Elizabethan Controversialists. Peter Milward
to frame their wills and doings according to the law of God, by instructing and admonishing one another, yea and by correcting and punishing all willful persons and contemners of the same.”
In these words we already find English Puritanism not just as a body of opposition to the Anglican establishment but rather as an establishment in its own right, based on an ideal which it professes to find in the Bible, particularly in Matt.xviii, where Christ says to his disciples, “Tell the Church”, but which it derives from the actual model of Calvin’s Church in Geneva. In these words, too, we see the English Puritans as Presbyterian in their theory of Church government. What they chiefly criticize are not so much moral abuses in the established Church of England, any more than their Lutheran predecessors had been chiefly critical of moral abuses in the Church of Rome. They are critical of the Church itself as established. They have their own theory of Church polity, as also of State polity, which is radically different from that of their Anglican adversaries. Between two such systems there can be no compromise, though in fact the Church of England was itself a form of compromise, based on expediency rather than any theory, between Catholic tradition and Protestant reform.
On this point, Field in his more negative View of Popish Abuses has little to add to the positive statements of Wilcox on discipline. Only in his closing commentary on the articles of religion, “which only concern the true Christian faith and the doctrine of the sacraments”, does he admit that the bishops “hold the substance together with us”, “apart from a point or two, which are either too sparingly or else too darkly set down”. Here there is as yet no great difference between Anglican and Puritan. Their difference is rather to be found in “the effect and virtue thereof”, since true doctrine should naturally lead, as he repeats after Wilcox, to “a true ministry according to the word instituted, discipline exercised, sacraments purely and sincerely ministered”.
It wasn’t long after the publication of such a document before the two authors found themselves close prisoners in Newgate and even “next-door to hanging”. Two public sermons were preached at Paul’s Cross against them and their Admonition, and a book was published by the bishops with a collection of its offending passages and a confutation of them. All this prompted the Puritans to issue a second anonymous Admonition, whose author has never been identified with any certainty. While maintaining the basic positions of Wilcox and Field, he adopts a less aggressive, more reasonable – but for that reason, less memorable – attitude.
In the first place, the author considers the various objections that have been voiced against the first Admonition – that it has ventured “to touch the quick too near” and even as it were to “uncover our fathers’ privities” (as Cham did with Noah), and also that its language is “too hot for this time”. On each point, however, he defends the admonishers. He further presents his treatise “as a second Admonition, with the like mind as afore by them, to crave redress of the great abuses in our reformation of religion”, and as another appeal “to this high court of Parliament from all other courts”. The only substantial difference he notes between this and the former Admonition is that “the other books are short” and “have not so much told you how to reform as what to reform”, whereas what he now offers is “a larger discourse”, in order to supply “something that may make to the expressing of the matter, so plainly that you may have sufficient light to proceed by”.
With these words the author embarks, with occasional echoes of the criticisms voiced by Wilcox and Field, on the first of a series of similar declarations of Ecclesiastical Discipline professedly drawn “out of the Word of God”. In itself it may seem insignificant, but it has a close connection with that Directory of Church Government which was published with authority in 1644 from a manuscript “found in the study of the most accomplished divine, Mr.Thomas Cartwright, after his decease”, and which was described as “anciently contended for and, as far as the times would suffer, practised by the first Non-conformists in the days of Queen Elizabeth”.
Bibliographical Note
1 An Admonition to the Parliament. (The first of “Two Treatises ye have here ensuing”, followed by the second, “A View of the Popish Abuses yet remaining in the English Church, for the which godly Ministers have refused to subscribe”). 1572 (RC 112)
2 A Second Admonition to the Parliament. 1572 (RC 113)
3 Certain Articles, collected and taken (as it is thought) by the Bishops out of a little book entitled, An Admonition to the Parliament, with an Answer to the same… 1572 (RC 114)
c) The Anglican Defender, John Whitgift (1530-1604)
If the Anglican champion in the sixties was John Jewel, his place in the seventies may be seen as taken by John Whitgift. Only the combat was now no longer against the external enemy, the old Papists, but against the internal enemy, the new Puritans. In the sixties, moreover, Jewel had been the attacker, provoking the Papists to controversy with his Challenge Sermon and his Apology, but now Whitgift appeared as the defender of the established Church of England against the attacks of the Puritan admonitions. Then the difference had been largely on matters of faith and doctrine, but now it was chiefly on matters of Church government and discipline.
Once the Admonition was published, it clearly called for some kind of official answer. The two sermons at Paul’s Cross and the pamphlet put out by the bishops entitled A View of the Church, which led to the second Admonition, were hardly a sufficient form of refutation. Already, however, a more solid work was under way, entrusted to the one man who seemed to be chosen by destiny for dealing with the Puritan menace. Earlier on in the reign John Whitgift, then fellow of Peterhouse, had been disposed to sympathize with the Puritan rejection of the surplice at chapel services, but he came to be persuaded otherwise and so to follow a swift path of preferment both at Cambridge University and in the Anglican Church. The turning-point was slight, even trivial in appearance, but it made all the difference between the path of honour that took him all the way to Canterbury and the path of exile that took his Puritan opponent by devious ways to Germany and Geneva. This alternative is significantly stated in his Answer to the Admonition. On the one hand, he points out, “such as consent in wearing of this apparel consent also in other points of doctrine and keep the peace of the Church”, whereas, on the other hand, “such as refuse the same apparel not only dissent and disagree among themselves, but fall into divers and strange opinions without stay and slander the Gospel with their contentiousness and tear in pieces the Church of Christ with their factions and schisms”. For this reason, both when he was appointed Master of Trinity College in 1567 and even more when he became vice-chancellor of the university in 1570, Whitgift stood out as a determined foe of the Puritan party and in particular of their acknowledged leader, Thomas Cartwright. It was therefore to him that the Anglican bishops turned as their champion against the challenge implied in the Admonition.
From the outset the position of Whitgift, like that of Parker before him, was based on practical rather than theoretical grounds, namely, the importance of comely order and peace within the Church of Christ. He was quite satisfied with the extent of ecclesiastical reform as it had been carried out under Queen Elizabeth, and he was indignant at the perversity of the Puritans in looking for their model of reform away from Canterbury to Geneva. Not that he was himself opposed to Calvin, but what was good for Geneva, he maintained, wasn’t necessarily good for England. “We have to consider,” he said, “what is most meet for this Church and State, and not to follow other as though we were children.” The Puritans, of course, claimed to be following the model not of Geneva but of the Bible, but Whitgift flatly told them, “I find no one certain and perfect kind of government prescribed or commanded in the Scriptures to the Church of Christ”. Much has been left, he pointed out, to the determination of Church authorities according to circumstances of place and time, and though these determinations may of themselves “be but trifles”, yet when they are commanded by the authorities “they are no trifles”. Not that this implies any curtailment of Christian liberty, as the Puritans complain, for, he explains, “Christian liberty is not a licence