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The Religious Settlement of 1559 (Lesson 4) gave England a Church that was Protestant in doctrine yet Catholic in much of its external form — the celebrated via media. But a settlement on paper is not a settlement in the hearts of the people, and the genius of the 1559 arrangement, its studied ambiguity, guaranteed that it would be pressed from both flanks for the rest of the reign. This lesson examines the two great challenges to the Elizabethan Church — the Catholic challenge, which found the Settlement heretical and, after 1570, treasonous to resist; and the Puritan challenge, which found it insufficiently reformed and demanded that its surviving "popish" elements be purged. It also asks the deeper question that the religion thread of this course keeps returning to: how far had England genuinely become Protestant by 1603, and how far did the Settlement simply command outward conformity from a population whose real convictions remained divided?
The Catholic and Puritan challenges are usually studied separately, and they were indeed very different in character. Yet they shared a single root: both were responses to the deliberate incompleteness of the Settlement, the space it left between Rome and Geneva. Elizabeth's achievement was to hold that middle ground for forty-five years against pressure from either side — to face down the Puritans on ceremonies and church government while treating most Catholics with a calculated leniency that only hardened into savagery when the papacy and Spain made loyalty to the old faith indistinguishable, in the regime's eyes, from treason. Understanding how she held the line, and at what cost, is the substance of this lesson.
The organising question is whether the survival of the Elizabethan Settlement is best explained by the queen's own firmness and political skill, or by the self-restraint of those it failed to satisfy — the quietism of most Catholics and the decision of most Puritans to conform rather than separate. Keep that question in view: it is precisely the kind of interpretive disagreement that Section C of Paper 1 rewards you for weighing, and it recurs in the historiography below.
This lesson belongs to Edexcel 9HI0 Paper 1, Option 1B (Route B): "England, 1509–1603: authority, nation and religion" — a breadth study assessed by extended analytical essays (Sections A and B) and by the evaluation of historians' interpretations (Section C). Within our own teaching sequence it is the direct continuation of the religious settlement of Lesson 4: where Lesson 4 explained the making of the 1559 Church, this lesson explains the challenges to it and the question of its success, carrying the religion thread to the end of the reign.
Because Paper 1 is a breadth paper, examiners reward command of change across the reign and judgements about the scale and permanence of religious change, not narrow narrative. Keep asking how far each development altered the relationship between the Crown, the Church, and the beliefs of ordinary people. (For the exact assessment weightings and question wording, consult the official Edexcel specification and sample assessment materials rather than any paraphrase.)
Before the challenges hardened, there was a decade of deliberate gradualism. Elizabeth and her ministers understood that a settlement imposed too harshly on a conservative population might drive it into open resistance; their strategy was to secure outward conformity now and trust to time for inward conversion. This early leniency is itself an important piece of evidence in the historiographical debate about how Protestant England really was.
| Instrument | Detail |
|---|---|
| A new episcopal bench | The Marian bishops almost all refused the Oath of Supremacy and were deprived (1559–60); Elizabeth had to construct an entirely new bench, headed by Matthew Parker as Archbishop of Canterbury (1559) — moderate men, many of them returned Marian exiles, on whom the whole enforcement of the Settlement depended |
| Light early enforcement | Royal visitors toured the dioceses in 1559 to administer the oath and remove images, but enforcement of church attendance was at first deliberately mild, to avoid provoking conservatives into open recusancy |
| Toleration of "church papistry" | For roughly the first decade, many conservative parishioners conformed outwardly — attending the parish church to avoid the shilling fine — while privately retaining Catholic belief; the regime tolerated this rather than force a confrontation, hoping the old faith would simply die with the old generation |
| The hardening after 1570 | The papal bull, the Northern Rising, and the arrival of the missionary priests ended this tolerance; from the 1570s enforcement became systematic and the penal laws savage |
Church papistry — the practice of outward conformity combined with the private retention of Catholic belief and, where possible, secret access to the Mass — is a concept worth grasping firmly, because it blurs the neat line between "Protestant" and "Catholic" and lies at the centre of the debate about how Protestant England really was by 1603. That the regime tolerated it for a decade is powerful evidence for Christopher Haigh's picture of a slow Reformation: the Settlement succeeded, on this reading, less because it converted the country quickly than because it endured long enough for a Protestant generation to grow up within it. The willingness to wait is the tell.
The Settlement faced sustained challenge from Catholics — but the character of that challenge changed sharply across the reign, and the single most important analytical task on this topic is to chart that change, from quiet survival before 1570 to a criminalised and (in a minority) conspiratorial faith thereafter.
In 1570 Pope Pius V issued the bull Regnans in Excelsis, excommunicating Elizabeth, declaring her deposed, and absolving her subjects of their allegiance to her. This transformed the Catholic question at a stroke. Before 1570 the regime could afford to treat conformity leniently, hoping the old faith would wither; after 1570 loyalty to Rome was, in the government's eyes, potentially synonymous with treason, because the supreme authority of the Catholic Church had explicitly commanded English Catholics to disobey their queen. The bull supplied the pretext for ever-harsher penal laws and cast every recusant as a potential traitor. Its timing — in the immediate aftermath of the Northern Rising of 1569 (Lesson 8) — sharpened that effect. And it was, in a bitter irony for English Catholics, largely counter-productive: by forcing every loyal Catholic to choose between Pope and Queen, it handed the regime the perfect justification for treating the old faith as sedition, and appalled the many Catholics who wished only to worship quietly and remain loyal subjects.
The second great development was the arrival, from the late 1570s, of a Counter-Reformation missionary effort designed to sustain and renew English Catholicism.
| Development | Detail |
|---|---|
| William Allen's seminary at Douai (1568) | Trained exiled Englishmen as missionary priests to return home and sustain Catholic worship; by around 1580 perhaps 100 seminary priests were active in England |
| The Jesuit mission (1580) | Edmund Campion and Robert Parsons led a high-profile mission of the Society of Jesus; Campion was captured, tried, and executed in 1581 (his defiant Decem Rationes and his "Brag" became Catholic touchstones); Parsons escaped abroad to direct Catholic activity from the Continent |
| Priest holes | Catholic gentry concealed missionary priests in hidden chambers, many of them ingeniously constructed by the Jesuit lay brother Nicholas Owen |
| The penal laws | Steadily intensified: the recusancy fine was raised to a crushing £20 per month in 1581; an Act of 1585 made it treason for a seminary priest merely to be in England and a felony to harbour one |
The distinction between the Catholicism of survival and the Catholicism of mission — associated with the historian John Bossy — is the analytical key to this whole topic. The "survivalist" Catholicism of the early years was quiet, household-based, and seigneurial: the private continuity of the old faith on conservative estates, especially in the North and West. The Catholicism of "mission" was the Counter-Reformation effort of the seminary priests and Jesuits, which sought actively to renew English Catholicism and, in its most political forms, to overthrow the Protestant state. Whether the "Catholic threat" was truly existential or largely the fear generated by a conspiratorial minority depends entirely on which Catholicism one has in view.
A minority of Catholics turned to conspiracy, and the succession of plots — most of them centred on freeing Mary, Queen of Scots and placing her on the throne — did much to sustain the regime's fear and to justify the penal laws.
| Plot | Date | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| The Northern Rising | 1569 | The Catholic Earls of Northumberland and Westmorland rose to free Mary and restore Catholicism; it collapsed, and perhaps 600–700 were executed (analysed comparatively in Lesson 8) |
| The Ridolfi Plot | 1571 | A conspiracy linking the Duke of Norfolk, Mary, the Pope, and Spain; its exposure led to Norfolk's execution in 1572 |
| The Throckmorton Plot | 1583 | A scheme for a Spanish-backed invasion coordinated with English Catholics, uncovered by Walsingham's intelligence network |
| The Babington Plot | 1586 | A plot to assassinate Elizabeth and free Mary; Walsingham's interception of Mary's incriminating correspondence sealed her execution in 1587 |
Recusancy — the refusal to attend Church of England services, punishable by fine — is the technical term for the visible Catholic dissent the penal laws targeted. It is crucial to hold two facts together: the plots were real and genuinely dangerous, and yet the number of politically active Catholic conspirators was small. Most recusants were quietists who sought survival, not rebellion, and many were horrified to be forced by the bull and the plots into a choice they had never wanted. The penal laws targeted the conspiratorial few but bore down on the quietist many — a distinction that lies at the heart of assessing how "real" the Catholic threat was.
At the opposite pole from the Catholics stood the Puritans — "the hotter sort of Protestants" — who pressed for the Settlement to be reformed further, purging it of the surviving "Catholic" elements they regarded as idolatrous relics. It is essential to grasp that, on doctrine, Elizabeth and the Puritans were largely agreed: both were broadly Calvinist, and the Thirty-Nine Articles (Lesson 4) were a Protestant confession. The Puritan quarrel was over ceremony and church government, not the fundamentals of belief — and this, as we shall see, is exactly what allowed Elizabeth to defeat them.
| Issue | Puritan position | Elizabeth's position |
|---|---|---|
| Vestments | Condemned clerical vestments as "popish rags" and idolatrous survivals of Rome | Required by the Ornaments Rubric of the 1559 Settlement; a test of obedience |
| Church government | The more radical (Presbyterians) wished to abolish bishops altogether in favour of governance by elected elders | Episcopacy was non-negotiable — bishops were the instrument of royal control over the Church; the logic ran "no bishop, no king" |
| Preaching | Demanded a learned, preaching ministry and far more sermons | Wary of unlicensed preaching as a vector of dissent and sedition |
| Ceremonies | Wanted to abolish kneeling at communion, the sign of the cross in baptism, and the wedding ring as relics of popery | Held these to be adiaphora (things indifferent) that the Supreme Governor had every right to command |
The concept of adiaphora — "things indifferent," matters neither commanded nor forbidden by Scripture and therefore within the authority of the Church to order — is the intellectual key to Elizabeth's management of Puritanism. By insisting that vestments and ceremonies were adiaphora within her prerogative as Supreme Governor, she reframed every Puritan demand as a question of obedience to lawful authority rather than of theology — and thereby made resistance look like disloyalty rather than piety. It was a brilliant political manoeuvre, and it worked because on the underlying doctrine the two sides genuinely agreed.
| Episode | Date | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| The Vestments Controversy | 1565–1566 | Archbishop Parker's Advertisements demanded conformity in clerical dress; around 37 London clergy were suspended for refusing — the first open clash |
| Thomas Cartwright | 1570 | The Cambridge Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity advocated a Presbyterian system of church government; he was deprived of his chair and driven abroad |
| The Admonition to Parliament | 1572 | Field and Wilcox's printed manifesto demanded a Presbyterian, preaching Church — the boldest Puritan challenge yet, and swiftly suppressed |
| The prophesyings crisis | 1576–77 | Elizabeth ordered Archbishop Grindal to suppress "prophesyings" — clergy Bible-study meetings she distrusted as seed-beds of dissent; Grindal refused on grounds of conscience and was sequestered from his functions for the rest of his life, a revealing demonstration of the queen's resolve |
| The Classical Movement | 1580s | Puritan clergy organised semi-secret "classes" (presbyteries) within the Church; they were broken up by Archbishop Whitgift (from 1583) through his Three Articles and the Court of High Commission |
| The Marprelate Tracts | 1588–89 | Scurrilous anonymous pamphlets lampooning the bishops; their very extremism backfired, alienating moderate Protestant opinion and discrediting the radical cause |
The Grindal affair repays particular attention, because it shows the queen's priorities with unusual clarity. Grindal was a committed Protestant and a conscientious archbishop, but when Elizabeth ordered him to suppress the prophesyings he told her, in effect, that he could not offend God to please her — and she never forgave him, sequestering him from his duties (though not formally deposing him) until his death in 1583. That she was willing to paralyse the leadership of her own Church rather than tolerate unlicensed clerical assembly demonstrates how completely she subordinated the reform of religion to the control of it. Her successor, Whitgift, shared her instincts exactly, and used the Court of High Commission and his subscription articles to break the Classical Movement and drive organised presbyterianism underground by the end of the 1580s.
Standing back from the two challenges, the largest analytical question this topic poses is whether the Settlement had genuinely converted England by the end of the reign. The answer is a carefully qualified one, and holding its two halves together is what marks out a strong breadth essay.
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