THE UNACCEPTABLE FACE OF REFORMISM

Early evangelicals have never been easy people to find. Attempts to guess at their numbers are clearly futile, although tempting. All our knowledge about the early modern world is fragmentary, but Henrician evangelicals took active steps to conceal themselves and their opinions. They bought their survival at the very reasonable price of historical anonymity. A few evangelicals became visible by virtue of their place in English society: the reformers at court, amongst the higher clergy or in the universities. Others chose to make themselves visible: preachers, authors and printers. While of enormous significance to the movement, naturally none of these groups were representative of the rank and file. A third group had visibility thrust upon them. The sporadic enforcement of heresy laws has left us with a few glimpses of late Henrician heresy as it existed behind closed doors, in parishes across the country. This private face of reformism is qualitatively different from the aspects of the movement which we have seen so far. However, it is also intimately related to the more visible evangelical movement. The connections between the private and the public worlds can help us understand the nature of both.

Single heretics crop up unevenly across the country during this period, but more useful than such individual cases are those in which groups were detected.