“Marry, sir, sometimes he is a kind of puritan.” – “O, if I thought that I’d beat him like a dog!”
The word ‘puritan’ was used as a term of abuse in Shakespeare’s ‘Twelfth Night’, yet fifty years earlier John Knox wrote of “the godly and zealous preachers” in his works of 1558. There is a wide scale of debate over where the biggest Puritan threat came from, and the level of success in which Elizabeth dealt with them. Overall, the biggest threat came from separatists who aimed to disband the Church of England. A rise in extreme Puritan ideology would’ve certainly been perceived as a threat. However, these threats were dealt with so effectively by Elizabeth that they could not have developed into a serious threat by the 1590s.
John E Neale argues that the Settlement was challenged by a ‘Puritan Choir’ in Parliament. With hindsight, it is proven that Neale took his idea from the 17th century Puritan sympathiser Simon D’Ewes, who possessed unreliable sources. However, Elton points out that leading Puritan MPs consistently opposed features of the Settlement. This is true to some extent – Walter Strickland’s 1571 Bill to reform the Book of Common Prayer was shortly followed by the start of John Field’s Parliamentary campaign through his ‘Admonitions to Parliament’. Opposition seemed evident up until the late 1580s; in 1587 Anthony Cope’s bill demanded the publication of an English Genevan Prayer Book. The fact that Parliament allowed the bill to be read shows that it had some sympathy toward Puritan grievances. Nevertheless, Elton’s view loses interpretation against the more sustained view of W.J Jones, who claims that the parliamentary challenge stood little chance. Indeed, within Parliament Elizabeth was in her strongest position to keep “a vice-like grip on the pace of change”, as stated by John Guy. The Queen showed her indignation towards Strickland by vetoing most of the 1571 Alphabet Bills. She also had the support of powerful orator Chris Hatton, who in 1584 spoke against Peter Turner’s religious bill, forbidding the House of Commons from discussing religion. Moreover, the deaths of Leicester and Warwick in the late 1580s reduced the number of Puritan voices in the House of Commons, thus permitting Elizabeth to easily combat the Puritan threat using her prerogative power.
Historian Peter Lake marks the Puritan threat within Church as a “two-speed settlement” beginning from the 1559 Religious Settlement. To Elizabeth, the settlement was to be a permanent fix whereas to the Puritans, the via media mirrored an idolatrous Church that needed further reform. In the 1560s, the Puritan threat increased through the 1566 Vestiarian Controversy and the appointment to official Church roles e.g. Archbishop Parker of Canterbury, who in 1564 wrote a document of General Notes that promoted Puritan doctrine to local clergy. There was also John Jewel of Salisbury, who called for more reform in his 1562 Apology, showing signs of discontent amongst the ecclesiastical elite. Within the ensuing Convocation, the 39 Articles were approved in 1563 by just one vote, supporting Chris Haigh’s view that Puritanism held a dominating position within the Church. Furthermore, Archbishop Grindal’s opposition to reduce prophesying – backed up by 10 bishops – suggests that there was potential for serious conflict between the Queen and the Church. All these features seem to signify what Lake described as a “gradually mounting crescendo of Puritan complaint and criticism”. However, Elizabeth appeared to deal with these threats with relative ease. The suspension and death of Grindal was followed by the appointment of John Whitgift, who shared Elizabeth’s view of the Puritan threat. Through his 3 Articles of 1583 and ex officio oath policy, Whitgift forced the clergy to sweat acceptance of Bishops, the Prayer Book and the 39 Articles or face suspension. The efficiency of this attempt is most evident in the number of clergy suspended – over 300 in Canterbury alone. There was also a considerable lack of support from the radicals in Zurich and Geneva, who surprisingly shunned the Puritans for not maintaining loyalty towards Elizabeth. This meant that, whilst Convocation remained undeniably Protestant-dominated, Elizabeth could reduce the threat from within without the fear of invading radicals from abroad.
Lake also claims that Whitgift’s appointment provoked local Presbyterians activists into “a renewed bout of activism”. It is important to note that this activism was already present from the early 1570s. Cartwright’s lectures can be seen as the first public demand for a Presbyterian movement, which denied the Queen’s religious authority. The classis movement led by John Field suggested a lack of uniformity and a move towards populism – both were considered unacceptable and dangerous ideologies by Elizabeth. Field himself wrote a “View of Popish Abuses” which claimed that the Book of Common Prayer contained nothing similar to God’s word. Elton argues that the extremists “naturally took the lead” in successful movements. The view of A.N Wilson is more convincing. He argues that in reality, local Puritan movements posed little threat due to the “sheer inefficacy of evangelical propaganda”. Recent evidence supports this view – in Cambridgeshire, Richard Greenham preached 6 Calvinist sermons a week, but was disappointed by the “unreachableness” of the congregation. This is just one example of how Puritanism failed to hold a strong grip on laypeople. Consequently, regulations such as the 1581 Act led to the removal of 300 to 400 ministers. Whilst some Presbysterians were in touch with international groups, the lack of unity and organisation hindered this advantage. John Field was imprisoned for a year, and since his savage attack actually appalled many Protestants, he was not considered a martyr. Overall, Elizabeth controlled the local movements because they were geographically narrow, failing to impact whole counties such as the West Midlands and the North East.
The Separatists, created by the realisation that Puritanism must be practised in a secret underground, posed the most significant threat since it was outside the government’s control. The most radical of the three Puritan groups, they offered an alternative Church structure on the Genevan model. Separatist leader Robert Browne wrote his “Treatise of Reformation” in 1582, reinforcing a more radical settlement without authoritative permission, thus directly challenging Elizabeth’s position as well as that of Convocation. As a result, The ‘Brownists’ were imprisoned, and it was made a criminal offence to carry Brownist works. Michael Graves argues that this “new generation of Puritans made concerted efforts to demolish the Religious Settlement”, implying that they were strong in numbers. Yet by the 1590s, it was clear that the Separatists were small in numbers. Whitgift pursued and executed several separatist in order to dissuade others from following their example. Even challenges such as the 1589 Marprelate Tracts backfired by alienating the support of those it was aiming to seek. The government acted swiftly by linking all Puritans to the treasonous Separatist and enacting the 1593 Act against Seditious Sectaries. Therefore, Elizabeth easily suppressed the Separatists due to their numerical insignificance.
To conclude, the Puritan threat cannot be dismissed as minimum, since they maintained themselves long enough to reappear in the reign of James I. By the end of Elizabeth’s reign, however, the threat had been successfully contained through a stable line of religious policies, and a lack of enthusiasm from the English people. If the Puritans posed as much threat as historians such as Neale and Graves suggest, then a revolution on the scale of the French Religious wars would’ve surely taken place.