Elizabeth’s Wax Nose
Queen Elizabeth was excommunicated by Pope Pius V April 27, 1570, twelve years into her 45 year reign as Queen of England and Ireland. The pope dismissed her as a "heretic and favorer of heretics.” The Church of England had been independent from Rome since 1534, but Catholics in England and around the world were ever hopeful that Henry VIII’s successors would see the error of their Protestant ways and hobble home.
When Elizabeth took the throne there was every reason to believe that the daughter of Henry and Anne Boleyn would continue the Edwardian reforms. She had been educated and cared for by the Protestant Queen Catherine Parr, the English people generally opposed Mary’s forced and oppressive Catholicism, the Marian exiles that included some of the best Reformation minds in the world returned from the continent, and John Calvin had risen to prominence in Protestant circles. But situations change and things are not always as clear-cut as they seem. Elizabeth’s rocky encounter with England’s face of Calvinism, John Knox, was unfortunate, and marked her leadership as Supreme Governor of the Church of England.
Elizabeth’s religion was something of a wax-nose, and somewhat politically motivated as she steered church and society between the religious extremes. John Calvin pejoratively dismissed Elizabeth as a “Nicodemite” after Nicodemus who, for fear, had visited Jesus only by night. Historian Diarmaid MacCulloch addressed the nuances of Elizabeth’s personal faith:
“Elizabeth was an evangelical, but of a distinctive and (in the conditions of the late 1550s) an extremely old-fashioned variety. She disliked the marriage of clergy and enjoyed more ceremonial and decoration in worship that her half-brother would have considered tolerable. If we want to place her beliefs, we should do so not in the court of Edward, but at the court of Henry VIII and Catherine Parr in the mid-1540s. This was the era when Elizabeth had first been given a role of dignity, when she became one of the elite of children who enjoyed an exceptionally rich and privileged education. It would not be surprising if those years, and her time in the Seymour/Parr household, became a formative experience for her piety…”
But, as MacCulloch writes, the Elizabethan Settlement was not a Nicodemite settlement. Elizabeth landed the Church of England plane decisively into an expression of Protestantism that is thoroughly biblical, theologically orthodox, pastorally generous, and liturgically beautiful. She grounded the new church on the foundation of Holy Scripture, and to Anglican’s Formularies that have defined Anglicanism ever since: the 1662 Book of Common Prayer (including the Ordinal), the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion (1571), and the two books of Homilies. It is not an exaggeration to say that the Church of England, from Edward VI (Cranmer) through Elizabeth (and James I), was substantially Calvinist theologically as reflected in the Anglican formularies. This only began to be challenged in the early 17th century with the rise of Arminianism and the high churchmanship of William Laud, and the unfortunate rise of moralism that has always tempted the church away from the Cross-centered gospel of Jesus Christ.
Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church, Peter Lake
Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c. 1590-1640, Nicholas Tyacke
John Whitgift and the English Reformation, Powel Mills Dawley
The Boy King: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation, Diarmaid MacCulloch
William Perkins and the Making of Protestant England, W. B. Patterson
Archbishop Grindal 1519-1583: The Struggle for a Reformed Church, Patrick Collinson
The Rise of Moralism: The Proclamation of the Gospel from Hooker to Baxter, C. Fitzsimons Allison