Elizabethan Era

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.

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.