Chapter One. The Reformation And Its Ideas

Abstract

This chapter presents insights into the reformation in England, Edwardian England, Marian England, and Elizabethan England. It was the ideas that emerged from the radical Reformation that led to the political radicalism in seventeenth-century England. The first Reformers were aware of this dangerous misunderstanding of their message, being 'painfully conscientious revolutionaries, whose grasp of the principles was usually sounder than their understanding of political realities'. The Henrician emphasis on the king as vicarius Dei was retained throughout the reign of the Tudor dynasty. In the 1553-1558 period, the Roman Catholic church was fully restored in England and the dominion of the pope was again recognised. Zealous Protestants who refused to conform to Marian Catholicism either formed underground churches or, fled to the Continent to wait for England once again to embrace the Reformation.Keywords: Edwardian England; Elizabethan England; Marian England; Protestants; Reformation; Roman Catholic church