James Pilkington was an influential figure within the early Elizabethan Church of England. He was Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge from 1550 until the death of Edward vi and, after spending Mary's reign in peripatetic exile, returned to Cambridge in February 1559, where he quickly became Master of St John's College and Regius Professor of Divinity.Footnote ¹ An active preacher at court and St Paul's during the early 1560s, Pilkington played a role in crafting the new religious settlement through his work on the Book of Common Prayer, the Thirty-Nine Articles and the Book of Homilies.Footnote ² At Cambridge, he also played an important role in the development of Elizabethan Puritanism. Richard Bauckham has demonstrated Pilkington's formative influence over many future Puritan leaders at St John's, a group Pilkington referred to as his ‘halfe a score’, which included Ralph Lever, Percival Wiburne, Roger Kelke, Leonard Pilkington and Thomas Cartwright.Footnote ³ In 1561 Pilkington became bishop of Durham, where his diocesan administration would be staffed by Puritans like Thomas Lever and William Whittingham.Footnote ⁴ David Marcombe reports that it was widely thought that this cadre had been sent to Durham to ‘blunt the edge of their radicalism in a land of papists and malcontents’: Pilkington's time at Durham was ‘unique in its indiscretion’ and marked by violent iconoclasm, aggressive antagonism of Catholics and widespread toleration of nonconformity.Footnote ⁵ As Patrick Collinson described Durham under Pilkington, ‘here alone the puritans had unfettered control’.Footnote ⁶

This article examines a lengthy commentary that Pilkington published in 1560 on the Old Testament book of Haggai.Footnote ⁷ Richard Bauckham has hypothesised that the text ‘probably originated in sermons delivered at Cambridge’, and while it is impossible to date its composition precisely, a range of internal evidence suggests that it was composed at the beginning of Elizabeth's reign.Footnote ⁸ Pilkington wrote about Haggai because it enabled him to draw abundant parallels with Elizabethan England, since ‘the state of religion in these oure miserable dayes, is muche lyke to the troublesom time that this Prophet lived in’.Footnote ⁹ Haggai prophesied to the Jews after their return to Jerusalem from Babylonian captivity.Footnote ¹⁰ After their seventy years in exile, the Persian king Cyrus gave the Jews permission and funds to return to Israel and rebuild the Temple. Led by Zerubbabel, Joshua, Nehemiah and Mordecai, the Jews returned to Jerusalem where they laid a foundation for the Temple and built an altar upon which to make sacrifices to God. Within two years of their return, however, the surrounding inhabitants of Israel accused the Jews of rebellion against the new king in Persia, Ahasuerus, who then forbade any further work on the Temple. After forty years Haggai rebuked the Jews for their inactivity and work began again. To Pilkington, the analogy with Elizabethan England was obvious. Just as the Temple remained unbuilt for forty years, so had forty years passed in England since the beginning of Reformation, and it remained incomplete. Writing about Haggai, therefore, enabled Pilkington to denounce the failure of reform and call for the completion of the English Reformation.

In glossing Haggai's prophecy, Pilkington articulated a series of radical ideas about the nature of the Church and about the respective roles of ‘the people’ and magistrates in reforming it. This vision of the Church and its reform had deep affinities with Marian Protestant arguments for separatism and resistance, which is surprising, given that these values are typically seen as foreign to the life of Protestants under a ‘godly’ monarch. Historians have tended to portray the radical ideology of Marian Protestantism as an aberration produced by the exigencies of a hostile monarch and the experience of persecution. While Protestants had ‘temporarily discarded’ the ‘habits and attitudes that belonged to life in an established Church’ during the Marian persecution, ‘the accession of protestant Elizabeth at once revived deeply-rooted notions of the Church as a great public corporation, one with the commonwealth, and presided over by royal governors’.Footnote ¹¹ With the return of a godly monarch, we are told, Protestants forsook their temporary sectarianism and again embraced the notion of an inclusive national Church under royal authority. Puritans and separatists would later challenge parts of this vision, choosing to separate from the ‘ungodly’ and/or to cease ‘tarrying’ for the magistrate to reform, but this too is seen as the product of frustration with the regime's failure to support the ‘further reformation’ that almost all Elizabethan Protestants expected would follow the settlement of 1559.Footnote ¹²

A close reading of Pilkington's commentary suggests an alternative narrative for Protestant ideological development in early Elizabethan England. For Pilkington, the ideas that historians tend to associate with ‘persecuted Protestantism’ continued to have great purchase in a time of Protestant political ascendancy. The accession of a godly monarch did not cause Pilkington to abandon ‘Marian’ ideas regarding separation from the ungodly or private activism in reform, but nor did it lead him to adopt a hostile or straightforwardly ‘oppositional’ stance towards the Church of England or the royal supremacy – he was willing to become a bishop, after all. Instead, Pilkington's ideas redefined these institutions in ways that blurred the boundaries between resistance and obedience, separation and conformity. Understanding Pilkington's thought on these subjects has important implications for comprehending the nature and development of English Puritanism.

The book of Haggai was about building the Temple, or as Pilkington frequently called it, ‘spiritual house buyldinge’ or simply ‘edification’. Pilkington's understanding of this task seemed to fall within a broadly Reformed model: just as God had issued strict instructions for how the physical Temple was to be built, so the Bible functioned as a blueprint for the proper form and practice of true religion. When God instructed the Israelites to build the Temple, he told them to ‘make it lyke unto that facion whyche was shewed thee in the hyll, devise nothing of thy selfe, neither put to, take awaye, nor chaunge anye thing, but onelye content thyselfe wyth that which I shewed thee’. When it came to building the Church, then, Pilkington insisted that ‘muche lesse in thys spirituall house of gods buyldyng, whych is chiefelye by the preachyng of hys word, may we devise any thyng of our selves, but exactly folow that whych God hathe taught us, and content oure selves therewyth’.Footnote ¹³ There would be no place in the new Temple for the mass, Latin services, unpreaching prelates like ‘Sir John mumble Matins’, images or popish ceremonies of any kind. The new Temple would have a pulpit and communion table, walls that were either bare or covered with Scripture, a preacher to proclaim the Gospel and administer the sacraments, a deacon to serve the poor and discipline to correct faults and maintain order.

Pilkington's commentary, however, was less a blueprint for building this Temple than an extended rebuke to England for failing to finish the task of reformation. Pilkington devoted much of his commentary to attacking the many excuses made by the Jews – and some that he simply invented – for not building the Temple. The Jews had claimed that there was too much work to be done, that the king had forbidden them to build, that work needed to be done on their own homes, that they were too poor, that they were not capable of building the Temple, that the work was too costly, that they had to go slowly because of the weak and, finally, that the task ‘belonged not to them’.Footnote ¹⁴ For Pilkington, these were the same excuses that the English made and, like Haggai before him, he rejected them all: ‘Why, wyll no excuse serve, but that every man must lay hys helping hand to the building of Gods house?’ Pilkington's answer was adamant: ‘God alowes none at al.’Footnote ¹⁵

A close analysis of Pilkington's response to these excuses reveals much about his view of the Church of England and the nature of royal authority. Pilkington hypothesised that some of the people might have excused themselves by claiming ‘we dyd not thys faulte, but our Rulers, or we were not able ta [sic] take it in hand, or if they had begon we would have folowed, or such like fonde excuses’.Footnote ¹⁶ It is significant that Pilkington would inject this hypothetical excuse into his commentary, not only because it was absent from the biblical text, but because it also highlighted one of the most pronounced tensions within English Protestantism, that between obedience to the prince and obedience to God. Early English Protestants were deeply committed to the royal supremacy over the Church and firmly believed that reformation should be led by a godly prince, but these ideological commitments were tested whenever they perceived that the prince was opposing reform or somehow failing to reform adequately. When faced with an ungodly prince, Protestants had to consider what their duty to ‘obey God rather than man’ actually meant in practical terms.Footnote ¹⁷

Pilkington's rejection of excuses alleging royal opposition rested in part on the standard doctrine of passive disobedience, first articulated in the English Reformation by William Tyndale in his Obedience of a Christian man. In short, this argued that Christians must obey civil authorities ‘in all thynges, not contrary to Gods truth and religion’, but must refuse to obey commands ‘where in God is offended and dysobeyed’.Footnote ¹⁸ For Pilkington, since God commanded the building of the Temple, Christians must disobey any prince who forbids it. A close reading of the excuses Pilkington raised, however, reveals what we might call princely sins of commission (such as commanding things against the word of God) and princely sins of omission (such as failing to take the initiative in reform – hence the excuse, ‘if they had begon we would have folowed’). While passive disobedience was clearly the proper response to princely sins of commission, passive disobedience was the wrong response to princely sins of omission, precisely because it was passivity that demanded a response. As Pilkington put it, ‘nothyng can defende us, where that is lefte undone whyche God commaundeth, but it is synne’.Footnote ¹⁹ Indeed, passive disobedience was never a sufficient response to a prince who failed to build the Temple, because it left the Temple unbuilt. For Pilkington, then, the proper response to princely sins of commission and omission was something that might be called activist disobedience. This response was activist insofar as it demanded that all people, always and everywhere, obey God's command to build the Temple: ‘God requires hys house to be buylded, hys woord and religion to be kept and maintayned as well of the lowest as the hyghest, and they whych do not, shall not escape unpunished.’Footnote ²⁰ It was disobedient only incidentally, because princes wrongly understood it as treason or rebellion, but in fact ‘thys is not treason to Kinges to do that whych God commaundes. When Danyell dyd praye thryse a daye to God, contrarye to the Kynges commaundement. And the Apostles dyd preache contrarye to the wylles and commaundementes of the Rulers, and it was neyther treason nor rebellion’.Footnote ²¹

A prime example of this activist mentality can be found in Pilkington's gloss on Haggai i. 14–15. After receiving Haggai's rebuke, the Jews feared God's wrath and trusted that God would be with them if they began to rebuild the Temple. After

Pilkington reiterated that, despite being forbidden to build the Temple, the Jews ‘went forwarde in their buyldynge, askynge no lycence at all of anye man, before they were complayned on’.Footnote ²³ As promised, God blessed their obedience, so that when their enemies accused them of rebellion to yet another king of Persia, Darius, ‘God so moved the Kynges hart, that he gave them not onely libertye to buylde, but money also to doo it wyth all.’Footnote ²⁴

In the context of the royal supremacy, which assigned to the monarch supreme authority over the Church – not local magistrates, the clergy or the people – this was a surprising account of reformation. Indeed, the radical minister Robert Browne would offer the same interpretation of Haggai when defending his congregation's separation from the Church of England in 1582:

Recognising how controversial it was to praise those who proceeded to build the Temple without the prince's approval or participation, Pilkington immediately explained how his position was entirely obedient: ‘This was neyther treason nor rebellion agaynste the Kinge to do that which God by his prophet so straitly commaunded as was declared and noted before but they were rather traytours to God that had not of so many yeares gone more ernestly about that buildinge of Goddes howse as God willed them to doo.’Footnote ²⁶ Pilkington redefined treason here, arguing that in matters relating to the Temple, treason could not be committed against the prince, because the jurisdiction over such matters belonged to God. Building the Temple was a duty imposed on all people directly by God so that any accusation of treason, rebellion or disobedience to the prince in building the Temple rested upon a jurisdictional confusion. Asking his readers if they would obey a sheriff's command over the king's, Pilkington explained that ‘so is the Kyng Gods under Officer, and not to obeyed before hym’.Footnote ²⁷ Indeed, if the prince opposed the building of the Temple, he or she became the rebel and traitor.

This interpretation of the Jews' response to Haggai differed dramatically from other contemporary Protestant readings.Footnote ²⁸ Calvin lectured on the minor prophets at the end of the 1550s, and these lectures were first published in 1559, dedicated to the reformist king of Sweden, Gustavus Vasa. Calvin's dating of Haggai's prophecy differed from Pilkington's, a seemingly minor point that nevertheless had major implications for how they understood Haggai's teaching regarding magistrates. Calvin argued that Haggai prophesied to the Jews after Darius had given them liberty and funds to build the Temple.Footnote ²⁹ Unlike Pilkington, then, who interpreted Haggai's prophecy as a rebuke for fearing to disobey a royal command, Calvin interpreted it as a rebuke for failing to obey a godly king. Since ‘Darius had so kindly permitted them to build the Temple, they had no excuse for delay’.Footnote ³⁰ In Calvin's interpretation, the blame for failing to build the Temple lay entirely with the people, not their civil magistrate or high priest, for ‘if a probable conjecture be entertained, neither Zerubbabel nor Joshua were at fault … Zerubbabel was a wise prince, and that Joshua faithfully discharged his office as priest’.Footnote ³¹

A similar interpretation was offered in England by Bishop John Jewel in a sermon on Haggai i. 2–4 preached at Paul's Cross some time during the 1560s.Footnote ³² Jewel argued, like Calvin, that Haggai prophesied after Darius gave the Jews licence to rebuild the Temple, and he also contrasted the sloth of the people with the enthusiasm of their rulers for building the Temple:

Zerubbabel was the hero of Jewel's sermon. While the building of the Temple entailed real hardship, ‘all this discouraged not the good prince Zorobabel, hee armed himselfe with Gods promise against all impossibilities, and so called the people to the buylding of the temple … that man of GOD despayred not, though hee sawe all the worlde against him’.Footnote ³⁴

According to Calvin and Jewel, therefore, the prophet Haggai joined forces with godly civil and religious leaders to rouse a slothful people to build God's Temple. These interpretations emphasised the central place of the godly ruler in God's providential design for Temple-building and the necessity of civil authority for its success. Calvin noted, for example, that when the rebuilding of the Temple finally began, the prophet

Jewel's emphasis was even more strictly on the civil magistrate: the Temple ‘was restored, not by the Bishoppes, but by Zorobabel the Prince of Juda’.Footnote ³⁶ This was an expression of the high ideology of the royal supremacy, described in great detail by Stephen Alford, in which ‘the royal supremacy and godly Reformation fused’.Footnote ³⁷

Pilkington could have read Haggai in this fashion, but as we have seen his interpretation was rather different.Footnote ³⁸ Pilkington was aware that his chronology was not universally accepted and he defended his interpretation by invoking the principle of sola scriptura and implicitly criticising other commentators for relying overmuch on historical criticism: ‘although the countinge of these yeares be harde to count, and are dyverslye reckened of dyvers men, because they woulde make the Greeke histories to agre with the scriptures, I shall let al other histories passe, because they be to troublesome, and folow that onelye whiche the scripture teacheth’.Footnote ³⁹ Whatever its source, Pilkington's chronology enabled him to develop a distinctive political interpretation of the passage. All the Jews – not just the ‘people’ – had failed to build the Temple: ‘Aggeus dyd rebuke both Zerubabel the chiefe civil Ruler in the common wealth, and Josua the hye Priest and chiefe in religion, and also the whole people besyde, & threatens the plages indifferentlye to all wyth out any flatttery or respect of person.’Footnote ⁴⁰ Indeed, when he did assign blame to particular persons, Pilkington reversed Calvin's argument by suggesting that Zerubbabel and Joshua ‘had offended moste, because they beyng rulers dyd neyther their duty them selves, nor yet caused others to doo theirs, whyche both they should have done’.Footnote ⁴¹ In short, rather than glossing the eventual building of the Temple as an act of obedience to Darius, or as revealing the godly leadership of the inferior magistrate Zerubbabel or high priest Joshua, Pilkington chose to portray the Jews' building as a collective act of obedience to God which happened to be disobedience to royal pretension.

It is crucial to stress that Pilkington hardly rejected the royal supremacy or denied that the godly monarch should play a central role in leading reform. He presented Darius' assistance as desirable and welcome and he emphasised throughout the commentary that Elizabeth and other magistrates had a crucial role to play in building the Temple. But as frequently as he proclaimed the duties of the monarch to lead the people, he put that duty in the broader context of all people's duty to build the Temple. On this point and others Pilkington's commentary was intriguingly similar to the thought of the Marian resistance theorists. Pilkington shared with John Knox, his minister for a brief time at Geneva during the Marian exile, a view of reform as a duty laid upon all people by God that was in no way obviated by the failure of civil or religious leaders. In his 1558 Letter to the commonalty, Knox thundered that

Knox demanded that the people take reform into their own hands if the prince failed in this regard: ‘And if in this point [providing ministers] your superiors be negligent, or yet pretend to maintain tyrants in their tyranny, most justly ye may provide true teachers for yourselves, be it in your cities, towns or villages.’Footnote ⁴³

The notion that God directly commanded all people to obey him was voiced even more vehemently by Christopher Goodman, who argued in How superior powers oght to be obeyed of their subjects (1558) that

An even more striking parallel between this text and Aggeus can be found in Goodman's rejection of the notion that obeying God before man was a passive duty. As Jane Dawson has shown, Goodman moved beyond the doctrine of passive disobedience by ‘insisting that not obeying an ungodly command was insufficient and could not constitute complete obedience to God’. Indeed, Goodman's text was so shocking to sixteenth-century readers precisely because it demanded that all people ‘do the contrary’ to the commands of an ungodly ruler.Footnote ⁴⁵ On this point, both Pilkington and Goodman pointed to Daniel's refusal to obey Darius' royal prohibition on prayer as a prime example of the duty (as Goodman put it) ‘not onelie to contemne the kinges unlawfull commandement, but to do the plaine contrarie’.Footnote ⁴⁶

The similarities between Pilkington and the resistance theorists even extend to choice of topics: Knox preached a ‘vehement’ series of sermons on Haggai to the Scottish parliament in the summer of 1560, remarking that the ‘doctrine was proper for the time’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Unfortunately, the content of these sermons has not survived, but I would strongly suspect that they were similar to Pilkington's interpretation of Haggai. We can perhaps surmise Knox's interpretation by comments made in A briefe exhortation to England for the spedie imbrasing of Christ's gospel (1559), which Roger Mason has characterised as a call to ‘avoid any compromises with the civil authorities and recreate a godly commonwealth in strict accordance with the law of God’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Knox exhorted the English to

This advice, which Mason notes was ‘hardly compatible with the doctrine of the royal supremacy’, was entirely compatible with Pilkington's insistence that same year that ‘thys is not treason to Kinges to do that whych God commaundes’.Footnote ⁵⁰

But the most striking parallel between Pilkington and the Marian resistance theorists was their common fondness for the Old Testament figure of Phineas. As the story is recounted in Numbers, an Israelite man was permitted to marry a Midianite woman in the presence of Moses and all Israel – a mixed marriage directly prohibited by God – and Phineas took justice into his own hands by entering the man's tent and spearing man and wife together through the belly. Because of Phineas's zeal, God's wrath was satisfied, and the plague he had unleashed on Israel relented. This story was obviously much beloved by the resistance theorists and Knox prayed ‘God for his great mercies sake stirre up some Phinees, Helias, or Jehu, that the bloude of abhominable Idolaters maye pacifie goddes wrath, that it consume not the hole multitude.’Footnote ⁵¹ With this set of associations, it is therefore remarkable that figures like Phineas and Jehu are not only praised in Pilkington's commentary on Haggai, but that Pilkington put Phineas on the title page: ‘Phinees hath turned away my anger because he was moved with love of me.’Footnote ⁵² Pilkington began a book about the need to reform the Church with an example of a hero, perhaps not coincidentally a priest, whose zealous desire to obey God's commandments led him to act on his own initiative while the authorities sat idly by.Footnote ⁵³

In Pilkington's Aggeus, the fundamental ideas animating Marian resistance theory continued to animate Protestant thought about reform and the prince, even after the end of persecution and the accession of a Protestant monarch. Catharine Davies has noted that with the accession of Catholic Mary Tudor, ‘the ideological line separating a withdrawal of obedience from an act of resistance would become very hazy’, as the official doctrine of passive disobedience promulgated in the Edwardian homilies would be reinterpreted in Goodman's ‘radical call to resistance’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Pilkington's commentary illustrates this point at the other end of the exile, showing how an ideology of active and direct obedience to God could recommend resistance under a persecuting monarch, but then underwrite reformist activism in a time of Protestant political ascendancy.Footnote ⁵⁵ To Pilkington, God commanded all people to build the Temple: this was not an emergency plan to be activated only when the monarch persecuted the Gospel, but rather a guiding principle at all times. As Pilkington put it, ‘he that waytes whan hee maye buylde Gods house, and have the worlde wyth hym wyth oute dyspleasure of the Rulers, the people, the Cleargy, or the Layty, shal neuer do his duty, for ever the gospel hath some enemyes’.Footnote ⁵⁶

Another hypothetical excuse that Pilkington considered was that, while the Jews wanted to build the Temple, they had to contend with the ‘weakenes of the people’. Pilkington translated this into Tudor England by complaining that while the English had been willing to demolish the pope's Church when it resulted in private ‘profit and promocion’ – such as the dissolution of the monasteries – they had refused then to build the Temple for fear of ‘rebellion or insurrections of the commons, otherwhyles to beare with the weakenes of the people’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Pilkington rejected this as an excuse primarily because of the way in which he understood the ‘weakenes of the people’. Weak people were those who had not yet been ‘sufficiently taught and all doutes they can laye, taken away’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Those who refused to learn the lessons of the Gospel were no longer ‘weak’ but instead ‘froward supersticious Papistes that wyll not learne’.Footnote ⁵⁹ As Pilkington put it, ‘although the scripture require that … the weakenes of our brethren that have not lerned their libertye must be borne with for a tyme, yet are we not bidden alwaies to do it, nor be so wise that to please man we displease god’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Weak status, in other words, was time sensitive: the weak could not remain so indefinitely, but had only so many chances to become strong before they devolved into superstitious papists. As such, Pilkington urged that while one must take care to bear with genuinely weak brethren when building the Temple, bearing with obstinate papists displeased God, because it placed the true practice of Christian liberty in bondage to popery. One should follow Christ's teaching to ‘let them alone they be blynde guydes of the blynd’.Footnote ⁶¹

This distinction between the genuinely weak and the superstitious was extremely important to Pilkington because he saw popery as a contagion that would inevitably infect true Christians. Not only did popish ceremonies ‘tread down’ the true use of Christian liberty, but contact with papists themselves posed a serious threat to the spiritual well-being of Christians. Pilkington lamented that ‘in companyng with Papists, & to please the world, many have forsaken the truth, which they knowe and profes, and are become open enemyes and persecuters of God and hys people’.Footnote ⁶² Simple conversation with a papist was a dangerous game, for it was inevitable that ‘thou shalt heare some crooked reasons which shal deceive thee, & paradventure entangle thee and bryng the from Gods truth’.Footnote ⁶³

Ideas like these about the need for purity and separation from papists were commonplace in the writings of Marian Protestants, who condemned the evils of dissembling and Nicodemism, demanded that Christians must vocally attack superstition whenever they encountered it, and urged Christians to separate from papists because they believed that even social contact could lead to physical and spiritual death. For these Protestants, peaceful cohabitation with papists was tantamount to betraying the Gospel. In 1554 John Bale wrote that ‘Suche as beare ii. faces in one hoode, such as play on both handes, such as deni the knowen truth such as obstinatly rebel against it, al such with their partakers, shall the Lord destroi.’Footnote ⁶⁴ The best policy concerning papists, according to Knox, was ‘to flee and avoid the society and company of the proud contemners of God’.Footnote ⁶⁵ J. T., a Marian Protestant in exile on the continent, put it most strongly when writing to his brethren in England: ‘O my frend do ye thinke that the word of the spirite of God, speaking so earnestly & with such vehemence, by the mouthes of those holy men: to commaunde us to avoyde the company of Idolaters, is written in vayne & to no purpose … S. Paul hath the lyke saying: Come out from amonge them, & separate your selves from them, saith the Lord.’Footnote ⁶⁶

While these views led a particularly uncompromising segment of Tudor Protestants into exile or separatism under Mary Tudor, they led Pilkington to urge a purge of papists from the Elizabethan Church. Haggai again provided a clear model in Pilkington's mind. When the Jews were first given licence by Cyrus to return to Jerusalem and build the Temple, many ‘people of the countrye’ joined them in their task, claiming to worship the same God. But when Ahasuerus came to power and forbade building, these people proved to be false workmen and vehemently turned against the Jews.Footnote ⁶⁷ This, according to Pilkington, was precisely what had happened recently in England: ‘So manye amongst us whyche be Papistes in deede, when they see that they shal please the rulers, wyll crye most earnestly for the buyldyng of Gods house, and pretende as though they would worke most stoutly: but if they se the world turne, they wyll be the first & moste earnest destroiers of the same.’Footnote ⁶⁸ Praising the Jewish temple builders, who ‘woulde not suffer them [dissemblers] to woorke wyth them’, Pilkington warned his readers that ‘such false brethren must be most diligently taken hede of and not bee suffered to joyne them selves wyth the true workemen least they betray all the good, as we both feele and see oure Papistes to have done, to the slaunder of God and hys woord, our hurt and shame’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Claiming the authority of the Apostle Paul, Pilkington wrote that the worst danger facing Christians and the Church was not open papists, but ‘false brethren which make a shewe of godlynes and yet are most wycked wythin, even very Wolves in Lambes skynnes’.Footnote ⁷⁰

Given the portion of the population that he would have characterised as ‘superstitious papists’, and given his consistent emphasis that all people must actively build the Temple, it seems that Pilkington would have had a majority of the population excluded from ‘spiritual house building’ and ‘edification’.Footnote ⁷¹ In a much-quoted passage, Pilkington lamented that while Moses commanded that blasphemers be put to death, in England ‘they beare the name and title of Ministers in Christes church’.Footnote ⁷² Indeed, the vision of the Temple found in Aggeus is one safe for the godly, maintaining the Gospel and rigorously preserving its purity lest popery silently creep in through the pews. Pilkington became positively rapturous when describing what this Church would be like:

On this point, I want to continue the argument made earlier regarding resistance theory. Pilkington's vehement arguments about keeping papists out of the Temple and Marian arguments about separating from papists were different sides of the same ideological coin. Both were driven by the idea that contact with papists and dissemblers would not only bring harm to individual Christians, but to the Church itself. According to Thomas Lever, for example, the underground Protestant congregation that met under Mary (and continued to meet well into 1559) would not allow any strangers to be present when they received communion, unless they had ‘kept pure from popery and even from the imputation of an evil conduct’, or openly confessed and repented their backsliding to the congregation.Footnote ⁷⁴ Only one year later Pilkington was deploying this same approach in the context of the national Church: the new Temple must carefully guard against papist infiltration, just as Marian separatist congregations needed to guard their membership carefully against contamination and spies.

Pilkington never saw these ideas as entailing Protestant separation from the Church of England, but the writings of William White reveal how easily arguments like Pilkington's could be used to justify private reformation and separation. White, a baker and amateur theologian, is a fascinating figure in the London godly scene of the later 1560s and early 1570s. He was a separatist in the later 1560s and a leader of the Plumbers' Hall congregation, as well as a close associate of John Field and Thomas Wilcox and the author of a preface to the Admonition to parliament.Footnote ⁷⁵ In 1569 White wrote a letter to Edmund Grindal, then bishop of London. White had previously appeared before Grindal, along with several other members of the Plumbers' Hall congregation, and faced Grindal's rebuke for holding a fast and exercise without public authority. He responded by citing John Hooper's Edwardian sermons on Jonah: the people of Nineveh did not wait to obey Jonah's preaching until their king and priests had decided whether it was true. Quite the opposite, ‘the king of Ninivee did not blame his subjects’ for running ahead of him in ‘well doing’, but instead gladly followed their godly example. If the king of Nineveh responded this way, White asked, should not Christian magistrates do the same?Footnote ⁷⁶

In another tract White complained about the way in which the bishops suppressed godly reformation. White began by sarcastically recounting the doctrine that ‘none may meddle with these matters, but such as are thereunto called, I mean with religion’. But this was clearly wrong, according to White:

Having reached this conclusion, White began all over again in a sarcastic tirade that is worth citing at length:

On these points, the London separatist and the bishop of Durham were in agreement, a fact that should blur the firm ideological line that tends to be drawn between mainstream Elizabethan Protestants and separatists.Footnote ⁷⁹ Patrick Collinson excluded separatists from his magisterial Elizabethan Puritan movement because ‘they believed not in reformation, properly understood, but in the creation or restitution of a totally alien, elect Christian society’.Footnote ⁸⁰ In contrast, Puritans and Conformists shared the belief that the ‘promiscuous membership’ of the Church ‘was no cause for separation. One must adhere to the corpus permixtum of the confused, all-inclusive Church. It was safe to do so, since to remain was not to risk one's soul … It was not permissible to do otherwise, since as private persons individual Christians had no right or authority to take the law into their own hands’.Footnote ⁸¹ Pilkington argued, however, that the ‘promiscuous membership’ of the Church – not just false doctrine or the false administration of the sacraments – posed a fatal threat to the Church and to Christian souls, and he also argued that Christians must execute God's commands when the authorities failed to do so. Pilkington was deeply enmeshed in the Protestant establishment and condemned those who forsook church attendance for separatism, but he was nevertheless envisaging something like the creation of a separated Church of England – not unlike those Puritan parishes where the ‘ungodly’ were excluded from communion in an act Collinson so aptly describes as ‘not a separation of the godly but a forcible separation of the ungodly: the driving of the bondswoman Hagar and her son Ishmael out of the tent and into the wilderness’.Footnote ⁸²

Reading James Pilkington's Aggeus reminds us that the accession of Elizabeth could have a number of different meanings for English Protestants. It is typically seen as transporting Protestants' imaginations ‘from the conditions of apostolic Christianity to the godly Commonwealth of Israel’.Footnote ⁸³ Protestants placed great hopes on Elizabeth, who was regularly portrayed as a new Josiah, Deborah, Esther or a second Constantine in the 1563 edition of Foxe's Acts & monuments. Footnote ⁸⁴ When Pilkington looked to the Old Testament for guidance at the beginning of Elizabeth's reign, he could have looked to these figures of triumphant Israel – as so many Protestants would throughout Elizabeth's reign – but instead he turned to accounts of Israel after the destruction of the monarchy and the Babylonian exile. This did not preclude an emphasis on the godly reforming prince, as Calvin and Jewel's interpretations show, but this was not how Pilkington chose to read Haggai. His interpretation of post-exilic Israel valorised the collective efforts of inferior magistrates like Zerubbabel (the Jews' ‘mayor’Footnote ⁸⁵), priests like Joshua and the people of Israel themselves to build God's Temple in the face of royal forbidding. It highlighted, moreover, the tremendous danger posed by enemies who would dissemble and hypocritically join with true gospellers, and demanded their utter exclusion. For Pilkington, the ideas that historians associate with persecuted Protestantism – emphasising purity, separation and private initiative in religion – continued to have great purchase in a time of Protestant political ascendancy. The way in which Pilkington deployed these ideas hardly constituted ‘opposition’ to the Church of England or the royal supremacy, but it redefined these institutions in significant ways: it subsumed the authority of the prince under the broader authority of ‘the godly’ to build God's house and it redefined the national Church in terms of the godly community.

This article has focused upon aspects of the worldview articulated by an influential figure within early Elizabethan Protestantism, but attitudes like those expressed in Pilkington's commentary were to play an important role in driving the activism of ‘the godly’ throughout the 1560s. The Elizabethan vestiarian controversy may have been ignited by the regime's efforts to impose conformity in 1565, but the confrontation between the queen and the godly was only made possible because substantial numbers of clergy, from bishops like Pilkington and Edmund Grindal to parish ministers like Robert Crowley, refused to wear (or require others to wear) the clerical uniform prescribed by the crown. This was to reform the Church of England without waiting for licence and, as they vigorously defended their actions in the ensuing polemical deluge, to demand that the queen follow suit: would the queen emulate King Darius or the king of Nineveh by following their obedient example? The same could be said about the later crisis occasioned by Elizabeth's hostility towards prophesyings, which many bishops encouraged or established themselves. A group of Puritan ministers in Leicestershire defended themselves against charges of holding illegal exercises during the 1570s by claiming that they had warrant from both the Bible and earthly authorities. Nevertheless, they admitted ‘let it be that we had no commaundement of man, yet that the necessitie of our tyme doth requyre suche publique exercises there is no man can denye that hath any conscience of synne, or any consyderacon of gods plagues imminent, or any care for the furtherance of Christs holy gospell among us’.Footnote ⁸⁶ They justified their private activism in terms of their duty to edify the Church, which they regarded as valid regardless of whether the authorities agreed.

The development of Puritanism was profoundly shaped by these confrontations between Elizabeth and ‘the godly’, as some Protestants came to believe that separation from the Church of England or the imposition of presbyterian discipline was the only course of action that remained to them. But the politico-ecclesiological radicalism of the 1570s and 1580s was not created by Elizabeth's propensity to confound the godly; indeed, the godly bore as much responsibility as the queen did for these ecclesiastical conflagrations. Peter Lake has aptly described the ideological tension in early Elizabethan Protestantism as being ‘between the demands of external order and the spiritual dynamic of edification or, if you prefer, between a view of the Church centred on the Christian prince and one centred on the godly community’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Lake goes on to describe how the presbyterian movement of the 1570s ‘developed and deepened that split, by shifting the Christian prince from the centre to the periphery of protestant concern and effectively handing control of the church to the godly’.Footnote ⁸⁸ While the vestments controversy of the 1560s did much to drive a segment of the Puritan community towards increasingly militant ecclesiological stances, the mentality found in Pilkington's Aggeus reveals that the shifting of the godly prince to the periphery of Protestant concern was already well underway at the beginning of Elizabeth's reign. This was not a later development within Elizabethan Protestantism – a reaction to the failure of the queen to live up to Protestant expectations – nor was it limited to radical separatists and presbyterian agitators. Instead, it was the evolution of attitudes that had been fermenting long before Elizabeth convinced many Protestants that she would not be the second Constantine for whom they had hoped.