The article starts by discussing puritan responses to the demands for conformity and subscription. This part of the argument turns on two vignettes designed to bring out the subtleties and contradictions in the puritan position at two distinct moments in the history of conformity, and how it was glossed and enforced. We then compare Catholic and puritan responses to the demand for conformity. Those were diverse, determined not merely by the tensions between those doing the enforcing and those on the receiving end of the enforcement, but also by disagreements on both sides of that equation, over-determined by attendant political circumstances. (The role of political contingency is emphasized throughout.) The tentative conclusion is that among both puritans and Catholics the issue of outward conformity may not have been as central in determining and defining the categories and identities of puritans and Catholics as the existing literature suggests.

At some point in the late 1620s or early 1630s, the long-serving naval officer, Sir William Monson, took the time to set down his thoughts about recent history, particularly of the Reformation in the English Church, the success (or lack of it) of the so-called Protestant cause, and of what appeared to him to be a slew of corruption which he associated with an unchecked tendency to puritanism. However, Monson was not just any run-of-the-mill Church-of-England conformist. As his, admittedly, often bizarre and even rambling text made clear, he had internalised some of the sharpest edges of what one might term the 'Catholic' account of the post-Reformation. But despite his family's reputation for having such tendencies, he, it seems, never went into separation. It is, therefore, worth revisiting his words to see how contemporaries in the early seventeenth century could think about their political and religious identity, and how they applied their thoughts in this respect to the political situations in which they found themselves.