Talk:Elizabethan Religious Settlement/revision 870547421
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The Elizabethan Religious Settlement, which was made during the reign of Elizabeth I, was a response to the religious divisions in England during the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI and Mary I. This response, described as "The Revolution of 1559",[1] was set out in two Acts. The Act of Supremacy of 1558 re-established the Church of England's independence from Rome, with Parliament conferring on Elizabeth the title Supreme Governor of the Church of England, while the Act of Uniformity of 1559 outlined what form worship in English Church should take by restoring the 1552 Book of Common Prayer, although modified a little in a more Catholic direction to get it passed by the Lords 21 to 18, and to mollify the conservative majority, Christopher Haigh, English Reformations, Religion, Politics and Society under the Tudors, 1993, pp. 235, 240-242 ISBN 978-0-19-822162-3; Diarmid MacCullough, The Later Reformation in England, 1547-1603, 1990, p. 24, 26 ISBN 0-333-69331-0.
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It's a matter of debate what the Queen's personal beliefs were. For a long time it was thought she favored the moderate Protestantism in a heavily disguised Catholic 1549 Prayer Book, MacCullough, p. 241 (quoting J.E. Neale). It has been argued "Elizabeth and her Protestant advisers had wanted a thoroughgoing Reformation; they had to accept a half-hearted Reformation," MacCullough, ibid. Or that here beliefs were a "discreet evangelicalism" as displayed by her step-mother Catherine Paar amid the splendours and continuing ceremonial worship of Henry VIII's Court in its last years: Protestantism, indeed, but not in the uncompromising form prevailing in the Church of Edward VI," pp. 26-26. Although she "had, with some difficulty, achieved an instant Reformation in law,"..."it was very different in the churches"..."series of minor adjustments, as parish clergy conformed little by little to the pressures of authority," Haigh. p. 242. At the center power Reformation was decisive: at the parish level it was fudged and fumbled as before, Haigh, p. 242. A number of other measures taken after 1559 to 1571 confirmed the moderate stance and halted any further moves to radicalism: the publication of the moderate Protestant Thirty-Nine Articles, the retention of Church music, medieval canon law and the affirmation that nought would be taught that contradicted the Church Fathers and Catholic Bishops. By the end of her reign "the political Reformations" had "made parish Anglicans," the majority of the nation, "were de-catholicized but un-protestantized," Haigh, pp. 242 and 241. The flexibility of the Settlement, "rather against the will of many of its leaders," permitted a wide variety of opinions that make it difficult to draw ecact confessional boundaries," MacCullough, p. 27, except for determined minorities.
The Papal bull Regnans in Excelsis, issued on 25 February 1570 by Pope Pius V, declared "Elizabeth, the pretended Queen of England and the servant of crime" to be a heretic, released all of her subjects from any allegiance to her, and excommunicated any who obeyed her orders. The bull, written in Latin, is named from its incipit, the first three words of its text, which mean "ruling from on high" (a reference to God). Among the queen's alleged offences, it lists that "she has removed the royal Council, composed of the nobility of England, and has filled it with obscure men, being heretics."
From 1571 there were no further changes for the rest of the reign. In the succeeding decades the civil and ecclesiastical authorities, more confident, enforced the Settlement against Catholic recusants and Protestant Dissidents who were perhaps 20% and 10% of the population by the end of the reign in 1603. In the opinion MacCullough, p. 141, "The whole story of the later English Reformations which produced the Church of England is a tale of retreat from the Protestant advance of 1550, when in the struggle between Hooper and his more cautious episcopal colleagues, it seemed for a moment as if the work of Reformation would progress towards the standard set by the best reformed Churches of the continent. Hooper's defeat meant that the 1552 Prayer Book represented the most radical stage which the official English Reformation ever reached: whatever plans Cranmer had to on with further reform"..."ended with Edward VI's death in 1553. From then on the Protestantism of the English Church was in a state of arrested development: although continental advances could sway the minds and hearts of the majority of activist clergy and laity"..."they could not"..."move the structure any further forward from its idiosyncratic anchorage in the medieval past"..."...from the 1590s a group of churchmen began boldly to enunciate views which took the English Church in a very different direction, and which for a brief period in the 1620s and 1630s, succeeded in capturing its leadership," ibid. pp. 141-142. The result is a Church that refuses to state decisively whether it is Protestant or Catholic, indeed, prefers to say it is both.