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Handout #177 |
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Protestants are upset with the Queen |
| Some of Elizabeth's Protestant clergy were
unhappy with the caution that her new government showed in bringing
forward the Protestant Reformation: even some who would accept bishoprics
from her and have to defend the new arrangements. Here is the future
Bishop of Salisbury, John Jewel, writing in1559 A.D. to his friend Peter
Martyr, an Italian theologian in Switzerland, after returning to England
from his refuge from Queen Mary in Zurich:
And what, after all, can I write to you? For we are all of us hitherto as strangers at home. Return then, you will say, to Zurich. Most earnestly do I wish, my father, that this may some time be possible: ... 0 Zurich! Zurich! how much oftener do I now think of thee than every I thought of England when I was in Zurich! ... As to religion, it has been effected, I hope, under good auspices, that it shall be restored to the same state as it was during your latest residence among us, under Edward. But, as far as I can perceive at present, there is not the same alacrity among our freinds, as there lately was among the papists ... The scenic apparatus of divine worship is now under agitation; and those very things which you and I have so often laughed at, are now seriously and solemnly entertained by certain persons (for we are not consulted), as if the Christian religion could not exist without something tawdry. ... Others are seeking after a garden, or as it rather seems to me, a leaden mediocrity and are crying out, that the half is better than the whole. Text abbreviated from Zurich Letters Vol. 1, Parker Society 1842, 23. |
