The Lambeth Articles (1595) and the Doctrinal Stance of the Church of England

Abstract

Abstract The Lambeth Articles have always bulked large in debates about the Calvinist tenor of sixteenth-century English Protestantism. But in a recent article, Debora Shuger has raised the stakes dramatically. Not content to deny that the Lambeth Articles were ‘Calvinist’, she claims that they were the work of a group of ‘non-Calvinist divines’, specially commissioned by Archbishop Whitgift to produce a ‘consensus document’ designed to put an end to the predestinarian controversy which had broken out at Cambridge University. Paradoxically, Shuger combines this with the view that the Lambeth Articles were nevertheless suppressed, on the orders of Queen Elizabeth. It follows that the idea of a subsequent ‘rise of English Arminianism’ is fundamentally flawed. The present piece argues that the Lambeth Articles in their final form (a) emanated from a meeting of the Court of High Commission at Lambeth, presided over by Whitgift himself, Bishop Richard Fletcher of London, and Richard Vaughan, the bishop-elect of Bangor, all of them Calvinists; (b) are best understood as speaking the language of sublapsarian Calvinism; and (c) were not suppressed but continued to be regarded as interpretative guidelines until the 1620s. The 1620s, however, witnessed a dramatic renversement when, unlike the 1590s, Calvinism was indeed suppressed by royal command and at the hands of a new breed of anti-Calvinist divines. Nevertheless, via the Irish Articles of 1615, the Lambeth Articles were to attain an afterlife as part of the Westminster Confession of Faith promulgated in 1648.