The Elizabethan Settlement

Elizabeth I was proclaimed queen in London on 17 November 1558, the day her sister Mary I of England died (Machyn, Diary 17 November 1558). Her first Parliament passed two statutes. The Act of Supremacy repealed Mary’s revival of the heresy laws, declared that no “foreign prince, person, prelate, state, or potentate” should exercise spiritual jurisdiction in the realm, and annexed authority over the church to the crown (Act of Supremacy, 1559, in Gee and Hardy, pp. 446–447). Clergy and officers of the crown were to swear that the queen was “the only supreme governor of this realm” in spiritual as in temporal things, or lose their offices (Act of Supremacy, 1559, in Gee and Hardy, pp. 448–449).

The Act of Uniformity restored the Prayer Book of the last years of Edward VI, with a few named changes, as the only form of public worship from 24 June 1559; everyone was to attend the parish church on Sundays and holy days or pay twelve pence (Act of Uniformity, 1559, in Gee and Hardy, pp. 458–463). Machyn’s diary records the bishop of London deprived in May and seven more bishops in June (Machyn, Diary 10 and 29 May, 21 and 26 June 1559). Matthew Parker, who had lost his own offices under Mary, was consecrated archbishop of Canterbury on 17 December 1559 (Parker, Correspondence pp. 482–484).

The Thirty-Nine Articles, agreed, as their title says, in the Convocation of 1562 and confirmed in 1571, teach that “we are justified by Faith only” and that transubstantiation “cannot be proved by holy Writ”. They give the prince the chief government of all estates, ecclesiastical and civil, but not the ministering of God’s word or of the sacraments (Thirty-Nine Articles title; articles XI, XXVIII, XXXVII; ratification).

On 25 February 1570 Pope Pius V issued the bull Regnans in excelsis. It declared Elizabeth a heretic, excommunicated her and her adherents, pronounced her deprived of her “pretended title” to the crown and released her subjects from their oaths (Pius V, Regnans in excelsis sections 3–5 and the closing date). Parliament answered in 1571 by making it high treason to bring in or use a papal bull or to be reconciled to Rome by one (Act against Bulls from Rome, 1571, in Prothero, pp. 60–62). An act of 1581 made it treason to withdraw the queen’s subjects from their obedience, or for that purpose from the established religion to the Roman, and fined those who heard mass or stayed away from church (Act of 1581 (23 Elizabeth, c. 1), in Prothero, pp. 74–75). An act of 1585 made it treason for any subject of the queen ordained priest under Rome’s authority since 1559 to be in England at all, and a capital crime to shelter one (Act against Jesuits and Seminarists, 1585, in Gee and Hardy, pp. 485–487).

Catholics were now put to death as traitors, as Protestants had been burned as heretics under Mary. On 1 December 1581 the Jesuit Edmund Campion and two other priests were drawn to Tyburn and executed (Allen, Briefe Historie p. 1), convicted of plotting the queen’s deposition and death (Allen, Briefe Historie pp. 16–20). The Catholic writer William Allen held that they suffered “under pretence of high treason” and in truth for their religion (Allen, Briefe Historie p. 1); the statute of 1585 says that such priests came to stir up “sedition, rebellion, and open hostility” (Act against Jesuits and Seminarists, 1585, in Gee and Hardy, pp. 485–487).