Elizabethan Religious Settlement
Elizabeth’s first supremacy bill reaches the House of Lords
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Original prompt & settings (JSON) ↗The bill arriving in the Lords threatened anyone refusing to call Elizabeth Supreme Head with a traitor's death.
27 February 1559: a bill, not an act
On 27 February 1559 a government-backed bill restoring royal supremacy over the English church reached the House of Lords, having passed the Commons.
It was an early and severe proposal. It would have styled Elizabeth Supreme Head, and required an oath under threat of a traitor's death.
No Act of Supremacy and no Act of Uniformity became law that day.
A dozen bishops against thirty lords
The bishops opposed the measure in the Lords. The Marian bishops formed the core of the resistance to a proposal that threatened open adherents of Roman jurisdiction with the penalties of treason.
About twelve prelates were in a position to obstruct the Crown's programme, because scarcely more than about thirty temporal lords ordinarily attended.
What actually became law
Opposition in the Lords forced the supremacy proposal into a substantially milder form by March, and the final settlement required new bills after Easter.
The Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity that passed were different bills, given royal assent on 8 May. The familiar title Supreme Governor belonged to that later compromise, not to the bill before the Lords in February.
Sources
Researched 24 Aug 2026 3 sources not yet audited
How this was checked
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What the sources leave uncertain
- The date is the conventional English historical date, using a modernized year number. England still used the Julian calendar and legally began the year on 25 March.
- Surviving evidence for the 1559 Parliament is fragmentary, and historians continue to debate the exact authorship and sequence of its early religious bills.