According to a tradition going back to Izaak Walton, Richard Hooker was the archetypal ‘Anglican’ divine, whose celebrated defence of the established church against the Puritans, Of the Lawe of Ecclesiastical Polity, finally made explicit the principles of the Elizabethan church settlement as a via media between Rome and Geneva. The ‘Anglicanism’ he defended was implicit in that settlement, ‘protestant but not Calvinist, episcopalian yet reformed, sacrament and ceremony centred although in no sense popish’. ‘Puritanism’, by contrast, was the radical Protestant opposition to that mainstream.

The reaction against Walton has today gone so far that scholars refuse to accept even the categories he took for granted. It has become all but an orthodoxy that ‘Anglicanism’ did not exist under Elizabeth. ‘Puritans’, by contrast, have been moved so far to the centre of the stage that it is they, we are told, who represented the ‘mainstream’: English Protestant divinity is said to have been so much dominated by a word-centred, austerely simple ideal of piety that the small minority of those Protestants who wanted to retain some degree of ceremony can in turn be consigned to the sidelines, and the name ‘Puritan’ safely dispensed with, the more so as there were no significant differences of theology that divided them. Others would not go so far, but nevertheless are convinced that the influence of Calvin was unquestioned, that his theology was a common bond in spite of all the other disagreements between Cartwright and Whitgift, and that even the continued existence of episcopacy was precarious.

Where, then, did Hooker stand? From that perspective, implicitly if not explicitly outside the existing consensus.