We are apt to associate Puritanism, quite reasonably, with evangelical preaching, and to talk about the Puritan movement as the tail end of the English Reformation, as the last attempt to take Biblical Christianity into every parish pulpit and hence into the hearts of God's “Elect Nation.” As a consequence, it has seemed both proper and illuminating to view the history of Elizabethan Puritanism as a series of confrontations between Puritan ministers and the Queen's bishops, the bishops attempting to create unity by imposing uniformity of practice, the Puritan ministers attempting to follow what they believed Scripture and the example of the best reformed Churches dictated, with the inevitable consequence that they found themselves engaged in a kind of perpetual guerrilla war with the Queen's guardians of a prescribed uniform order.

If such basic assumptions are accepted, then the history of Elizabethan Puritanism can be seen as a series of escalating encounters, beginning in 1564, when the Queen forced the issue of discipline and order on a reluctant Church by requiring that Archbishop Parker publish his Advertisements. The debating stage was over in the Spring of 1566, when Parker and the Ecclesiastical Commissioners summoned the defiant London clergy to conform to the prescribed clerical dress or face expulsion for refusing to wear what Robert Crowley called “the conjuring garments of popery.” The year 1570 saw an escalation of the controversy. Cartwright's lectures on the nature of the true church mounted a much more substantial attack than had been seen in the first decade of the reign, for it was one thing to attack the surplice as a popish garment, quite another to argue that episcopacy itself lacked a Scriptural basis and that by implication it was, therefore, the Queen's duty to impose “discipline out of the Word”—a Presbyterian order—on the Church of England. In 1572 two Londoners, John Field and Thomas Wilcox, tried to give political reality to these notions in their Admonition to the Parliament.

When Henry VIII raised Thomas Cromwell to the earldom of Essex, most observors were both dazzled by the ceremony and deceived as to its significance. The French ambassador Marillac had taken the measure of events, however. He had speculated that Cromwell would lose authority in religious matters, while perhaps retaining it in worldly affairs. Those whom Cromwell had put in the shade reserved “une bonne pensée” for him, Marillac said. And Cromwell's close ties to religious radicals (Friar Barnes and the Calais Sacramentarians) provided weapons to his enemies. Norfolk and his conservative friends feared further reformation might provide occasions for new waves of rebellion in a country already under diverse threats at home and abroad. They would not miss their chance to cast down the upstart.

Modern historians have dismissed Marillac's chief point, that Cromwell would fall because he had used his powers to make a ‘party’ in the State. Foxe, Hall and Burnet had seen the king's minister in that light. Many of Cromwell's contemporaries held such views. But the weight of Professor Elton's opinion has lain heavily on the subject. He dismissed Marillac as little more than an ill-in-formed gossip. Then, turning to the evidence of the Act of Attainder passed against Cromwell, the Cambridge wizard treated it with equal severity. Allegations that Cromwell had illegally retained heretical men, in order to have a force with which to defend error with sword in hand, were obviously contrived.

The authors of the two preceding papers have both given us multum in parvo—by which I mean that each has dealt with a particular, localized problem and at the same time raised larger and very important questions. Professor Slavin has cast a new light on one of the major mysteries of early Tudor history—the fall of Thomas Cromwell. He adds substantially to G.R. Elton's careful survey of the evidence and takes us another step forward in the elucidation of this momentous episode.

Professor Seaver has focussed on a problem which other historians of the Puritan movement have hinted at but not fully explored, in suggesting that the role of the laity in the Reformation has been underestimated—and in the further assumption that they cannot be conveniently ticketed with the labels in common usage to designate the various clerical factions of the religious left. Both he and Professor Slavin have redirected our attention to the fundamental ambiguities of the English Reformation. Too often writers have unconsciously assumed that it was a fairly coherent process, moving in a reasonably orderly progression through the stages of separation from Rome followed by the renunciation of the mass and, then, after 1559, by a division within the Protestant ranks between Puritans and those who are anachronistically referred to as Anglicans. The process was in fact at every stage a very untidy splintering in which, as in Professor Slavin's study, the struggle is not between two well-defined adversaries but rather a tangled melee in which friend and foe were not always clearly identifiable. What I should like to reflect on briefly here is one such ambiguity, which has not always been presented with maximum clarity. I refer to the confused and indeed contradictory character of the church established by law in 1559 and its fumbling response to the initial challenge of Protestant dissent.

There is a story told among English historians about two enterprising and perceptive young scholars who, more than fifty years ago, determined that their common interest in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Parliaments could best be served by a fundamental division of labor. One of them, Professor Wallace Notestein, took as his province the early Stuart Parliaments while the other, Professor John Neale, took the Elizabethan Parliaments as his own. Elaborations of this story tell us that while Notestein had a goodly collection of diaries and journals to work with in his studies, Neale was less well served by the evidence; thus he was forced to cut accordingly his scholarly coat. This led to a parliamentary history which concentrated upon a limited range of important constitutional issues: the succession, the religious settlement, and the privileges of the House. Neale excluded from his study any account of the economic and social legislation of his period. On the other hand, Notestein, who had more material to work with, was able to produce a more encompassing history which took into account the economic and social legislation as well as the structure of English government in its many parts.

Neale has dominated the field by the sheer volume of his work, by the apparent comprehensiveness of his evidence, and by the elegance of his style. His interpretation of the Elizabethan period has come to be cited as authority, and it has colored the writings of many younger historians. For the novice scholar, however, Neale's histories are fraught with hidden difficulties. Neale provided no caveat to warn the reader of his limited range of topics. Because of the scope of his work and the clarity of his argument, the student is often left with the impression that the only issues which were significant were the constitutional issues, and that the only goal of politically ambitious Elizabethan Englishmen was a seat in Parliament.

One of the most important consequences of the granting of colonial self-government in the British Empire in the early and mid-Victorian period was that it created complex problems for the Colonial Office concerning the future of native populations. In the nineteenth century this imperial dilemma was termed the “native question.” Natives were regarded as a lower class, like the Irish or the poor in Britain, and British liberals sought to better the material condition of these people by means of the panaceas of education and religion. Their object was humanitarian and their methods were usually paternalistic. Herman Merivale, in his role as a commentator on the native question, was both naive and at times Utopian in his attempts to find a solution. As an imperial administrator he was involved in the ineffectual attempts to implement the schemes of “amalgamation” (gradual union leading to assimilation) and “insulation” (reservations). British native policies failed largely because of resistance by native peoples and the weaknesses of imperial administration rather than British racial attitudes.

For Merivale “race” was a cultural idea derived from early nineteenth century ethnography, not a pseudo-scientific rationale which determined that native peoples were physically and, therefore, intellectually and materially inferior. Until the 1860's, at least, his ideas on this subject were not very different from those of his British contemporaries and were derived from a wide variety of written sources rather than direct observation.