The Church of England, the Catholics and the People

Abstract

The puny mind of the historian, grappling with the almost infinite detail and complexity of the past, seizes with relief upon such simplifications as are to hand. Periodisation, the division of the past into manageable blocks for the purpose of study, is an essential, but dangerous, simplification. Our understanding of politics and religion in the sixteenth century has been bedevilled by the assumption that the period of ‘the English Reformation’ was definitively completed by ‘the Elizabethan Settlement’, leaving only the residual problem of those papists who did not realise that the Reformation struggle was over and they had lost. 1558–9 is too often regarded as a decisive turning-point: students are expected to change their mentors (Elton gives way to Neale), their organising-concepts (‘the Reformation’ gives way to ‘the origins of the Civil War’), and their categories — medieval obscurantism is dead, and we are in the exciting new world of ‘the rise of Puritanism’, ‘the rise of the gentry’, and ‘the winning of the initiative by the House of Commons’.

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