Puritans
Ideology | Active
1540 CE to 2057 CE
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The religious issue that had divided the country since Henry VIII is in a way put to rest by the Elizabethan Religious Settlement, which re-establishes the Church of England.
Much of Elizabeth's success is in balancing the interests of the Puritans and Catholics.
She manages to offend neither to a large extent, although she clamps down on Catholics towards the end of her reign as war with Catholic Spain looms.
Despite the need for an heir, Elizabeth declines to marry, despite offers from a number of suitors across Europe, including the Swedish king Erik XIV.
This creates endless worries over her succession, especially in the 1570s when she nearly dies of smallpox.
It has been often rumored that she had a number of lovers (including Francis Drake), but there is no hard evidence.
Elizabeth's immediate and lasting aim is to reunite England—now at its lowest ebb since Tudor rule began in 1485—reestablish the Anglican church, fend off foreign threats, and bring her people as much peace and prosperity as possible.
On the morning of her accession, Elizabeth, herself a moderate Protestant, names as her secretary of state Sir William Cecil, who shares many of her views.
With his help, Elizabeth concludes the famous Elizabethan Settlement for the Church of England.
The Settlement excludes papal authority and reinstitutes the Book of Common Prayer, an English-language liturgy, but does not recognize the demands of the more extreme Puritans, who wish to purify their national church by eliminating every shred of Catholic influence.
John Dee, the alchemist, astrologer, and mathematician, is asked to name a propitious day for Elizabeth's official coronation.
Francis Walsingham returns from the Continent and immediately secures a prominent position among Elizabeth’s advisors, as well as a seat in Parliament.
Elizabeth names as master of the horse her court favorite, Robert Dudley, pardoned for his involvement in his father's plan to secure the succession to the throne of Lady Jane Grey in 1553.
A new Book of Common Prayer, incorporating the features of the 1549 and 1552 editions, is in 1559 authorized under Queen Elizabeth.
Miles Coverdale, having moved from Denmark then to Wesel, and finally back to Bergzabern in the Palatinate, returns to England in 1559, but is not reinstated in his bishopric, perhaps because of puritan scruples about vestments; he continues as a leader of the Puritan party.
Today, Coverdale’s translation of the Psalter is used in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, and is the most familiar translation of the psalms for many Anglicans all over the world.
As a consequence, many musical settings of the psalms make use of the Coverdale translation.
His translation of the Roman Canon is still used in some Anglican and Anglican Use Roman Catholic churches.
The Duke of Norfolk, discovered to have been funding the Marian party in Scotland, is on September 7, 1571, arrested.
The plot, although unsuccessful, has concentrated the minds of the English government on assassination attempts on Elizabeth, and, more importantly, exacerbates the Puritan demand that Mary be executed in order to safeguard the English church and state.
Burghley presses for Mary’s execution, but Elizabeth resists these demands by Burghley and other advisors.
Thomas Erastus, born Thomas Lüber in Baden, Switzerland, and a student of philosophy and medicine for nine years, is invited in 1557 by the elector Otto Heinrich of the Palatinate to be professor of therapeutics in the new faculty of medicine at the University of Heidelberg, where he had quickly achieved a favorable reputation as a physician and a teacher.
As a supporter of the church reforms advocated by the Swiss theologian Huldrych Zwingli, Erastus has become closely associated with the introduction of Reformed Protestantism into the Palatinate during the electorate of Frederick III (1559–76).
In debates over the Eucharist, the sacrament deriving from the Lord's Supper, he has defended the Zwinglian view that Christ's body is present in the sacramental bread only symbolically, in contrast to Luther's view that his body is really present.
The central controversy in Erastus' life had come to a head after he had opposed efforts by Calvinists in the Palatinate, notably Caspar Olevianus, to impose the system of church discipline that had been established by John Calvin at Geneva and elsewhere.
When, in 1568, a set of theses had been presented at Heidelberg by the English Puritan George Withers, who had affirmed both the presbyterian system of church government (assemblies of elected representatives) and the practice of excommunication, Erastus had drawn up one hundred theses (later reduced to seventy-five) to refute him.
Erastus maintains that excommunication is unscriptural, that the sacraments should not be withheld from anyone genuinely wishing to receive them, and that in a Christian society—and Erastus explicitly limits his argument in this manner—the punishment of sins is in the hands of the civil magistrates.
Because the Calvinists have the support of the elector, however, the presbyterian system had been established in 1570 by electoral decree.
For his opposition to the new order and also for alleged tendencies away from the doctrine of the Trinity toward Unitarianism, Erastus had been excommunicated for two years.
John Aylmer had served as chaplain to Henry Grey (later the Duke of Suffolk) and as tutor to Grey's daughter Lady Jane Grey.
During Queen Mary's vigorous restoration of Roman Catholicism, Aylmer, who had been given an archdeaconate in 1553, lost his post because of his opposition to the doctrine of transubstantiation.
While living in exile in Strassburg and then in Zürich in 1559, he had written a reply, entitled An Harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe Subjectes, to John Knox's famous First blast of the trumpet against the monstruous regiment of women.
Knox has argued that by both natural law and revealed religion, women are unfit to rule.
After the accession of the Protestant queen Elizabeth, Aylmer had returned to England and become known for his vigorous enforcement of the Act of Uniformity of 1559 within his Church of England diocese.
Becoming archdeacon of Lincoln in 1562 and appointed a member of the convocation that reformed and settled the doctrine and discipline of the Church of England, he had been consecrated in 1577 as bishop of London.
His harsh treatment of all (whether Puritan or Roman Catholic) who differ with him on ecclesiastical questions causes him to be characterized in 1579 as “Morrell,” the bad shepherd, in Edmund Spenser's The Shepheardes Calender, considered the first outstanding pastoral poem in English.
Thomas North in this same year translates Jacques Amyot's French version of Plutarch's Parallel Lives as The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes, which has been described as one of the earliest masterpieces of English prose.
Thomas Erastus dies on December 31, 1583; the significance of his theses, which will be published posthumously in 1589 under the title Explicatio gravissimae quaestionis … , is reflected by their numerous translations: in 1659 as The Nullity of Church Censures, in 1682 as A Treatise of Excommunication, and in 1844 in a Scottish edition.
Erastus also had written several medical and scientific treatises in which he attacked such popular superstitions as the belief in astrology and in alchemical transmutation of metals.
He himself, however, shared the contemporary belief in witchcraft, which he opposed in his Repetitio disputationis de lamiis seu strigibus (1578; “Repetition of the Disputation Against Witches”), a defense of the use of the death penalty against witches and sorcerers.,
The Swiss physician and religious controversialist had been forced to leave Heidelberg following the reinstitution of Lutheranism under the elector of Palatine Louis VI (1576–83).
On his return to Basel, he had been appointed professor of medicine there in 1580 and of ethics in 1582.
The term Erastian—for Erastianism, a doctrine of church-state relationship that he himself never taught—will evidently come into use first in 1643 in England; Presbytelouirians will use it as a term of abuse for those who urge state supremacy.)
Thomas Cooper, educated at the University of Oxford, had become master of Magdalen College school and afterward practiced as a physician in Oxford.
The first edition of his most notable work, Thesaurus Linguae Romanae et Britannicae, had appeared in 1565.
Three other editions had followed in 1573, 1578, and 1584.
Queen Elizabeth is greatly pleased with the Thesaurus, which becomes known as Cooper's Dictionary.
Cooper, who had been ordained about 1559, had been made dean of Christ Church, Oxford, in 1567.
Two years later he had become dean of Gloucester, in 1571 bishop of Lincoln, and in 1584 becomes bishop of Winchester.
Cooper defends the practice and precept of the Church of England against the Roman Catholics on the one hand and against the Martin Marprelate writings and the Puritans on the other.
Jasper Heywood, a son of the playwright John Heywood, had been educated at Oxford, joined the Jesuits in Rome in 1562, and two years later become professor at their college at Dillingen in Germany.
His translations of the works of the Roman playwright Seneca, including Troades (1559), Thyestes (1560), Hercules furens (1561), and other plays issued as Seneca His Tenne Tragedies Translated into English 1581, will influence English drama.
Head of the Jesuit mission to England from 1581, he had been imprisoned during 1583–85 and now is exiled.
New intrigues had brought Northumberland to the Tower a third time in December 1584, where six months later he is found dead, shot through the heart.
The official verdict, probably accurate, is suicide.