‘Where there is quietness, there is not the truth.’ This had been Hugh Latimer's riposte to Cardinal Pole's appeal for religious peace in Mary Tudor's reign. Whatever one supposes the religion of protestants to have been, disputation and controversy were its lifeblood. It might seem on the surface that the 1590s were a period of relative religious peace, at least when compared to the 1550s, the 1570s and the 1580s. Membership of the political élite was effectively limited to protestants, since avowed Catholics were excluded from Parliament and the commissions of the peace. The erosion of parish Catholicism was virtually complete. The Prayer Book of 1559 had won general acceptance, and the missions of the Catholic seminarians and Jesuits had largely been confounded. At the other end of the spectrum, the organized puritan movement had been decisively routed.

Yet appearances are deceptive. As the first generation of Elizabethan bishops died in the 1580s, they were replaced by a different species: more rigidly authoritarian conformists led by John Whitgift whom the queen preferred to Canterbury in 1583. Whereas the careers of the first generation episcopate had been shaped in the same mould as the moderate puritans, those of the second generation derived from the polemical attack on presbyterianism and external church government out of scripture which the Admonition Controversy had ignited in the 1570s. The result was that jure Divino theses of monarchy and episcopacy were increasingly voiced in pulpit and press after 1589.