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few prominent Catholic officials, who, predictably, complained about confinement, their replacements, and the new regime. Horne said that the complainants conspired “to ingrafte in the mindes of subjects a mislikyng of their [new] Queen’s majestie, as though she usurped a power and authoritie in ecclesiastical matters.” He and other exiles-turned-bishops explained, during the early 1560s, that popes were the real usurpers, that “the wylie foxe of Rome,” armed with a “rable of bulls, dispensations, and indulgences,” ruled rulers for centuries. Horne put the reformed alternative succinctly: “It apperteineth to the emperiall office . . . to preserve the estate of God’s holy churches,” and, from late 1558, “it apperteineth” to Elizabeth’s office.³

      And she demanded “due obedience.” Many priests acquiesced, perhaps counting on the survival of traditional liturgies or on the short shelf life of alterations proposed by the religiously reformed.⁴ But some Catholics departed and promptly plotted to return with reinforcements from abroad to topple Elizabeth’s new government. Nicholas Sander, for one, quit Oxford and crossed the Channel while the queen’s Council was finding its feet. He told anyone who would listen that Calvinists in England were few and very unpopular, but two decades passed before he joined an expedition to collect colonists in Ireland for an invasion of the realm he left. Charles Neville, the sixth Earl of Westmoreland, departed for the Continent shortly after his “rising” in the north of England collapsed in 1569. He lived as a pensioner of Spain, scheming to scupper the Tudor regime and religious reforms he despised. Thomas Norton, Neville’s nemesis and an ardent advocate of both the regime and its religious reforms, would rather have had the insurgent earl “preach the right frutes of rebellion” from a scaffold, but Westmoreland was safely away when Norton pushed through Parliament statutes, the effect of which was to punish Catholics’ sedition as treason.⁵ During the deliberations in the Commons, Walter Mildmay, who was chancellor of the exchequer and Norton’s collaborator, complained that all the trouble in England had been “procured” in and by Rome.⁶

      Shakespeare was a teenager then, in 1581.

      The legislation did not deter Philip Howard, first Earl of Arundel and, Richard Wilson now recalls, the “great hope of Catholic resistance.”⁷ Howard’s conversion to Catholicism in 1584 was something of a scandal, particularly after he was intercepted while sailing from Sussex the next year. Authorities accused him of planning to collude with fellow fugitives once he landed on the Continent and to offer service to Spanish troops should they agree to invade England. Howard denied it, spent years awaiting trial, then the rest of his life in prison, all the while claiming that he had only wanted to cross the Channel “for his conscience.”⁸

      Conscience versus obedience to the new Tudor sovereign and her bishops: that choice soon faced certain Elizabethan Calvinists as well as their Catholic countrymen, specifically the Protestants who were impatient for sweeping religious reforms. They objected to wearing the surplice and square cap that the new Prayer Book required of the clergy. They complained that standards for candidates for the ministry were too low and that diocesan oversight, which should have ensured clerics’ competence and exemplary conduct, left much to be desired. They wanted to compose and preach sermons rather than read homilies scripted and prescribed by authorities of the established church. Authorities, for their part, tended to answer such criticism by issuing progress reports: any fool could tell, they intimated, that reformed religion was steadily gaining ground, rescuing the realm from “poperie, superstition, and the remaynente of idolatry.” By the 1580s, as a result, the laity was “farre more pliable to all good order than before.”⁹ But the most ardent Calvinists were hoping for much more than pliable people, who had conformed without being fully reformed; lay pliability signaled the failure, not success, of England’s religious reformation.

      Thomas Lever tried to get that point across, tried to persuade “pliable people” that “salvation cannot be gotten by man’s works in keeping with the lawe, but it is freely given by God’s grace to the beleevers of the Gospell. The righteousnesse of the lawe of God is so heavie a yowke by reason of the infirmitie of man’s flesh[, but] the glad tidings of the gospell of Christ by reason of the grace of God be so cleere and comfortable unto the faithfull as causeth all things to bee unto them pleasant and profitable.”¹⁰ The problem was to circulate that “cleere and comfortable” message, which had traditionally been identified with the Catholic sacraments widely “understood to be sanctifying signs that caused what they signified.”¹¹ The ministry was understaffed, and the presence of many priests, lately turned Protestants, posed another problem for the recently repatriated reformers. Lever, for one, mistrusted the ministry around Coventry and appointed lay lectors to lead worship in several parishes.¹² Some of the new queen’s new bishops licensed itinerant preachers to go “up and downe the countrie as apostles,” to make sure the gospel’s “glad tidings” were compellingly delivered. However, Diocesan officials heard word that itinerants were overcharging for their services.¹³ Lay lectors, moreover, took it upon themselves to appoint replacements, in effect undermining diocesan supervision. Even as time passed and as the settled ministry was better staffed, pastors complained that parishioners were indifferent and undisciplined. Some reformers noticed that their sermons proclaiming that salvation was freely given to the faithful only infrequently had the desired effect of inspiring gratitude and of leading to lasting, meaningful improvements in the laity’s behavior. Settled pastors were known to envy itinerants, who—encountering opposition, listlessness, or mindless conformity—had the option to move on.¹⁴

      To others, who were generally satisfied with the pace of reform, conformity was of paramount importance. Acknowledging that results were sometimes spotty, these satisfied others nonetheless insisted that orderly progress could be made—with less confusion and less rancor—if the critics of the established church would only cease carping at bishops and their deputies and stop pressing for the immediate implementation in England of protocols of select Swiss or south German reformed churches.

      Historians once called persons satisfied with the progress of reform in England Anglicans and dissatisfied persons puritans, but revisionists objected to the old categories and were right to do so. Jacobethan reformed religious commitments were too complicated to fit into the Anglican/puritan grid. What followed its disaccreditation, however, was a contagious logophobia; many historians resisted naming attitudes toward reform for fear of inappropriately tidying up and of creating coherent factions where there was considerable confusion. Charles Prior has come up with what I think is a useful solution. He describes those satisfied with the pace and trajectory of the realm’s reform as “conformists,” because their expressions of satisfaction were accompanied by arguments for conformity as well as for patience. Prior’s “reformists,” however, were “anxious to put forth detailed reasons” for ongoing reformation. The conformists’ Prayer Book, they said, savored of Catholicism; episcopacy was obsolete (and, more important, unscriptural).¹⁵ I have adopted Prior’s solution, recycling his terms, “conformist” and “reformist,” to denote levels of satisfaction with the progress of reform in the religion around Shakespeare. But, unlike Prior, I retain the term “puritan” to refer to the religiously reformed who internalized dissatisfaction—pietists in England who became “their own greatest accusers,” as Richard Greenham urged.¹⁶ Puritans, in this application, therefore, are Calvinist pietists, whose sense of how a church’s ministry and discipline might be improved was determined by their dedication to turning parishioners into prodigal souls. In that respect, puritans, as we shall see, were remarkably similar to Catholic pietists whose devotional literature was bent on restructuring Christians’ desires by raising questions about the quality of their repentance.¹⁷

      Puritans’ strategy was to throw more sermons at the realm’s religious problems. The objective was to extinguish England’s attachment to Roman religion and to awaken “drowsy” Calvinists.¹⁸ Puritans relied on preaching to prompt conflict, which was more desirable than conformity as long as the realm’s reformation was still a work in progress. And progress was possible only if conflicts between reformed Christians’ regenerate and unregenerate impulses or inclinations threw into greater relief the contrast between the reformed and unreformed practices in their churches. The latter thrived on complacency and were said to “oppresse grievously”

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