That’s enough background…
And so in 1558, Elizabeth I ascended the throne of England, hailed as the ‘New Deborah’ after the tragic reign of her Catholic half sister ‘Bloody Mary’. And Elizabeth’s reign was to last for more than forty years until her death as a frail old woman in 1603.
Again I must emphasise that her basic instinct was always for peace and tolerance. Mary had burned 300 Protestants at the stake in three terrible years. No one died under Elizabeth for their faith until 1575 – and she exacted no reprisals on the Marian persecutors. In addition she was initially a conciliator on the international stage. She had no real appetite for war and foreign adventures – unlike her father Henry VIII who it seems, at least in his prime, would wake up each spring with his blood up and full of heat for new battles. It was only new and threatening developments in the International situation that persuaded her to engage in war with the mighty Spanish Empire (with great success) and colonial repression in Ireland (with tragic consequences).
Elizabeth’s first big challenge on coming to the throne was to sort out the religious mess left by Mary (in an age when religion and politics were identical). As I wrote in an earlier post –
Elizabeth was in a difficult situation and was not fully confident of her position until late in her reign after the defeat o the Spanish Armada when she finally became ‘Gloriana Virginia,’ the Virgin Queen beloved by her people. At first she had to play different parties off against each other in order to survive, and also take care not to offend continental Princes of various religious sympathies so as to keep open the prospect of a marriage match and build defensive alliances on the basis of this guessing game. She also had to cope with religious pluralism and the need to prevent the sectarian violence that was all too common on the Continent.
I will add that her position was also difficult because of the slur attached to her name that she was illegitimate; the child of the Protestant whore Anne Boleyn who had supplanted the rightful Queen Katherine of Aragon and had eventually been tried and executed explicitly on charges of adultery and implicitly on charges of witchcraft. This slur was made good use of by supporters of Mary Queen of Scots later in Elizabeth’s reign.
The solution thrashed out by Elizabeth and her supporters and advisers in both the Lords and the Commons to the politico-religious quandary has become known as the Elizabethan Settlement. The Act of Settlement/Supremacy passed in 1558-9 made Elizabeth – rather than the Pope – the Supreme Governor of the Church of England. This meant that she was empowered to appoint Archbishops and Bishops, and therefore had control of the reins of Church politics. However, regarding matters of Church doctrine it was agreed that while she should be consulted on these, she should not interfere unnecessarily in them (and most of the time she kept to her part of this bargain – she only influenced two of the 39 Articles explicitly, for example). The revision of the Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer with its 42 Articles by Archbishop Matthew Parker in Convocation with Bishops Cox and Gheast was the next stage of consolidation.
The ‘total package’ that was the Elizabethan Settlement rapidly came to be known as the Anglican ‘via media’ (‘middle way’). Richard Hooker was later to describe this in a ringing phrase as the ‘Golden Mediocrity’ (mediocre ‘in them days’ was used to describe the virtuous and moderate middle ground or ‘golden mean’, and had none of its modern idolatrous connotations of ‘second best’). By Elizabeth’s time the actual influence of Erasmus on doctrinal matters was on the wane – but Erasmus rhetoric of moderation still exerted a powerful influence on the formation of this ‘Golden Mediocrity’.
As I have suggested earlier, the various factions that existed in the Church of England then, and the slightly different factions that exist in the Church of England now, all have different interpretations of this ‘Golden Mean’ – is it set between Catholicism and Calvinism; between Lutheranism and Calvinism; between Calvinism and Radicalism etc…? My view, as you will have guessed, is that it was actually a piece of benign religious/political fudge to privilege the Peace of the realm over any factional understandings of Truth. It was indeed – ‘All things to all men’.
I note that in the early 1950’s a very influential theory – since discredited – was put forward by the historian Sir John Neale concerning the Settlement. He argued that Elizabeth’s real intention had been to preserve the old Catholic faith of England in everything excepting loyalty to the Pope and the restoration of Monastic lands – but she was pushed into a more radical reforming programme by a Puritan pressure group in Parliament known as ‘The Puritan Choir’. He noted hesitations in legislation in support of his thesis. However these hesitations are now almost unanimously put down to ‘government politicking round Catholic peers and bishops until a Lords majority could be constructed to pass the settlement’ (see ‘ The History Today Companion to British History’, p.282).
I go with the current consensus – Elizabeth wanted to avoid strife with English Catholics (while hoping that the old religion in its Roman form would die out in a generation). She needed to appease the powerful Calvinist lobby without bowing to them. And her own instincts, like Matthew Parker’s, were basically Lutheran softened by Christian Humanism. And this is the context for the shaping of the 39 Articles to which I will now turn (at last!!!) - obviously, with special attention to the abrogation of the 42nd Article of Cranmer’s Prayer Book.
A final word at this stage. Just to give you a seed thought about the subject that I will turn to after considering the Articles – that is, the Elizabethan church as a persecuting Church – I’d like to briefly introduce you to the character of John Foxe, the Protestant martyrologist. I remember perusing Foxe’s ‘Acts and Monuments’ (commonly known as ‘Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’) as a child in a public library. It filled me with terror – all of those grisly, seemingly sadomasochistic depictions of deaths most horrid in graphic illustrations. The book begins with the stories of the early Christian Martyrs; then fast forwards to the martyrs of pre-reformation Protestantism (the Waldensians on the Continent, and the Lollards in England); then forwards to the persecutions of the new Reformed Christians under the still Catholic Henry VIII (with Sir Thomas Moore as the arch-villain); and finally forwards to the martyrs during the reign of ‘Bloody Mary’. The book has often been used as a rallying point for the fears of Protestant fundamentalists – the message seeming to be that persecution was always and only an attribute of Romish Popery . Indeed when John Locke was writing his epistle on Religious Toleration at the end of the seventeenth century he had to employ the collaborative skills of the scholarship of his Dutch Armenian Christian Humanist friends to debunk this myth.
However, for his time Foxe was a radical. Almost alone among magisterial Protestants he bravely protested that the burning of heretics – and indeed the death penalty for heresy – was not a good idea. When a congregation of Anabaptists who had fled to England to escape persecution on the continent were discovered worshipping in secret and tried and condemned in 1575, it was Foxe who bravely pleaded for their lives. It was Foxe’s Acts and Monuments and its affect on the public imagination which meant that there was no public stomach for a large scale burning. And it was Foxe, who when two were finally burned at the stake, comforted them in their hour of trial. In addition to this, Foxe’s ‘Acts and Monuments’ was a very controversial book at the time. Elizabeth was none too keen on her half-sister Mary, also a Queen of England, being portrayed as a villainess, and Foxe also wanted to commemorate the twenty Anabaptists who had died under Mary, but this was censored. His inclusion of the Lollards in his martyrology was suspect, because like the Anabaptists the Lollards had disobeyed the ‘dread majesty’ of Christian Princes (albeit Catholic ones).
All the best
Dick