ABSTRACT
This chapter diagnoses the kind of religious moderation found in Matthew Parker and the religious settlement of 1559. The moderation found in Matthew Parker and the religious settlement in 1559 embodied a generational attitude to conformity, compromise and obedience fashioned from the fluidity of the early English Reformation. The authors of the mass of literature on the religious settlement have handled moderation superficially and with ambivalence. Over the centuries the Elizabethan religious settlement of 1559 has been the subject of much debate. Religious moderation in early Elizabethan England was a subjective and complex condition. Religious moderates allowed the government to prescribe the pace and method of Reformation and to decide adiaphorous matters in order to maintain the stability of the commonwealth. Early Elizabethan religious moderation was about having the appropriate amount of Protestantism, avoiding the excessive scrupulosity of Geneva, to defeat the Popish Antichrist.
