Appeals to antiquity in the making of the Elizabethan settlement

Abstract

This study covers ground well-travelled by accomplished, and sometimes eminent, historians. My hope is that I may have asked a new question of familiar sources. But I am conscious of how much my answer owes, not merely to recent works on some of the figures mentioned in these pages and on the various aspects of the Elizabethan Settlement, but also to the efforts of older historians for whom my admiration has steadily mounted over these past few years. Preceded by scholars of the calibre of Matiland, Neale and Pollen (to mention but a few), and the exhaustive inquiries of today's specialists, one even wonders whether worthwhile questions are left to be posed about the happenings of the first few years of Elizabeth's reign. My query has to do with a particular mode of argument. The phrase, 'the making of the Elizabethan Settlement', is meant to be sufficiently broad to encompass the statements of those who used this argument - mainly in public debate - not merely when the terms of the 1559 religious legislation were in the process of being formulated, but also in the first years of the Settlement's implementation. The common denominator in the items considered is that, roughly speaking, they all represent initial reactions to the first parliament's enactments. There is the official justification, incorporated into the statutes themselves and other documents connected with the Settlement; the reaction of the Marian ecclesiastics to the new legislation; the defence of it that was offered by the reform divines who supported Elizabeth; and finally, the first published assessments of the papist theologians, which only came after they had established themselves, with some kind of stability, in the Low Countries. In every case, whether it be to justify the Settlement or to condemn it, the appeal to antiquity features prominently. I have attempted to ask why; and also to see how the argument is handled, and to what effect, by the various parties. Show more