Doubt Among the Few
Religious conflict bred doubt among a growing minority and, in some places, outright unbelief. The variety of creeds, their attacks on one another, their militant intolerance, the clash of sects and the conduct of Christians made some realistic minds suspicious of theology in general. Roger Ascham, in The Scholemaster, dated by the book to 1563, attacked the Italianate Englishmen, men who in his view had brought home from Italy not only vanity in living but shameless opinions in religion. Such men, he wrote, valued Cicero's De Officiis above the epistles of Paul and a tale of Boccaccio above the stories of the Bible, counted Christian rites as fables, used Christ and the Gospel only to advance their policy, laughed in private at Protestant and papist alike, mocked the pope and railed at Luther, and openly professed themselves Epicureans in living and atheists in doctrine.
Cecil complained in 1569 that atheists and Epicureans, mockers of religion, were everywhere. John Strype reported in 1571 that many people avoided communion altogether and no longer attended church services. John Lyly remarked in 1579 that even among infidels there were no such sects, and no such unbelief as among scholars. Theologians wrote books against "atheism," a term that then often meant belief in God combined with denial of Christ's divinity. In 1579, 1583 and 1589 several people were executed for denying that divinity. Some playwrights, notably Greene, Kyd and Marlowe, were reputed unbelievers. Elizabethan drama, which in other ages mirrored life, conspicuously says little about the religious struggle and parades instead the legends of Greece and Rome.
The School of Night
In Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost (Act IV, Scene 3) there is a cryptic passage calling black the badge of hell, the hue of dungeons and "the school of night." Many have taken the last phrase to refer to the night meetings of Walter Raleigh, Thomas Harriot, Lawrence Keymis, perhaps Marlowe and the poet Chapman, and others, who gathered at Raleigh's country house at Sherborne to discuss astronomy, geography, chemistry, philosophy and theology. Harriot, apparently the group's intellectual leader, held, according to the antiquary Anthony Wood, strange opinions about Scripture and always rejected the old story of creation; he was said to have written a Philosophical Theology that discarded the Old Testament. He believed in God but rejected revelation and the divinity of Christ.
The Jesuit Robert Parsons wrote in 1592 of "Sir Walter Raleigh's school of atheism," in which, he claimed, both Moses and the Savior, both Testaments, were mocked, and the scholars were taught to spell God backward. Raleigh was accused of listening while Marlowe read an essay on atheism. In March 1594 a government commission met at Cerne Abbas in Dorset to investigate rumors of atheist circles in the area, including Raleigh's household. The inquiry apparently led nowhere, but at his trial in 1603 Raleigh was also charged with atheism. In the preface to his History of the World he took pains to affirm his belief in God.
A Queen Without Religious Fervor
Elizabeth herself may be counted somewhat free of religious ties. John Richard Green wrote that no woman ever lived who was so totally destitute of religious sentiment. Froude held that she had no definite faith and, valuing Protestantism no more than Catholicism, mocked religious zeal with complete detachment. She would call God to witness, with terrible oaths that frightened her ministers, that she would marry Alencon, while privately ridiculing his courtship. She once told the Spanish ambassador that the quarrel among the Christian sects was a trifle, and the ambassador promptly concluded that she was an atheist.
Religion as the Foundation of Order
Nevertheless, like nearly every government before the French Revolution of 1789, she believed that some religion, some supernatural sanction and moral basis, was necessary for social order and the stability of the state. Until her position was secure she seemed undecided between the faiths and let Catholic nobles hope she might join them. She liked Catholic ceremony, clerical celibacy and the ritual of the Mass, and might have reconciled with Rome had it not required submission to the pope. She regarded Catholicism as a foreign power that might lead Englishmen to put obedience to the pope above loyalty to their queen.
She had been raised in her father's Protestantism, essentially Catholicism without the pope, and meant to establish it in England. She hoped that the half-Catholic Anglican liturgy would soothe the rural Catholics while the break with Rome would satisfy the Protestant townsfolk, and that state control of education would raise a new generation in this mold and end the disruptive conflict. She used the same hesitation in religion as in marriage, turning it to political ends, keeping potential enemies occupied and divided until they faced an accomplished fact.
Building the Settlement
Many forces pushed her to complete the Reformation. Continental reformers wrote to thank her for restoring Protestantism, and their letters moved her. Holders of former Church property prayed that Protestantism would endure. Cecil urged her to make herself leader of Protestant Europe. London Protestants showed their feelings by breaking the neck of a statue of Saint Thomas and throwing it into the street. Her first Parliament, which sat from 23 January to 8 May 1559, was largely Protestant and voted the money she asked for without condition or delay, imposing a tax on clergy and laity alike.
A new Act of Uniformity, dated in the book to 28 January 1559, revised Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer and made it the law of English public worship, forbidding all other rites. The Mass was abolished. Every English subject was required to attend the Anglican church on Sundays or pay a shilling for the poor. The renewed Act of Supremacy of 29 April declared Elizabeth supreme governor in all matters, spiritual and temporal. All clergy, lawyers, teachers, university graduates, judges, church officers and courtiers had to swear an oath acknowledging her religious authority. Major church appointments and decisions passed through the Court of High Commission, whose members the state chose. From 1563, defending papal authority over England was punishable by life imprisonment for a first offense and death for a second. By 1590 every church in England had accepted the Protestant rite.
Conformity Without Freedom of Speech
Elizabeth claimed not to persecute dissent. Anyone, she held, might believe as he pleased provided he obeyed the law; all she wanted was outward conformity to the Anglican rite for the sake of national unity. Cecil assured her that a state with two religions could never be secure, which did not stop her from defending the freedom of Protestants in Catholic France. She did not object to peaceful hypocrisy, but freedom of belief did not mean freedom of speech: preachers who differed with her on important questions were silenced or removed. The laws against heresy were redefined and enforced; Unitarians and Anabaptists were declared illegal sects, and five heretics were executed in her reign, a modest figure for that age.
The Thirty-Nine Articles
In 1563 an assembly of divines defined a new creed. They accepted predestination, declaring that God, by His will and before the creation of the world, had chosen some for salvation and rejected the rest, without regard to merit. They adopted Luther's view that salvation comes through faith: the elect are saved not by their good works but by faith in God's grace and the redeeming blood of Christ. Yet they defined the Eucharist in Calvin's terms, as a spiritual rather than physical union with Christ. By an act of Parliament dated in the book to 1566, all English clergy had to subscribe to these "Thirty-Nine Articles," which still express the official creed of the Anglican Church.
A Liturgy of Compromise
The new ritual was likewise a compromise. The Mass was abolished, but to the horror of the Puritans priests were ordered to wear the white surplice for prayers and a cope for communion. Communion was to be received in both kinds, bread and wine, kneeling. An annual remembrance of Protestant heroes replaced the invocation of saints. Confirmation and ordination were kept as sacred rites, though not as sacraments instituted by Christ. Confession to a priest was retained only for those facing death. Many prayers kept their Catholic form but put on English dress, becoming a precious part of the nation's literature. For four hundred years those prayers and hymns, sung by people and clergy in great churches, have given English families inspiration, comfort, moral discipline and peace of mind.