The Elizabethan Church and the New Religion

Abstract

Philip Stubbes was a Londoner, a gentleman and that new phenomenon of the Elizabethan age, a nearly professional author. He was also a thoroughly professional complainer, whose most successful book, An Anatomy of Abuses (1583), castigated the many diversions of Merrie England. Not long after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, Stubbes escaped from an outbreak of plague by mounting his horse to undertake a three-month exploration of England, ‘This our noble island, in the bowels whereof, as in the womb of my mother, I was both bred and born’, a delectable country lacking nothing ‘save only good people’.¹ This grand tour provided particular grounds for complaint, what Thomas Nashe called more muck for a melancholic imagination,² in Stubbes’s inspection of sundry provincial amenities: the schools, almshouses, highways and bridges which were the accumulated social credit of earlier centuries. The most common of these public utilities were the parish churches, many of them beautified and extended in the last decades before the Reformation with soaring towers or spires, spacious and well-lit naves and aisles. Even an incorrigible Protestant such as Stubbes was impressed. ‘And for good works, who seeth not that herein they went far beyond us. … What memorable and famous buildings, what stately edifices of sundry kinds. … What churches, chapels and other houses of prayer did they erect. …!’³

For this is a high brag they have ever made, how that all antiquity and a continual consent of all ages doth make on their side; and that all our cases be but new and yesterday’s work and until these few last years never heard of Questionless, there can nothing be more spitefully spoken against the religion of God than to accuse it of novelty, as a new-come-up matter: for, as there can be no change in God himself, so ought there to be no change in his religion.

John Jewel, An Apology of the Church of England (1562)