Elizabeth clearly sought to reverse the Marian religious direction, yet competing for her attention and consequently her care in theological decisions, was a fractured domestic scene and tenuous foreign relationships. England was still at war with France and allied with Spain, both Catholic states.
The French were supporting Mary Stuart’s rival claim to the English throne and, if needed, Elizabeth could tap Lutheran states as prospective allies to ward off potential French aggression. Her personal theological preferences; some favoring Protestant thinking, some favoring Catholic ritual, helped shape the religious settlement she fashioned in 1558–59 and the resulting, enduring Anglican Church.
As an institution, the church’s favorable acceptance of the principles of adiaphora (things indifferent) and via media (a middle way), allowed religious liberty and toleration to manifest themselves as never before welcomed. Anglicanism was English, patriotic and not firmly Calvinist. It rejected what was, in its eyes, the bibliolatry of the hard-line Protestant in favor of a more broadly based appeal to tradition, reason, and history, as well as Scripture. It embraced adiaphora and came to tolerate various church polities. By the mid-1550s these values formed the seeds of seventeenth century English Congregationalism and Independency. These ideas emerged both in the exiled congregations, especially at Frankfurt, and in the remaining underground Protestant congregations in England. This religious atmosphere had profound historical consequences as it allowed the growth of various nonconformist groups and the development of Puritan thought, which itself would create an atmosphere conducive to political developments that likely would not have happened in a Catholic society. In the 1560s, London became the center of a movement to accomplish a truly reformed church.
Despite its accomplishments, Elizabeth’s broadly accommodating church had not completely satisfied the urge to purify the church and nowhere was this unquenched thirst for purification felt more strongly than in London. In reaction to Elizabeth’s compromises, viewed as unacceptable and even threatening to those with strong Protestant convictions, the godly moved among parishes seeking one that was more than half-reformed. Puritan movements and separatist tendencies found vitality among the varieties of faith in the city. Believers now faced choices, not only about how to reach salvation, but where, and with whom they could consciously commune. It effected a shift from a religion of symbol and allegory, ceremony and formal gesture to one that was plain and direct: a shift from the visual to the aural, from ritual to literal exposition, from the numinous and mysterious to the everyday. It moved from the high colors of statue, window and painted walls to whitewash; from ornate vestments and altar frontal to plain tablecloth and surplice; from a religion that, with baptismal salt on lips, anointings and frankincense as well as image, word and chant, sought out all the senses, to one that concentrated on the word and innerliness.
There was a shift from a religion that often went out of doors on pilgrimage and procession to an indoor one; from the sacral and churchly to the familial and domestic; from sacrament to word; from the objectivity of ex opere operato and Real Presence, for instance, to the subjectivity of feeling faith and experience. Consequently, the Reformation had produced a Protestant nation, but not immediately a nation of Protestants. Catholic behaviours and doctrines had been removed from worship via political statute but Catholic views of life and salvation took time to die out.45
In Anatomy of the Abuses in England in Shakespeare’s Youth by the Cheshire Calvinist, Philip Stubbes, first published in 1583, he bewails the vain pastimes of the Christmas season.
“Especially,” he says, “in Christmas time, there is nothing else used but cards, dice, tables, masking, mumming, bowling, and such like fooleries; and the reason is, that they think they have a commission and prerogative at that time to do what they want, and to follow what vanity they will. But (alas!) do they think that they are privileged at that time to do evil? The holier the time is (if one time were holier than another, as it is not), the holier ought their exercises to be. Can any time dispense with them, or give them liberty to sin? No, no; the soul which sins shall die, at whatever time it offends . . . Notwithstanding, who knows not that more mischief is at that time committed than in all the year besides?”46
During the Elizabethan Period poets wrote carols of a more polished character but still dealt with the life of the Christ Child. One of the best known of this era would be Nahum Tate’s “While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks.” This work was more of a transitional piece from true carols to hymns and paved the way for such Methodist Revival hymns as “Hark The Herald Angels Sing,” “Angels From the Realms of Glory,” or “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear.” These were made widespread over the years by careful editors and enterprising publishers. On Christmas Day in England, these and other carols took the place of psalms in the churches, especially at afternoon service with the congregation joining in. At the end of the service the parish clerk would usually declare in a loud voice his wishes for “a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.”
Puritan Era
When the Puritans had gained the upper hand they proceeded with the suppression not only of seasonal abuses but of the season itself. On September 2, 1642, the largely Puritan Parliament outlawed the performance of plays, including Christmas pageants and plays, and the theaters were closed.47 On June 12, 1643, Parliament abolished the offices of Archbishops, Bishops, their Chancellors, Commissaries, Deans, Deans and Chapters, Archdeacons, declaring “and other Ecclesiastical Officers depending upon the Hierarchy, is evil, and justly offensive and burthensome to the Kingdome.”48
On August 26, 1643, legislation was passed which included a bill entitled, “An Ordinance for the utter demolishing, removing and taking away of all Monuments of Superstition or Idolatry.”
The aim was to facilitate an improved observation of the Lord’s Day, and thereby the “better advancement of preaching God’s Holy Word in all parts of the kingdom.”
Communion tables were to be moved from their customary location on the east side of churches, to be fixed in some convenient place in the body of the church. All altars and rails, tapers, candlesticks, basins, crucifixes, crosses, images, pictures of saints or the Virgin Mary or depicting the Persons of the Trinity, and superstitious inscriptions in churches or churchyards, were to be taken away or defaced.49 Church organs were also moved from many churches.
An excellent opportunity for turning the annual Christmas feast into a fast, as the church had done earlier with the Kalends festival, came in 1644. It had been the practice in the past to preach a sermon to the Lords in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day, something that a growing number of Puritans were uncomfortable with. The issue came to a head in that year, when Christmas Day happened to fall upon the last Wednesday of the month, a day already appointed by the Lords and Commons for Fasting and Humiliation. Parliament published the following “Ordinance for the better observation of the Feast of the Nativity of Christ,” on December 19, 1644:
Whereas some doubts have been raised whether the next Fast shall be celebrated, because it falleth on the day which, heretofore, was usually called the Feast of the Nativity of our Savior; the lords and commons do order and ordain that public notice be given, that the Fast appointed to be kept on the last Wednesday in every month, ought to be observed until it be otherwise ordered by both houses; and that this day particularly is to be kept with the more solemn humiliation because it may call to remembrance our sins and the sins of our forefathers, who have turned this Feast, pretending the memory of Christ, into an extreme forgetfulness of him, by giving liberty to carnal and sensual delights; being contrary to the life which Christ himself led here upon earth, and to the spiritual life of Christ in our souls; for the sanctifying and saving whereof Christ was pleased both to take a human life, and to lay it down again.50
This, in effect, banned the celebration of Christmas that year, 1644. Edward Calamy (1600–1666) from London, preached the Lord’s sermon on December 25. He stated:
This day is commonly called The
