The essay examines how the international Protestant identity of the English Church came to be in tension with the later assertion of sacramentalist or Catholic values within it. It chronicles how the Reformation in England came to align not with Lutheranism but with Reformed Protestantism, and compares Henry VIII's reforms with contemporary Reformations in mainland Europe seeking a ‘middle way’. Edward VI's Church is contrasted with the temperature perceptible in Elizabeth I's religious settlement – which nevertheless asserted Protestant values with no concessions to Catholicism. The anomalous role of the cathedrals in England is identified as a major source of the English Church's later deviation from mainstream European Reformed Protestantism, which itself produced attempts to recreate a Reformed Church in the English north American colonies.

(READ 7 July 2004)