1 - The Two Churches

Summary

William Harrison's ‘Great English Chronology’ shows how attitudes derived from European mainstream Protestantism when deployed in the English context could become transformed by their new environment into something identifiable as ‘Puritanism’. Harrison's detailed examination of salvation history since Adam in his ‘Chronology’, written in the 1570s, developed a received historical model through which he also interpreted his contemporary experience of the Reformation in England. That historical viewpoint therefore helped to define the content of Harrison's radical Protestantism within the particular conditions of the Elizabethan Church, for he believed that interpreting both world history and contemporary events according to the criteria laid down by the Scriptures unanimously confirmed that the English Reformation represented yet another episode in the eternal struggle between the True Church and the satanic Church of Cain.

Drawing heavily upon the European formulators of the Protestant world-view, Harrison's ‘Chronology’ traced this conflict in the Scriptural account of history from the Creation, and in post-Scriptural history. Together with his well-known Description of Britain, the ‘Chronology’ applied the criteria of a True Church which he found implicit in this Scriptural interpretation to all aspects of Church and society in Elizabethan England. For the ‘Chronology’ also reflects the fact that Harrison had grown to maturity through the disquieting religious fluctuations of the previous four decades which in hindsight seemed to fit the universal pattern of conflict. Perhaps most importantly, the method and viewpoint of the ‘Chronology’ developed more fully elements of Harrison's historical thought which had originated in a period of personal evangelical crisis in the 1560s.