Puritans and Puritanism under Elizabeth I (1560-1604)

Question 1

With hindsight it seems that Elizabeth’s reign was incredibly secure and stable, but to those living through these decades it seemed like England was in a perpetual state of danger and had to fight threats from all sides.

Answer 1

“The politics of Elizabethan England was dominated by events which did not happen,” Ryrie, p. 231.

Question 2

What were the three main issues in Elizabethan England?

Answer 2

1) the succession and the queen’s marriage

2) the direction of religious policy

3) foreign policy

Question 3

Categories of catholics

Answer 3

-militant catholics
-recusants
-church papists
-conformists

Question 4

puritans

Answer 4

-moderate puritans
-presbyterians
-separatists

alternatively:
-anti-Calvinist
-conformist Calvinists
-moderate puritans
-radical puritans

Question 5

recusants

Answer 5

was the state of those who remained loyal to the Catholic Church and refused to attend Church of England services after the English Reformation.[3]

The 1558 Recusancy Acts passed in the reign of Elizabeth I, and temporarily repealed in the Interregnum (1649–1660), remained on the statute books until 1888. They imposed punishments such as fines, property confiscation and imprisonment on recusants. The suspension under Oliver Cromwell was mainly intended to give relief to nonconforming Protestants rather than to Catholics, to whom some restrictions applied into the 1920s, through the Act of Settlement 1701, despite the 1828-1829 Catholic emancipation.

In some cases those adhering to Catholicism faced capital punishment, and some English and Welsh Catholics who were executed in the 16th and 17th centuries have been canonised by the Catholic Church as martyrs of the English Reformation.

Question 6

puritan impulse in Elizabethan England

Answer 6

generally traced back to the reign of Edward VI and to the experience of the exiles (and maybe even earlier to Tyndale and radical English reformers, or even Lollards)

Question 7

Lollardism

Answer 7

proto-Protestant Christian religious movement that existed from the mid-14th century until the 16th-century English Reformation. It was initially led by John Wycliffe, a Catholic theologian who was dismissed from the University of Oxford in 1381 for criticism of the Roman Catholic Church. The Lollards’ demands were primarily for reform of Western Christianity. They formulated their beliefs in the Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards.

Sola scriptura underpinned Wycliffe’s beliefs, but distinguished it from the more radical ideology that anything not permitted by scripture is forbidden.

Instead, Hudson notes that Wycliffe’s sola scriptura held the Bible to be “the only valid source of doctrine and the only pertinent measure of legitimacy.

With regard to the Eucharist, Lollards such as John Wycliffe, William Thorpe, and John Oldcastle, taught a view of the real presence of Christ in Holy Communion known as “consubstantiation” and did not accept the doctrine of transubstantiation, as taught by the Roman Catholic Church. The Plowman’s Tale, a 16th-century Lollard poem, argues that theological debate about orthodox doctrine is less important than the Real Presence

Question 8

The vestarian controversy

Answer 8

As early as 1559, a memo sent to Dudley listed 28 ministers who rejected “Antichriste and al his Romishe rags”, suggesting they be appointed to church positions. Most were exiles, many had been in Geneva.

Dissatisfaction with BCP and non-conforming ministers (vestments + shorten services) : not enforced by bishops, esp. Grindal (London); Bentham

1563: first disagreements over articles of faith emerged during Convocation + attempt to alter the liturgical practices

Question 9

First, I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, etc. And I believe every article of the Catholic [i.e. worldwide] faith, every word and sentence taught by our Savior Jesus Christ, His apostles and prophets, in the New and Old Testament.

And now I come to the great thing which so much troubles my conscience, more than any thing that ever I did or said in my whole life, and that is the setting abroad of a writing contrary to the truth, which now here I renounce and refuse, as things written with my hand contrary to the truth which I thought in my heart, and written for fear of death, and to save my life, if it might be; and that is, all such bills or papers which I have written or signed with my hand since my degradation, wherein I have written many things untrue. And forasmuch as my hand hath offended, writing contrary to my heart, therefore my hand shall first be punished; for when I come to the fire it shall first be burned.

And as for the pope, I refuse him as Christ’s enemy, and Antichrist, with all his false doctrine.

Answer 9

Cranmer was condemned at Rome, and on February 14, 1556

John Foxe’s description of the death of Cranmer in Acts and Monuments

Ryrie: “If there was a moment when puritans as a distinctive group appeared within the Engl church, this was it”, p. 268

Question 10

Why did vestments become a flashpoint ?

Answer 10

Entailed a personal commitment by clergy = conscience
“a snare for the simple”

Question 11

Unfurling of events

Answer 11

1. In 1565, the Qu. E wrote to Matthew Parker asking him to use his auth to ensure that the BCP provisions were enforced

25 January 1565 : Queen’s letter to Parker expressing alarm at the diversity of opinion esp. in matters of ceremony (reportedly drafted by Cecil, cf letter from Wood)

2. Feb 1565 Parker wrote to the bishops to enforce the orders. Queen did not deliver official approval
3. March 1565: Parker Published his Advertisements (not by royal authority) clarifying his expectations in terms of teaching, doctrine and liturgical practices and clerical dress : kneeling for communion, use of the font ( rather than basin) and wrote that he would settle for the use of the surplice only in parish ch (rather than full vestments). Cath ch and collegiate ch = exception /

When not performing the liturgy, ministers should wear the square cap rather than a hat, except on long journeys

Question 12

Puritan responses and ensuing controversy:

Some bishops might have confronted Will. Cecil (Parkhurst, Sandys, Pilkington) and otherwise resisted

Answer 12

Conformist response:

Grindal argued that he hated the surplice but preferrred to be allowed to preach than be banned from the pulpit (puritan division)

Bullinger ( Zürich) supported the regulation lest the Queen should turn away from Protestantism
Cecil enforced order in Universities

Question 13

Puritan responses and ensuing controversy:

Agroup of ministers appealed to ecclesiastical commission for exemption from the new regulation in March 1565

London clergy oppose advertisements

Opposition in Oxford
Thomas Sampson (Chr. Ch.)

Laurence Humphreys (Magd.)

R. Crowley (a minister on Dudley’s list) preached against popish ceremonies at St Paul’s in autumn 65. – Clear mention of a duty to refuse

Answer 13

Conformist response:

Grindal negotiated compromise for London clergy : distinctive garb but not associated to popery/or foreign Protestant churches

Question 14

T Sampson had been offered a bishopric early on in the vestarian controversy

Answer 14

“Let others be bishops; as to myself, I will either undertake the office of the preacher or none at all.”

Question 15

Parker’s response to the Puritan position refusal of the surplice, refusal to kneel for communion

Answer 15

Conformist Parker’s response:
1) Religious authority
2) Adiaphora (for good order and comeliness): these things are “not per se impious, papistical and idolotarous” ( Collison, 73
3)Obedience

Question 16

“One smells the true tang of puritain satire in the description of the conforming cleric who ‘didst jet up and down so solemnly in the church, and so like an old popish prelate’ (EPM, p. 78)

Answer 16

Collinson : (on Gilby’s tract)

Question 17

In 1566 when the Puritan ministers John Gough and John Philpot were suspended from their pulpits and banished from London for their refusal to wear the white outer robe, or surplice, marking their special holiness as priests of the church, a crowd of more than two hundred women gathered at London Bridge to cheer them on as they left the city.

Answer 17

As Gough and Philpot crossed the bridge, the women pressed bags of food and bottles of drink on them, all the while “animating them most earnestly to stand fast in the same their doctrine.”

That same year, when John Bartlett was also ordered to step down from his pulpit in London for refusing to wear the surplice, sixty women assembled at the home of his bishop to protest the suspension. Such demonstrations of women’s support for Puritan ministers were not isolated events. As the historian of Elizabethan Puritanism Patrick Collinson asserted, “it was the women of London who occupied the front line in defence of their preachers, and with a sense of emotional engagement hardly exceeded by the suffragettes of three and a half centuries later.”( cf his Elizabethan Puritan Movement, p. 93) Source : “Women’s attraction to Puritanism”

Question 18

1566 : Puritan Bills in Parliament (“alphabetical bills” labelled A to G)

Answer 18

Puritan ascendency in Parliament: Throughout the ten years Elizabeth had been in power, it was possible to be Catholic and work in Elizabethan clergy, bishopric, admin, etc. But now, Catholics can obey queen in all temporal matters, but, if the crisis were to continue, a rebellion would result from from her excommunication

Some of these bills would have redressed abuses (non-residence and simoniacal presentations to livings [i.e. selling sacriments]). Some of the bills targeted Catholics directly by enforcing protestantism in clergy. The first bill would have enshrined the 39 Articles into law, it was opposed by the queen and the other bills were not even examined.

General context
1569: The Northern Rebellion [rebels in North wanted to replace her with the Duke of Norfolk]
1570 : Bull Regnans in Excelsis
1570 : Second edition of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments
Mary Stuart is the legitimate heir to the throne and Plt wishes to pass legislation to prevent her from ever ruling England
St Bartholomew massacre in France : brutal massacre of leading Protestants in Paris

Question 19

Regnans in Excelsis

Answer 19

Regnans in Excelsis (“Reigning on High”) is a papal bull that Pope Pius V issued on 25 February 1570. It excommunicated Queen Elizabeth I of England, referring to her as “the pretended Queen of England and the servant of crime”, declared her a heretic, and released her subjects from allegiance to her, even those who had “sworn oaths to her”, and excommunicated any who obeyed her orders: “We charge and command all and singular the nobles, subjects, peoples and others afore said that they do not dare obey her orders, mandates and laws. Those who shall act to the contrary we include in the like sentence of excommunication.”[1][2] Among the queen’s offences, “She has removed the royal Council, composed of the nobility of England, and has filled it with obscure men, being heretics; oppressed the followers of the Catholic faith; instituted false preachers and ministers of impiety; abolished the sacrifice of the mass, prayers, fasts, choice of meats, celibacy, and Catholic ceremonies; and has ordered that books of manifestly heretical content be propounded to the whole realm and that impious rites and institutions after the rule of Calvin, entertained and observed by herself, be also observed by her subjects.”[2]

Question 20

Mary Stuart

Answer 20

Legitimate heir to throne & the prelate seeks to pass legislation preventing her from ruling England

Question 21

Admonition Controversy

Question 22

ADIAPHORA

Answer 22

Greek word meaning “indifferent.” In the context of the Reformation, it was used in a technical sense. Certain religious beliefs and practices were prescribed in the
scriptures, but others were “indifferent,” in the sense that they were matters over which believers could disagree without offending God. Early in the sixteenth century,
Martin Luther and Erasmus engaged in a spirited debate over whether certain doctrines and actions were essential to Christian belief or were indifferent.
In England, the concept that certain matters were indifferent was present from the early days of the Reformation. The argument could cut two ways. During the
late Elizabethan and early Stuart period, puritans argued that since some of the prescribed practices of the church (wearing vestments and signing with the cross in
baptism) were not defined as essential to Christianity, they were free to follow their own beliefs and practices. But during the reign of Charles I, the debate shifted. On
the one hand, Richard Hooker argued that God’s will needed to be interpreted on the basis of reason and experience as well as scripture, in the process limiting the
range of practices that were truly indifferent. At the same time, other church authorities, while still conceding that many such matters were indifferent, argued that there
was no reason for puritans not to be forced to perform as required in the interests of uniformity to the dictates of the monarch and the church and used this logic to insist
on conformity to practices where diversity had previously been tolerated in practice.

Question 23

AN ADMONITION TO THE PARLIAMENT (JUNE 1572)

(Admonition Controversy)

Answer 23

A pamphlet written and printed, clandestinely, by two young London preachers, John Field and Thomas Wilcox.

It was less an appeal to Parliament than an appeal beyond Parliament to the people. The parliament that had met in that summer and the earlier parliament of 1571 both had failed to give the Puritans what they wanted, a “further reformation” on their own radical and Presbyterian terms. The real strategy of the Admonition was revealed when a witness in Star Chamber (twenty years
later) reported Field as having said: “Seeing we cannot compass these things by suit or dispute, it is the multitude and people that must bring the discipline to pass which
we desire.” That was inflammatory. Archbishop Matthew Parker had passed sentence on the Scottish Reformation: “God keep us from such visitation as Knox have
attempted in Scotland; the people to be orderers of things.” The populism of the Admonition explains why it was taken so seriously, why there was a royal proclamation against a book “rashly set forth and by tealth imprinted,” and why the authors spent the next year in prison. John Whitgift, the future archbishop, ignored advice to regard the Admonition as a nine days’ wonder and wrote a book against it, which led to the definitive controversy between Elizabethan conformists and nonconformists, Whitgift versus Thomas Cartwright, known as the Admonition Controversy.

Question 24

AN ADMONITION TO THE PARLIAMENT (JUNE 1572)

Answer 24

A pamphlet written and printed, clandestinely, by two young London preachers, John Field and Thomas Wilcox. It was less an appeal to Parliament than an appeal
beyond Parliament to the people. The parliament that had met in that summer and the earlier parliament of 1571 both had failed to give the Puritans what they wanted, a
“further reformation” on their own radical and Presbyterian terms. The real strategy of the Admonition was revealed when a witness in Star Chamber (twenty years
later) reported Field as having said: “Seeing we cannot compass these things by suit or dispute, it is the multitude and people that must bring the discipline to pass which
we desire.” That was inflammatory. Archbishop Matthew Parker had passed sentence on the Scottish Reformation: “God keep us from such visitation as Knox have
attempted in Scotland; the people to be orderers of things.” The populism of the Admonition explains why it was taken so seriously, why there was a royal
proclamation against a book “rashly set forth and by tealth imprinted,” and why the authors spent the next year in prison. John Whitgift, the future archbishop, ignored advice to regard the Admonition as a nine days’
wonder and wrote a book against it, which led to the definitive controversy between Elizabethan conformists and nonconformists, Whitgift versus Thomas Cartwright,
known as the Admonition Controversy.

Question 25

Tone of the Admonition

Answer 25

Whether Parliament or “the people” was the intended target, the Admonition could not have been more direct, in tone as well as content. “You should now . . . with all your main and might endeavor that Christ . . . might rule and reign in his church by the scepter of his word only.” The little book consisted of two parts, the “Admonition” proper, and “A view of popish abuses yet remaining in the English Church, for the which godly ministers have refused to subscribe.” When Archbishop Matthew Parker’s chaplain interviewed Field and Wilcox in the Fleet prison and complained of “the bitterness of the style,” the relatively emollient Wilcox pointed to Field, who was happy to admit that he was responsible for that. “As God hath his Moses, so he hath his Elijah. . . . We have used gentle words too long, and we perceive they have done no good. The wound groweth desperate. . . . It is no time to blench, nor to sew cushions under men’s elbows, or to flatter them in their sins.” Field was the leading Bolshevik, the Lenin of the further reformation that was destined never to be, as much opposed to the moderate Mensheviks as to the bishops.

Question 26

This role of his suggests that it was Field who wrote the “view of popish abuses,” the more stylistically vivid of the two essays. It is here that we read about such
“abuses” as women arriving in church to be married bareheaded, with bagpipes and fiddlers and “divers other heathenish toys,” making a “maygame” of marriage.

Answer 26

As for the people, they were all over the place.
“Now the people sit and now they stand up. . . . When Jesus is named, then off goeth the cap and down goeth the knees, with such a scraping on the ground that they
cannot hear a good while after.” Field’s contribution to the Admonition is a milestone in the history of English satire, and the next milestone was to be the Presbyterian
pamphlets known as the Marprelate tracts.

Question 27

But Wilcox was responsible for the sentence that said it all.

Answer 27

“May it therefore please your wisdoms to understand, that we in England are so far off from having a church rightly reformed, according to the prescript of God’s word, that as yet we are not come to the outward face of the same.”

That was to go rather too far. In the three surviving copies of the first edition of the Admonition, someone’s pen has altered “not” to “scarce,” and the correction was made in print in the second edition. If the English church had not acquired even the outward trappings, the infrastructure, of a truly reformed church, then it was Babylon, not Zion, and it would be a necessity to leave it and find the true church somewhere else. That is what the Separatists did. But that was not Puritanism, which was defined by that “scarce.” The Church of England of the Elizabethan Settlement was not a false church like the church of Rome. It was permissible, and indeed necessary, to work within it, to turn its
scarcity into a rightful reformation.

Question 28

Admonition controversy summed up

Answer 28

Field and T. Wilcox, An Admonition to the Parliament, June 1572 ( Doc 5 below)

A public attack ag/ episcopacy in English

Accused bishops of being enemies of true Xianity

Field attached A View of Popish Abuses yet remaining in the English Church (Doc 6 below)

Tone is ironical and polemical

BCP: “ is an vnperfect boke, culled & picked out of that popishe dunghil, the Portuise and Masse boke ful of all abhominations”
+ other pamphlets criticizing bishops published in the aftermath

Many puritans (inc. T. Norton) deplored the tone of the text, as did Beza

Question 29

Enforcement of conformity by requiring subscription

Answer 29

to the 39 Articles and to the BCP for renewal of preaching licences John Field’s qualified subscription to the Articles was rejected as was his promise not to criticize ministers who wear the surplice

Collapse of confidence in bishop led reform ( end of Pn trust in “godly minded prelates”, Collinson 119)

Question 30

Whitgift, An Answer to a Certain Libel entitled an Admonition to the Parliament, 1572

Question 31

Two sorts of things Scripture is silent about :

Answer 31

1) grave errors/heresies (papacy, sacrifice of the mass, ceremonies as conveyors of grace…) – all firmly rejected.

2) how, when, and where the Lord’s Supper should be memorialized. These are indifferent matters and hence to be decided by the proper authority, for good order.

Ceremonies were abominable in the context of the old religion (bell-ringing) but are not definitely tainted
Authors of Admonition are papisticall and anabaptists (slippery slope to disorder and anarchy

Question 32

Thomas Cartwright (CA. 1535–1603)

Answer 32

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.

Innumerable references to Continental Reformers + their letters printed in the pamphlet
Cartwright, Reply to an Answer, 1573
Whitgift, The defence of the Answer, 1574
Cartwright, Second Reply, 1575
Cartwright, Rest of the Second Reply, 1577

Meanwhile, in 1571, Cartwright had withdrawn with his Presbyterian colleague Walter Travers to Geneva, where Theodore Beza was rector of the university, and
the Scottish Presbyterian Andrew Melville was also resident. During the spring of 1572, the puritans in England launched their campaign for further ecclesiastical reform
in their Admonition to Parliament, spearheaded by John Field and Thomas Wilcox. Though Cartwright was responsible for neither the Admonition nor the Second Admonition, he had already become a recognized leader of Presbyterianism and was further involved through his response A replye to an Answere made of M.
Doctor Whitgift, against the Admonition to Parliament, A second replie, and The rest of the second replie. Cartwright returned to England from Geneva in April 1572. When the ecclesiastical commissioners of London issued a warrant for his arrest in December 1573, Cartwright retreated to Heidelberg University, where, in
addition to A second replie, he translated Walter Travers’s Presbyterian treatise the Explicatio and A brief discours off the troubles begonne at Franckford.

Following a short period at the University in Basel in 1576, Cartwright moved to the Netherlands, joining the Merchant Adventurers in Middleburg as a factor in 1577, and marrying Alice, sister of John Stubbs, in 1578. Cartwright succeeded Travers as minister of the Antwerp congregation in July 1580, agitating the queen by further establishing the Presbyterian practices introduced by Travers in Her Majesty’s merchant congregation.

These texts are published by the printing press and the debate is entirely conducted in English
Budding “public sphere” in England.

Question 33

The issues at stake in the admonition controversy

Answer 33

1) Degrees of anti-popery
2) Is church polity adiaphora?
3) Ecclesiology / who should rule the church?

Question 34

1) Degrees of anti-popery

To what extent has the office of bishop (and ceremonies) been corrupted by its use in the Roman church?

Answer 34

Whitgift and Cartwright accuse each other of being papists.

Cartwright: CofE has thrown popery out the door but let it in by the window of episcopal govt and ceremonies Whitgift : presbytarians are like papists in their casting the magistrate (= the prince) out of the govt of the Ch and the presb system would make each minister a pope in his parish. “The magistrate was lef at the beck and call of the synods which ran the church” (Lake, p. 21)

Question 35

Ecclesiology / who should rule the church?

Answer 35

A top-down system.
- bishops and the royal supremacy : prelates + magistrate

A bottom up system.
- a system of congregational consistory :

congregation with elected pastor and elders local representatives gathered in a classis (in Fr colloque; in Sc presbytery) provincial synod
national synod
(universal synod)

based on rival readings and interpretation of Scripture : to what extent is the early church polity binding ?

Question 36

Is church polity adiaphora?

Answer 36

Stubbes: “bishops were a necessity but not a separate species of minister” and their superiority in auth, dignity, honour was granted to them by the prince, the source of any well-ordered kingdom

Question 37

WHITGIFT, JOHN (CA. 1532–1604)

Answer 37

Archbishop of Canterbury.

Despite his flirtation with nonconformity during the Vestiarian Controversy of 1564–1566, in 1567 he was
appointed both as Regius Professor of Divinity and master of Trinity College.

When in 1570 Thomas Cartwright, his successor as Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, comprehensively attacked the provisions of the Elizabethan settlement in
a series of lectures, Whitgift emerged as his most implacable opponent. As vice chancellor of the university, he sanctioned Cartwright’s removal from his professorship.

When An Admonition to the Parliament (1572), by John Field and Thomas Wilcox, was immediately followed by A Second Admonition, perhaps by Cartwright, Whitgift was chosen to counter this burgeoning Presbyterian threat in print. An answere to a certen Libel intituled, An admonition to the Parliament also appeared
before the end of 1572. Cartwright hit back with A Replye to an answere (1573). Whitgift countered with The Defense of the Aunswere in 1574.

Although Cartwright published The second replie . . . agaynst Maister Doctor Whitgiftes second answer (1575), Whitgift never returned to the subject in print, perhaps in
part because Edmund Grindal’s elevation as archbishop of Canterbury in 1576 marked a temporary cessation of hostilities.

Question 38

Marian Exile

Answer 38

Henry had overthrown Catholicism and become head of England’s Protestant Church in order to obtain a divorce from Mary Tudor’s mother, Catherine of
Aragon. Thus, Mary identified the Protestant faith with the dishonoring of her mother and the loss of her claim to inherit the English throne as Henry’s oldest child.

Upon her accession to the throne in 1553, Queen Mary restored Catholicism to England and instituted repressive measures against Protestants. Threatened by the
queen’s insistence that they repudiate their beliefs, about 800 Protestants fled England. Referred to as the Marian exiles, many of those Protestants, who escaped from England to the Continent, settled in Geneva or Zürich.

Question 39

Marprelate Tracts

Answer 39

The Marprelate tracts are seven Presbyterian pseudonymous pamphlets important to both English religious and literary history, published between October 1588 and
September 1589.

By 1588, the cause of Presbyterian reform appeared bleak.

Queen Elizabeth had blocked all efforts at ecclesiastical reform through parliament, and
with her angry speeches and imprisonment of unduly assertive members, she left no doubt that she would continue to do so.

The appointment to her Privy Council of the puritans’ archenemy Archbishop John Whitgift in 1586 and the death of their protector the Earl of Leicester in early 1588 signaled the growing dearth of friends in
high places to protect and promote their cause.

It was looking increasingly improbable that reform would take place through official channels.

As a result, Presbyterian activists resorted to more unconventional and desperate measures.

In 1587 and 1588, informal provincial classes and synods began meeting and started debating how much, if any, respect and validity was to be accorded the bishops and nonpuritan ministers of the Church of England. Some of their members seem to have envisioned England gradually becoming Presbyterian through the irresistible but peaceful force of a growing movement, while some even toyed with the idea of implementing Presbyterianism against Elizabeth’s will.

Question 40

The Presbyterian organization was furtive and, in its own eyes at least, nonconfrontational and within legal bounds. The Marprelate tracts were neither.

Answer 40

In 1587 the dean of Salisbury, Dr. John Bridges, wrote a large volume attacking Presbyterianism and defending episcopal government.

A response to an earlier Presbyterian treatise, it received two sober responses from Presbyterian divines.

It also received a response of a very different nature by an author who identified himself as Martin
Marprelate—a response almost stream of consciousness in structure, far more interested in scurrilous gossip and jokes than in analysis of Bridges’s works, and
frequently wandering off into lively and very entertaining personal attacks on various bishops and other foes of the Presbyterians.

Two months later, another, slightly less giddy follow up pamphlet under Martin’s name appeared. Martin’s fresh inventive satire is regarded as a landmark in English literature.

Question 41

By this time the Marprelate affair took on a life of its own.

Answer 41

Thomas Cooper, bishop of Winchester, responded and thereby provided Martin with a fresh target.

More pamphlets followed.

The government launched a two pronged attack.

Its agents scoured the Midlands for the press, while it fought fire with fire. It paid its own satirists to attack Martin, while Martin became a figure of crude abuse on the London stage.

Martin’s printers were caught, on 14 August 1589, and tortured.

One angry short last pamphlet under Martin’s name appeared at the end of September

Question 42

Apart from the personal attacks and wit, Martin’s was a conventional Presbyterianism, distinctive only in its uncompromising urgency.

Answer 42

The struggle between the
Presbyterians and the bishops would tear England apart if the government did not intervene to end it, Martin warned, and should the government support the bishops, the outcome would be apostasy and the wrath of God.

The pamphlets made a variety of suggestions as to ways to end the dispute. In one of his tracts, Martin
suggested that Parliament had the authority to institute reformation even over the monarch’s objection. He did not pursue this truly revolutionary line of thought, although
hostile critics made much of it.

His other suggestions were standard Presbyterian appeals. He called for a great supplication to the queen, a supplication that would draw its force not only from the righteousness of the cause of the godly, but also from their strength—“lords, knights, gentlemen, ministers and people” a hundred thousand signatures, “the strength of our land, and the sinew of her Majesty’s royal government.” Elizabeth was under the sway of evil counselors, and if she could only be reached by this impressive demonstration of the will of the people, then Presbyterianism would be installed. He also wanted the defenders and opponents of Presbyterianism to have a winner decides all debate.

Question 43

The Marprelate tracts could not have had press runs in more than three figures, but that small figure scarcely conveys the extent of their distribution.

Answer 43

Copies were said to have been read to pieces, and we have one account of a puritan minister gathering the godly together in a house to share with them the latest product of the
Marprelate press. The frantic efforts of the government to track down the press seem to have been based on a realistic appraisal of the pamphlets’ appeal.

Question 44

Some Presbyterians thought that Martin’s appeal to the people through ridicule was worth a try and that the defamation of the bishops could be seen as a just
judgment of God upon them. But his tactics were far from universally appreciated among Presbyterians.

Answer 44

Leading puritans like Thomas Cartwright showed a great deal
of unhappiness about the Marprelate tracts.

The tracts, they felt, displayed a less than godly scurrility, and mockery was a less than godly substitute for argument.

Furthermore, Presbyterians liked to project themselves as the rightful religious establishment in England, the rightful monitors of order and decorum. Martin’s guerrilla
and gutter tactics, completely severed from the respectable traditions of learned exchange and severed even from conventional venues of change like Parliament, neatly played into their opponents’ preferred portrayal of them as “popular” and seditious sectaries promoting social instability. Martin, in turn, denounced his puritan critics as cowards.

Question 45

Martin certainly did not help the Presbyterian cause, but it might be doubted that he did much damage to a movement that was already pretty much dead in the
water.

Answer 45

It has been argued, however, that by bringing the debate over church government into the gutter, Martin licensed the creation of the “puritan” as a figure of abuse. He was thus indirectly responsible, this argument goes, for the standard “stage” puritan who began appearing in the 1590s, a hypocritical, oversexed, greedy fraud. However little direct damage Martin may have done, the search he precipitated did have serious consequences. It uncovered the secret classis organization, and
the trials that followed effectively killed Presbyterianism as an organized movement in England.