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Building on recent reconsiderations of James I's Church policies, this article ties James's performance at the Hampton Court conference to his Scottish experiences, his texts on kingship and what he perceived in the Church of England upon arrival in his new realm. The linking thread is not theology but rather his fervent anti-popularity, bred in his reaction to the Scottish Reformation, rejection of Buchanan's limited monarchy theories and struggles to exert and expand his kingship in Scotland. In England, he found natural allies in a late Elizabethan tradition of anti-popularity. The puritan petitioning campaign for Church reform convinced him that nonconformity equated with popularity and that he had to crush it immediately (as intimated in Basilikon Doron), if he was to be a “free” monarch. At the conference, James made clear that he would have a strong episcopal church as a bulwark protecting his kingship against any popular challenge. The subsequent rigorous conformity campaign and purge of unyielding ministers indicate that far from seeking an irenic compromise, James sought to extirpate any challenge from below to his authority as Supreme Governor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sixteenth-century English Protestants struggled with the legacy left them by the Lutheran reformation: a strict disjunction between inward and outward that hindered the development of a robust theology of worship. For Luther, outward forms of worship had more to do with the edification of the neighbour than they did with pleasing God. But what exactly did ‘edification’ mean? On the one hand, English Protestants sought to avoid the Roman Catholic view that certain elements of worship held an intrinsic spiritual value; on the other hand, many did not want to imply that forms of worship were spiritually arbitrary and had a merely civil value. Richard Hooker developed his theology of worship in response to this challenge, seeking to maintain a clear distinction between the inward worship of the heart and the outward forms of public worship, while refusing to disassociate the two. The result was a concept of edification which sought to do justice to both civil and spiritual concerns, without, pace Peter Lake and other scholars, conceding an inch to a Catholic theology of worship

This paper discusses competing notions of the concept of ‘order’ in the Admonition Controversy with respect to the interpretation of the decorum of 1 Corinthians 14:26-30, a text principally concerned with order in worship. As the controversy ensued the understanding of ‘order’ broadened to include church discipline and polity, both Puritan and Conformist alike constructed their polemic with a rhetorical appeal to the Pauline text in question-interpretations at odds with each other. Furthermore, both sides understood their interpretation as standing faithfully in the tradition of Calvin. This paper follows the appeals to 1 Corinthians 14:26-40 by Advanced Protestants and Conformists from its use in the treatise ‘Of Ceremonies’ found in the Book of Common Prayer, through the Admonition to the Parliament, the responses of John Whitgift and Thomas Cartwright, and finally Richard Hooker’s Preface to the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie.

Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft is above all remembered for its proto-anthropological approach to the question of witchcraft, while the anti-Catholicism of his books is usually played down or rapidly acknowledged as part of a general trend. And yet the author fully participates in a vast campaign of anti-Catholic propaganda fuelled by the Jesuit missions of the early 1580s and further intensified by the appointment of John Whitgift as archbishop of Canterbury in 1583. Peter Elmer has recently demonstrated that Scot was charged by Whitgift with writing a report of non-conformist activities in Kent, which begs to re-examine The Discoverie of Witchcraft not only through the anti-Catholic prism but also through an anti-puritan one. Yet Scot’s treatise shows very few traces of such an important shift in the doctrinal positions of its author who, until the arrival of Whitgift, seemed to have shared Edmund Grindal’s views by supporting tolerance and freedom of preaching. The present paper will try to show that the answer may lie in the very circumstances of its composition, written between 1582 and 1584 and published in the summer of 1584.