Who posed the greater threat to Elizabeth

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Who posed the greater threat to Elizabeth’s authority, the Protestants or the Catholics?

What Elizabeth faced were two main groups of opposition that could potentially diminish her royal supremacy – they were the Puritans and the Catholics. Unlike the Catholics, the puritans did not necessarily want to strip Elizabeth of her position as queen. Instead, they wanted for Elizabeth to remain in power, on the condition that she implemented more Protestant ideas. It could be argued that ultimately these two groups both had the same intention of bringing about change to Elizabeth’s religious settlement. However, the nature of threat they posed was, arguably, altogether very different.

The Puritans were a radical group (consisting of the Separatists, Conformists and Presbyterians) that branched out from the Protestants. Two issues, however, separated the two groups. Firstly, the speed at which the church was to be fully reformed – for Puritans it was to be done as swiftly as possible. Secondly, there was the issue of obedience to the princely power. Elizabeth insisted that in matters apathetic to salvation, the will of the prince must be obeyed. For the Puritans, if such things were not in the Bible, then a Christian was free to ignore them: for them, loyalty to God came before loyalty to the Prince, and a truly reformed Church had to be separated from the power of the monarch. Throughout the reign of Elizabeth I, the Puritan movement involved both a political and a social component. Politically, the movement attempted, mostly unsuccessfully, to have Parliament pass legislation to replace the hierarchical Church of England with a Presbyterian system, and to alter the 1559 Book of Common Prayer to remove elements considered odious by the Puritans. Socially, the Puritan movement called for a greater commitment to Jesus Christ for greater levels of personal holiness. Elizabeth looked upon all Puritans, including the majority of them who were moderate, with suspicion. This could suggest they posed a great threat as she felt the need to be wary of even the moderates. However, it could also be argued, seeing as she only looked upon them with suspicion, that they actually posed a small threat because she didn’t feel the need to progress her view. That being said, Elizabeth did regard the Presbyterians as a serious danger to her royal authority. The Presbyterians wanted to model the government of the Church, not just its theology, on the Calvinist system. This was objectionable to a monarch who required regularity for the sake of political strength and who, having established a national Church, saw no need for added debate. It can be argued the Presbyterian threat can be seen as less of a threat than Elizabethan propaganda made it appear. As apposed to the Catholics, the Puritan threat may be seen as more subtle and harder to deal with. Elizabeth’s power may have been weakened due to the intelligent way the Puritans went via Parliament. They opted to use Parliament as a way of passing laws and thus attempted to decrease Elizabeth’s power. Many Protestants, and not only those known as Puritans, were not satisfied with the 1559 religious settlement. They wanted to see an end to the remaining Catholic practices. The 1560s saw the Puritans seek further official reformation of the Church, while unofficially adapting the Prayer Book to create a more ‘godly’ Church at community level. When the Convocation of Canterbury met in 1563 to define the beliefs of the Church of England, Puritans sought to promote further reformation. In 1571 William Strickland introduced a Bill to Parliament to reform the Prayer Book and abolish the surplice. It was rejected but the Queen was forced to allow the 39 Articles to be given the status of an Act of Parliament, a move which she had overturned earlier, but which she now saw as necessary to contain the Puritan’s challenge. Thomas Cartwright called for the abolition of bishops and suggested their replacement by a Presbyterian Church organisation – he was later sacked. In 1572 John Field presented the ‘Admonitions to Parliament’, which were ‘warnings’, but they were rejected and Field was sent to prison. In 1575 Edmund Grindal was made Archbishop of Canterbury, and in 1576 he was ordered to suppress prophesying. The Queen assumed that these religious gatherings outside the formal arrangements of the Church promoted Presbyterian unrest, she therefore wanted them closed. Grindal, on the other hand, appreciated the value of prophesying as means of improving the quality of the parish clergy and he refused to suppress them. In 1577 he was suspended. John Whitgift was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in 1583 and, in 1584, Puritans organised petitions to Parliament criticising his methods. A ‘General Supplication’ for reform, based on evidence from 2537 parishes, was presented to Parliament in 1586. In 1587, a Puritan MP, Anthony Cope, introduced a pro-Presbyterian Bill to Parliament suggesting the abolition of all existing laws and customs of the Church and the establishment of a Presbyterian system of government. In 1588, the Martin Marprelate Tracts, which were violent attacks on the Church of England, further scandalised religious opinion and distanced political support from the Puritans. Separatist groups began to emerge. These groups saw themselves as the ‘saints’ of a true but invisible church and wanted to be separate from the Church of England.

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During the 1560s there was little threat from Catholicism. Several priests of the Church of England provided the official Church services in public and Catholic ones in private. Many Catholics maintained their traditional practices in private. In 1568 Mary, Queen of Scots arrived in England which posed a serious threat to Elizabeth’s royal supremacy. Catholics knew that if Elizabeth were to die without issue then her Catholic cousin, Mary, could take control of England. The Earls of Northumberland and Westmoreland launched a rebellion in 1569. The rebels all shared the same view about the religious settlement. The rebellion enjoyed ...

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