A Queen Splits the Difference

Elizabeth I inherited a kingdom whipsawed by a half century of religious change when she took the English throne in 1558: her father Henry VIII had broken from Rome, her brother Edward VI's government had pushed the church toward Reformed Protestantism, and her half sister Mary I had then restored papal authority and burned Protestants for heresy. The settlement Elizabeth's first Parliament passed in 1559, an Act of Supremacy naming her supreme governor of the church and an Act of Uniformity requiring use of a revised Book of Common Prayer, was deliberately built to hold a broad middle position rather than complete either extreme.

The Book of Common Prayer that resulted kept much of the older liturgical structure and vestments that Reformed Protestants objected to, while its doctrine, later fixed in the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion of 1571, was unambiguously Protestant on questions including justification and the nature of the eucharist. A study of Anglicanism as a tradition treats this settlement as the founding document of a distinctively English form of Protestantism, one that described itself less as a compromise between Rome and Geneva than as a considered third position, though it satisfied neither committed Catholics nor the more thoroughgoing Reformed Protestants who wanted the church to go further.