The Naming of Protestant England

Abstract

The writer Daniel Defoe, surveying two centuries during which his country had travelled 'from the Romish Religion to Reform'd, from Reform'd back again to Romish, and then to Reform'd again', could note with satisfaction that 'the Name of Protestant is now the common Title of an Englishman'. How, and how quickly, England became Protestant, and English people became Protestants, in the course of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries is a longstanding and contentious historical question. In the late 1970s, Britain's leading Tudor historian, G. R. Elton, could confidently assert that by the end of the reign of Edward VI 'England was almost certainly nearer to being a Protestant country than to anything else'. But it was already becoming clear that what Patrick Collinson has christened 'the birthpangs of Protestant England' were a more protracted and painful process. Revisionist scholarship of the 1980s and 90s stressed the slow and uncertain pace of reform, and the difficulty in securing conversions, with Christopher Haigh proposing, in an intriguing formulation, that even by the middle of Elizabeth's reign, the Reformation had succeeded in creating 'a Protestant nation, but not a nation of Protestants'. More recently, attention has shifted from measuring patterns of conversion to investigating political accommodations and negotiations on the part of rulers and ruled. Other studies of a broadly 'post-revisionist' character draw attention to transitions and continuities in religious culture across the putative Reformation divide. The 'Protestantism' of the English Church and its people is assumed, but the degree to which common understandings of it were shared by clergy and laity, and across social classes, remains deeply problematic.