ABSTRACT
In the third year of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, a certain William Ramsey, a preacher then residing at Chard in Somerset, addressed himself to a collection of old friends in and around the little market town of South Molton, on the southern edge of Exmoor. John Wesley might have written such a letter two centuries later, rejoicing, like Ramsey, at the news of a sinner ‘lately turned to the Lord’. But the ‘Epistle to the Moltonians’ opens an unsuspected window into the religious world of Elizabethan England. If the ‘natural’ leadership of the nobility still counted for much in the sixteenth century, the Tudor monarchy discovered a far greater potentiality to determine the religious allegiance, and even the religious persuasion of the whole nation. Elizabethan protestants might distinguish between the public, visible Church and the invisible company of God’s elect, concealed within it. But election itself was more commonly an inclusive than an exclusive concept.
