Edward Fisher and the Defence of Elizabethan Protestantism during the English Revolution

Abstract

During the seventeenth century several attempts were made to change fundamentally the character of the Church of England founded by Elizabeth I. The innovations introduced by Laud in the 1630s precipitated a civil war and brought to power godly governments which restructured the Church on a Presbyterian model. The amateur theologian, Edward Fisher, opposed this new godly establishment, arguing for the continued celebration of Christmas, and against sabbatarianism and sacramental examination and suspension. His tracts in support of ' Elizabethan Protestantism ' proved popular in the 1650s and helped to cement attachment to a more inclusive vision of the English Church.A t the start of her reign in the mid-sixteenth century, Elizabeth I founded an indigenous English Protestant Church, which combined a predestinarian theology with a traditional hierarchical ecclesiological structure and a conservative liturgical and ceremonial order. She subsequently spent much of her long reign breaking down the residual attachment of a sizeable minority of her subjects to the old Roman Catholic faith, and defending her new hybrid Church of England from the attacks of godly Puritans who considered that it was ' but halfly-reformed' and contained far too many obnoxious vestiges of popery. During the 1590s her new English Church was given a clearer identity and enhanced sense of self-worth through the writings of Richard Hooker, and, as Judith Maltby has recently shown, by the early decades of the seventeenth century the unique brand of Protestantism which found expression in the 1559 Book of Common Prayer had begun to put

Review of periodical literature published in 2005

“…Articles by Spurr and Starkie demonstrate that historical controversies over the origins and ‘true path’ of the Church of England rumbled on into the eighteenth century. Similarly, Durston’s depiction of Edward Fisher’s nostalgia for the Elizabethan church illustrates how he sustained ‘popular Anglicanism’ in the critical 1650s. Meanwhile, Cressy (in Huntington Library Quarterly ) depicts the rhetorical fight for control over the meaning and memory of the Civil War, between those who depicted a providential deliverance from tyranny, and those who saw only an unexpected, painful slide into anarchy.…”