Queen Elizabeth and the settlement
The English church finds an uneasy middle
Elizabeth I takes the throne in November 1558, the daughter of Anne Boleyn, the woman her Catholic half-sister Mary spent her reign trying to undo. She is twenty-five years old, highly educated, politically astute, and deeply pragmatic about religion in a way that both Catholics and Puritans will find maddening.
The Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 re-establishes the Church of England as Protestant and restores Cranmer's prayer book — in a slightly revised form — as the liturgy. Elizabeth is Supreme Governor of the church rather than Supreme Head, a terminological adjustment that makes the claim slightly less offensive to those who think only Christ can be head of the church.
The settlement is deliberately vague on the questions that divide Protestants — precisely so that as many people as possible can find a home within it. The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, finalized in 1563, are Reformed in their theology of grace and salvation but catholic in their structure and liturgical sensibility.
Both Catholic recusants and radical Puritans find the settlement unsatisfying. Elizabeth does not care. She wants a church that most English people can inhabit, governed firmly enough to prevent rebellion, flexible enough to prevent fragmentation.
The via media — the middle way — that the Church of England occupies between Catholic and Reformed is not a failure of theological nerve. It is a considered attempt to hold together a diverse nation under one ecclesiastical roof.
It partially succeeds. The Puritans who cannot accept it will eventually sail to America.
“I have no desire to make windows into men's souls.”
— Queen Elizabeth I, attributed, c. 1568 AD
“One man esteems one day above another. Another esteems every day alike. Let each man be fully assured in his own mind.”
Elizabeth's settlement has been criticized from every direction: too Catholic for the Puritans, too Protestant for the Catholics, too vague for the theologians, too firm for the separatists.
Her response — I have no desire to make windows into men's souls — is one of the most theologically wise things ever said by an English monarch. The outer conformity the settlement requires is minimal. What people actually believe in their hearts is, she suggests, not the state's business.
This is not indifferentism. Elizabeth cared deeply about the church's order and the nation's stability. It is the recognition that genuine faith cannot be coerced — that requiring outward conformity while leaving interior conviction free is the most any human institution can legitimately do.
Where is the line between the unity your community requires and the freedom of conscience it must protect? Elizabeth's question is still live.