritanism, to which English Catholics had also contributed. Stigmatized as “sedicious and factious persons in the commonwealth” who “seeke the overthrowe of Civill Magistrates” and encourage people to “frequent private Conventicles,” would-be presbyterians and well-known nonconformists such as Cartwright were questioned, deprived, or imprisoned. A telling sign of the authorities’ paranoia was their assertion that Cartwright was conspiring to subvert the authority of the queen “by force and arms.”74 Released in 1592, Cartwright waited a few years before defending himself. But the clock could not be turned back. The meeting book of the Dedham “classis” ended abruptly in 1588, as did general meetings of the kind Field had been able to organize. Simultaneously, the church acquired a new group of defenders—Bancroft for one, Richard Hooker for another—who insisted that episcopacy was what the church fathers had intended.75 The Protestantism of these men was, in some general sense of the term, Reformed and therefore anti-Catholic in its contours, but the arguments they set in motion would have unexpected consequences in the next century, as would the pleas of Cartwright and company that the Church of England align itself with the Reformed international.
When Whitgift and his allies reckoned up the score after two decades of contestation, the outcome was exhilarating: victory seemed theirs, with Parliament rebuffed, the compromises of the Church of England justified, Puritanism tagged as seditious, and episcopacy given a fuller rationale as apostolic if not biblically mandated. Moreover, the bishops who had gone abroad during the 1550s were being “replaced by a different species: more rigidly authoritarian conformists” who had little in common with the moderates of the 1560s.76 The queen, too, was pleased. Caring little about personal belief but a great deal about conformity, she acquired a compliant archbishop in Whitgift, but only after punishing his predecessor. Hearing in 1576 of disorders connected with the exercise known as prophesying,77 the queen had ordered Grindal to suppress it. Although he offered to curtail abuses of the practice, the archbishop rejected her request, telling her in a letter that conscience prevented him from doing so. Defiance of this kind was unacceptable to Elizabeth. On her orders he was sequestered, whereupon the work of running the church fell to others. Forewarned by this episode, Whitgift did Elizabeth’s bidding. He and Bancroft, who became archbishop in 1604 after Whitgift’s death, threw themselves into suppressing nonconformists and erstwhile presbyterians, a program paralleled in the realm of political philosophy by their “imperial” version of royal power and the royal supremacy.78
Among the men and women whose hopes ran high in 1559 that the church would align itself with the Reformed international, the mood was one of deep discouragement. According to a veteran of the struggle for a “thorough” reformation, “these thirty years we have neither added any thing which might further, nor took away anything which might hinder, the building of God’s Temple among us: but that our proceeding therein is like to the journeys of the Israelites in the wilderness, which went but eleven days’ journey in forty years.”79 To be sure, the church was Protestant in its understanding of salvation and the Eucharist. Yet the twin tasks of reforming an imperfect Reformation and launching a broad-based program of evangelization remained undone. What had gone wrong? And why had some reformers turned so strongly against episcopacy when doing so alienated them from the queen and many others?
The imperative to evangelize and the practical difficulties in the way of such a program underscored the failings of episcopacy. Called to account by the bishop of London in 1578 for refusing to conform, a young minister named Francis Marbury minced no words: the bishop and others of his kind were “guiltie of the death of as manie soules as have perished by the ignoraunce” of those parish clergy unable to preach the Word in the manner Christ and St. Paul had mandated. Edward Dering said something of the same kind to Elizabeth’s chief administrator, Lord Burghley; without sermons that taught the “horror of sin,” “we can never have faith.” John Udall summed up this and other shortcomings in a fiery statement printed surreptitiously in 1588. Allied with the Antichrist and Rome, the bishops were soul killers who deprived common people of the promise of free grace because they refused to eliminate pluralism and suppressed godly preaching.80 Documented in Puritan-sponsored county-by-county “calendars” identifying hundreds of parishes without regular preaching or controlled by pluralists, this critique was echoed in sessions of Parliament, as when Job Throckmorton told the House of Commons in 1586 that, “If I were asked what is the bane of the Church and commonwealth, answer make, ‘The dumb ministry, the dumb ministry’; yea, if I were asked a thousand times, I must say, ‘the dumb ministry.’ ”81
Whenever the reformers exploited the weaknesses of the church as an evangelical institution, their movement aroused broad support. Notably, some of Elizabeth’s bishops ignored the rules about conformity if doing so enabled them to retain the most effective ministers in their dioceses. High-placed civil leaders followed suit, reasoning that zealous preachers were “far too useful and necessary to be persecuted,” an argument the Privy Council acknowledged when it intervened to provide evangelical preachers for one of the “dark corners of the land,” the Catholic-tilting county of Lancashire, knowing that such men would “instruct the people the better to know their duty towards God and Her Majesty’s laws.” It helped, as well, that several members of the council used their powers of patronage to secure bishoprics and other offices for the more resolute of the Marian exiles. In the 1580s and 1590s, Lord Burghley tried to blunt Whitgift’s anti-puritan policy, as did the Earl of Leicester, the Earl of Huntington, and Robert Rich, the second Baron Rich. Local gentry, church wardens, and justices of the peace also favored the reformers. This willingness to befriend nonconformists and evangelizing ministers enabled the movement to survive and flourish in towns, parishes, and a handful of colleges at Oxford and Cambridge. In Parliament as well, some in the House of Commons could be counted on to complain about the “greevous abuses” of the bishops. As the historian Alan Cromartie has pointed out, “In every single parliamentary session from 1566 to 1593, there was some attempt to bring in legislation . . . to remedy what were seen as clerical abuses.” On high and from beneath, the reformers were assured of a voice in church and civil politics.82
The dynamics of reform persisted for another reason, the ability of the fervently Protestant to play upon popular fears that Catholicism might return as the state religion by conquest or conspiracy. Within the country itself, no one knew for sure if high-ranking Catholics would put loyalty to Elizabeth ahead of loyalty to their faith. Some did not. Although a Catholic-led insurrection in 1569 was quickly crushed, Pope Pius V’s decision to excommunicate the queen brought into being a militant group that aspired to remove her from the throne and make Catholicism the religion of the land. Militant Catholicism spawned a militant Protestantism that spilled over into foreign policy. By the mid-1580s, the firmly Protestant members of Parliament and the Privy Council had persuaded Elizabeth to support the anti-Catholic, anti-Habsburg insurgency underway in the Low Countries, although she turned a deaf ear to pleas that robust preaching would prevent a resurgence of Catholicism in England itself, an argument tied to assertions that the defects of the church were responsible for the “abounding increase” in domestic Catholicism. For good reason, a foreign policy directed against Spain seemed urgent in the 1590s. Domestically, Parliament continued to press for stronger laws against Catholic recusancy and stricter enforcement of laws already on the books.83
The question remains, why did militant reformers become so vocal in the 1570s and 1580s about episcopacy and the Book of Common Prayer? Matthew Hutton, the future Archbishop of York, posed this very question to Lord Burghley in 1573: “at the Begynninge, it was but a Capp and a Surplice . . . but now it is growen to Bishopps . . . and (to speake Plaine) to the Queene Maiestie’s Authoritie in Causes ecclesiasticall.”84 We must look to the Continent and ongoing connections with the Reformed international for a significant part of the answer. From the late 1550s onward, Reformed churches in Europe were engaging in a process of self-definition signaled by the emergence of creeds or confessions alongside schemes of church governance or polity. All this was happening at a moment when, in the context of the Counter-Reformation, the Council of Trent was summoning lay Catholics to “exterminate” the heretics in their midst. The first of these developments ended any possibility of rapprochement with Lutheranism.85 The second made it much less likely that the Reformed international would tolerate episcopacy. In France, the Huguenot community formalized a version of presbyterianism in the 1560s and early 1570s. The Dutch Reformed followed suit in 1586, and the Church of Scotland in 1578–81, after several years of argument.86 As the historian Andrew Pettegree has pointed out, these events, together with insurgencies or civil war in the Netherlands, France, and Scotland between Catholics and Protestants, signaled a new mood of militancy within the Reformed about worship, church structure, and the errors of Catholicism, a militancy more than matched on the Catholic side. This was also the period when a new kind of minister came onto the stage, a cadre formed at the academy Calvin set up in Geneva and, in Britain, at a handful of colleges at Cambridge and Oxford and others both old and newly founded in Scotland. What happened in France, Geneva, the Low Countries, and Scotland was being transmitted to England via publications and personal connections; notably, Travers spent four years (1571–75) in Geneva, where he became good friends with Beza and met Andrew Melville (see chap. 3).87
It seems more than accidental, therefore, that a group of university-trained ministers began to agitate against episcopacy in the 1570s. For these young men, the advantages of something akin to presbyterianism were sixfold: (1) as was argued in the opening sentence of the Directory of Church-Government, such a scheme was warranted by Scripture; (2) it contained multiple safeguards against Catholic-style “tyranny” while guarding the “liberties” of ordinary people to participate in the choosing of their ministers; (3) it provided a rigorous set of procedures for protecting the sacraments from the unworthy and advancing the imperative of edification; (4) it disposed of nonresidency and pluralism by the rule that all clergy serve a single parish; (5) it safeguarded the church from an imperious monarchy; and (6) it supported a sermon-centered mode of worship. The sum of these advantages made it everything the Church of England was not, a church cleansed of “idolatry,” capable of evangelizing the entire country, and fostering edification.88
Of these advantages, two had a special importance in the English context, the possibility that presbyterian-style discipline would enable the state church to become a sanctified community and the emphasis on a more participatory style of governance. In Cartwright’s exchanges with Whitgift as well as in the Admonition and other critiques, a picture was painted of local churches allowing the wrong kinds of people to receive Holy Communion and bring their children to be baptized. Of the “hundred pointes of poperie” listed in the un-dated (c. 1575) “Viewe of Antichrist . . . in our English Church unreformed,” two were “the want of examination before the receiving of the Lords Supper” and “the wante of true Discipline for the whole congregation.” The remedies were obvious: improve the workings of discipline and expand the privileges of the worthy, who deserved a better reputation than what was implied by the trope of laypeople as ignorant, illiterate, and unstable. As was said from time to time by English presbyterians, the people were spiritually capable of great things: “although they be called sheep in respect of their simplicity . . . yet are they also for their circumspection wise as serpents in the wisdom especially which is to salvation . . . they are the people of God, and therefore . . . those of whom St. Paul saith, ‘The spiritual can discerneth all things.’ ” Hoping that a cadre of such people would emerge around them, the makers of the presbyterian program also knew that many of their countrymen would not welcome godly discipline.89
Eventually, all roads led to the question of authority: where it resided, what gave it legitimacy, and how it was being thwarted or sustained. Well before Bancroft came on the scene, the Puritan movement had tied the lawfulness of worship and church government to the authority of Scripture and the “primitive” phase of Christian history. The movement did so having absorbed the rule of sola scriptura from the makers of the Reformed tradition, who also passed on the message that true (or lawful) religion was the very opposite of Catholic-style “tyranny.” From day one, therefore, the more daring wing of the movement endorsed a version of authority at odds with the royal supremacy and a strong version of episcopacy. With his customary astuteness, Sampson posed the crucial question in 1566: “Whether any thing of a ceremonial nature may be prescribed to the church by the sovereign, without the assent and free concurrence of churchmen?” The “troubles” in Frankfurt arose out of a division of opinion about the absolute authority of Scripture, moderates insisting that the policies of the Edwardian state church should be respected and radicals insisting that those policies must be revised to align them more fully with what Christ had prescribed. The same division of opinion, although overlaid with problems posed by the royal supremacy, marked the vestarian controversy of the 1560s, the disputes provoked by the emergence of the presbyterians, and the agitation in the House of Commons about reform. At these moments, the reformers evoked the authority of “conscience,” which registered what was really lawful, or tied the legitimacy of ministers to a congregation’s affirmation of them or, in Parliament, questioned the scope of the royal prerogative in matters of religion; as was argued in a statement of 1586, subscription to Whitgift’s “Advertisements” should be “left free to the full perswasion and resolution of a good conscience” instead of being threatened with “menacing” penalties. Sampson saw what was coming, a politico-religious crisis that pitted religion as endorsed by the civil state against religion as endorsed by Scripture and conscience.90
Not that every critic of the state church shared his perspective. By the 1580s and early 1590s, contradictions abounded within the movement thanks to mediations and circumstances of several kinds. From the start, it encompassed laypeople and clergy who hesitated to transform their discontent into a program of the kind that Field, Travers, and Cartwright were proposing. Such half-hearted Puritans—or half-hearted conformists—were much less likely to question the principle of things indifferent, the royal supremacy in matters of religion, and the office of bishop if some of its Catholic aspects were eliminated. Cartwright himself climbed down from a strong version of presbyterianism after he was criticized by Richard Bancroft from one side and more radical Puritans from another. Responding to Bancroft’s assertion that he “intended” a “seditious and rebellious disorder,” Cartwright insisted that the presbyterian party had always stayed within the bounds of what was “lawfull and godly” as judged by “the law of this land.” In his more moderate guise, Cartwright was willing to play the card of institutional authority, as were others who reasoned that the royal supremacy was how national unity was preserved and the English Reformation legitimized, a line of argument most Protestants welcomed as a means of refuting Catholic assertions that Protestantism was an illegitimate and disruptive novelty.91
Supporting the royal supremacy in the context of anti-Catholic polemics may have been easier to do given the fact that Elizabeth I did not have a free hand in matters of religion. From the earliest moments of the Elizabethan Settlement, it was being said that civil rulers must defer to divine law and that sacerdotal power—as in being able to administer the sacraments—was singular to ordained clergy. As bishops and ministers pointed out, matters of doctrine and worship came within the jurisdiction of the church and its leaders. Richard Hooker, whose credentials as an anti-puritan were impeccable, insisted in Laws of ecclesiastical polity (1594 and beyond) that the monarch, although entitled to enforce the rules of the church, should leave the fashioning of these to “pastors and bishops.” Hezekiah was the great exemplar, the godly king who restored true religion but called upon the priests to regulate religious affairs. Exercising this principle in practice was no simple matter. Yet its presence buffered the royal supremacy.92
Another constraint on the royal supremacy—on paper if not necessarily in fact—was Parliament’s role in matters of religion. From its point of view, the history of the English Reformation vindicated this argument. Had Parliament not shaped the government’s anti-Catholic program and, at various moments, urged Elizabeth to pursue a foreign policy that favored international Protestantism? As well, from the mid-1560s onward, bills were being introduced and sometimes approved that touched on worship, the plight of nonconformists, the economic problems of the Church, and the bishops’ authority to grant dispensations from penalties imposed by the church courts. Yet the queen herself and those who spoke on her behalf in Parliament were quick to deny that institution any real authority over matters of religion. As Christopher Hatton, a loyal supporter of the queen, said in February 1586 in response to assertions within the House of Commons of Parliament’s privileges, “It overthroweth her Majestie’s supremacie.”93
Disputes of this kind explain why the agenda of a thorough reformation could become entangled in its own contradictions. What Parliament wanted was not a two-kingdoms system but a role for itself that was as imperious or “Erastian” as the queen’s.94 When it came to core principles, these could also be ambiguous or uncertain. Things indifferent or adiophra, which Whitgift used to such effect in the 1570s, had a respectable genealogy within the Reformed tradition. Tone also mattered. Martin Mar-prelate alienated moderates within the Puritan movement who preferred a go-slow process of reform instead of the more sweeping program endorsed by Sampson and others. Inevitably, therefore, a spectrum emerged, some chafing at any compromises and others, like Cartwright by the late 1580s, retreating from his initial insistence on a church aligned with divine law.
Yet the questions that John Foxe tried to finesse in the Book of Martyrs refused to disappear. Were the faithful entitled to act on their own if their ruler disobeyed divine law? Did the true church consist of the faithful and ever-suffering few, or was it a national institution headed by another Constantine? And if a church of the few, did this point toward a congregation-centered polity?95 Summing up the tension between these two possibilities, a historian of the Puritan movement in England has described the presbyterians as “torn between an actual state of schism and their devotion to the Calvinist ideal of a Christian society.”96 Time would tell whether this and other contradictions would overwhelm the possibilities for compromise and moderation, as in fact they did for the handful of Puritans who chose the path of Separatism.
When Whitgift and Bancroft began their assaults on John Field-style dissidents in the early 1590s, the hardest blows fell on a different kind of Puritan, the people who became known as “Brownists” or Separatists.97 Tiny in numbers but vocal about a state church they regarded as suffused with “Idolatry” and in “bondage” to the “invention[s] of man,” Separatists inserted themselves into the story of the faithful few Foxe narrated in the Book of Martyrs. They owed other themes to the authors of the Admonition, including the imperative to never “goe backeward” but always “labour or contend for perfection.” Scorning compromises of the kind that enabled Cartwright and his allies to argue that the state church was lawful, Separatists formed congregations of their own.98 In doing so, they sidestepped the two dilemmas that dogged English Puritans and, more intermittently, the reformers in Scotland. The first of these was how to reconcile an inclusive state church with the church as a sanctified community, and the second, how to remain loyal to a Christian prince while acknowledging the authority of divine law. Separatists solved the first by reimagining the visible church as a cluster of small-scale voluntary communities, each of them empowered to exclude the unworthy, and the second by withdrawing from the magistracy-ministry alliance so dear to the Reformed international. Aware of how Cartwright and company had trimmed their sails in response to the argument of things indifferent, Separatists reaffirmed the regulative principle and its corollary, Christian primitivism.99
What counts as Separatism has perplexed every historian of these people, for some continued to acknowledge the state church but abstained from its patterns of worship.100 Any long-lasting stability was hard-won; debate persisted about the details of what was lawful, as did quarrels of the kind that so often disrupt projects aimed at achieving absolute purity. People came and went, some so alienated from their fellow Separatists that they washed the dirty linen of these communities in print or returned to the church they had repudiated. Caution is in order, therefore, in labeling the men and women who make their appearance in the rest of this chapter, especially if we keep in mind the informal meetings of laypeople and clergy that arose alongside presbyterian-style reform, the virulent anti-popery of this period, and the dismay among so many of the godly with compromise and accommodation.101
Something akin to Separatism emerged during the reign of Mary Tudor, when “zealous professors of the gospel” in London and southeastern England stopped attending Catholic services and formed covert fellowships where they worshipped in a Protestant manner.102 Writing of one of these groups after it emerged into the open in 1558, Thomas Lever, a former Marian exile, spoke admiringly of how it had barred anyone with a reputation for “evil conduct” or “popery” from participating in Holy Communion and sustained a “godly mode of worship,” language that suggests the group was using either the 1552 Book of Common Prayer (possibly with changes) or an order of worship closer to what was being practiced by the exiles in Geneva. Foxe was also impressed, marveling in the Book of Martyrs at the “preservation of a congregation” in London that, at its height, may have numbered two hundred people and citing the “godly multitude” that gathered at Smithfield to support seven persons about to die at the stake, “meeting and embracing, and kissing them” and, as fire engulfed the martyrs, declaring “Almighty god, for Christ’s sake, strengthen them!” One of those martyrs was John Rough, who fled his native Scotland after converting to Protestantism and became a minister in England, only to flee again after the accession of Mary Tudor. Returning to London in late 1557, he became the minister of a “secret” congregation until he was captured, condemned as a heretic, and executed. Thanks to Foxe, who included Rough in the Book of Martyrs, the London congregation became a legendary presence among Elizabethan Separatists.103
Then came the vestarian controversy and, with it, Archbishop Parker’s insistence on uniformity. This situation prompted several new communities of laypeople to emerge as the controversy was winding down. The most substantial was probably the Plumbers’ Hall congregation, so named because of where it met in London. Discovered by the authorities in 1567, its members were interrogated by Grindal in his capacity as bishop of the city. They responded to his inquiries by invoking the Marian martyrs, the English congregation in Geneva, and the vestarian controversy to justify their independence; as one of the group told him, “We remembered that there was a congregation of us in this city, in the days of Queen Mary; and a congregation at Geneva, which used a book and order of preaching, ministering the sacraments and discipline, most agreeable to the word of God . . . which book and order we now hold,” a reference to the Forme of Prayers published in Geneva in 1556. Possibly not hostile to episcopacy but certain that the Church of England was infected with “idolatrous trash,” the group characterized “the whole religion of papistry” as “filthy Idolatry,” a judgment that encompassed the surplice. Simultaneously, these people cited the apocalyptic scenario of warfare between the few and the many in Revelation: the state church bore the “markes of the Romanish beast,” whereas their community exemplified “the pure unmingled and sincere worshipping of God” shorn of “all traditions and inventions of men.”104
Try though the government did to suppress such groups, people of this temperament continued to choose resistance over accommodation, a process fed by the sympathies of nonconforming clergy such as Lever but fed above all by the compromises of the Elizabethan Settlement. John Coppin (or Copping) of Bury St Edmunds was among the more intransigent. In 1578 he refused to have a newborn child baptized and, during his time in prison, complained of parts of the Book of Common Prayer and the queen’s supremacy in matters of religion.105 In the early 1580s Robert Browne (d. 1633) became the architect of a more theorized Separatism that acquired the nickname of “Brownisme.” After graduating from Cambridge in 1572, Browne turned to school teaching, unable to enter the ministry because he refused to acknowledge the authority of the local bishop. At some point he decided that episcopacy was an “antichristian” legacy from Catholicism, an argument he expanded into an uncompromising rejection not only of that office but also of the men who held it and those they had ordained. In his alternative, the lawful route to becoming a minister was congregation or parish-centered, which was where Christ had placed the authority to call and appoint someone to that office. Browne was just as scathing about the surplice and worship. Echoing what was said in the Admonition, he lamented the “worshipping [of] Idols.” It was imperative, therefore, that ministers and laypeople throw off the “yoake laid upon [true Christians] by antichrist.”106
Browne’s enduring contributions were twofold: the case he made against nonconformity and his understanding of the true church. In A True and Short Declaration, he rehearsed the back- and-forth he had with Robert Harrison, a disaffected minister who clung to the possibility that the Church of England was lawful. In response, Browne insisted that the “open wickedness” of parish churches and the anti-Christian nature of episcopacy nullified the customary marks of a true church. Hence the imperative to “leave such parishes”—an imperative he also justified by his understanding of the “liberty” of Christians and the true church to act without the assent of the monarch. Browne accepted a Moses-like role for civil rulers, a role limited to protecting the “outward” being of the church (or religion). Otherwise, the church did not need to “tarrie” for the magistrate to endorse reform. Turning to church membership, he argued that “the kingdom off God was not to be begun by whole parishes, but rather off the worthiest, Were they never so fewe,” a position he justified by citing the parable of the mustard seed (Matt. 13). Via this argument, Browne abandoned the premise—dear to presbyterians and conformists alike—of the church as an inclusive institution. The alternative was a network of small-scale congregations limited to the “worthy” and organized around a “covenant” requiring those who accepted it to “keep & seek agreement under [Christ’s] lawes & government.” Arguably, Browne’s “emphasis on the voluntary church and the unforced conscience went beyond the thinking of any other English religious leader of his time,” to the point of making “Brownisme” “synonymous with popular governance.”107
Together with Harrison, who, at Browne’s urging, had rejected ordination by a bishop, he organized a covenanted fellowship in the city of Norwich in early 1581. Wanting to further the process of edification or, in their words, to ensure that the “clean” were not mingled with the “unclean,” the two men empowered the congregation to “protest, appeale, complaine, exhort, dispute, reprove, &c,” and allowed “men which had the guift” to exhort, practices sanctioned by Browne’s assertion that the church as the body of Christ was “the voice of God.” In his exegesis of Matthew 18:17, he altered how this verse was usually understood in Puritan circles by insisting that “the church” referred to the congregation, not, as presbyterians assumed, to officers or elders. When the authorities caught up with him that spring, Browne was also preaching in “private houses and conventicles” in nearby towns such as Bury St Edmunds, aided in doing so by “some gentlemen” in the region.108 Released from prison a short while later, he persuaded a few dozen people to follow him to the town of Middelburg in Zeeland, a province of the Netherlands.
There, with access to a local printer, Browne and Harrison began to publish books in which they explained why, on the grounds of conscience, the faithful must leave the Church of England. Before the end of 1582 a Middelburg printer had issued A Booke which sheweth the life and manners of all true Christians, and how unlike they are unto Turkes and Papistes and Heathen folke. What Browne meant by “true Christians” was spelled out in a related publication, A Treatise of reformation without tarrying for anie. Tempted by the ideal of the Christian prince and the two-kingdoms understanding of church and state and, in one of his treatises, acknowledging that the godly magistrate “may reforme the Church and commaunde things expedient for the same,”109 Browne preferred to empower the faithful few who adhered to Christ and “presse[d] unto his kingdome” even if doing so was accomplished by “violence” (Luke 16:16). In exile, he also assailed the presbyterians for counseling their followers to “wait” for the queen or Parliament to act. For him the alternative to Christ was simply the Antichrist.110
Before and after Browne moved to the Netherlands, his message appealed to laypeople elsewhere in Suffolk, most notably in Bury St Edmunds, where “a hundred at a tyme” gathered to hear him speak and, some time later, began to read the books he and Harrison were writing. When the government learned that these were trickling into the country, it issued an order in June 1583 demanding that copies be “burned or utterly defaced.” Coppin and another man arrested for distributing them were hanged in Bury in July and some forty books committed to a bonfire. Despite another execution in a nearby town, local expressions of Separatism managed to persist.111 Browne’s own revolt was short-lived. After leaving Middelburg and returning to England via Scotland, he wrote one more defense of Separatism, An Answere to Master Cartwright (1585), before beginning a process of reconciliation with the state church that ended in his ordination in 1591.
Others proved more resilient. By 1587 the authorities were aware of small groups of Separatists in London who ordained their own ministers and celebrated Holy Communion. One or more of these groups had also employed a simple covenant in which the signers pledged to “walk in the way of the lord and as far as might be warranted by the word of God.”112 That year, the authorities seized and imprisoned some twenty members of such a fellowship led by Henry Barrow, a Cambridge graduate and, at one point, a lawyer in training in London, and John Greenwood, another Cambridge graduate and ordained minister who subsequently repudiated his ordination. Both men denied having any connections with Robert Browne. In the same breath, however, both reiterated his insistence on the freedom of the church to adhere to divine law if the civil magistrate was unwilling to do so.113
During their nearly six years of imprisonment, punctuated for Greenwood by his release in July 1592, whereupon he helped organize a new congregation which he served as pastor until he was rearrested in December, the two men found printers willing to publish tracts in which they denounced the Church of England as unlawful, basing this argument on the regulative principle and its corollary, the imperative to separate from idolatrous worship. Echoing a theme of An Admonition to the Parliament, Barrow complained of the laxness that enabled the “profane and ungodly” to have their children baptized and allowed others to participate in Holy Communion. The larger problem arose out of the abrupt transition in 1558 from Catholicism to Protestantism. That the state church was so accepting of people who were never summoned to repent their errors had filled it with “prophane ungodly multitudes.” The alternative was virtually identical with what Field and Wilcox wanted, a “people called and separated from the . . . worlde.” But Barrow transformed the presbyterians’ “faithfull people” into “a select peculiar people” who “voluntarily make a true profession of faith and vowe of their obedience.” Only those who repented and in some public manner acknowledged divine law could become church members. In A true description out of the worde of God, of the visible church (1589), the two men incorporated the biblical and Reformed concept of edification into their understanding of the true (visible) church, characterizing its members as “a most humble, meeke, obedient, faithfull, and loving people, everie stone livinge, elect and precious . . . All bound to edifie one another,” language that came close to associating membership with being among the elect. A covenanted church of the worthy was also a church in which “only the children of such . . . are to be baptized,” a point on which Barrow and Greenwood agreed with Robert Browne. Likewise, they described the power of the keys as held by ministers and lay members alike, although Barrow withheld the privilege of choosing ministers from the membership, assigning it, instead, to a select group of lay officers. Nor did he want laymen administering the sacraments.114
The daring of Barrow and Greenwood extended to the figure of the Christian prince. Declaring themselves loyal to the queen as their Protestant ruler and endorsing the magistrate’s authority to order the external features of the church, Barrow and Greenwood rejected the royal supremacy in matters of religion. Moreover, conscience as a register of divine law trumped the authority of the Christian ruler: “we are not bound to obey the prince’s law for conscience sake, because only God’s laws do bind men’s consciences.” Questioned by the authorities, who challenged Barrow’s assumption that the church could proceed on its own to reform abuses, he replied “that it might and ought, though al the Princes of the world should prohibit the same upon paine of death.” Moreover, the authority of each covenanted congregation was such that Elizabeth I in her capacity (wholly hypothetical!) as a member of such a group was subject to discipline. Not, however, to discipline as practiced in the official church, for Barrow insisted that excommunication, the most severe of the spiritual penalties that a gathered church could impose, should not have civil penalties added to it.115
Charged with sedition for refusing to accept the authority of the queen, the same accusation used to justify the execution of John Coppin, Barrow and Greenwood were hanged in 1593; a few months later, the Oxford-educated Welshman John Penry—who, after living in Scotland, became involved in the making of the Mar-prelate tracts and in 1592 joined the Greenwood-Barrow congregation—met the same fate. It was also in 1593 that Parliament approved the repression of “seditious sectaries” who refused to attend church services, a measure aimed at radical Puritans.116 The survivors of the Barrow-Greenwood community had already acquired a new leader in the person of Francis Johnson, a Cambridge-educated minister who was expelled from that university in 1589 after preaching a university sermon on behalf of presbyterianism. Johnson then moved to Middelburg in the Netherlands and ministered to the same English congregation that had welcomed Thomas Cartwright. There, he also encountered the congregation that Browne and Harrison had created. When this group arranged a local printing of a book by Henry Barrow, Johnson secured the town government’s consent to destroy the edition except for a few copies he retained and read. Convinced by Barrow’s critiques of the state church, he became a Separatist, returned to London, and in late 1592 began to minister to the Barrow-Greenwood group. Arrested and imprisoned but finally released in 1597, he and two “elders” made their way to Amsterdam, where they met up with others of the London congregation who had arrived in 1593. Subsequently, they were joined by the Cambridge-educated Henry Ainsworth, a noted biblical scholar and translator whose version of the Psalms was adopted by the “Pilgrims” of Leiden and new-world Plymouth fame.117
Separatism had no creed or catechism, although individual congregations published documents of this kind. At best it was a fragile movement, persecuted in England, disparaged in Scotland, and scorned in the Netherlands by the leaders of the Dutch Reformed Church, who regarded the exiles as schismatic.118 Within its own sphere it was prone to disagreements and secessions; as happened with Robert Browne, people who became Separatists sometimes returned to the state church. Nonetheless it acquired a remarkable energy thanks to the personalities of a few leaders and the power of certain themes. One of these was the biblical injunction (2 Cor. 6:17) to quit the company of the unclean; another was a contempt for bishops as virulent as Throckmorton’s in the Mar-prelate tracts. A third theme concerned the “true minister of Christ,” who must oppose the “corruptions of Religion” even if doing so cost him his place in the church.119 More unusual, perhaps, was an emphasis on the free movement of the Spirit and its corollary, the “Lords Kingdom” as a place where nothing happened by “force.” Simultaneously, the radicals were emphasizing the spiritual capacities of the “Lords people.” It may have been the last of these themes, together with Browne’s insistence on their freedom to act, that prompted some of the townspeople in Norwich to listen so intently to him. For sure, the laymen and laywomen who gathered around Barrow and Greenwood shared an unusual self-confidence. Thomas Cartwright’s sister-in law Anne Stubbe, whose second husband was the lawyer and member of Parliament John Stubbe, lived and breathed this confidence, telling Cartwright in a letter of c. 1590 that she was “Commaunded by the lorde to Come out from amongst them that weare not the churche of God.” Unmoved by his suggestion that some ministers in the Church of England were lawful because they had been chosen for their post by their congregations, she played her trump card, the imperative to “obey the lorde accordinge to his worde.” When Cartwright criticized the exegetical capacities of lay Separatists, she retorted that persons of her way of thinking had been “taught” by Christ and the Apostles. “It must needes be Christ or Antichrist,” was her final response to the compromises she discerned among the presbyterians.120
A tiny number of people acted on the imperative to quit the state church. Why did others who wanted reform or reformation not follow their example? As often happened in early modern Europe, outbursts of radicalism prompted a reaction in favor of more moderate or even conservative principles or goals. The first of these was the ambition to take over and refashion a state church with the help of the civil magistrate. In 1558 hopes ran high for Elizabeth—and, some years later, in Scotland, for James VI—to play this role. In the eyes of English and Scottish presbyterians, magisterial Protestantism—that is, church and state working together to impose and protect a certain version of Protestantism–was justified by biblical precept and political theology. Moreover, this kind of Protestantism preserved a strong role for the clergy over against the “Brownistical” or “democratic” implications of Separatism. At a moment when the rhetorical strategy of anti-puritans such as Bancroft was to emphasize the “Anabaptisticall” aspects of the movement (i.e., nullifying the authority of the magistrate and favoring a sectarian or schismatic kind of church), a third goal was political, to deflect the force of that rhetoric by insisting on the benefits of a national church and some version of the royal supremacy.121
These contexts explain why Cartwright and the English minister George Gifford went on the attack. Dipping into the grab bag of anti-puritan rhetoric, Gifford pulled out Whitgift’s complaint that the English presbyterians were akin to the fourth-century CE Donatists in their understanding of the visible church and turned it against the Separatists. He backed this critique by citing the Calvinist principle of comprehension intermixed with discipline; the Church of England remained true despite the “presence of sinners,” for the purpose of the church on earth was “to redeem, not abandon.” Job Throckmorton weighed in as well; the radicals were not the bitter fruit of the movement for reform but people with a wholly different genealogy.122
Nonetheless, apologists for the Church of England continued to tie the tin can of “Brownisme” to the tail of every Puritan they encountered. Were they onto something? Whitgift had already detected Anabaptist-like elements in the presbyterian impulse to strengthen the practice of discipline in each parish church. Refusing to “tarie for anie” may be understood as a more emphatic version of what the presbyterians were saying about the liberty of the church, and Separatist-style “congregationalism” as in keeping with the imperative of purging the church of those deemed unworthy. Moreover, assertions that ministers who accepted ordination from a bishop were illegitimate servants of the Antichrist was already being voiced by the more radical presbyterians.123
These continuities can tempt us to embrace the Separatists as authentically Puritan because they acted out the principles of liberty, edification, and a “thorough reformation.” Any such gesture is useful up to a point, for the Separatist insurgency can be likened to a mirror that reflects certain tendencies the broader movement was struggling to contain. Here, yet again, the dynamics of reform in France and Scotland illuminate the situation in England. Never allowed to worship freely by that country’s Catholic rulers, the French Reformed had to accept the fact that theirs was substantially a congregation-centered church. Not so in Scotland, where neither “congregational”-style reform nor Separatism emerged in the sixteenth century, thanks to the fact that John Knox and his fellow reformers took over the state church. Nonetheless, the Separatist presence in late sixteenth-century England forewarns us that something akin to its principles and tactics was likely to emerge whenever moderate reformers found themselves confronted by an alliance of monarchy and ministry advocating a definition of true religion at odds with their own. For that phase of Puritan history, we must wait for chapters 7 and 8.