From the beginning of the Reformation hostility towards religious imagery and an emphasis on the sin of idolatry were important features of Protestant thought. These issues remained a constant topic of discussion throughout the period considered here – from the first official critique of images in the royal injunctions of August 1536 to the meeting of the Long Parliament in November 1640. The iconoclasm of the sixteenth century, which played such a central part in the English Reformation, has been thoroughly analysed, and it is not the aim here to provide a detailed account of early iconoclasm, but rather to look at the development of arguments against images in broad terms as a background to the resurgence of iconoclastic zeal in the mid seventeenth century.

Eamon Duffy has called iconoclasm ‘the central sacrament of reform’, an almost ritualistic act concerned with the obliteration of past beliefs and practices, a ‘sacrament of forgetfulness’. Similarly, Pieter Geyl, describing the activities of iconoclasts in the Netherlands, saw them as attempting ‘to pull down at one blow a past of a thousand years’. The destruction of the external symbolism of a defeated ideology or regime is a common phenomenon. While this was certainly part of the equation, there was a deeper meaning to the Reformation hostility towards images. Reformist objections to the Roman Church centred on its materialism, its mix of the sacred and the profane, its emphasis on ritual (smacking of magic) and its claim to be endowed with the authority to continue Christ's work on earth (opus operatum).