Vestments Controversy - Vestments Among The Marian Exiles

Vestments Among The Marian Exiles

In the controversy among the Marian exiles, principally those in Frankfurt, church order and liturgy were the main issues of contention, though vestments were related and debated in their own right. At several points, opponents of the English prayerbook in John Knox's group maligned it by reference to John Hooper's persecution under the Edwardian prayerbook and vestments regulations. On the other side, that of Richard Cox, the martyrdom of Hooper and others was blamed on Knox's polemic against Mary I, Philip II, and the emperor, Charles V.

By 1558, even the supporters of the prayer book had abandoned the Edwardian regulations on clerical dress. All the Marian exiles—even the leading promoters of the English prayer book like Cox–had given up the use of vestments by the time of their return to England under Elizabeth I, according to John Strype's Annals of the Reformation. This seeming unity did not last.

During the troubles in the English exile congregation in Frankfurt, some people shifted sides that would shift again upon their return to England, and certainly, there was no direct correlation between one's views on church order and one's views on clerical dress. Nevertheless, there is a general pattern wherein the members of the "prayer book party" were favoured for high appointments in the church under Elizabeth I that required conformity on vestments, as opposed to the exiles who departed from the order of the English national church in favour of the more international, continental, reformed order. Occupying many lower positions in the Elizabethan church, this latter group grew during the exile period and produced many of the leaders of the Elizabethan anti-vestments faction. As deans, prebends, and parish priests, they were freer to disobey openly, en masse, the requirements for clerical dress.

Notably, some of the leaders of the Elizabethan anti-vestments campaign spent time in Calvin's Geneva, many of them following the successful takeover of the Frankfurt congregation and ouster of John Knox by the pro-prayerbook group. In Geneva, these men were immersed in a reformed community that had no place for vestments at all, whereas the exiles who became Elizabethan bishops (and thus had to accept the use of vestments) never visited Geneva except for James Pilkington, Thomas Bentham and John Scory. Yet these three, or at least Pilkington for certain, were hostile toward vestments and sympathetic to nonconformists under Elizabeth I, though Cox and Grindal also showed such sympathies.