Elizabethan Settlement: a Biblical, Generous, and Beautiful Faith

When Mary died, her half-sister Elizabeth was crowned Queen of England January 15, 1559. Elizabeth was the last of five monarchs of the House of Tudor. She had private Lutheran leanings, but she was more interested in keeping peace between the different Protestant factions in England. In her long reign as Queen and Supreme Governor of the Church of England, she landed the newly formed church in a thoroughly biblical, generous, and beautiful field. Her successors (James I and Charles I) would continue to fight the Protestant identity battles, but the plane had landed. Elizabeth gave space for important theologians and leaders who firmly secured England in the Reformed faith, including John Jewel, Richard Hooker, and John Donne. In 1559 the future bishop of Salisbury, John Jewel, preached the famous “Challenge Sermon” in which he dared anyone to show even one way in which the Church of England was less catholic than the Roman Catholic Church - in due course this would be turned into the best known defense of Reformation Anglicanism written at the time: The Apology of the Church of England (1564). Perhaps no one was more influential and successful for the making of a Protestant England than the most popular writer of his day, William Perkins, whose books are still read and studied today. During her 44-year reign as queen (1559–1603), Elizabeth was surrounded and tortured with conflict of every kind, but she managed to settle the Church of England securely into the mainstream Protestantism of the 16th century Reformation.