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Vestments controversy

The vestments controversy or vestarian controversy arose in the English Reformation, ostensibly concerning vestments or clerical dress. Initiated by John Hooper's rejection of clerical vestments in the Church of England under Edward VI as described by the 1549 Book of Common Prayer and 1550 ordinal, it was later revived under Elizabeth I. It revealed concerns within the Church of England over ecclesiastical identity, doctrine and church practices.

Vestments among the Marian exiles[edit]

In controversy among the Marian exiles, principally those in Frankfurt, church order and liturgy were the main issues of contention, though vestments were related and debated in their own right. At several points, opponents of the English prayerbook in John Knox's group maligned it by reference to John Hooper's persecution under the Edwardian prayer book and vestments regulations. On the other side, that of Richard Cox, the martyrdom of Hooper and others was blamed on Knox's polemic against Mary I, Philip II and the emperor, Charles V.


By 1558, even the supporters of the prayer book had abandoned the Edwardian regulations on clerical dress. All the Marian exiles—even the leading promoters of the English prayer book such as Cox–had given up the use of vestments by the time of their return to England under Elizabeth I, according to John Strype's Annals of the Reformation.[1] This seeming unity did not last.


During the troubles in the English exile congregation in Frankfurt, some people shifted sides that would shift again upon their return to England, and certainly, there was no direct correlation between one's views on church order and one's views on clerical dress. Nevertheless, there is a general pattern wherein the members of the "prayer book party" were favoured for high appointments in the church under Elizabeth I that required conformity on vestments, as opposed to the exiles who departed from the order of the English national church in favour of the more international, continental, reformed order. Occupying many lower positions in the Elizabethan church, this latter group grew during the exile period and produced many of the leaders of the Elizabethan anti-vestments faction. As deans, prebends, and parish priests, they were freer to disobey openly, en masse, the requirements for clerical dress.


Notably, some of the leaders of the Elizabethan anti-vestments campaign spent time in Calvin's Geneva, many of them following the successful takeover of the Frankfurt congregation and ouster of John Knox by the pro-prayerbook group.[c] In Geneva, these men were immersed in a reformed community that had no place for vestments at all, whereas the exiles who became Elizabethan bishops (and thus had to accept the use of vestments) never visited Geneva except for James Pilkington, Thomas Bentham and John Scory. Yet these three, or at least Pilkington for certain, were hostile toward vestments and sympathetic to nonconformists under Elizabeth I, though Cox and Grindal also showed such sympathies.

Emergence of separatism and Presbyterianism[edit]

In the summer and autumn of 1566, conformists and nonconformists exchanged letters with continental reformers. The nonconformists looked to Geneva for support, but no real opportunity for change was coming, and the anti-vestments faction of the emerging Puritan element split into separatist and anti-separatist wings. Public debate turned into more and less furtive acts of direct disobedience, with the exception of a brief recurrence of the original issue in communications between Horne and Bullinger, and between Jerome Zanchi and the Queen, though the latter correspondence, held by Grindal, was never delivered.


Despite the appearance of a victory for Parker, Brett Usher has argued that national uniformity was an impossible goal due to Parker's political and jurisdictional limitations. In Usher's view, the anti-vestments faction did not perceive a defeat in 1566, and it was not until the Presbyterian movements of the next two decades (which Parker's crackdown helped to provoke) that relations really changed between the state and high-ranking clergy who still sought further changes in the church.


After 1566, the most radical figures, the separatists, went underground to organise and lead illegal, secret congregations. One of the first official discoveries of a separatist congregation came on June 19, 1567, in Plumber's Hall in London. Similar discoveries followed, with the separatists usually claiming they were not separatists but the body of the true church. Anti-vestiarians like Humphrey and Sampson who rejected this movement were called "semi-papists" by the new radical vanguard.


Others opposed to vestments elected to try to change the shape of the church and its authority along presbyterian lines in the early 1570s, and in this, they had continental support. Calvin's successor, Theodore Beza, had written in implicit support of the presbyterian system in 1566 in a letter to Grindal. This letter was acquired by pro-presbyterian Puritans and was published in 1572 with Thomas Wilcox and John Field's Admonition to Parliament, the foundational manifesto and first public manifestation of English Presbyterianism. (The ensuing controversy is sometimes referred to as the Admonition Controversy.) Also included in the Admonition was another 1566 letter from Gualter to Bishop Parkhurst that was seen as lending support to the nonconformists. By some accounts, Gilby, Sampson, and Lever were indirectly involved in this publication, but the ensuing controversy centred on another public literary exchange between Archbishop John Whitgift and Thomas Cartwright, wherein Whitgift conceded the non-indifference of vestments but insisted on the authority of the church to require them. The issue became deadlocked and explicitly focused on the nature, authority, and legitimacy of the church polity. A primarily liturgical matter had developed into a wholly governmental one. The Separatist Puritans, led by Cartwright, persisted in their rejection of vestments, but the larger political issues had effectively eclipsed it.


In 1574–75, A Brieff discours off the troubles begonne at Franckford ... A.D. 1554 was published. This was a pro-presbyterian historical narrative of the disputes among the Marian exiles in Frankfurt twenty years earlier "about the Booke off common prayer and Ceremonies ... in the which ... the gentle reader shall see the very originall and beginninge off all the contention that hathe byn and what was the cause off the same." This introductory advertisement on the title page is followed by Mark 4:22–23: "For there is nothinge hid that shall not be opened neither is there a secreat that it shall come to light yff anie man have eares to heare let him heare."

Idolatry in Christianity

Elizabethan Religious Settlement

a similar, contemporaneous controversy in Sweden

Liturgical struggle

Ritualism in the Church of England

R. E. Pot, ""

In Pursuit of Plainness: The Puritan Principle of Worship