In this sermon, the speaker discusses the story of Carter, who played a central role in the next chapter of the story. The sermon is divided into three paragraphs: the leaders, the arguments, and the activities of the Puritan Presbyterianising movement. The speaker mentions that Carter and Field were imprisoned for writing a seditious document, which will be discussed in more detail in the next class. The sermon also mentions Elizabeth instructing Parker to enforce conformity in the Church of England, leading to some clergymen being deprived of their living for refusing to comply.

Well now, last time it was the Elizabethan settlement, if you remember, and I was trying to put you an Elizabethan picture of it, and explain to you some of the factors which made her resolve that she wasn't going to change her religious settlement, she wasn't going to give the Puritans any rope, if one may put it that way. Now we are going to look at the Puritans themselves, carry on with the story seen through their eyes, and consider the first of the engagements in which the Puritans tried their strength, the controversy concerning ceremonies. Let's pick up this story with the return of the exiles from the Swiss cities to which they'd gone, Geneva, Zurich, Strasbourg, well of course they're not all Swiss, Strasbourg and Frankfurt are Germany, so is Worms, Basel, Switzerland, cities in Germany and Switzerland I should be saying, to which they'd gone. They came back in 1558, hoping that reformation would be carried further under Elizabeth than it had been under Edward VI. John Knox, that Kenny fellow, writing from Geneva as soon as the news of the death of Leary came through, suggested that they should all work out a common policy, in effect, a common policy before they went home, and in effect go home with an ultimatum in their corporate pocket, all resolved to stand for the same thing. But oddly enough, I think it was because Knox's personal stock was low in the eyes of some of the exiles, nobody took this suggestion seriously, and they just went back one by one, not as an organised body, not with any organised policy, simply waiting and hoping and looking to see what in the providence of God would be forthcoming in the way of a settlement. Knox himself wrote a little tract called Admonition to England, summoning the Queen and the Parliament of England to set up a preaching ministry, church discipline, and schools, interesting the humanist touched there, schools in England as soon as possible. It seems that nobody in England took any notice of it. You'll note, by the way, from what I've said already, that these Marian exiles have a Lutheran approach to questions of church order, they've no objection to bishops, no objection to taking over an established form of ecclesiastical hierarchy, no objection to the idea, I should be saying, of a book of common prayer. More radical objections were to be developed later, but they didn't exist at this stage, provided that the gospel was established, the Marian reformers would be happy, really, with any form of church order. And certainly they're happy that the civil power, the Queen and her Parliament, should establish the form of church order that England was going to exhibit. They were happy, in other words, to acknowledge the royal supremacy in matters of religion, and this must be understood, this was part of their point of view. So back they went to England, and what did they find? Well, they found, as the years went by, that Elizabeth, though when she came to the throne she was only a girl in her middle twenties, a person you would have expected to be vulnerable to persuasion, Elizabeth proved unexpectedly strong-minded for reasons of her own, which she didn't always make public to her subjects, she would not go any further in reforming the prayer book than her act of uniformity of 1559. Right from the start, she showed her spirit by refusing to allow John Knox into the kingdom, and she showed it also by refusing to offer any official positions, bishoprics, deaneries, or what not, to those of the Marian exiles who had come back from Geneva. Those who had been of Geneva had been with that wretched fellow Knox, and they'd been able to drink of the tradition of their equally wretched fellow Kelvin, and they were not fit to hold office in the Church of England. That was Elizabeth's mentality, that was her attitude. At Nathans, fairly common, on page 178 of Tudor Puritanism, she preferred to see the English Protestant Church sink into a state of mildly scandalous torpor, I like that phrase, most of world Anglicanism is still in it, mildly scandalous torpor, than to give it capable leadership that might in time disturb her political equilibrium. So the Geneva group, who were in fact the largest group of returned exiles, were not given any positions of eminence in the Church of England at all. But she gave bishoprics to some of the returned exiles. The most distinguished of, and the most distinguished of the exiles who received bishoprics at that time were Parker, Cox, whom we met at Frankfurt, Grundle, who'd been at Frankfurt, G-R-I-N-D-A-L, by the way, and Jewell, John Jewell, who became Bishop of Salisbury. Now, all these men took office as bishops in the Church of England only after deep heart-searching. Because in fact, they disliked the ceremonies of the Book of Common Prayer, specifically the use of the surface, and the use of the Eucharistic vestments, and the sign of the cross in baptism, and the fact that any saint's days at all were kept, even scriptural ones, and the use of the ring in marriage, and the practice of kneeling at communion. They wished, as heartily as any of the brethren at Frankfurt had wished, to get rid of these features. They'd become so associated with superstition in the days when Rome held sway, that it really didn't seem appropriate, to state it no more strongly, that a reformed church should retain them. Furthermore, these nominated bishops found that one condition which the Queen imposed upon them of taking office was that they should exchange some of the endowments of their fees for less wealthy endowments. So, in effect, the Queen and her royal treasury would make on the exchange. This was something which Elizabeth imposed off her own bet as a condition of a man becoming a bishop. Legally, she was entitled to do that as supreme governor of the church. So, the price of taking office for these men was that they accepted certain ceremonial features in worship which they didn't like, and they had to accept the impoverishing of the endowments of their fees. They didn't like it one little bit, but they accepted it, hoping, as, of course, they were quite entitled to hope, after the state of things in English religion had changed so many times in the previous thirty years, they hoped that there would soon be more reformation under Elizabeth. Nobody realised that Elizabeth intended to stand past. So they took these jobs, they resolved, as Grimdal wrote in a letter that's quoted on that in page 179, if you want to look it up, not, quote, not to desert our churches for the sake of a few ceremonies and those not unlawful in themselves. Well, that sums up the mentality, and so these men accepted office. Bishop Ricks ordineries were offered to some others, too, but they declined them. Bishop Coverdale, who's taken up the work on the English Bible where Tyndale left it off, declined to be an Elizabethan bishop on these terms. John Fox, the martyrologist, declined to have a job in the ecclesiastical establishment, so did Thomas Sampson, whom we met, you remember, as the convert, friend and biographer of John Bradford. And these men simply lived on occasional fees for preaching and occasional payments for pieces of writing. Sampson eventually got a job in Oxford University as Dean of Christchurch. But there were quite a number of exiles, a lot of the Geneva party, who just weren't offered any jobs of significance at all. Or rather, who just didn't take the jobs of significance. The Geneva people, I'm sorry, that's a misleading sentence. The Geneva people, as I said, weren't even offered them. These other men, though offered them, didn't take them. Well, what happened during the first two or three years while Elizabeth's establishment was settling down is that those who didn't want to use the offensive ceremonies and where the surplus and the Eucharistic vestments just didn't. Communications throughout England, remember, at this time were bad. It was hard in any case to keep tabs on what men were doing in the parish churches of the country. And it was easy enough to get away with this kind of non-conformity. But in any case, for the first few years nobody was taking any action against it. But that situation didn't last too long. And now we get to the controversy proper. Understand again, before we go any further, what precisely was the issue here. It wasn't at this stage that a reformed, well, at least what has gone down in the books, as a reformed line as contrasted with a luceran line on ceremonies was being taken by the Puritans. They hadn't got at the issue as clear as that. And incidentally, this so-called reformed line was not the line of Calvin, but that's the detail. They weren't, in other words, arguing that nothing ought to be done in the worship of God for which there isn't explicit scripture precepts or at any rate approved scripture examples. All they were saying, at least when the controversy started, is that these particular ceremonies are associated with superstition to such an extent that, on the one hand, nobody ought to be compelled to use them and, on the other hand, every wise and right-minded minister will surely want to discontinue them and ought to be allowed to do so. The thought of the surplus, sorry, the use of the surplus, was supposed to carry with it the thought that ministers, the people who used to be called priests, are a quite distinct sort of person from lay folks with a special holiness all their own which the surplus symbolically expressed. And the sign of the cross on the child's forehead in baptism was associated with the thought of mechanical baptismal regeneration, the idea that when the sign of the cross was made it did something to the child. And the use of the ring in marriage, though it was held, was bound up with the thought that marriage was a sacrament and that this was the sign of the sacrament, the matter, if you like, of the sacrament. No theologian had ever said this, but it was a popular idea and the Puritans felt it important that people be disabused of it. Equally, kneeling to receive the communion was held to imply veneration of the elements even despite the black rubric which now, of course, was gone. And the Puritans were simply saying that in holy worship, in a reformed church, it was inexpedient to have ceremonies that were so tainted in people's minds with superstitious ideas as were these. So that was the contention and here's the account of the controversy. Elizabeth, remember, is convinced that uniformity is necessary for peace in the nation and she is convinced that the church ought to be, she's convinced that as a matter of loyalty to herself, church people ought to be content with the establishment that she set up. She was convinced, in other words, that non-conformity was disloyalty and indeed, when people began to separate from the church that she regarded as her church, well, she regarded it as a positively treasonable action. In 1564, she resolved that she would take up the slack where the ceremonial non-conformity was concerned and get everyone to conform as they should. So she told her bishop, whom she regarded, you remember, as her lackeys there to execute her will in the church, that she wanted uniformity of clerical dress enforced. In a matter of the surface, she didn't insist on everyone wearing the last vestment, but she did insist on every minister wearing the surface. She passed on the news to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Parker. He was in a difficult position. He knew that many men had a conscience about wearing the surface and he didn't want to precipitate any trouble. So his first move was to write a letter to Samson, who is now installed in his deanery at Christchurch, Oxford, and to a friend of Samson's, another Puritan, Laurence Humphrey, who is president of Magdalen College, Oxford. Spelled M-A-G-D-A-L-E-N, by the way, in case you didn't know. But in Oxford and Cambridge, it's pronounced Magdalen. Well, as they parted, Parker sent this letter to Samson and Humphrey, asking them this question. Is the surface a thing indifferent? A thing, therefore, about which, according to Lutheran theory, as Melanchthon had set it out, the governor, the supreme governor of the church, the civil power, could lawfully prescribe uniformity for the sake of good order and edification. Well, that is the right question for him to ask. Is the surface a thing indifferent that may be lawfully prescribed? If it's not a thing indifferent, then why not? If, in other words, it ought to be a matter of conscience, well, you explain the reason why. The answer which Samson and Humphrey sent to this letter from Parker was along this line. It was stated in terms of an ideal, set out in terms of an ideal for a reformed church. Granted, they said, the surface is a thing indifferent in itself. It hasn't got any necessary doctrinal meaning attached to it. It isn't a thing necessarily and intrinsically either. But yet, no one can deny that it's been defiled by association. That it has been so associated with this false idea of the extra-special holiness of the clergy that it's inexpedient to use it. And therefore, in the best sort of reformed church, it won't be imposed and made compulsory upon anybody. Because the church will be in a less than ideal state if it is. Well, that, as you see, was a theologically good and discreet answer which could be defended in debate if need be. Parker's reply was also, however, judicious. He made the point, which is obviously true, that the abuse of a thing doesn't destroy the right use of it. That order in the church is a good thing and, so he maintains, the use of the surface makes for a more decent order in worship than there'd otherwise be for if you didn't make men wear the surface, says Parker, there's no telling what they would wear in conducting divine service. And Parker went on, the argument that these things are defiled by association shouldn't be taken too seriously because this particular clerical garment goes back long before the Roman abuses came in. It goes right back in its history to the patristic period and has not got any necessary association with Roman era at all. So, in my judgment, says Parker, this argument that these things are so evil that they mustn't be enforced fails. And the argument that the surface makes for good order is a sufficiently strong argument to warrant the present legal order of the Church of England. Well, Naphon was deftly right to say that in the mouth of Parker and other bishops who were later to reason in this way, what you were seeing was, I quote his phrase, a rationalization by reluctant men of a position forced on them from without. For one knows from their reaction to the prospect of becoming bishops and accepting the surface that they weren't really too thrilled by it. But yet they thought it could be defended and that it as bishops they were bound to defend it as best they could against the Puritan objections. Well, that was the exchange, that was the learned discussion that went on in 1564. But then Elizabeth told Parker that he must start using the big stick. She sent him a letter instructing him to enforce conformity and no messing. He didn't want to do it, but in 1566 he issued a document called simply Advertisement, which prescribed for all clergymen in the Church of England and obliged all bishops to enforce of the Church of England the wearing of this surface. And a few refused and were deprived of their living, which they accepted. They didn't rebel, they simply worked on the principle on which all the English reformers had worked up to this date, the principle of passive resistance. If the civil authority tells you to do what in good conscience you can't do, well, you decline to do it, but then, recognising God's ordinance of civil government, you submit to the punishment which this particular civil government imposes upon you. There were a lot of pamphlets published regarding this. A lot of petitions sent up to Parliament and to bishops asking that this rule be not enforced against such and such a person. To which the bishops replied by invoking the further argument, which hadn't come into the debate as yet, that it was a Christian duty to obey the Queen. To obey, that is, the one whom God had set on the throne to order the Church's affairs. And that it really was an act of disloyalty and a consummation act to resist the Queen's wishes as well as resisting the letter of the law in this particular matter. The Puritans, from their side, retorted, Has the Queen any right to command things which are doubtfully scriptural and further ought not, they pressed the point, ought not the individual minister to be allowed to use his discretion on things indifferent? But the arguing achieved nothing. Parker persisted in enforcing the requirements of the advertisement and in fact only a very small number of those who were deprived stayed permanently out of their livings. Most of them climbed down, conformed, got livings again and carried on. At a certain stage in the debate the Puritans wrote to continental divines, Bullinger and Walter, his assistants in Zurich. But the Zurich divines had already been written to by Anglican divines and they wouldn't support the Puritans in their stand against the surface. And the other what do you call it ceremonies which came into the dispute. So really this particular Puritan protest fizzled out and this round of the battle ended with the Puritans quite definitely having lost. They climbed down. Their protest failed. They weren't an organised body. And they weren't in fact able to maintain their position beyond 1566 1567. The dispute subsided. Conformity was enforced. But the argument about the vestments went on until the prayer book was made illegal in 1645. But into the situation had come the argument which the Puritans used to each other that in a situation like this the lesser of two evil of two evil should be chosen and rather than be deprived for non-conformity it was right to conform under protest so that men might still retain the benefits of their ministry. Cartwright, whom you'll meet in a moment the leader of the Presbyterianising Puritans in 1570 and Cartwright's successor as the head of that group, a man named Travers and several other Puritans including a Jacobean Puritan named Prince, who wrote a book on this subject in 1618 all argued this point and carried the party with them. Under protest the Puritans conformed. This became the standard Puritan line. Most of the Puritan ministers about whom I'm going to tell you, I shall probably begin telling you next class, were conformists. Their Puritanism didn't consist in ceremonial non-conformity it consisted in something else. But they all of them, as Richard Dexter who knew many of them, said on one occasion, they all conformed under protest and all of them, I quote his phrase, would rather be excused. This is then what the majority did. A few didn't. A few stuck out and got into trouble down the years for ceremonial non-conformity, but the majority did. And that's all that I need to tell you about the debate concerning ceremony. Except for this final point that the leaders in this round of the conflict were Marian exiles. Older men that is who after the 1660s were really too old to do any more fighting and moved out of the leadership of the movement. In the next round about which I'm going to tell you the controversy concerning Presbyterianism, leadership was passed to a new generation, a younger generation, men literally of a different generation from the other men. And this means a certain change of spirit amongst the Puritans. The young men had more heart for fighting and they had I think it's fair to say more truculence in the way in which they argued their case. Well let's get on to this now. Unless there are questions first that you want to ask or points you want to raise about the dispute. Everybody happy? No, it was during these years the 1560s that the first non-conformist appeared and I think I'm right in saying it was during this time that the word it simply denotes you see a person in the Church of England who doesn't do all that the prayer book tells him he should in the conduct of worship. He is a non-conformist to the established order. And the word just became part of the English religious vocabulary. Baxter writing in the 1660s speaks regularly of the old non-conformists and the old non-conformity. And the word is in contemporary documents. It changed its meaning I may say in English usage after 1662 then it was applied to the people who had actually left the Church of England because they couldn't accept all the established order. And then it became a regular name for the so-called English free churches. Oh, well the system is this. That the Church of England in the medieval period when the parish system was being extended throughout the country was endowed by various lords of the manor. You see from the Middle Ages onwards most of the land in England belonged to somebody and most of the parish churches in England planted and built as they were in the centres of population were under the special patronage of somebody. Well the somebody in question if he was a wealthy lord would regularly endow the church. That is he would make over to the parish church and to the incumbent of the living so much land from which the income should be given to the incumbents. Or if he didn't make the land over it would be enacted and sort of written into the title deeds of the parish church that on so much of the land of the particular area of population where the church was and the man served tithes should be paid to him. Tithes of all the crops you see 10%. And he would then have a tithe barn near the church in which he could store it and that would be his salary. This of course was modelled on the Old Testament system of supporting the Levites. And with the land and their income that were made over to the churches and the tithes and sometimes the endowments came in other forms, in financial forms. But this was the standard thing, the standard pattern of tithes and endowments. With this you see you had an income which the incumbent of the parish church knew he would get. And it would keep him alive. That was his income. This meant that in the medieval period a parson lived on his tithes and he didn't live on any of the money that was given by members of the parish in what we would now call the collection. Such money as was given in those days was put to the relief of the poor. This idea actually of using monetary collections in the church only really got off the ground in the Reformation. Luther made it a big thing in the Lutheran churches that you have a church chest and people are expected to live in the collection as part of their service of God and this must be used for the relief of the poor. And the parish chest on the Lutheran pattern became a standard thing in the English churches of the Reformation. But I say this simply to make the point that the money didn't in fact go to the minister's salary. He got his salary from the tithes. And in the case of bishops and their bishoprics the bishops had in many cases in the Middle Ages themselves. And by fair means or foul they'd acquired to themselves enormous estates from which all the income in terms of crops and what was paid by tenant farmers and so on went into their own episcopal treasuries. Well, what happened right from the start of the English Reformation was that church lands began to be pillaged no, not pillaged, just appropriated by one means or another by a series of legal tricks in very many cases by the crown and by the new nobility who were growing up in the country the new nobles. Henry VIII started it when he closed down all the English monasteries as one of his first acts after breaking with the Pope and confiscated all their lands and all their revenues. They simply went to the crown to swell the royal treasury. And then the nobles of England got the same idea and they found ways and means of appropriating church lands and this is simply Elizabeth carrying on with the same pattern. The bishoprics, they'd been already deprived, most of them at any rate had been deprived of some of their lands but Elizabeth wanted more still and the point of the exchange was to leave the bishop with less in the way of lands and income than they had before so that she would make on the exchange. Another thing incidentally that I may say at this point since we've started talking about this in the Middle Ages when churches were founded in England, as I say they were founded on somebody's land in centres of population of which a particular lord of the manor was the boss and normally he took to himself the right of appointing a priest to be the priest in that church and serve this particular group of people and this also became part of the English common law that such and such a nobleman has the right of presentation to the living, as we say, in such and such a church. This isn't of course the Presbyterian pattern of churches electing their own, choosing their own ministers. This is quite a different pattern. It goes right back to the feudal system. Just as the lord of the manor looked after his tenants in other ways, so he gave them their minister. This system actually was to benefit the Puritans very much at a later stage because where a nobleman was in sympathy with the Puritan movement, he would appoint Puritans to the living of which he had the right of presentation and he was usually strong enough, I mean he had enough lawyers on his side and strings he could pull to prevent the bishop from taking any effective steps against these chaps to enforce conformity. So you get individual Puritans living under the protection of rich noblemen and if you read their writings you find that treatise after treatise is dedicated to such and such a nobleman sir something or lord something else. My honoured and esteemed patron and the lord. You see? This was part of the system and it was to help the Puritans at a later stage. Any more queries or shall we move on? Oh yes, it's just a loose-sleeved white sack. We've only seen a presbyter before. Now the sack usually stops. Then, according to the older rules, there's no it's certainly true, well wait a minute, this is true. When Anglo-Catholic the Anglo-Catholics immediately said you could tell a man's church ideals by looking at them. Also they introduced the clerics but they set the fashion of having very shallow little round collars like their Roman brethren had this is mid-nineteenth century so that you could tell the difference between one sort and the other by the depth of the perhaps you don't care but I thought you might be interested. It was called it was about not simply setting up church courts and this is the story as I told you there was a new generation emerging the first generation of Elizabethan Puritans as distinct from the old generation, excuse me, generation of Edwardian Puritans Cambridge in particular in the 1560s became a hotbed of Puritans who wouldn't wear the surplus and generally showed their sympathy with the Puritan protesters in a number of ways It is to be remembered I think before we embark on this part of the story that young men men of university age, men in their twenties are inclined to be enthusiasts and extremists they're ready sometimes too ready to follow any active leader who waves the flag they don't always act judiciously and they are prone to riot, excess satire criticism of their elders and all kinds of what we might call umpty action I don't know if you use that word over here we do in England umptiness is an English word to describe this ebullient contentious frame of mind I expect you know what I'm talking about and it was this sort of chap who was right at the centre of this next chapter of the story, where we divide the story into three paragraphs first the leaders, second the arguments third the activities of the Puritan Presbyterianizing movement. Leaders first Thomas Cartwright, himself a young man born in 1535 had been appointed Professor of Divinity in Cambridge University in 1569 when he was 34 and in the winter of 1569-1570 he gave his first course of lectures and they were on the Acts of the Apostles they were exegetical lectures with general theological reflections based upon the exegesis of God and in the course of his reflections he criticised the established order of government in the Church of England and he advocated this was simply in his classroom, he wasn't agitating he was just putting out ideas protected no doubt as he believed by the ordinary conventions of academic freedom putting out ideas for people to consider. He was in fact advocating pretty strongly the following changes in the Elizabethan establishment abandon diocesan episcopacy and the two provinces of Canterbury and York, each with its archbishop abandon all the elaborate paraphernalia of diocesan administration that traditionally went with them with the bishops that is church courts centred on the diocese and a lot of laymen chancellors administering church affairs at the diocesan headquarters scrub all that, said Cartwright and replace it by simple Presbyterianism for this, he maintained, is the apostolic order this is what we see in the Acts of the Apostles this means that each parish will choose its own minister no man will have the right to call himself a minister who is not actually a pastor of a church, a man who that's a little congregational touch as you see but it was part of Cartwright's platform each man who wants to be a minister will seek election by a church as distinct from going to a bishop and asking him to ordain him each parish will have its kirk session and each group of parishes will have its presbytery meeting and deacons in each parish church will be men who care for the poor laymen not junior ministers who are in practice as it were for the presbyterists and further said Cartwright all Christian men ought to seek this reform, each according to his own vocation ministers should preach the necessity of it magistrates by which he meant the queen and parliaments and justices of the peace should use what legislative and executive authority they'd been given to work for it and bring it in well in fact academic freedom didn't protect Cartwright he was tilting at Elizabeth's establishment his ideas were widely discussed in the university word got to the queen's palace in Whitehall, back came a demand for coercive action so with the queen having expressed her will Cartwright was deposed from his professorship for having put out unlawful views in his lectures and in the next year he was expelled from the university he paid a short visit to Geneva to see how Presbyterianism really works and when he came back in 1571 or early 1572 he found that he'd become a Puritan hero because you see he'd become a Puritan martyr in the ordinary sense of the word remember the Puritan ideal of heroism here was a man who for loyalty to the truth had made a bold witness had refused to climb down when he was challenged by authority and had stuck to his testimony even when it involved personal loss now such a man became a hero as we saw amongst the Puritans and Cartwright found that there was a whole crowd of young men who regarded him as their hero, their leader, and who were prepared to follow him and do anything that he said but already there were others emerging into the situation willing to work with him and incur the responsibility of similar ill-treatment and similar similar loss that Cartwright had suffered for the sake of the testimony in 1572 in fact I gave you the wrong date for Cartwright's return, he was still at the beginning of 1572, he only came back in the middle of the year in 1572 a book was sent up to Parliament called An Admonition to the Parliament it was the product of a committee of Puritans that had been written by two young Puritans named Field and Wilcox it was a pretty vigorous challenge to Parliament to do away with the defects of the Book of Common Prayer and to set up a Presbyterian form of church order it was tilting of the establishment and Field and Wilcox could not have been surprised when they got both of them a year in prison for writing this seditious document if you'd like to know what was in it I could well indeed next time I will I'll read you a summary of the contents of the Admonition to the Parliament it was an important piece of work it became a kind of Puritan platform a classic item a sort of classic reference point in the Puritan controversy it was the first time that the Puritans had gone directly to Parliament and it was in fact a very able if a very vigorous statement of what they were after so I'll begin next class by giving you a summary of what was in the Admonition to the Parliament when the Presbyterian Puritans in a very real sense nailed their we'll leave it there any queries or points of discussion about what I've just said then all's well, end of class for today thank you