English Presbyterianism, 1590-1640

In a pioneering discussion of the English Reformation and its aftermath, this book offers an alternative interpretation of the religious and political history of Elizabethan and early Stuart England. It challenges the standard narrative that English presbyterianism was successfully extinguished in the late sixteenth century, finding that it continued to function as a political and religious force until its public resurgence during the English Civil War. Drawing on hitherto unexamined manuscripts, it explores an active English presbyterian underground that tailored European models of government to suit the Church of England. Fusing their polity with royal supremacy on the one hand, the presbyterians drew from English precedent to refute episcopacy on the other. Despite their efforts to universalize reformed Protestantism, however, by the early seventeenth century they had contributed to the birth of "independency," which made new claims to popular sovereignty.

Polly Ha broadens the spectrum of ecclesiastical debate not only as it was carried out in England but also as it developed in the Netherlands and in New England. Through a detailed case study of the English Reformed Church in Amsterdam, she demonstrates how a presbyterian community functioned. In showing that poorer men and women were energetic participants, she stretches received opinions on what, in social terms, was the driving force in the operation of reformed government. This sheds new light on the dynamics of confessional identity and on the relationship between religion, politics, and society in early modern England.

Polly Ha is Lecturer in Early Modern British History at the School of History, University of East Anglia. She is co-editor, with Patrick Collinson, of The Reception of Continental Reformation in Britain (2010).