‘The task of the religious historian of England between the Elizabethan Settlement and the Civil War’, it has been said, ‘is … one of daunting complexity, if he is to confront the entire scene.’ Somehow he must describe the simultaneous emergence of two ‘almost antithetical processes’: an increasing diversity of religious allegiance on the one hand, and the growth of a Protestant consensus on the other, closely linked with a sense of national identity and a hostility to Catholic foreign powers and to the Pope himself.

One answer to this dilemma has been to assert the existence of a doctrinal consensus usually labelled Calvinism as a ‘theological cement’ which held the Elizabethan and Jacobean church together. The Lambeth Articles of 1595, agreed to by Archbishop Whitgift and sent by him to Cambridge to be imposed upon the university, are held to be conclusive evidence of that consensus. The English Civil War is then seen as primarily the result of a Laudian or Arminian assault on a previously triumphant Calvinism. From that perspective, the Arminian assertion of ‘the free will of all men to obtain salvation’ was, in a society as steeped in Calvinist theology as England, revolutionary, and is the main reason why religion became an issue in the Civil War crisis. Differences over rites and ceremonies or over church government were not too divisive while Calvinist predestinarian ideas provided a ‘common and ameliorating bond’, as they did under Elizabeth and even more under James I. James's education in Scotland had left him favourably disposed towards Calvinist teaching. The majority of the clergy and probably most of the laity were convinced predestinarians. The harmony that ensued was symbolized by the attendance of English divines at the Synod of Dort.