Puritans—Exceptional Protestants or Prejudiced Moralizers?
The English Reformation began when King Henry VIII broke with Rome over the pope’s failure to approve an annulment of the king’s marriage. This inauspicious beginning virtually guaranteed the tumultuous and erratic history of Puritanism that followed. The Reformation was everywhere tied up with disputes over state power and the allegiances of monarchs, but nowhere more so than in England, which whipsawed between Catholic and Protestant rulers until Elizabeth I’s long reign for the last four decades of the 1500s secured the nation for her…