The Persecution Intensifies
The Catholics who had predicted that the Jesuit mission would bring heavier persecution were proved right. Elizabeth asked her people to judge between her and those who plotted against her crown and life. Parliament voted that reconciliation to Catholicism would count as high treason, that any priest who said Mass would pay, according to the book, a fine of two hundred marks and serve a year in prison, and that those who refused to attend Anglican services would pay twenty pounds a month, enough to ruin any but wealthy Catholics. Failure to pay meant arrest and confiscation of property. Soon the prisons were so crowded with Catholics that old castles had to serve as jails.
Hostility grew on every side and soon deepened with the execution of Mary Stuart and the conflict with Spain and Rome. In June 1583 a papal envoy presented Gregory XIII with a detailed plan to invade England through Ireland, France and Spain. The pope approved and preparations were made, but English spies learned of it, the government took countermeasures, and the invasion was postponed.
Laws Against Priests
Parliament retaliated with still harsher laws. All priests ordained since June 1559 who still refused the oath of supremacy were to leave the country within forty days or be executed as traitors, and anyone sheltering them would share their fate. Under this and other laws, the book reports, 123 priests and 60 laymen were executed during Elizabeth's reign, and perhaps some 200 more died in prison. Some Protestants protested against such severity, and some even turned Catholic; Cecil's grandson William fled to Rome in 1585 and submitted to the pope.
Many English Catholics opposed any violence against the state. One group sent the queen a humble petition in 1585 declaring their loyalty and begging that their sufferings be viewed with compassion. But Cardinal Allen, as if to say that England's measures deserved war, published a tract supporting the coming Spanish invasion. He attacked the queen's birth and private life with lurid slanders, urged English Catholics to rise against this "excommunicated heretic," and promised forgiveness of sins to anyone who helped depose her. English Catholics answered him in their own way: when the Armada came, they rallied bravely to the defense of England alongside the Protestants.
A War Continued by Other Means
After that victory the persecution of Catholics became a continuation of the war. Between 1588 and 1603, sixty-one priests and forty-nine laymen were executed, many of them with the brutal penalties then reserved for treason. In the year of the queen's death thirteen priests wrote asking her permission to remain in England. They rejected any attack on her right to the throne and denied the pope's power to depose her, but in conscience could accept no one but the pope as head of the Church. The letter reached her only a few days before she died, and no one knows whether it had any effect; yet it unknowingly laid down the principle by which, two centuries later, the religious question would be settled. Elizabeth died victorious in the greatest struggle of her reign, a victory marked by no darker stain than this.
The Puritans
Against an apparently weaker enemy, a handful of Puritans, Elizabeth could achieve little. These were people shaped by Calvin's teaching. Some had fled to Geneva in Mary Tudor's time; many had read the Bible translated and annotated by Calvinists in Geneva; some had read or heard John Knox's fierce criticisms; and some may have inherited the ideas of Wyclif's "poor priests," the Lollards. Taking the Bible as their infallible guide, they found in it nothing about the powers of bishops or the vestments Elizabeth had carried over from Catholicism into the Anglican Church; instead they found reasons why clergy should have no king but Christ. They accepted Elizabeth as head of the Church only because she opposed the pope, but at heart they rejected any state control of religion and hoped to bring the state under the rule of their own faith.
Around 1564 they were mockingly named Puritans because they wished to purify English Protestantism of every form of worship not found in the Bible. They fully accepted predestination, election and eternal damnation, and felt that only complete religious and moral discipline could save a person from hell. As they read the Scriptures with reverence in their homes on Sundays, the figure of Jesus almost faded against the background of the Old Testament, with its jealous and avenging Jehovah.
Cartwright and the Presbyterian Ideal
The Puritans opened their attack in 1569, when Thomas Cartwright, professor of divinity at Cambridge, pointed in his lectures to the contrast between the early Church, governed by elders, and the Anglican Church, governed by bishops. Many at the university agreed, but John Whitgift, master of Trinity College, denounced him to the queen and had him removed from his post in 1570. Cartwright went to Geneva, where under Theodore Beza he became firmly convinced of Calvinist church government. Returning to England, he and Walter Travers and others proclaimed the Puritan view of the Church: Christ had ordained that lay elders, chosen by parishes, provinces and nations, should govern the Church, and the assemblies so formed should regulate faith, worship and morals according to Scripture.
The first English parish organized on these principles was at Wandsworth in 1572, and presbyteries appeared in the eastern and central counties. By then most London Protestants and a majority of the House of Commons were Puritan. London artisans, stirred by Calvinist refugees from France and the Netherlands, applauded Puritan attacks on bishops and ceremonies. London merchants saw Puritanism as the bulwark of Protestantism against Catholicism, for the old Church had long looked askance at moneylending and the middle classes, whereas Calvin, though strict with them, approved of interest, industry and thrift. Even the queen's favorites saw advantages in Puritanism: Cecil, Leicester, Walsingham and Knollys regarded it as a firm defense should Mary Stuart ever come to the English throne.
The Queen Against the Puritans
But Elizabeth felt that the Puritan movement obstructed her effort to reduce religious division. She regarded Calvinism as the creed of John Knox, whom she never forgave for his attack on the rule of women. She mocked Puritan zeal even more than Catholic zeal. She still had some fondness for the crucifix and other religious symbols, and when iconoclasts in the early years of her reign smashed paintings, statues and stained glass in their fury, she compensated the victims and forbade any repetition. She did not consider herself fussy, but she was angered when some Puritans called the Prayer Book a selection from the "dunghill" of the Mass book and the High Commission a "little stinking ditch." She saw the choice of ministers by church councils and synods, free of state control, as a republican threat to monarchy, and believed that only royal power could keep England Protestant, since universal suffrage would bring back Catholicism.
She encouraged the bishops to suppress the nonconformists. Archbishop Parker banned their publications, silenced them in the churches and prevented their meetings. Puritan ministers had formed groups to discuss Scripture in public; Elizabeth ordered Parker to end these "prophesyings," and he did. His successor, Edmund Grindal, tried to protect the Puritans, and she suspended him. When he died in 1583 she made her new chaplain, John Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury, and he devoted himself to silencing the Puritans. He required all clergy to swear acceptance of the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Prayer Book and the royal supremacy, then summoned every dissenter before the High Commission and examined their conduct and beliefs so inquisitively that Cecil compared his methods to the Spanish Inquisition.