Squeezed From Both Directions

The Elizabethan Settlement's middle position left the government fighting pressure from both directions for the rest of the reign. Roman Catholics who refused to attend the new church's services, recusants in the era's legal language, faced escalating fines under successive statutes, and the threat sharpened after the pope formally excommunicated Elizabeth in 1570 and after Jesuit missionaries began arriving from continental seminaries in the 1580s to minister covertly to England's Catholic remnant, several of whom were executed as traitors rather than simply as religious dissenters once found.

Puritan reformers pressed from the opposite side, arguing the 1559 settlement had stopped the English Reformation halfway: they wanted the retained vestments, the office of bishop, and much of the inherited liturgical ceremony stripped out in favor of a church governed on more explicitly Reformed, Genevan lines. Elizabeth and her bishops resisted these demands as forcefully as they resisted Catholic recusancy, deploying the church courts against Puritan ministers who refused to conform to the prescribed forms of worship. Neither pressure broke the settlement during Elizabeth's own lifetime, but both outlived her: Catholic recusancy and Puritan nonconformity remained the two fault lines English religious politics ran along well into the following century.