Four Settlements in Twenty Five Years

Between 1534 and 1559 the official religion of England changed four times, and every change was enforced. Henry's church kept Catholic doctrine without the pope. Under Edward VI the reform went much further, with Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer in English, altars replaced by tables and images removed. Under Mary the country was reconciled to Rome and the leading reformers were burned, Cranmer among them.

Under Elizabeth the settlement of 1559 restored royal supremacy in a modified form and a revised prayer book, and it was deliberately built to be inhabitable by people who disagreed. The prayer book's words at communion combine formulas from two earlier versions, so that a worshipper could understand them in more than one way, and the church kept bishops, cathedrals and a liturgical calendar that stricter Protestants elsewhere had abolished. The result is a church that has contained recognisably Catholic and recognisably Protestant parties from the beginning, which is not an accident or a later drift but the design. For ordinary parishioners the practical experience of the period was a generation of repeated, compulsory and reversible changes to how their parish worshipped, imposed under penalty each time.