Presbyterian puritans Flashcards
Thomas Cartright (CA. 1535–1603)
Minister, eminent scholar, and foremost leader of Elizabethan Puritanism.
Born in Hertfordshire, Cartwright matriculated at Clare Hall as sizar November 1547.
In 1550 he became scholar of St. John’s while Thomas Lever was master.
Although not a Marian exile, Cartwright quitted the university after graduating B.A. in 1554 to clerk for a counselor at law and returned to St. John’s upon the accession of Elizabeth as fellow of the college in 1560, and of Trinity College in 1562. Having
established a reputation for intellectual and rhetorical skill, Cartwright was a natural choice to deliver a philosophical disputation before the queen on 7 August 1564. In 1565 his influence on younger (and more impressionable) minds was seen when the members of his college relinquished their surplices in the evening service after he preached against the surplice.
In 1565 Cartwright was in Ireland serving as domestic chaplain to Adam Loftus, archbishop of
John Field (CA. 1545–1588)
Officially no more than a minor London clergyman, John Field was the linchpin of the militant wing of Elizabethan puritanism.
A Londoner, supported at Oxford by the Clothworkers Company, he probably proceeded B.A. in 1564 and M.A. in 1567, and at his ordination was said to be of Christ Church. He had already attracted the patronage of Ambrose Dudley, Earl of Warwick, and the Dudley brothers continued to protect him.
With the London vestiarian crisis of 1566, in which thirty seven ministers were suspended for refusing to conform, Field was probably one of the young
unbeneficed ministers who took their places, before returning to Oxford.
There is evidence to link him with the leading early Nonconformist, Laurence Humphrey, president of Magdalen, and he was an assistant in the great project of the Actes and monuments (or Book of Martyrs) of John Foxe, which later provided a model for
his own collecting of a “register” of the doings of the puritan ministers. In 1568 he returned to London, preached regularly in the highly irregular parish of Holy Trinity Minories, and became curate in neighboring St. Giles Cripplegate, where all his children were baptized. By 1571 he was living in Grub Street, which was also Foxe’s address; another neighbor was the wealthy patron of all godly causes Nicholas Culverwell, with whom Field also collaborated.
In about 1570 Field began with Thomas Wilcox, curate of All Hallows, Honey Lane, to convene clerical meetings, which were the conference movement in
embryo.
When Field and Wilcox printed An admonition to the Parliament in the summer of 1572, Field may already have been suspended from preaching and
reduced to schoolmastering, a radicalizing experience of which he complained in letters to one of the fathers of the puritan movement, Anthony Gilby.
The Admonition presented in a populist and polemical style the antihierarchical, presbyterian principles already enunciated in academic lectures at Cambridge by Thomas Cartwright.
The authors found themselves in Newgate Prison, where they were visited by some of the original leaders of the radical tendency in the Elizabethan Church, many of
whom distanced themselves from the manner as well as the matter of the manifesto.
Field claimed sole responsibility for the bitter and brilliant satire that characterized the Admonition.
Field and Wilcox were in fact puritans of two very different kinds, and later they fell out in a rancorous exchange of letters that the future Archbishop Richard Bancroft gleefully exploited in his anti puritan writings, when those letters and much of Field’s other correspondence fell into his hands.
The influence of the earls of Warwick and Leicester got Field and Wilcox out of prison, after which Field disappeared from view for two years, possibly to the
sanctuary of Heidelberg, which also received Cartwright, and where he may have been involved in the publication of further manifestoes.
Field’s return to London coincided with that relatively peaceful episode in the history of the Elizabethan church during which it was presided over by Archbishop Edmund Grindal, and Field now devoted his pen to the common cause of anti Catholicism.
Leicester secured him a preaching license from Oxford University, and he became lecturer at St. Mary Aldermary, where he preached until again suspended in 1585. But he was still the same Field. He took his great patron severely to task for supporting stage plays, and he exploited a fatal accident at the Paris Garden bear pit to lambaste the new leisure industry.
Although Field had now regained a measure of respectability, he was not very comfortable with it, and the advent in 1583 of Archbishop John Whitgift, with a
mission to deal with puritan nonconformity once and for all, was almost a relief.
Field now made it his business to work not only against Whitgift but against those moderate puritans who were willing to subscribe to the archbishop’s conformist test articles with conditions.
He was also active as the national coordinator of quasi presbyterian conferences that were designed to bolster resistance to Whitgift and to promote a species of presbyterian church order.
Field worked closely with the puritan printer Robert Waldegrave and amassed many of the materials that were later exploited in the Marprelate tracts, which Waldegrave printed, documents later published overseas in 1593 as A parte of a register.
But Field himself was dead before Marprelate ruined the cause for which he had fought. His sons would have been a disappointment. One, Theophilus, became a bishop, and the other, Nathan, an actor and dramatist, who had his apprenticeship in the anti puritan plays of Ben
Jonson.
See also:
An Admonition to the Parliament, Book of Discipline, Conference Movement, Martin Marprelate
Further Reading
Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967); Patrick Collinson, “John Field and Elizabethan Puritanism,” in Collinson, Godly People:
Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism (London, 1983);
Walter Travers
