The Church of England presents innumerable problems of definition for the historian. The first century of its existence, when it still aspired to be the inclusive church of the English people, witnessed the conflicts of a variety of different visions of what its identity should be. That such a range of different doctrinal and ecclesiological predilections were able to lay claim to the national church was a reflection of the flexible character of the reformation settlement itself. The First Edwardian Prayer Book has been described as ‘a masterpiece of compromise, even of studied ambiguity’, and the same phrase could justly be taken to describe the later Elizabethan settlement in toto. While her doctrinal formulations were clearly of a Reformed character (although more reflective of mid-century Protestant thought rather than its later Calvinist elaborations) the English Church still retained a structure of worship and administration which had not broken as decisively with the Romanist past as had been the case in other Protestant countries. The question of where the Church of England stood vis-à-vis the Roman Church and the Reformed Churches of the continent was therefore an issue which remained unsettled and was subject to constant reinterpretation and sometimes bitter recrimination in the ensuing years.

It is in English Protestant divines' perceptions of these foreign churches –Roman and Reformed – that their different images of the nature of the English Church come into clearer perspective, and it is these perceptions which will be the concern of this book.