The Elizabethan Settlement
Queen of England for 44 years and 127 days, Elizabeth I died March 24, 1603 at the age of fifty-nine. She was the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, and she never married (called the "Virgin Queen"). She was brilliant, shrewd, and political like both of her parents, and, unlike her stepsister Mary, she was a settled Protestant. She spent her reign navigating the turbulent religious waters in England: first between Edward VI’s Protestantism and Mary’s Catholicism, and later between Protestantism and the more extreme form of Protestantism, the Precisionists or Puritans. Her coffin was placed on top of Queen Mary’s in Westminster Abbey, clearly symbolic of who won the religious wars in Great Britain. The famous “Elizabethan Settlement” was a hard-fought battle, resulting in the Book of Common Prayer of 1559 (Cranmer’s Prayer Book of 1552, which became the 1662 version that is today considered the standard for theology and worship), and the Forty-two Articles which became the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion under Elizabeth and Anglican’s confessional statement: “For the avoiding of diversities of opinions and for the establishing of Consent touching true religion” (the final version of 1571). She was en enthusiastic supporter of the Homilies that Thomas Cranmer had edited to be read sequentially in every church in England.
Although she was a very complicated person and Queen, she was by no means perfect (she habitually cursed, dabbled in astrology, and was extremely vain in her appearance with a glove collection in the thousands). However, Elizabeth settled the church in England into the Reformation Anglicanism of the Book of Common Prayer, the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion as Anglican’s confessional statement, and the Homilies that were first edited by Cranmer and then added to in Elizabeth’s reign - these are the historic formularies of the Church of England. Anglican theology and worship as seen in the Elizabethan Settlement is thoroughly biblical, beautiful, and generous in its balance between doctrinal essentials and liberty in nonessentials.
One of the more revealing chapters in Elizabeth’s life was her conflict with her Archbishop of Canterbury, Edmund Grindal, over the 1560s-1570s practice of “prophesyings.” These were clergy meetings to hear a minister deliver a sermon that was then followed by a discussion by those in attendance. The purpose was to train clergy in the right handling of Holy Scripture, and to demonstrate how a text of the Bible could be treated in a sermon. Elizabeth thought of them as hotbeds for fomenting Puritanism and anti-authority sentiment and she ordered Grindal to put an end to them. In response, the Archbishop wrote a famous 5500-word letter defending the importance of preaching as the “ordinary mean and instrument of salvation for mankind.” Elizabeth angrily responded saying that the prescribed Homilies were sufficient. Grindal agreed that the Homilies were good and godly, but they were not nearly as helpful as training a minister to preach his own sermon to a congregation that he knew and loved. Grindal “was a man of principle, who despite reaching the very top after a glittering ecclesiastical career was willing to sacrifice it all. For the sake of what? For the sake of sound biblical preaching, the means and instrument of salvation” (Lee Gatiss “The Ordinary Instrument of Salvation”). As a consequence, Elizabeth had her Archbishop confined to Lambeth Palace, and before she would have him removed, he died. This made room for an archbishop who would tow the Elizabethan party line: John Whitgift.
“The Ordinary Instrument of Salvation: Edmund Grindal on Preaching,” Cornerstones of Salvation, Lee Gatiss
John Whitgift and the English Reformation, Powel Mills Dawley
Archbishop Grindal: 1519-1583 The Struggle for a Reformed Church, Patrick Collinson
William Perkins and the Making of a Protestant England, W. B. Patterson