Tyndale’s New Testament was more than just a religious phenomenon; it transformed the way English was spoken and written. Tyndale had the literary skills to convey the music as well as the meaning of the Scriptures. His prose style was homespun yet numinous, simple yet profound. The King James or ‘Authorized’ version of the Bible, published in the early years of the seventeenth century, would largely be Tyndale in fancier clothing, and retained many of his phrases: ‘the spirit is willing’; ‘a law unto themselves’; ‘gave up the ghost’; ‘fight the good fight’; ‘the powers that be’. If any individual can be credited with enriching the expressive qualities of the English language to the level reached by Shakespeare’s day it is William Tyndale. There is some truth in the remark that ‘without Tyndale, no Shakespeare’, although Shakespeare himself probably used the more trenchantly Protestant Genevan Bible.27 The translation of the Common Prayer Book and the Bible into Welsh during Elizabeth’s reign helped to win the Welsh for Protestantism. But the New Testament and prayer book were not translated into Gaelic Irish until the early seventeenth century, by which time, as we shall see, it was too late.
Tyndale’s Bible, Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer and Foxe’s stridently anti-Catholic Acts and Monuments were fundamental in shaping English Protestant identity. Yet they represented merely the peaks in a vast range of works of instruction and controversy that was thrown up during England’s ‘long’ Reformation. The several and conflicting Tudor religious settlements provided a massive stimulus to the publishing industry as first the crown and then various court-backed interests, both Catholic and Protestant, used print and scribal publications to mobilise public opinion in the name of ‘true religion’ and the common good (the two were deemed inseparable). An unintended consequence of this playing to the gallery – one that was deplored as seditious and divisive by its very practitioners – was a dramatic widening of the discursive space in English society, or what has been termed the ‘public sphere’. Moreover, the huge redistribution of land and wealth from Church and crown to the private sector following the Dissolution ensured that the productions on this stage played to an increasingly prosperous and attentive audience.
There were few greater causes of controversy in word and print than Elizabeth I’s idiosyncratic piety (the palimpsest of modern-day Anglicanism). Unlike most Protestants, the queen preferred to have ritual and the sacraments at the centre of public worship rather than ‘painful’ preaching of the Word, and this religious conservatism was reflected in the church settlement that her first Parliament (skilfully purged of its Catholic bishops) enacted in 1559. The royal supremacy in religion was reinstated, and much of the ceremony enjoined in the Edwardian prayer books and canons was retained, along with episcopacy: the Church’s government by crown-appointed bishops. This eccentric synthesis was created with one eye on winning approval from Protestant states on the Continent, and was a kind of halfway house between Catholicism and the more rigorous and systematic Protestantism of ‘the Reformed’: the second-generation Protestants who were now at the cutting edge of the Reformation in Europe. Elizabeth had mixed feelings about these advanced Protestants and their battle against the forces, spiritual and military, of the Counter-Reformation: the great movement of Catholic revival that the papacy had initiated in the mid-1540s. In general, she did not share their visceral hatred of ‘popery’, which was fast becoming the most highly charged word in the English language. Broadly speaking, popery signified the threat that Catholicism posed to the political and scriptural integrity of Protestantism at home and abroad. Elizabeth, however, worried little about foreign Catholics as such, nor about her own ‘popish’ subjects. Provided they conformed outwardly she was content to let them believe what they liked.
The most strident opposition to the Elizabethan settlement – this ‘leaden mediocrity’ as one of her own bishops called it28 – came not from religious conservatives but from those eager for ‘further reformation’. Some of the more devout Protestants had gone into exile under Mary and had experienced at first hand the ‘purer’, Reformed Protestantism that was beginning to find a spiritual leader in the influential Genevan theologian Jean Calvin (1509–64). Yet while the Elizabethan Church adopted a recognisably Reformed theology – given the generic name of Calvinism – its liturgy and government remained fossilised in their Edwardian form and were regarded by the hotter sort of Protestants as unwarrantable in Scripture and therefore as vestiges of popery. The Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer, declaimed one leading Protestant polemicist, was ‘culled and picked out of that popishe dunghill, the Masse’, while episcopacy was ‘drawne out of the Popes shop … Antichristian and devillishe, and contrarye to the scriptures’.29 Those committed to purging the Church of these Romish ‘superstitions’ formed a small but vociferous minority, with powerful friends at court. Their shrill denunciations of what to many people seemed harmless customs earned them the derogatory nickname ‘Puritans’. Using Parliament and print the Puritans – or ‘the godly’, as they called themselves – tried to pressure Elizabeth into further church reform and to pursue a more militantly anti-Catholic foreign policy. A defining feature of Puritanism was the belief that the Church of England was merely one part of a pan-European Calvinist community, the Reformed Church, and should therefore be – as should Elizabeth – attuned to the needs of the Protestant cause. Puritans also subscribed to the very unappealing doctrine (certainly to modern eyes) that God had predestined the vast majority of mankind to eternal damnation, reserving Heaven for the remnant – the ‘elect’ – that He had decided to save solely through His own inexplicable mercy. All good Calvinists believed in predestination. But what marked out Puritans was their hunger for assurance that they were among the elect, which they satisfied, in part at least, by seeking out the society of the godly and shunning the ungodly. This, again, did not make them very popular. Nevertheless, as Protestantism gradually became bound up with the nation’s identity, the Puritans’ zeal in the fight against popery gave them the look of over-ardent patriots, and, as such, their message on political issues – national security, for example – carried wide appeal.
The calculated mediocrity of the Elizabethan religious settlement was in stark contrast to the thoroughgoing Calvinist Reformation effected north of the border. Protestantism triumphed in Scotland – as its king from 1567, James VI (1566–1625), would lament – by ‘populaire tumulte and rebellion and not proceeding from the princes ordare as it did in Englande’.30 Slowly but surely after 1560, the majority of Scots were indoctrinated in Calvinist Protestantism and its austere form of church worship. Moreover, the reformers were gradually able to introduce Presbyterianism in Lowland Scotland – that is, a hierarchy of clerical governing assemblies, or presbyteries, modelled along Genevan lines. This system of church government limited royal control in matters of religion. Scottish Presbyterians also fostered the idea that Kirk and crown were completely separate jurisdictions, and that the Kirk had the power to discipline the monarch on religious matters. It is not surprising, therefore, that when a pro-Presbyterian group emerged among the English Puritans in the 1570s in opposition to episcopacy, it was suppressed. Yet in spite of the different church structures and national identities that prevailed in England and Scotland, the Elizabethan period saw the emergence of a ‘British’ Protestant culture based on a sense of shared destiny in the struggle against popery. The Scots did much to encourage this religious bond between the two nations by using English rather than their own language in the devotional literature that circulated between the Protestants of both kingdoms. This linguistic convergence, and the spread of Protestantism among the powerful Clan Campbell and its allies in the western Highlands, helped to widen the already growing cultural divide between the Gaels of Scotland and Ireland.
The Reformation pulled England into, or at least towards, the Calvinist communities on the Continent while at the same time distancing it from Catholic Europe and its cultural fashions. It is telling that although the sale of monastic lands fuelled a building craze among the nobility and gentry that was unprecedented in English history, none of the great houses built between 1560 and 1620 comprehensively applied the neoclassical designs favoured on the Continent. Most of these buildings mingled Gothic, Renaissance and vernacular motifs in an exuberant architectural cacophony. Royal portraiture by the 1590s, with its two-dimensional, almost surrealistic appearance, and encoded propaganda messages in adoration of the Virgin Queen, reveals much the same sense of self-imposed isolation from the fashionable neoclassicism