ABSTRACT
Before the 1970s, the religious history of Elizabethan and early Stuart England was depicted as a steadily mounting conflict between the conservative, ‘Anglican’ establishment and radical puritanism, culminating in the Civil War-a ‘Puritan Revolution’. In this 1973 article, and more fully in his recent book, Anti-Calvinists, Tyacke turned this model on its head and set the agenda for historical debate on early Stuart religion for the next two decades. First, he argued that the Elizabethan and Jacobean Church was not characterized by conflict at all, but by a consensus based on theological agreement: both puritans and bishops shared a commitment to the Calvinist view of grace, embodied in the Church’s official confession of faith, the Thirty-nine Articles, and especially in the Lambeth Articles of 1595. This part of his argument has received strong support from Patrick Collinson’s recent work. Only after the accession of Charles I and the ascendancy of William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1633, did conflict emerge and escalate. This conflict was not, however, between radical puritans and conservative bishops; rather, it pitted radical anti-Calvinist theology (Arminianism, defined more fully below), against traditional reformed predestinarianism, which after 1625 was increasingly identified with puritans. The ‘Puritan Revolution’ was thus really a Calvinist counter-revolution against Arminian notions of free will and universal grace.
