Indeed, this connection had been made in the sixteenth century, both
implicitly and explicitly: implicitly when Alexander Nowell in 1565
reproduced as his own Martin Bucer’s four arguments against Hooper’s
discontent;^25 explicitly when Matthew Parker, asked for the Privy
Council to act in support of him, citing the council’s actions in the case
of Hooper both as precedent and as an illustration that only the
Council’s intervention would suffice to thwart Precisian recalcitrance.^26
Nonetheless, the identification of Hooper with the Puritans begs the
question of the two episodes’ essential unity, slighting the dynamic of
both the events of the Elizabethan period and the overt politicalization
of adiaphora by the Elizabethans. That the Edwardian incidents
provided a model for the Elizabethan contest is clear; the difference
between the two pertains to the merely incidental nature of the Hooper
situation in the larger picture of the Edwardine Church’s program of
reform, as opposed to how the apologists for the Elizabethan order
turned their confrontations into an exercise in creating a uniform order
that transformed liberty of conscience into unity and conformity;^27 and
that transformed adiaphora from the particulars surrounding caritas,
into categories of submission and obedience. For the Elizabethan
apologists, and particularly Jewel, adiaphora become not the incidentals
within the context of uniformity – what they had been in the instance of
Hooper, but a theological means for attaining a political end. By the
1560s, questions of adiaphora become absorbed into the larger category
A PRELATE PUBLIC AND PRIVATE 163
Church of England in the Reigns of Edward VI and Elizabeth(Kampen, 1960). William
West made this same connection, depicting Hooper as the father of the Puritan movement,
John Hooper and the Origins of Puritanism, Zurich 1955. Though this conclusion is
contradicted by Hooper’s most recent biographer. Cf. E.W. Hunt. The life and times of
John Hooper (c. 1500–1555), Bishop of Gloucester(Lewiston, c. 1992). Hunt, sees
Hooper (pp. 303–7) as merely a Church Calvinist (appropriating this concept from Tyacke,
and it may be a fair use, but Hunt does not expand on this definition). While carping about
vestments, they were eventually and ultimately adiaphora, and he would never have
separated from the Church of England. Hunt even numbers him among the likes of Cox,
Grindal and Scory, though why and how he does not elaborate. But Cf. West, pp. 62–74.
M.M. Knappen was of the same mind concerning the question of the unity of the two
instances, each given a chapter in his study of Puritanism. M.M. Knappen, Tudor
Puritanism(Chicago, 1939).
(^25) Primus,Vestments, p. 93.
(^26) Correspondence of Matthew Parker, ed. John Bruce Esq. (Cambridge, 1853), pp. 234,
280–81.
(^27) Diarmaid MacCulloch sees in the Hooper incident a reaction by the Edwardine clergy,
and particularly Cranmer and Ridley, to the rising tide of Anabaptism and radicalism. This
intransigence by Cranmer and Ridley had not been the case just two years earlier in the
case of the consecration of Robert Farrar. MacCulloch notes that when Robert Farrar was
consecrated bishop of St Davids, Cranmer and Ridley had not used the form of either the
Henrician or the Edwardine ordinals. Cranmer, p. 397. Both MacCulloch and Primus
wonder how often Hooper wore his vestments after his consecration.