The Latitude of the Church of England

The Rev’d Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch Kt, DD, FBA

Diarmaid MacCulloch is Professor of the History of the Church in the University of Oxford and Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford.

His book Reformation: Europe’s House Divided (1490-1700) won the 2004 National Book Critics’ Circle Award and 2004 British Academy Book Prize. In 1996 he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Thomas Cranmer: A Life. A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, was published in September 2009 with a related 6-part television series called A History of Christianity on BBC 4 in 2009 and then on BBC 2 and BBC 4 in 2010. The book won MacGill University’s Cundill Prize. Professor MacCulloch was knighted in the 2012 New Year’s Honours for services to scholarship. While Debretts gives his formal style as ‘Prof Sir’, MacCulloch has expressed the preference that he not be addressed in that manner, and the view that as an ordained deacon, this would also be formally incorrect. He sits on the European Advisory Board of Princeton University Press.

My title1 has a useful ambiguity, reflecting the two tasks which I seek to carry out. One is to continue my efforts to place pre-Restoration Church of England in its theological latitude in Protestant Europe up to the late seventeenth century. 2 The other is to note just how much latitude was possible within this structure, and to consider why that might be. On the first point, the historiography has been complicated by the battles of church parties which started in the seventeenth century, the aim of which was very precisely to shift the latitude of the C of E. Sometimes the aim has been to tow the Church firmly into the latitude of sixteenth-century Geneva or seventeenth-century Boston: still avowedly the agenda of Peter Jensen, the present Anglican Archbishop of Sydney. Sometimes the ship has been tugged into the Tiber and moored against the Trastevere bank within sight of the Vatican.

A more generally popular course has been to head for a theological Bermuda Triangle and label the location ‘Anglicanism’, well out of reach of any foreign pollution and not susceptible to ready identification with any other ‘ism’. The implication of this is that Anglicanism is sui generis, and that in some mysterious or mystical way, this was the intention of the Tudor monarchs, churchmen and statesmen who founded it in the first place.

This Anglican latitude certainly does represent something essential and undeniable about the modern Church of England and its sisterchurches of Wales, Scotland and Ireland and their worldwide offshoots; but the Anglican identity is extremely problematic if applied to the pre- 1662 C of E. I have consistently discouraged students from using the word at all in that earlier context, though I still constantly notice the usage in places distressingly beyond my influence or control. 3 It cannot be emphasised too often that the Anglican word is comparatively recent as a usage. It may well have been invented by King James VI of Scotland, and if so, it was meant as a term of abuse: in 1598, he assured a suspicious Church of Scotland that his proposed strengthening of episcopacy would not take Scotland down a path to ‘papistical or Anglican’ bishops. 4 After that, the word was hardly used at all until the nineteenth century, when it was found convenient for describing a church now spreading throughout the world – in the case of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States and its missions, developing beyond the British Empire and therefore without the benefit of a Supreme Governor. As this sudden vast expansion of the Church was already taking place at a time of internal party strife, Anglicanism was a convenient concept to bridge the Church’s theological divisions. For High Churchmen turning a wistful eye towards Roman Catholicism, it also had the convenient echo of a respectably antique movement of sturdy independence within the Catholic fold, Gallicanism. So in a nice historical irony, the word Anglicanism took a new lease of life as a result of the American Revolution, just as Gallicanism was eviscerated by the French Revolution.

The prehistory of the 1559 Settlement which created the presentday Church of England lay in the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI. I have suggested elsewhere that in the actions of such monarchs as King Henry, we are witnessing an effort to create a European ‘Third Way’ in religion which was neither in thrall to Luther or the Pope. 5 The early English Reformation represents a march away from an initial Lutheran mould, at a much earlier stage than the same process in Scotland. There was more to what Alec Ryrie has termed ‘the strange death of Lutheran England’ than the familiar story of King Henry’s moodswings. 6 Thomas Cranmer, at the heart of the Henrician and Edwardian Reformations, was in close touch with Martin Bucer and the Strassburg Reformation as early as 1531, and any theological pundit worth his salt in the 1530s would have seen Strassburg as the future of any united Protestant Reformation. So Cranmer veered away from Luther towards Strassburg and therefore further south, towards the likeminded theologians of Zürich led by Heinrich Bullinger, on the important question of the admissibility of images in worship. This matter was reflected on the basic question of how one numbers the Ten Commandments. Already in the Bishops’ Book of 1537, the English Church was numbering the Commandments in the manner of Strassburg and Zürich, to make a separate commandment of the order to destroy images, in contrast to Luther’s loyalty to the Western Church’s traditional numbering.

The other big divide among evangelicals was on the eucharist. Throughout Henry’s life, England did remain officially aloof from the eucharistic theology of Strassburg and Switzerland, and not simply because of King Henry’s obstinate refusal to alter the liturgical form of the Mass: establishment evangelicals like Cranmer were just as committed to the defence of real eucharistic presence as Luther or the King, and in 1538 they even actively engineered the downfall and eventual burning for heresy of their wayward colleague John Lambert, who had denied the real presence. 7 Yet even in the late 1530s, there are interesting counter-indications. Between the years 1536 and 1538 successive young Englishmen, including young evangelical Oxford dons from Magdalen College, travelled to Zürich, and in return Heinrich Bullinger’s foster-son Rudolph Gwalther paid a visit to southern England and Oxford in 1537. 8 He never forgot his warm welcome there, and it had consequences for the rest of the century, as we will see.

Now it is clear that Cranmer was prominent in the actual organisation of the initial visit to Zürich and he continued to take an interest in the English ‘exchange students’. But as I have looked closely at those involved and their backgrounds, what has struck me forcibly is on the one hand, how few traceable links they had to Cranmer and his Cambridge-educated clerical circle, and on the other, how many they had to Thomas Cromwell and the Court circle of the Greys, Marquises of Dorset. I suggest that while political proprieties dictated that the clergyman Bullinger should deal with the clergyman Cranmer rather than with politicians, Thomas Cromwell was the driving force behind the Zürich initiative. During 1537 and 1538 Cranmer made it clear that he strongly disapproved of the eucharistic theology of his Strassburg and Zürich contacts. That makes it all the more interesting that Cromwell should be so heavily and consistently involved with the English friends of Zürich, and it makes it all the more clear why Henry VIII was prepared to listen to those who called Cromwell a sacramentarian. Perhaps Cromwell’s accusers were right, and Cromwell died for what Henry VIII would have considered the right reason. Cromwell has often been called a Lutheran; perhaps he was actually Zürich’s best friend in Henry’s England.

The eucharistic gap separating the English evangelical establishment from Strassburg and Zürich was abruptly reversed in 1546-7, when Cranmer and his circle jettisoned their views on the real presence. This remains a mysterious business, and without question the death of Henry VIII counts as a major factor. There is no reason to be too cynical about that: the old man without doubt had a mesmerising effect on those around him, and his death left them free to think new thoughts. One must also take into account the devastating psychological effect on Cranmer, Latimer and others of the final round of vicious conservative heresy-hunting in spring and summer 1546, when they saw ever closer colleagues burned at the stake for denying the real presence. Real presence eucharistic doctrine had sustained them even when they rejected transubstantiation as a way of explaining it, but now it must have seemed severely contaminated in what had become literally a fight to the death between traditionalists and evangelicals. 9 So after 1547, on both images and the eucharist, the two greatest points of distinction between Lutheran and non-Lutheran Protestants, those in charge of England’s religious destiny, had made a decisive break with Wittenberg.

While Henry was the first monarch to break with the Pope, then Edward VI’s regimes undertook the largest-scale effort at Reformation so far in all Europe, and their failures and imperfections ought to be perceived in that light: the same applies to the failures and imperfections of Mary’s effort at Catholic Reformation. One essential aspect was the opening of Edwardian England to the possibility of international leadership of the Reformation: particularly after the crushing defeat of the Schmalkaldic League at Mühlberg in spring 1547, there was not much alternative to England. Hence the piecemeal relocation of many of the brightest stars in the Strassburg Reformation to England between 1547 and 1549 and the setting-up of the London Stranger Church under Jan Łaski from 1550. Hence also the great caution with which the regime approached making any public statement about the nature of the eucharist, until Heinrich Bullinger and John Calvin reached a satisfactory compromise in spring 1549, in what later became known as the Consensus Tigurinus. For instance, there was no sermon on the eucharist among the twelve Homilies issued in 1547, while the doctrines of justification and works were clearly and indeed classically set out in Reformation patterns. A eucharistic homily was promised in 1547 was not delivered until Elizabeth’s reign, and Archbishop Cranmer delayed publishing his own extensive treatise on the eucharist until 1550, when the Consensus had been safely agreed and published.

So the Edwardian Reformation was emphatically non-Lutheran: might it still be called simply part of a ‘Third Way’? Such a mediate position became increasingly difficult in the early 1550s, when the fierce Gnesio-Lutheran attacks on the Consensus Tigurinus meant that increasingly one had to make a decision on the eucharistic issue: Lutheran intransigence was creating a rival bloc, which soon had the label ‘Reformed’ wished on it. Theologians of the ‘Third Way’, who in the 1540s would have included such luminaries of Edwardian England as Martin Bucer, Peter Martyr Vermigli and Łaski, were now clearly part of the new confessional bloc, and their host country with them.

With Strassburg no longer a reforming centre, the chief alternative left was Zürich. English contacts with Zürich do not seem to have been close during the Protectorate of the Duke of Somerset, but when his colleagues overthrew him in autumn 1549, the new regime included the leaders of the Grey family, who had been so prominent in the Zürich exchange visits of the 1530s. 10 Bullinger became a good friend of the English Reformation, commending it as the best hope for convening a true General Council, and seeing it as a bulwark against Anabaptism: from 1550, he dedicated parts of his classic collection of sermons the Decades successively to King Edward and Henry Grey Marquis of Dorset. Bullinger had already become a best-selling English author in the 1540s, although generally anonymously, because of English versions of his treatise on marriage sponsored by Miles Coverdale. 11 By contrast, John Calvin had few close friends in Edwardian England, and Calvin kept an obstinate attachment to the fortunes of the Duke of Somerset, a stance which became an embarrassment to those who knew England better. 12 An England ruled by Lady Jane Grey would have been an England increasingly tied in with far-distant Zürich, and far-distant Geneva would not have enjoyed much benefit.

That was a might-have-been, thanks not merely to Queen Jane’s defeat by the Lady Mary in 1553, but by the rapid movement of the Reformation in Europe as a whole over the next decade. Geneva’s burning of Miguel Servetus in 1553 established Calvin as a theologian to be treated with respect throughout Protestant Europe. The caucus of English and Scottish exiles from Mary’s regime in Geneva for the first time gave the Atlantic Isles a body of churchmen who had experienced Genevan systems at first hand. The extraordinary series of popular Protestant convulsions in the 1560s, which produced such great upheavals successively in Scotland, France and the Netherlands, looked to Geneva rather than Zürich. Zürich’s European-wide influence began steadily diminishing at least in western Europe, particularly in matters of church government, as embodied in the defeat of Zürich partisans in the debates sparked by Thomas Erastus about excommunication in the Palatinate from 1568.

And in the middle of it all was a Reformation established in England in 1559, with virtually no popular convulsion, but through the will of a monarch operating in close cooperation with a close-knit circle of advisers and a strong body of opinion in the secular political nation. Elizabeth created a settlement of religion on the basis of decisions made in negotiation between herself, her Privy Council, a small group of clergy and the House of Commons – obtaining not a whisker of consent from overwhelmingly hostile legislative bodies or hierarchy of the English Church, and fighting past some formidable opposition in the House of Lords. Only when that opposition had been disposed of did the government activate newly-purged Convocations of Canterbury and York to assent to Articles of Religion for the new Church in 1563. 13

Elizabeth’s Settlement of 1559-63 was the subject of much ingenious analysis in the nineteenth century by representatives of the Oxford Movement, analysis designed to obscure its true nature and impose an anachronistic version of ‘Catholicity’ on it. In fact the parliamentary package of 1559 did something quite simple: restore the structure and liturgy of the Edwardian Church to the point where Parliament had last been able to have a say in it, in other words autumn 1552 and the publication of the previous Prayer Book authorised by Parliament. There was a little tinkering: some small modifications were made to the Prayer Book designed to appeal to the ultra-sensitive eucharistic antennae of Lutherans abroad and perhaps at home (there proved to be virtually none of the latter). 14 One clause of the Act of Uniformity about ‘ornaments’ restored the options in relation to clerical apparel which had prevailed in the first English Prayer Book of 1549. 15 No doubt this equally was intended to appeal to Lutherans, with their increasingly militant defence of much of the range of liturgical vestments. Despite its apparent authorisation of the traditional chasuble as an alternative to the cope at the eucharist, there is not a scrap of evidence that any clergyman of Elizabeth’s Church habitually used the chasuble when using Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer, and even the use of the cope soon became distinctly suspect in English parishes. 16 Nevertheless, the ham-fisted wording of this clause proved a happy hunting-ground for Anglo-Catholics in the nineteenth-century, supposedly allowing them to wear or use at pleasure any variety of liturgical garment or liturgical equipment which Rome had developed before or since.

So in essence what was restored was a Reformed Church, but, it will be noted, a Reformed Church which in Edward’s time had been developed in dialogue with theologians of Strassburg and Zürich, not of Geneva. By 1559 Strassburg was out of the picture, no longer a point of reference for Protestant Europe but an increasingly conventional part of the Lutheran world. Zürich stood firm in its theology, and its influence was now reinforced by its generous hospitality to a small group of exiled English clergy many of whom now became bishops in Elizabeth’s Church of England. But before exploring the consequences of that, we need to note ways in which the atmosphere had changed even while the structures of Edward VI’s Church were put back into place. First, the Edwardian Reformation had been a dynamic revolution, constantly moving on, constantly changing, modifying and then destroying more and more aspects of the religious past. The Elizabethan Settlement proved remarkably static in its structures, and thanks to the Queen deliberately so: as Elizabeth’s conservative favourite Sir Christopher Hatton said approvingly three decades after the 1559 legislation, at the beginning of her reign, the Queen had ‘placed her Reformation as upon a square stone to remain constant’. 17 That meant that it was indeed a snapshot of Reformation at one moment in time, autumn 1552, keeping everything that survived from the pre-Reformation past at that moment.

Most significant of such survivals were the cathedrals, with their unique position in England among European Protestant Churches. Nowhere else was there anything like the English cathedral close, with its daily round of liturgically-fixed services involving a large staff of clergy and elaborate music sung by paid professionals. Nothing of that seemed at the time of the Settlement to have much relevance to a Protestant church. One illustration of that comes from the first Englishlanguage edition of Bishop Jewel’s official defence or Apology of the Church of England published in 1564, this had an added appendix describing the structures of the Church to show how excellent they were. It is significant that the cathedrals were indeed given honourable and extended mention in this description, together with the collegiate churches of Westminster, Windsor, Eton and Winchester, but there was absolutely no mention of music in either case. The cathedrals on this account were centres of preaching and Eton and Winchester were centres of scholarship feeding the universities; a discreet veil was drawn over what the use of Westminster and Windsor might be. 18

At the heart of this survival against the odds was Elizabeth’s stubborn love of church choral music. Since she kept her choir in the Chapel Royal singing and her composers went on producing music of the finest quality, then the cathedrals were emboldened to follow suit as far as they could. This music had virtually no effect on musical and devotional life in the average English parish church down to the time of the Oxford Movement: most parishes sang metrical psalms in the manner of Geneva, at least until the eighteenth century evangelical ‘revival’ popularised a new sort of hymn not exclusively based on the text of the psalter. So this was not so much a latitude of practice as a polarity, without parallel elsewhere in the Protestant world. 19

The preservation of the cathedral tradition had huge significance for the future of Anglicanism, and it may be Queen Elizabeth’s chief original contribution to her Church. Elsewhere I have called the ethos which developed out of this the Westminster Movement, by deliberate analogy with the Oxford Movement. That is because it had much to do with the practice of Westminster Abbey, which behaved more like a cathedral than most cathedrals. The outlook was embodied in the conservative, ceremonialist and anti-Puritan outlooks of the Dean, Gabriel Goodman and the celebrated antiquary and headmaster of Westminster School William Camden. 20 Admittedly, the new ethos also owed a very great deal to a churchman who only arrived in a Westminster prebendal stall in 1597 and then succeeded Goodman as Dean in 1601 – Lancelot Andrewes. Already in the early 1590s, Andrewes as Rector of St Giles Cripplegate was preaching views from the pulpit which would have sounded astonishing in virtually any other parochial pulpit in the kingdom. The texts in Apospasmatia sacra, eventually published in 1657, show a churchman steeped in the liturgical year, criticising strict predestination and constantly emphasising the celebration of the eucharist. 21 Nicholas Tyacke has shown how Andrewes’s campaign to change hearts and minds came to be reflected in his administration of his Cripplegate parish, particularly in its liturgical reordering at the end of the 1590s. 22

Andrewes can be regarded as the first and most important ideologue of the movement which became Arminianism, and his transformation from an establishment Cambridge Reformed Protestant during the late 1580s remains as mysterious as the analogous though not identical shift in Richard Hooker at Oxford at much the same time. From the 1590s Andrewes proved to be the critic of Reformed Protestant soteriology with the most effectiveness and long-term influence: moreover, he was prepared to speak about predestination outside the universities when others would only speak inside their cordon sanitaire. The most noisy Cambridge anti-predestinarian William Barrett fell by the wayside, crushed by the hostile official reaction to his 1595 sermon, and subsequently a convert to Rome; other anti-predestinarians kept quiet and waited for better times. 23

Besides the new stasis of the 1559 Settlement, and its preservation of cathedrals, a further dimension to Elizabeth’s Settlement differentiated it from the Edwardian Church. It was a Settlement created by Nicodemites. Neither Elizabeth nor any of her leading advisors (including William Cecil and Nicholas Bacon, Matthew Parker her first Archbishop of Canterbury, and William May her first nominee for Archbishop of York), had gone abroad under Mary. Although unmistakeably Protestant by conviction, they had all conformed to Catholicism to a greater or lesser extent, even if some of them had covertly worked to help the Protestant cause, as was the case with Elizabeth’s quiet political scheming, and as we now know was also the case with Cecil. 24 Nicodemite too was Elizabeth’s first Dean of the Chapel Royal, her cousin George Carew. No other Protestant Church in Europe had such a beginning. It meant that the Queen had a sympathy for traditionalist Catholics whose religious convictions she detested, but who kept similarly quiet in her own Church – towards the end of her reign, Sir Nicholas Bacon’s lawyer and philosopher-son Francis said admiringly that she did not seek to make windows into men’s hearts. 25 That is often misquoted as referring to men’s souls, and I wonder whether the difference is significant. The heart is not the seat of salvation as is the soul. It would not be inconsistent with Protestantism for the Queen to care less about feelings or opinions than about salvation.

We could simply regard Elizabeth as the last of the ‘Third Way’ monarchs of Europe, deliberately avoiding identification with either of the two great Protestant groupings which had emerged, and achieving uniqueness for herself and her Church by living so long, long surviving such determined followers of a ‘Third Way’ as Countess Anna von Oldenburg of East Friesland or the veteran champion of non-aligned Reformation, Landgraf Philipp of Hessen. 26 But there may be something more about Queen Elizabeth, making for an official Settlement which enjoyed unusual latitude and showed itself distinctly cool towards forward Protestantism, and which provides at the very least another example of her lack of enthusiasm for opening casements on to the heart. It arises from her long-acknowledged personal contacts with members of that ultimate Nicodemite grouping the Family of Love, that peculiar quietist and spiritualist sect which established a discreet foothold in Elizabethan elite life, just as it did in the Netherlands.

Great was the consternation in 1580 when some of the Yeomen of the Guard turned out to be Familists. Puritans, familiar with the Familists’ activities in East Anglia and led the fight against them there, were enraged: Elizabeth did nothing to oust these personal servants. When in 1581 Puritans sponsored a bill in the Commons to punish the Family, it was quashed by a committee handpicked from among the Privy Council. 27 That was a stonewalling reaction with which Puritans were familiar from their other efforts to reform or extend the Elizabethan Settlement: as they well knew, such obstructions were directly thanks to the Queen. Moreover, after a burst of publicity for their cause in a series of tracts during the 1570s, the English Familists went quiet from 1581 until a petition to James I in 1604. It is as if they had adhered to some sort of deal to fall silent until the old monarch was no longer around. There were still Familists among the Court officials of her successor James I’s, including the keeper of the lions in the Tower of London. 28 All this does make one wonder about the Queen’s own private religious views, although a fascinating suggestion by David Wootton that she was the author of a French poem voicing Familist sentiments remains as yet controversial. 29

If I were to name names further, I would also finger Dr Andrew Perne, Master of Peterhouse and Rector of the Cambridgeshire village Familist stronghold Balsham, as a major protector of the Familists. If you like conspiracy theories, Perne spent his last years at Lambeth Palace with his old friend and protégé Archbishop Whitgift, who besides being accused by the muck-raking pseudonymous Puritan Martin Marprelate of having formerly been Perne’s homosexual lover, was the patron of both Lancelot Andrewes and Richard Hooker. 30 Moreover, Perne was also patron of the French exile Peter Baro, who was the mentor of another notorious anti-predestinarian William Barrett, and who was himself accused of Familism. 31 The Familists’ constant emphasis on obedience would certainly be music to the ears of both Whitgift and his royal mistress. But all this may be considered to stretch the latitude of my speculations to Da Vinci Code levels.

The Family of Love were not the only anomalous adherents of Elizabeth’s Church. Lancelot Andrewes did have one or two predecessors in opening opposing predestination, the most colourful and puzzling of whom was the Spanish exile Antonio del Corro. Del Corro was a rare example in England of a type more familiar in eastern Europe, a talented maverick theologian from southern Europe, who had passed from the world of the Spanish alumbrados through evangelical leadership in France, then to something which did not at all fit conventional northern Protestant moulds. 32 This was a man who as minister of the Spanish exile congregation in London in the late 1560s was prepared to officiate at the burial of someone he knew to be a crypto-Jew, who was prepared to say that not only Jews but Turks could be saved, and who for some time in the early 1570s, refused to join any congregation, refugee or parish. He then gained lecturing positions first in the Temple and then at Oxford which were both conveniently marginal and comfortably-paid, and finally in 1582 won a prebend at St Paul’s (for three years he was a colleague of Lancelot Andrewes there).

All this was despite the fact that from at least 1570, Corro began openly attacking the doctrine of predestination, and that also by 1570 he had moved towards cautious but unmistakeable statements of unitarianism which put him on the same trajectory as the developing Socinianism of eastern Europe encouraged by similar Southern European refugees. 33 He was on at least one occasion accused alongside Whitgift’s anti-predestinarian protégé Peter Baro, of being a member of the Family of Love. 34 What is most baffling, and still needs fully to be explained, is that Corro’s chief patron in his stormy London and Oxford career was the doyen of Puritan patrons, Robert Earl of Leicester. Leicester may have simply found it useful to have a Spaniard to deal with other Iberian refugees, notably the Portuguese pretender Don Antonio, but if Corro was useful on those grounds, he must have been very useful to make up for everything else. 35

Corro also gained a good deal of support from William Cecil, and more predictably later on, Sir Christopher Hatton. 36 He also addressed one edition of his printed vindication of his views in 1570 as a New Year’s Gift to the Queen, and he issued another edition with a dedication to her confidante Lady Dorothy Stafford, wife of a former Marian exile in Geneva – Calvin had been godfather to Lady Stafford’s son, but there was no love lost between her and the great Genevan reformer, and she might be expected to warm to a man who relished a good scrap with partisans of Geneva. As Corro’s biographer comments of his two dedications, ‘only a man convinced of the righteousness of his cause and sure of the support of powerful personages in the realm could have done so with impunity.’ 37 And William Barlow, son of one of the earliest evangelical English bishops, was not far wrong when he commented in perplexity to the Zürich pastor Josiah Simler in 1575 that Corro’s presence in the English Church was one of its mysteries ‘which I cannot yet fathom.’ 38

So we have a Supreme Governor presiding rather uncomfortably over a frozen tableau of her brother’s Church, a Church officially Reformed Protestant but not Genevan, with various remarkable undercurrents permissible beneath her jealous but idiosyncratic gaze. The Zürich flavour continued in the upper reaches of the Church throughout the reign to an extent which often has not been fully appreciated. Let us return to Queen Mary’s death and Elizabeth’s accession in 1558. Several of the clergy exiled in Zürich became bishops in major dioceses. Virtually all the leading former exiles kept in close touch with Zürich. Interestingly some former exiles also chose to join the circus of English correspondence with Zürich even though they had never met the Zürich leadership: notably Edmund Grindal and Richard Cox. Grindal’s and Cox’s initiative makes it all the more surprising that there is a complete silence from Matthew Parker, the first Elizabethan Archbishop of Canterbury. Parker was one of the clergy around the Queen who had shared her experience of being a Nicodemite in Queen Mary’s Church. Perhaps that made it more difficult for him to join those who had undergone the very different experience of exile in those testing years. Perhaps Zürich also felt the difficulty.

Any initial anxieties in Zürich about what Elizabeth might do with her Church were soon quelled: their main worries were either that there would be major concessions to traditionalist Catholics or a tilt towards the Lutherans. Neither materialised, and there was every reason to suppose that the imperfections already apparent in Edward’s unfinished programme of reformation would be remedied over time. 39 That was as much the expectation of the newly-appointed English bishops as it was of their friends in Zürich. Moreover, the Zürich leadership were aware of another circumstance about which they would necessarily have to be more reticent in public, but which might give them a certain private satisfaction: it was soon common knowledge that Queen Elizabeth was furious with the Genevan leadership because of their involuntary association with the ghastly faux pas of John Knox, when in 1558 he published his condemnation of female governance, The first blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. However much Geneva and Zürich might seek to co-operate, and however friendly relations might be between their leaders, there was now a discreet power struggle between the two great reforming cities for dominance in the Reformed world. In England, Geneva’s embarrassment over Knox was Zürich’s opportunity. 40 It is interesting that Bishop Jewel’s Apology, such a classic defence of the Settlement as first conceived in the early 1560s, nowhere mentions Calvin: when it speaks of a rift within Protestantism, admittedly in an effort to minimise it to scornful papalist Catholics, the rift is presented as between Luther and Zwingli, despite the bitterness of the ‘Supper-strife’ between Calvin and gnesio- Lutherans in the 1550s. 41

In the next few years, Bullinger and Gwalther’s tensions with Geneva inevitably affected their attitude to the developing disagreements in England, into which they found themselves being drawn by their former guests in exile. Friends of Zürich chosen as bishops gradually found themselves defending a static settlement in which they had little emotional investment. 42 The approval or disapproval of Zürich was a valuable prize for those involved in conflicts about the pace of reform, and so increasingly Zürich came to be a touchstone for measuring the imperfectly-Reformed Church of England. It was a two-way process: the warring factions in England sought support from an honest broker, and that role suited Zürich very well in its continuing efforts to maintain its position among Reformed Churches.

Broadly speaking, Bullinger and Gwalther acted in the Elizabethan disputes as they had done in earlier clashes about how fast the English should make changes, in King Edward’s reign involving John Hooper, and during the Marian exile, the English congregation in Frankfurt: they recommended further reformation, but they did not press uniformity on another Church, and they supported those placed in positions of authority by the civil power. 43 They were annoyed and embarrassed when a consortium of bishops at the height of their clash with Puritans in 1566 published an English translation of what the Zürich leadership had intended to remain private expressions of opinion to old friends. Yet they were even more annoyed when an angry young Puritan, George Withers, visited Zürich with Beza’s backing, and so misrepresented the situation in England that the Zürich leadership wrote more strongly to their English friends than they later felt warranted.44

Bullinger and Gwalther were all too conscious that that same young Puritan had intervened in the dispute over Thomas Erastus’s views on excommunication in the Palatinate which ultimately represented a defeat for Zürich’s ecclesiology at the hands of Geneva. 45 When they met Withers, they met a variety of Reformed Protestant who rejected the model of ecclesiastical superintendency uniting such Reformed Churches as Zürich, England and Hungary and Transylvania. Such people also rejected the model of close union between the authority of the civil magistrate and the administration and discipline of the Church, which in very different settings and with very different origins united England, Zürich and the advocacy of Thomas Erastus in Heidelberg. 46 So when Bullinger and Gwalther encountered English Puritans, they felt themselves drawn closer to the bishops of England, to whom they sent a steady stream of warm book dedications during the 1560s. And their ultimate seal of approval on England’s polity in Church and State was Bullinger’s vigorous riposte in 1571 to the papal bull excommunicating the Queen, rapidly put into an English translation within a few months of its arrival in England. 47

Ultimately the issue which made Bullinger and Gwalther support the English bishops was more profound simply than considerations of ecclesiastical politics. Bullinger’s natural conservatism as a leader of Reformation was sealed from the 1550s by his fraught dealings with antitrinitarian radicals in eastern Europe, whom he saw as threatening all the Reformation’s gains. In constructing their revisions of the Christology of the fourth and fifth centuries, the radicals maintained that whatever was not taught specifically in holy scripture should be repudiated. Bullinger and Zürich steadily maintained the opposite principle, that that which cannot be shown to contradict scripture may be retained even if it is not prescribed by scripture. 48

By contrast to eastern Europe, few such radicals strayed to England – of course one who did was the Earl of Leicester’s Spanish exile protégé Antonio del Corro, and it was not surprising that when he wrote to Bullinger from London pleading for help against Calvinist attacks on his criticisms of predestination, he did not meet with a sympathetic hearing. 49 Instead, a different group on the English theological scene might be portrayed as raising an echo of Bullinger’s foes in Hungary and Poland. The principle of the eastern anti-trinitarians could with a certain justice be represented as that of Elizabethan Puritans on matters ranging from clerical dress to the office of a bishop: indeed, it could even be represented as that of John Hooper in his intransigence back in 1550. It was a very shrewd hit of Bishop Horne of Winchester when he wrote to Bullinger in 1573 that the English Church was in less danger from papists than from ‘false brethren, who seem to be sliding into anabaptism’, by which he meant the Puritans. That provoked one of Bullinger’s last interventions in English ecclesiastical politics before his death in 1575: in his reply to Horne he expressed his disapproval of disruptive behaviour from those ‘that will seem most evangelical’, and he reminisced ruefully about the beginnings of Anabaptism in Zürich, back at the beginning of his long career in the 1520s. 50 In sixteenth-century terms, Puritans would feel that equating them with Anabaptists was the ultimate insult.

It is no accident that Bullinger’s swansong letter to England was preserved and published in both Latin and an English translation in a polemical work against Puritanism by John Whitgift, the future Archbishop of Canterbury. Whitgift represents a third generation of leaders in the English Church who drew on the work of Heinrich Bullinger. The relationship in this generation was completely different from earlier days, or to be more precise, non-existent. Whitgift never seems to have made any direct approach to the Zürich ministers, and his attitude to them might well be described as utilitarian. Take Whitgift’s exploitation of Bullinger in his massive literary war with Thomas Cartwright, the so-called Admonition controversy in the years after 1572. Whitgift makes much use of the topos of equating Anabaptism with Puritanism, given colour by quotations from Bullinger’s anti-radical writings, and otherwise he makes a good deal of fairly selective use of Bullinger (his tactical quotations of Calvin are necessarily even more selective). Bullinger is drafted in chiefly to illustrate Whitgift’s favourite ecclesiological theme, ‘I find no one certain and perfect kind of government prescribed or commanded in the scriptures to the church of christ; which no doubt should have been done, if it had been a matter necessary unto the salvation of the church’. That was the essence of Whitgift’s quarrel with the Presbyterians, and it must be admitted that Bullinger would certainly have echoed the general sentiment. 51

At this stage in the early 1570s, Whitgift made no use of Bullinger’s Decades, which would certainly have provided him with similar material; yet only a few years later he became involved in an enterprise which posthumously naturalised the former Antistes of Zürich as one of the doyens of English theologians. Remarkably, Bullinger was now cast as the defender of England’s episcopal system, and his Decades were to be a main bulwark of that defence. 52 This was the background to the first complete publication of the Decades in English in 1577. With that enterprise, once more we are taken back to Magdalen College Oxford and Gwalther’s visit in 1537, for the moving spirit in promoting the Decades was an equally anti-Puritan colleague of Whitgift on the episcopal bench, Thomas Cooper, by now Bishop of Lincoln, who had been associated with Magdalen since 1531. 53

The preface to the new complete English edition of the Decades places the work firmly on the side of the conformist bishops. It plunges quickly into a defence of the ministry as at present constituted in England, before remembering that one of the tasks of a translator’s preface is to praise the author. Even that manages to incorporate a sneer at the ‘obscurity’ of Calvin in comparison with Bullinger. And the most striking phrase in the preface, one to infuriate any Puritan, is the justification for using the Decades: ‘Better is a good sermon read than none at all’. 54 With this we have a major clue to the purpose of the new edition of the Decades. Turning the work to use as a clergy textbook, as was now ordered by Cooper and then other anti-Puritan bishops, Middleton of St David’s and Chaderton of Chester, was to provide a means of clergy training and instruction to substitute for the structure of prophesyings, the gatherings which between 1574 and 1576 Queen Elizabeth had decided to suppress as unacceptably Puritan. 55

There is irony here. The prophesyings now suppressed as the excesses of Puritan zealots were derived from the Prophezei of Zürich set up by Bullinger’s predecessor Zwingli and so central to its clergy training. Grindal, who had made it his business to become an admiring correspondent of Bullinger even though they had never met, ruined his career defending the prophesyings, and he was not the only bishop from the exile generation who thoroughly approved of them in the face of Elizabeth’s hostility. Now a new generation of bishops were exploiting the Antistes of Zürich in a way unthinkable in the days of Edward VI – but there was a certain logic in what they were doing, because their agenda was to combat Geneva’s influence in the English Church: to create an alternative Reformed Protestantism which would owe little to Calvin or Beza. The confrontation between conformists and Puritans escalated through the 1580s. 56 Archbishop Whitgift’s response to all this was twofold: he summoned up forces of repression, but he also took the positive step of canonising Bullinger still further as the agent of improving clerical education. In 1586 the Archbishop extended throughout the whole Province of Canterbury the order for lower clergy to read Bullinger’s Decades and be examined on it.

The regular use of the Decades in this fashion says something important about the official Elizabethan Church, which distinguished it from the Arminianism which became part of the Church’s identity in the next century. It was a Church still fully part of the Reformed Protestant world, and it was able to claim this identity because it drew on Bullinger as an alternative to Calvin and Beza. By canonising the Decades, and getting their clergy to read this book as a statement of the Church of England’s own theology, Cooper and Whitgift had still committed themselves to unmistakeably Reformed Protestant theological positions: they maintained a moderate and nuanced predestinarianism, they thought that there was nothing normative or universal about the institution of episcopacy, they saw the leading role of the civil magistrate in the Church as a positive virtue, and they maintained a spiritual presence view of the eucharist within the broad latitude offered by the Consensus Tigurinus, firmly differentiated from confessional Lutheranism. The parallel canonisation of the English translation of the adopted Züricher Peter Martyr Vermigli’s Common Places had the same effect.

As late as 1600, therefore, the official Church of England was marching to rhythms partly set in Zürich between the 1530s and 1550s, even though much of its theological life was set in different patterns decided by Churches and theologians with a greater allegiance to Geneva and its heirs. England was not unique in this: later still, in the early seventeenth century, the Reformed Churches of Hungary and Transylvania were still troubled by tussles between the traditions of Zürich and Geneva. 57 That element of the ambiguity of English divinity, a tension within the Reformed Protestant tradition, has largely been forgotten in the concentration of later party strife in the great fault-lines between Arminians and anti-Arminians, Restoration conformity and Dissent, and Evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics. Undoubtedly the English future turned in other directions, set by the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity of Richard Hooker. But even in Hooker, that delicate subverter of the Reformed tradition, the theologian of the Elizabethan Church who most resonates with the idiosyncrasies and strong opinions of Queen Elizabeth I, there is generous quotation from Bullinger, with rather more eclectic reference than Whitgift had made of him. Moreover, one can find emphases which Bullinger would have recognised and of which he would have approved: Hooker’s emphatic affirmation of the place of the civil magistrate in the Church, his relativistic discussion of episcopacy and his maintenance of a Reformed view of the eucharist, still firmly distanced from Lutherans – even his turning away from Calvinistic harshness on predestination would not raise eyebrows in Bullinger’s Zürich. The Ecclesiastical Polity was much more in the spirit of the Decades than has often been realised.

As I have argued elsewhere, Hooker is too protean a figure to be appropriated as uncompromisingly as he later was by the Oxford Movement. 58 In an important and perceptive article, Mark Perrott has argued that the argumentative strategy against Puritans which distinguishes Hooker from his patron Whitgift is not merely his new stress on reason, but through it, an appeal to probability. Whitgift stressed obedience, and saw his Puritan opponents as perversely disobedient, showing themselves no better than Anabaptists. That is why he had used Bullinger as he did. Hooker shifted the ground to recognise that Puritans had genuine scruples of conscience, and he did his best to resolve them. In doing so, he made reason a foil for what he saw as an excessively scripturalist mentality. 59 If the judgement of reason is a major criterion of authority in deciding on matters of controversy, then ‘of some things we may very well retaine an opinion that they are probable and not unlikely to be true as when we hold that men have their soules rather by creation then propagation, or that the mother of our Lorde lived alwaies in the state of virginitie as well after his birth as before.’ Equally, Hooker could assert of some elements of the Presbyterian case from scripture ‘That some thinges which they maintaine, as far as some men can probably conjecture, do seeme to have bene out of scripture not absurdly gathered.’ 60

In this death by a thousand probabilities, so infuriating to modern journalists seeking snappy quotations from Anglican theologians, we glimpse the taproot of a tradition. Where might it have travelled next, as the Church of England experienced what Patrick Collinson saw as ‘the greatest calamity ever visited upon [it]’, Archbishop Laud? 61 Certainly to William Chillingworth, a particular sort of fellow-traveller with Laud and the Arminians. But I suggest that one of the most distinguished representatives of the tradition was Richard Baxter, friend and admirer of that most Elizabethan of Stuart churchmen, Archbishop Usher, and himself once nearly a bishop at the hands of Charles II. Baxter was a man who despite that offer, spent most of his career shunted off the main line of the established Church after the Restoration Settlement, by what he called ‘the new Prelatical Way’, but he was proud to say of himself something that sounds remarkably like the comfortable confusion of modern mainstream Anglicanism: ‘You could not (except a Catholick Christian) have truelier called me than an Episcopal-Presbyterian- Independent’. 62

Baxter knew his Hooker. Like Hooker, logic and metaphysics were his favourite academic study, and consequently he read the medieval Schoolmen as attentively, and perhaps more attentively than, any Protestant Scholastic. 63 The consequence sounded like Hooker too: ‘And yet, after all, I was glad of probabilities instead of full undoubted certainties’. 64 Baxter, so often seen as a doyen of late Puritanism, went so far as to quote Hooker writing against the classic Elizabethan Puritan Walter Travers: ‘that whatever men may pretend, the subjective certainty cannot go beyond the objective evidence; for it is caused thereby as the print on the wax is caused by that on the seal.’ Controverting the priorities of the signatories of the Westminster Confession, who followed the innovation of the 1615 Irish Articles among Anglophone confessional statements in making the doctrine of scripture the starting-point of their text, he produced a personal hierarchy of certainties which would bear interesting comparison with Descartes: ‘My certainty that I am a man is before my certainty that there is a God, for Quod facit notum est magis notum; my certainty that there is a God is greater than my certainty that he requireth love and holiness of his creature’, and so on. 65

No-one has ever said that Richard Baxter was a simple or easily defined character, but I would be prepared to try out one title on him. Reginald Askew in an engagingly quirky series of essays on Bishop Jeremy Taylor placed his hero among ‘the last of the Anglicans’. 66 I would rather suggest that Taylor’s ejected contemporary Richard Baxter was the first of the Anglicans. His problem was that the Restoration Church had altered its latitude in both senses in order to exclude the likes of him. It shifted its centre of gravity away from its particular brand of Reformed Protestantism to something more sacramental, and in one sense more insular. It had also destroyed the latitude which had made it possible for Lancelot Andrewes, Antonio del Corro, Elizabeth I and Walter Travers more or less to co-exist in the same Church. Anglicanism has been asking questions about latitude ever since; but perhaps it has been hiding from some of the answers.

Diarmaid MacCulloch September 2005

‘The Latitude of the Church of England’, in K. Fincham and P. Lake (eds), Religious politics in post-Reformation England: essays in honour of Nicholas Tyacke (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006), 41-59 MacCulloch: Latitude of the Church of England Page 29


1 This paper was originally given at All Souls in the series ‘Doubt and Belief in early modern Europe, and I am grateful to those who commented on it on that occasion. I am also grateful to Nicholas Tyacke for inspiring so much of the new direction in discussion of Reformation Church history which has helped to shape this paper. My debt will be apparent from the footnotes.

2 D. MacCulloch, ‘Putting the English Reformation on the map’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series xv (2005), pp. 000-00.

3 For a fine overview of the revised historiography of the English Reformation, see N. Tyacke, “Re-thinking the ‘English Reformation’”, in Tyacke (ed.), England’s long Reformation 1500-1800 (London, 1998), 1-32, repr. in N. Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism c. 1530-1700 (Manchester, 2001), pp. 37-60.

4 James I’s apparent invention of the word ‘Anglican’ is to be found in D. Calderwood, History of the Church of Scotland by Mr. D. Calderwood, ed. T. Thomson (Wodrow Society, 1842-9), vol. V, p. 694.

5 MacCulloch, ‘Putting the English Reformation on the map’, pp. 000-00.

6 A. Ryrie, “The strange death of Lutheran England”, J.Eccl.H. liii (2002), pp. 64-92. See also K. Maas, ‘Robert Barnes as historian and theologian’ (unpubl. Oxford D.Phil., 2005).

7 D. MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: a life (London and New Haven, 1996), pp. 232-34.

8 On this and what follows on relations with Zürich, see more detailed discussion in my ‘Heinrich Bullinger and the English-speaking world’, in E. Campi (ed.), Heinrich Bullinger (1505-1575): Leben, Denken, Wirkung (Zürich, 2006, forthcoming).

9 For an account of these events, see MacCulloch, Cranmer, pp. 352-55.

10 MacCulloch, ‘Bullinger’.

11 C. Euler, ‘Heinrich Bullinger, marriage, and the English Reformation: The Christen state of Matrimonye in England, 1540-53’, Sixteenth Century Journal xxxiv (2003), pp. 367-94.

12 D. MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (London, 1999), pp. 173-74.

13 N.L Jones, Faith by Statute: Parliament and the Settlement of Religion, 1559 (London, 1982).

14 I say more about this in MacCulloch, ‘Putting the English Reformation on the map’, p. 000.

15 Anglo-Catholics did not always relate the clause to the parliamentary authorisation of the 1549 Prayer Book, and seized on the wording’s reference to the second year of King Edward VI as referring to the whole of 1548, when in theory there had been much more liturgical leeway possible than survived the first English Prayer Book. In context, however, it is quite clear that the reference is to the 1549 Prayer Book authorised by a session of Parliament beginning in 2 Edward VI (in fact November 1548): it was not therefore authorizing the pre-1549 situation. See the text in G. Bray (ed.), Documents of the English Reformation (1994), p. 334, and compare the similar reference in the 1559 Act of Uniformity to the 1552 Book of Common Prayer, in terms of its authorization by Act of Parliament in the fifth and sixth years of Edward VI: ibid., p. 329.) The rubric preceding Mattins in the 1559 Prayer Book specifically refers to this ornaments clause in the 1559 Act of Parliament: J. Parker (ed.), The First Prayer Book of Edward VI compared with the successive revisions of the Book of Common Prayer (Oxford and London, 1877), p. 64. The main effect would be to authorise the alternatives of a ‘vestment or cope’ over plain white alb for use at Holy Communion (cf. Liturgies of King Edward VI, 76): the ‘vestment’ was the chasuble, traditionally appropriate to the eucharist, while the cope was not a eucharistic garment. This represents a wide latitude indeed.

16 For an example of a Suffolk clergyman, Thomas Shackleton of Kenton, finding himself in the 1570s embattled and isolated for wearing a cope in worship, see D. MacCulloch, “Catholic and Puritan in Elizabethan Suffolk: a county community polarises”, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte lxxii (1981), pp. 232-89), at p. 254.

17 Washington DC, Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.b.303, pp. 183-6, qu. in P. Collinson, “Puritans, Men of Business and Elizabethan Parliaments”, Parliamentary History vii (1988), p. 192.

18 J. Ayre, ed., The Works of John Jewel, bishop of Salisbury (2 vols. in 4, Parker Society, 1845-50), III, p. 109.

19 For John Williams’s reminder to Laud in 1637 that there were different canonical provisions for cathedrals and parish churches, see B. Williams (ed.), The Work of Archbishop John Williams (Sutton Courtenay, 1988), p. 182. As late as 1680 there was an attempt to institutionalise in legislation the different liturgical styles, when in parliamentary negotiations over comprehension for nonconformists, there was a proposal that surplices should be worn only in cathedrals and the Chapel Royal: J.T. Cliffe, The Puritan Gentry besieged, 1650-1700 (London and New York, 1993), p. 183. On parochial music, N. Temperley, Music in the English Parish Church (2 vols, Cambridge, 1980), and J. Ottenhoff, ‘Recent Studies In Metrical Psalms’, English Literary Renaissance xxxiii (2003), pp. 252-75.

20 MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant, 204-8, 210-15; J.F. Merritt, “The cradle of Laudianism? Westminster Abbey, 1558-1630”, J.Eccl.H. 52 (2001), 623-46.

21 Curiously Archbishop Laud contributed to subsequent neglect of the surviving texts of these sermons when he did not embody them in his carefully presented selection of Andrewes’s works. We await Peter McCullough’s biography of Andrewes and his edition of Andrewes’s sermons: cf. the foretaste in P. McCullough, ‘Making dead men speak: Laudianism, print and the works of Lancelot Andrewes, 1626-1642’, Historical Journal xli (1998), 401-25. Of the few Cripplegate period sermons which Laud did allow into the 96 sermons, the most striking and audacious is that on Imaginations 15, preached and written in January 1593 at the height of the campaign against separatist nonconformity which also saw the publication of the first part of Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity. This sermon takes the topos of idolatry, so familiar in a Reformed Protestant context, and turns it against Puritan and separatist positions on church polity and liturgy, with a few token swipes at Roman Catholics. I am grateful to Dr Peter McCullough for our discussions on this remarkable sermon.

22 See N. Tyacke, “Lancelot Andrewes and the myth of Anglicanism”, in P. Lake and M. Questier (eds), Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560-1660 (2000), pp. 5-33, at pp. 19-24.

23 On the Articles, see E. Gilliam and W.J. Tighe, “To ‘Run with the Time’: Archbishop Whitgift, the Lambeth Articles and the politics of theological ambiguity in late Elizabethan England”, 16th Cent. Jnl. xxiii (1992), pp. 325-40. The best overview of the Arminian movement and its antecedents remains N. Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The rise of English Arminianism c.1590-1640 (1987); see especially introduction to the paperback edition, 1990.

24 E. Evenden, ‘The Michael Wood mystery: William Cecil and the Lincolnshire printing of John Day’, Sixteenth Century Journal xxxv (2004), pp. 383-94.

25 This remark so often misquoted and so often attributed to Elizabeth herself is to be found in James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis and Douglas Denon Heath, eds, The Works of Francis Bacon (14 vols, 1857-1874): Lord Bacon’s Letters and Life, I, p. 178. It occurs in Bacon’s ‘Observations on a Libel’ of 1592, but is also to be found word for word with its surrounding material in a letter of Francis Walsingham to M. de Critoy, written between 1589 and Walsingham’s death in 1590: ibid., p. 98. Spedding is almost certainly correct in postulating that Bacon had ghost-written this letter of Walsingham’s.

26 On these and the ‘Third Way’, see MacCulloch, Reformation, pp. 253-5, 290, 310, 317-19, 354, 570.

27 C.W. Marsh, The Family of Love in English Society, 1550-1630 (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 131-33.

28 Marsh, Family, pp. 282-3. Marsh’s seminal book remains the definitive account of the Familists in England.

29 D. Wootton, ‘Elizabeth and the Family of Love’, inaugural lecture, University of York, 10 October 2005. Noel Malcolm has suggested (in discussion and private correspondence) that the poem is not an original composition, but perhaps the Queen’s translation from a Spanish original. For the text, see S.W. May and A.L. Prescott, “The French Verses of Elizabeth I” English Literary Renaissance 24 (1994), pp. 9-43.

30 On Perne and Whitgift, P. Collinson, ‘Andrew Perne and his times’, in P. Collinson et al., Andrew Perne: Quatercentenary studies (Cambridge Bibliographical Society 11 (1991), pp. 1-34, at pp. 2, 20, 24, 34.

31 On Perne and Baro, H.C. Porter, Reformation and Reaction in Tudor Cambridge (Cambridge, 1958), p. 376. On Baro and Familism, see below, n. 000.

32 W. McFadden, ‘The life and works of Antonio del Corro, 1527-91’ (unpubl. Ph.D. thesis, Queen’s University Belfast, 1953; I am indebted to Dr Ronald Trueman for access to this work). For a treatment in print of Corro, much indebted to McFadden’s work, but with additional material, see C.M. Dent, Protestant Reformers in Elizabethan Oxford (Oxford, 1983), pp. 119-22.

33 McFadden, ‘Corro’, pp. 350-352; on Corro’s anti-predestinarian views and unitarianism, ibid., pp. 362-6, 373-84, 512, 624-32, 648-49, 737-38. The French national Protestant synod meeting at La Rochelle in 1571 explicitly made the connection between eastern European unitarianism and Corro: ibid., p. 398.

34 McFadden, ‘Corro’, p. 498.

35 McFadden, ‘Corro’, p. 508 (quoting the view of the Spanish Ambassador Mendoza), and on Leicester’s patronage to Corro generally, ibid., pp. 365-68, 405-407, 434-5, 445- 65, 484, 494-96, 508, 511-13, 527-28

36 On patronage from Cecil, see McFadden, ‘Corro’, pp. 337-8, on Hatton, ibid., pp. 482, 539-42

37 McFadden, ‘Corro’, 379-80. On Lady Dorothy Stafford, S.T. Bindoff, ed., History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1509-1558 (3 vols., London,1982), III, p. 365, and C.H. Garrett, The Marian Exiles (London, 1938), p. 296.

38 H. Robinson, ed., The Zürich Letters … (2 vols., Parker Society, 1842, 1845, with appendix of Latin originals), II p. 259. To extend further the interesting tangle of these orthodox and unorthodox clergy, Corro’s principal adversary at Oxford in his troubles from 1576 to 1582 was Richard Hooker’s patron (from Hooker was later to distance himself) John Raignoldes of Corpus Christi College: Dent, Oxford, pp. 119- 125.

39 On these nuances, see MacCulloch, Cranmer, pp. 620-1.

40 Robinson, ed., Zürich Letters II, p. 127.

41 Cf. especially Ayre, ed., Works of Jewel III, p. 69.

42 Cf. Bishop Parkhurst’s gleeful reaction to the destruction of the silver crucifix in Elizabeth’s Chapel Royal: Robinson, ed., Zürich Letters I, pp. 121, 128; R.A. Houlbrooke (ed.), The Letter Book of John Parkhurst, Bishop of Norwich, compiled during the years 1571-5 (Norfolk Records Society, 43, 1975), p. 62.

43 For general accounts, see especially J.H. Primus, The Vestments Controversy (Kampen, 1960), and H. Horie, ‘The influence of Continental Divines on the making of the English Religious Settlement ca. 1547-1590: a reassessment of Heinrich Bullinger’s contribution’ (unpubl. Cambridge University Ph.D., 1991), pp. 243-68.

44 Robinson, ed., Zürich Letters I, p. 357: cf. Gwalther’s comments to Bishop Cox in 1572, ibid., I, p. 362.

45 A. Mühling, Heinrich Bullingers europaische Kirchenpolitik (Bern and Frankfurt am Main: Zürcher Beiträge zur Reformationsgeschichte 19, 2000), pp. 116-17.

46 On this large theme, see J.W. Baker, ‘Erastianism in England: the Zürich connection’, in A. Schindler and H. Stickelberger, eds, Die Zürcher Reformation: Ausstrahlungen und Rückwirkungen (Zürich, 2001), pp. 327-49. K. Rüetschi, ‘Rudolf Gwalthers Kontakte zu Engländern und Schotten’, in ibid., p. 368, sounds a useful note of caution, pointing out the differences in the polities of England and Zürich, likewise Horie, ‘Heinrich Bullinger’s contribution’, p. 297.

47 RSTC 4044, and see D.J. Keep, ‘Bullinger’s Defence of Queen Elizabeth’, in U. Gäbler and E. Herkenrath (eds), Heinrich Bullinger 1504-1575: Gesammelte Aufsätze zum 400 Todestag, Bd. 2: Beziehungen und Wirkungen (Zürich 1975, Zürcher Beiträge zur Reformationsgeschichte 8), 231-41.

48 M. Taplin, The Italian Reformers and the Zürich Church, c. 1540-1620 (Aldershot, 2003), passim and p. 191.

49 Robinson, ed., Zürich Letters, II, p. 254.

50 Robinson, ed., Zürich Letters I, p. 276; J. Ayre (ed.), The Works of John Whitgift D.D. (3 vols., Parker Society 1851) III, pp. 496-7.

51 Ayre (ed.), Works of Whitgift D.D. I, p. 184. Cf. Whitgift’s very similar quotation from Gwalther, ibid., I, p. 186.

52 The story is well told in Horie, ‘Heinrich Bullinger’s contribution’, pp. 302-66, from where citations are taken unless otherwise stated.

53 A.B. Emden, A Biographical Register of the University of Oxford A.D. 1501 to 1540 (Oxford, 1974), p. 135.

54 , T. Harding (ed.), The Decades of Henry Bullinger (4 vols., Parker Society, 1849-52), I, pp. 8, 9.

55 On Grindal and the prophesyings, see P. Collinson, Archbishop Grindal 1519-1583: the Struggle for a Reformed Church (London, 1979), Pt. 4. On the other uses, Horie, ‘Heinrich Bullinger’s contribution’, 318.

56 The best account of this period is P. Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967), Parts 5 and 6.

57 For a superb study of these tensions, see G. Murdock, Calvinism on the frontier 1600- 1660: international Calvinism and the Reformed Church in Hungary and Transylvania (Oxford, 2000).

58 D. MacCulloch, ‘Richard Hooker’s reputation’, English Historical Review cxvii (2002), pp. 773-812

59 M.E.C. Perrott, ‘Richard Hooker and the problem of authority in the Elizabethan Church’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 49 (1998), pp. 29-60, esp. pp. 32, 37, 39, 49.

60 Perrott, ‘Richard Hooker and the problem of authority’, pp. 50, 51, qu. R. Hooker, ed. W.R. Speed Hill et al., The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker (7 vols., Cambridge and Binghamton, 1977-1994) I, pp. 179-80, 185.

61 P. Collinson, The Religion of Protestants (London, 1983), p. 90.

62 N.H. Keeble, ed., The Autobiography of Richard Baxter, abridged by J.M. Lloyd Thomas (London, 1974), pp. 84, xvii.

63 Keeble, ed., Autobiography of Richard Baxter, p. 9.

64 Keeble, ed., Autobiography of Richard Baxter, p. 11.

65 Keeble, ed., Autobiography of Richard Baxter, p. 111.

66 R. Askew, Muskets and altars: Jeremy Taylor and the last of the Anglicans (London, 1997).