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“To Omit the Precise Rule and Strayt Observacion”: The 1572 “Bill Concerning Rites and Ceremonies” and the Campaign for Liturgical Diversity in the Elizabethan Church
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 January 2020
Abstract
The focus on the rise and stall of English Presbyterianism has obscured other attempts by politically active puritans to address the problems that bedeviled the Elizabethan church—in particular, how to reconcile a promiscuously international reform movement with the reality of a national church, and the desire for parish-level autonomy with royal supremacy and statutorily mandated uniformity of practice. This article takes as its subject one such attempt, the remarkable “Bill Concerning Rites and Ceremonies” introduced in the 1572 Parliament, which leveraged the episcopal structure of the church to the advantage of the godly, empowering bishops to grant individual priests the right to diverge from the Book of Common Prayer liturgy and to adopt elements of the rituals used by the French and Dutch “stranger churches” then worshipping in London. The bill's emergence at a very specific juncture, after the statutory confirmation of the Thirty-Nine Articles in 1571, illustrates how godly Protestants sought to use newly ratified regulatory powers to their advantage and to establish that only theological, not liturgical, uniformity mattered for a functional and true national church. Moreover, the bill was legally innovative, proposing to use episcopal power in disaggregated ways, thus institutionalizing the exceptions in worship that individual bishops had informally granted to the ministers under their supervision. It offered a remarkable vision of a national church that contained within it ad hoc and multinational liturgies and that was defined not by its adherence to one form of worship but by the supervision of an enlightened bishopric.
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References
1 The National Archives (hereafter TNA), “Bill for Rites and Ceremonies of the Church,” 20 May 1572, State Papers (SP) 12/86, fols. 198v–199r (described below as Copy A). A second copy, referred to here as Copy B, contains an alteration in the second provision, from requiring only the consent of “the bishops of that dioces” to that “of the most part of Bishopps of this Realme.” This is TNA, SP 12/86, fols. 200r–201v. A substantially revised second version of the bill (referred to as Copy C) is catalogued as TNA, “Bill (Nova) for permitting alterations in the Celebration of Divine Service,” 21 May 1572, SP 12/86, fols. 206r–215r. Reprints of the bill (comparing Copy A and Copy C) can be found in Puritan Manifestoes: A Study of the Origin of the Puritan Revolt, ed. Frere, W. H. and Douglas, C. E. (London, 1954), 149–51Google Scholar.
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