History of the Puritans under Elizabeth I

Unlike the Reformed, the Lutherans believed in the objective, real presence of Christ in the Lord's Supper, and they were not opposed to religious imagery and vestments.

By 1548, leading English Protestants including Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, had adopted Reformed views on the Lord's Supper.

[5] Unwelcome in German Lutheran territories, the exiles established English Protestant congregations in Rhineland towns such as Wesel, Frankfurt and Strasbourg, and the Swiss cities of Zurich, Basel, and Geneva.

While the Elizabethan settlement proved generally acceptable, there remained minorities who were dissatisfied with the state of the Church of England.

They were opposed to the rule of bishops, to the required use of the Book of Common Prayer, and many of the rituals of the Anglican establishment, which they believed were obstacles to true religion and godliness.

They believed the majority of the common people were kept in bondage to forms and rituals, and as a result to false religion and spiritual ignorance.

The Puritans moreover wanted all the sins, rituals, and superstitions that "smacked of Roman Catholic idolatry" thoroughly abolished from the realm and from the churches, including; the mass, the surplice, kneeling at the Lord's Supper, vestments, graven images, profane and sexually immoral stage plays, and the widespread profanation of the Sabbath.

It is evident that Elizabeth, though a committed Anglican, relied heavily on Puritan leaders for the support of the crown as well as her own personal and state counsel.

In fact the Red Cross Knight, the chief hero of the poem, is designed to be the very image and model of Puritan virtue, and Una his betrothed a figure of the church purified from sin and idolatry.

Jewel's Apology of the Church of England and his Book of Homilies are both quintessential to Anglicanism; and yet his "Essay on Holy Scripture" is in many ways Puritan.

The Puritan movement was advanced by the work and ministry of John Knox and the Scottish Reformation that took place at the same time.

Second, Pope Pius V had issued the bull Regnans in Excelsis, absolving Catholics of their duty of allegiance to Elizabeth.

In response to this Catholic rebelliousness, the English government took several measures to shore up the Protestantism of the regime: all clergymen were required to subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles; all laity were required to take communion according to the rite of the Book of Common Prayer in their home parish at least once per year; and it became a treasonable offence to say that the queen was a heretic or a schismatic.

John Foxe and Thomas Norton presented a reform proposal initially drawn up under Edward VI to Parliament.

Meanwhile at Cambridge, professor Thomas Cartwright, a long-time opponent of vestments, offered a series of lectures in 1570 on the Book of Acts in which he called for the abolition of episcopacy and the creation of a presbyterian system of church governance in England.

Puritans were further dismayed when they learned that the bishops had decided to merge the vestiarian controversy into the requirement that clergy subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles: at the time they swore their allegiance to the Thirty-nine Articles, the bishops also required all clergymen to swear that the use of the Book of Common Prayer and the wearing of vestments are not contrary to Scripture.

According to the Admonition, the Puritans had long accepted the Book of Common Prayer, with all its deficiencies, because it promoted the peace and unity of the church.

In a Second Replye, Cartwright was even more forceful, arguing that any pre-eminence accorded to any minister in the church violated divine law.

The government moved against all three of these Puritan leaders: Field and Wilcox were imprisoned for a year, while Cartwright fled to exile on the continent to avoid such a fate.

The Marprelate tracts called the bishops "our vile servile dunghill ministers of damnation, that viperous generation, those scorpions."

Followers of Greenwood and Barrowe fled to the Netherlands and formed the basis of the Pilgrims, who later founded the Plymouth Colony in North America.

1593 also saw the English parliament pass the Religion Act (35 Elizabeth c. 1) and the Popish Recusants Act (35 Elizabeth c. 2), which provided that those worshipping outside the Church of England had three months in which to either conform to the Church of England or else abjure the realm, forfeiting their lands and goods to the crown, with failure to abjure being a capital offence.

Although these acts were directed against Roman Catholics who refused to conform to the Church of England, on their face they also applied to many of the Puritans.

(Since the time of the repression of the Lollards in the 14th century, it had been illegal for an ordained parish priest to preach to his congregation without first obtaining a licence from his bishop.)

However, many of Elizabeth's bishops did support the development of a preaching ministry and, aided by wealthy laymen, were able to dramatically expand the number of qualified preachers in the country.

For example, Sir Walter Mildmay founded Emmanuel College, Cambridge in 1584 to promote the training of preaching ministers.

Theologians such as William Perkins of Cambridge continued to maintain the rigorously high standards of previous Puritans but focused on improving individual, as opposed to collective, righteousness.

Perkins is credited with introducing Beza's version of double predestination to the English Puritans, a view which he popularized through the use of a chart he created known as "The Golden Chain".

In time, some Puritan clergymen and laity, who increasingly referred to themselves as "the godly", began to view themselves as distinct from the regular members of the Church of England, who had not undergone an emotional conversion experience.

At the same time the Puritan movement had ministers and magistrates that held to either congregational, presbyterial, or episcopal forms of church government.