On not being embarrassed about the Elizabethan Settlement

It is not a reference you would expect to find in an article entitled 'Why Anglo-Catholicism appeals to Millennials', appearing in The Catholic Herald.  The article by the Reverend Marcus Walker, Rector of St Bartholomew the Great, London, compared the similarities in the approach to worship of Anglo-catholics, charismatic evangelicals, and trad Latin Mass RCs:

All three use the body physically in worship: whether crossing yourself at the elevation of the Host or following Elizabeth I’s injunction to bow at the Name of Jesus or raising your hands at a profound moment of singing, there is an acknowledgement that worship is physical as well as mental.

Notice it?  That reference to Elizabeth I is somewhat surprising - and not just because it almost certainly had regular readers of The Catholic Herald quoting Regnans in Excelsis with approval.  Perhaps no less surprising is a positive reference to Elizabeth in an article written from an Anglo-catholic perspective.

There are many sources - some new, some old - for Anglo-catholic embarrassment with the Elizabethan Settlement.  Royal Supremacy, BCP 1559, Articles of Religion, Book of Homilies: it's all just too Protestant.  One does, more than occasionally, get the feeling that some Anglo-catholics have a greater sense of identity with the 'English Martyrs' than with Elizabethan clergy taking the Oath of Supremacy and ministering according to the BCP in the reformed ecclesia Anglicana.

That said, there is another Anglo-catholic voice to be heeded.  It was in the Preface to For Lancelot Andrewes: essays on style and order (1928) that T.S. Eliot famously described himself as "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion".  In the essay on Andrewes, he went on to state:

The Church of England is the creation not of the reign of Henry VIII or of the reign of Edward VI, but of the reign of Elizabeth ... The taste or sensibility of Elizabeth, developed by her intuitive knowledge of the right policy for the hour and her ability to choose the right men to carry out that policy, determinded the future of the English Church ... the Church at the end of the reign of Elizabeth, and as developed in certain directions under the next reign, was a masterpiece of ecclesiastical statemanship.

This praise for the Elizabethan Settlement is now, unfortunately, rare in Anglo-catholic circles.  As Eliot demonstrated, however, the Elizabethan Settlement bequeathed to us much of the native piety of Anglicanism. Speaking of Hooker and Andrewes, he calls them "fathers of a national Church": in their teaching, piety, and allegiance they embodied the Elizabethan Settlement.  So too in their "intellectual achievement and ... prose style", making "the English Church more worthy of intellectual assent".

In Eliot, then, we see why Anglo-catholic embarrassment with the Elizabethan Settlement is self-defeating.  It is to turn away from a rich native piety, leaving one a very unwelcome guest at a Baroque, Tridentine table, where foreign customs and a quite different fare are encountered.  Eliot urges a return to the customs of and fare set before us by the Elizabethan Settlement:

the English Church ... means Hooker and Jeremy Taylor - and should mean Andrewes also: it means George Herbert, and it means the churches of Christopher Wren.

Or, in the words of Hooker:

'By the sword of God and Gideon,' was sometime the cry of the people of Israel, so it might deservedly be at this day the joyful song of innumerable multitudes, yea the emblem of some estates and Dominions in the world, and (which must be eternally confessed even with tears of thankfulness) the true inscription style or title of all Churches as yet standing within this Realm, 'By the goodness of almighty God and his servant Elizabeth we are' (from the Dedication in Book V of the Laws)