Puritans and Puritanism under Elizabeth I (1560-1604) Flashcards

Question

Tone of the Admonition

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

“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.

Answer 4

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

Answer 5

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)

Answer 6

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

Answer 7

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.

Answer 8

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

Answer 9

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)

Answer 10

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 ?

Answer 11

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

Answer 12

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.

Answer 13

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.

Answer 14

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.

Answer 15

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.

Answer 16

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

Answer 17

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.

Answer 18

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.

Answer 19

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.

Answer 20

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.