Thomas Cartwright and his Confutation: From English Presbyterian gadfly to international Calvinist propagandist

This study refocuses attention on Cartwright's place in the English Reformation and also to correct the misunderstandings that have grown up around his Confutation of the Rheimist Translation. Part One will sift through some of the historical evidence from his contemporaries -- friend and foe alike -- about Cartwright in order to re-establish a proper understanding of his significance in the general retelling of the English Reformation. This renewed portrait of him is necessary not only for a full and proper picture of the English Reformation in the Elizabethan period, but is also helpful in assessing the historical value of his Confutation since its suppression and subsequent posthumous publication caused it to end up in an historical cul de sac. Part Two will reconsider the original occasion and purpose of the Confutation along with its polemical methodology. It will re-examine the evidence provided in the original publisher's preface and supplement it with external evidence to reconstruct an alternate scenario for the occasion of its commissioning and the purpose intended by Cartwright's political patrons. The intent is that this new proposal, which sets the Confutation in its proper historical context, will yield a more plausible construct for the Confutation's occasion and purpose than the traditional understandings held by modern researchers. The design of Part Two is to build a case that Cartwright's Confutation belongs not to his Presbyterian phase, which was characterized by pro-Presbyterian polemic directed against the Anglican Establishment, but rather to his International Protestantism phase in which he, as a faithful member of the Church of England, engaged the Roman Catholic translators of the Rheims New Testament in a propaganda war for the hearts and minds of the reading public who were buying and reading English vernacular Bibles.