The Curious History of Subscription to the Articles.
It is still not generally recognised that for nearly 300 years (1571 - 1863), civil law restricted subscription to a subset of the Articles of Religion which "only concern the confession of the true Christian faith and the doctrine of the sacraments".
Fifty years ago Sir John Neale settled the meaning of these words when he found that the original parchment document had been amended to replace three alternative forms of subscription by the words of the final Act. The first two alternatives were provided by the Bishops and required subscription to either the 38 Articles of 1563 or 39 we now know which were still being revised.
It is the story behind the third alternative inserted by the Commons that clears up the final meaning of the Act. Neale shows that laymen holding civil offices would subscribe a subset of the Articles being defined in a second Bill. The Commons were excluding the articles on the homilies, consecrating bishops, and anything they could not prove by Scripture. However when the Commons cross-referenced this subset as the third alternative for the Puritan clergy, Elizabeth I and her Bishops killed the Bill defining the subset.
The Commons clearly did not want to commit the Puritan clergy to the full articles of the two remaining options. So when they replaced the remaining options with their famous words, it was a deliberate attempt to indicate a subset of Doctrinal Articles.
In practice the bishops ignored this set back, enforcing full subscription by personal authority until 1603 when the new canon law required an unambiguous subscription to all 39 articles. Canon Law, though restricted to the clergy, was the bishops' law, to make, modify and to apply. Further it had penalties like deprivation that would be enforced by the civil authority.
The Elizabethan Act was soon misunderstood or deliberately misconstrued. The 1662 Act of Uniformity extended the Elizabethan Act to heads of colleges etc. but describes it as if subscription to all 39 Articles are in view. The Commons had meant to exclude 36th Article but this 1662 Act declared this article was to now to refer to the new Ordinal. The Puritan Act then turns up as a fundamental and unalterable condition of the Act of Union with Scotland in 1707.
William Paley believed purpose not the letter was binding, and held that this was to exclude not only Papists and Anabaptists, but also the Puritans! J. C. Ryle was correct in claiming episcopal and royal approval of the whole Articles but erred with our best judges over this Act. He lived to see the Puritan words replaced in 1865 by ones with a clear reference to the full Articles.
Had this been known in the last century, what would have happened? The Protestant doctrine of the sacraments would not have been in doubt. Had the Bishops allowed more licence on ceremonies - then Parliament might still have clarified the law as it did in 1865, only earlier.
Concluding on a wider note, it does remind us of the complexity of our constitution and the fallibility of its interpreters. It also reminds us of the distinction that has to be made within the Anglican formularies between their doctrinal content, and those distinctives such as episcopacy which rest on wisdom and church authority.
For more information see: Elizabeth I and her Parliaments: 1559-1581, J. E. Neale, Aston Professor of History, University of London, later Sir John Neal; Jonathan Cape, 1953, pp191-207; also see his article: Eng. His Rev lxvii, 510 seq.