The Church of England as redefined by the Elizabethan settlement of religion (1559–70) was a curious concoction, unique among the national churches of the reformation era. Traditionally described by Anglican historians as a compromise church of the via media, halfway between Rome and Geneva, something lauded as a piece of national pride (in George Herbert's words ‘A fine aspect in fit array,/ Neither too mean, nor yet too gay’), it was really nothing of the kind, unless the combination of strangely discrepant elements makes for a kind of compromise. The official doctrine of the thirty-nine articles, as glossed by leading Elizabethan churchmen and academics, aligned the English church not only with the churches of the reformation but with the ‘best reformed churches’ which followed the leads of Zürich, Geneva and Heidelberg, rather than with the Lutherans. In a conventional terminology which is a little too blunt an instrument, the Church of the Elizabethan settlement was ‘Calvinist’.

The most vocal of Elizabethan divines held Roman catholicism to be actually antichristian, and it was only by slow degrees that a more ecumenical vision made itself felt, through the writings of Richard Hooker and other theologians whom we can begin to call, cautiously, Anglicans. Those who still defined themselves as catholics were exhorted by their soi-disant leaders, mainly members of the Society of Jesus, to distance themselves totally from a chimaera of a church. Many did, and became in the eyes of the Elizabethan state ‘recusants’, those who refused to go to church – and who paid the penalty under increasingly draconian penal laws, punitive fines in some cases, the most obscene of scaffold deaths in others. Many more looked for the best of both worlds, and in some respects conformed outwardly. In the eyes of the catholic hardliners these were ‘schismatics’, and protestants called them ‘church papists’. We may regard them as ‘closet catholics’, and as long as they declined to come out, their indeterminate numbers aroused the fears and passions of totally committed protestants, who saw a papist under every bed.