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Covenant, Crown, and Commons in Elizabethan Puritanism

Elizabethan puritanism, becoming programmatic, declared its intentions for the church in An Admonition to the Parliament, by John Field and Thomas Wilcox, and in the Second Admonition to the Parliament, both in 1572. The first of those manifestos erected a “true platform of a church reformed” according to “the prescript of God's word” and the examples of the “best reformed churches throughout Christendom.” The second took up what its author called “the hardest point,” namely, to show how reform was to be accomplished—in effect, by persuading queen and parliament to become presbyterian. The admonishers appealed to the power of God's word, the threat of his wrath, and the promise of his reward, presenting the cause of reform as a national case of conscience for the civil authority. Two years earlier, in a bold sermon to the queen, another spokesman for the faction had set forth these same considerations but with a significant difference, for the preacher, Edward Dering, grounded his argument on a theopolitical principle—the principle of covenant—which Protestant extremists (including English and Scottish exiles of the Marian period) had already given a revolutionary twist. This article examines the role of ideas of covenant in the ideological address of sixteenth-century puritanism to crown and commons, prince and people. It finds in the reformers' changing conceptions and applications of covenant a key to the character of the puritan movement and the making of the puritan mind. Though puritans of the Elizabethan era made something of covenant doctrine in their theological writings, they rarely put it to political use, and when they did—when some hardy preacher proposed to constrain the civil magistracy by covenant to do God's will—such efforts boomeranged, endangering both the preacher and his cause.