ABSTRACT
What has already been said may have served to explain the presence of a loosely defined and widely dispersed ‘puritanism’ in Elizabethan England. But to account for the activity of a ‘puritan movement’ organized to realize a programme of further reformation requires a closer examination of the aspirations of ‘the hotter sort of protestants’ against the character imposed on the Church of England in the Elizabethan settlement of religion. Queen Elizabeth’s church policy was not unaffected by her private religious opinions, which seem to have been those of a moderate protestant, held with the independence of a mind which was not possessed by any of the current orthodoxies. In January Rodolph Gualter of Zürich warned the queen to beware of those who would obtrude on the churches ‘a form of religion which is an unhappy compound of popery and the gospel, and from which there may at length be an easy passage to the ancient superstition’.
