ABSTRACT
Grindal was an archbishop for thoroughgoing protestants, one of the very few Elizabethan bishops who enjoyed the full approval of the protestant governing class and the equal confidence of all but a small embittered minority of the godly preaching ministers. He was conspicuously a gospeller: severe to papists, but in all his dealings with protestants an evangelical father in God, whose instinct was to proceed fraternally rather than judicially, let alone pontifically. In 1581 Whitgift opposed almost every one of the proposals with sound enough arguments, and Grindal himself added his critical comment to at least one of them, but there is reason to believe that much of this programme would have had the archbishop’s blessing. To return to the Parliament of 1576: a committee, well-weighted with privy councillors, responded to Pistor’s motion by drafting a moderate but earnest petition, complaining in no presbyterian sense of “the lack of the true discipline of the Church’.
