Abstract :
Traditional historiographies of the Reformation, seeing it as a unified, directed transition
from Catholicism to Protestantism, seem increasingly untenable. This article looks in detail at three individuals
from the British Reformation whose careers did not fit this pattern : a Scotsman, John Eldar, and two
Englishmen, John Proctor and John Redman. Enthusiasts for Henry VIII’s Reformation, they found
themselves alarmed, but disempowered and compromised, in the face of Edward VI’s more radical religious
changes. Redman died in 1551, but Proctor and Eldar both celebrated Mary I’s Catholic restoration, while
not entirely forgetting their Henrician sympathies. The article argues that these men represent a distinctive
religious strand in Reformation Britain. Such ‘ latter-day Henricians ’ valued Henry VIII’s distinctive
Reformation : anti-papal, anti-heretical, sacramental, Erasmian, and Biblicist. The vicissitudes of religious
politics in both England and Scotland in the 1540s and 1550s left no space for such beliefs, although the
article suggests that traces of Henricianism can be seen in Elizabeth I herself. It also argues that the impotence
of the latter-day Henricians under Edward VI is a symptom of the paralysing weakness of all English
religious conservatives in the reign, a predicament from which they were rescued only by Mary’s restoration.
