Church and State under the Tudors/Chapter 10

by Gilbert William Child

CHAPTER X.

REIGN OF ELIZABETH (continued)

The consideration of the incidental matters referred to in the Litter part of the last chapter, while it has interrupted the proper course of the history, may nevertheless be excused, inasmuch as the history itself could scarcely be intelligible without it. The whole course of legislation, and not of legislation only, but of State policy also, so far as it affected religion, was profoundly modified by the bull of Pope Pius V., and by the Catholic conspiracies which followed it. Up to the time of the publication of that bull, Elizabeth and the Church of England were in the position of a province in rebellion, indeed, against the empire of which it had formed a part, but not yet separated from it. The bull was the final and fatal act—not its own, indeed, but that of the Catholic Mother Church—by which the Church of England was recognised as separate, and by the very recognition condemned as hostile to the Church Catholic, and the enemy of God and man.

Up to this time, however much Catholic Englishmen may have disapproved Elizabeth's ecclesiastical proceedings, they were not called upon peremptorily by authority to oppose them actively; now they were placed once for all under the uncomfortable necessity of taking a decided line one way or the other.

The general result of this bolder line of policy adopted by the Roman Church was, in the first place, to embitter the quarrel between the Roman and Protestant parties in England, and to endanger the person of the Queen; and, in the second, to compel Elizabeth to a more decided Protestant policy, and, by imperilling the very existence of the nation, to force men to decide whether they would be Catholics or Englishmen, and ultimately, by the constant formation and detection of Jesuit plots and intrigues, to possess the mass of the population with a thorough distrust and detestation of Romanism which three centuries have not entirely washed away.

The thirteenth year of Elizabeth was the next important epoch of ecclesiastical legislation. There was again a Parliament and also a Convocation which was permitted to perform its functions. The Acts of the former were:—

13 Eliz. c. 2, a reprisal for Pius V.'s excommunication, in the shape of an enactment against the introduction of bulls or instruments, and 'other superstitious things,' from the see of Rome, subjecting offenders to the penalties of a Præmunire, and containing also a clause forbidding the importation or use of an Agnus Dei, pictures, or cross, &c.;

13 Eliz. c. 10, providing against frauds by spiritual persons upon their successors in the matter of dilapidations, &c.; and

13 Eliz. c. 12, entitled an Act for the Ministers of the Church to be of Sound Religion.^[1]

This last Act is one of very considerable importance.. It provides: 1. That every person under the degree of a bishop which doth or shall pretend to be a priest or minister of God's holy word and Sacraments by reason of any other form of institution, consecration, or ordering, than the form set forth by Parliament in the time of the late King of most worthy memory. King Edward VI., or now used in the reign of our most gracious sovereign lady &c., shall declare his assent and subscribe all the Articles of Religion … and shall bring a testimonial of such assent, and shall openly read in church the said testimonial and Articles;

2. That he shall be deprived if he affirm or maintain any doctrine directly contrary to the said Articles;

3. That he shall be twenty-three years old, at least, and a deacon, and must read himself in within two months; and

4. That he must have due testimonials, &c.

Also another Act, 13 Eliz. c. 20, touching leases for benefices and other ecclesiastical livings with cure, &c.^[2]

In this Parliament two notable instances were given of Elizabeth's jealousy in the matter of her prerogative as supreme governor of the Church. A bill was passed in the Commons for the conservation of order and unity in the Church, and was duly sent up to the Lords; but an answer came from the latter to the effect that 'the Queen's Majesty having been made privy to the said articles liketh very well of them, and mindeth to publish them, and have them executed by the bishops, by direction of her Highness's royal authority and supremacy of the Church of England, and not to have the same dealt in by Parliament'; and when a member (Mr. Strickland) brought in a bill to amend the liturgy, the House resolved not to proceed with it until the Queen's pleasure were known. Even so, however, at the dissolution, the Lord Keeper, by the Queen's command, administered a sharp rebuke to those members who had meddled with matters not pertaining to them, and above their understanding, as well as contrary to her express admonition.

In Convocation, the Articles were once more reviewed, and subscriptions of all clergy who had not already subscribed was insisted on, and some canons were passed, which, however, were not ratified by royal authority.

The rule of conformity was now more and more rigidly enforced against those, on the one hand, who held too much to the old customs of the unreformed Church, especially in the northern and midland counties, and against the Puritans also, who seemed more than ever bent upon assimilating the English worship and discipline to that of Geneva. Cartwright, who was Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, and Fellow of Trinity, and at this time the most conspicuous Puritan leader, was deprived and expelled the University.

A careful consideration of the extravagances of both sides during the years intervening between the thirteenth of Elizabeth and the next epoch of serious ecclesiastical legislation—viz., the twenty-third of her reign—would surely go far to relieve Elizabeth and her counsellors from that charge of deliberate hypocrisy which Mr. Froude so constantly brings against them.^[3]

During all these years the air was full of Jesuit conspiracies. Mary Stuart was a prisoner in England, and, with her will or without it, was the focus of them all. Elizabeth's life was the one hope for the independence of England, and Elizabeth's life was the point at which they all were aimed; and the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, and Pope Gregory's Te Deum, showed the spirit of Popery and the lengths to which it was prepared to go.

With all these forcible 'dissuasives from Popery ' added to the associations connected with her mother's marriage, and her own subsequent life during her sister's reign, it might have been expected that Elizabeth would have thrown herself into the arms of the Protestants without reserve; and if she had f?one all lengths with the most extreme of them, there would have been no cause for surprise. Yet she was far from doing so and, as we have seen, it was her personal predilections alone which preserved to the Church of England its singular and unexampled form and character. There are some minds—and Elizabeth's was one of them whose actions are directed more by their taste than by either reason or conscience; and the canting phraseology and external precision of the Puritans seem to have been as revolting to Elizabeth's taste as their extravagant doctrines were to her reason. Having them on the one hand, and the Romanists on the other before her eyes, she, and many others with her, might well be led to ask whether it was not possible to avoid Scylla without falling at once into Charybdis. Anyone who will contrast, for instance, the language of the Admonition to Parliament with that of the correspondence of Bullinger or Peter Martyr, and with that of Elizabeth's bishops, will scarcely fail to be struck with the difference of tone between them, and will be ready to admit the difficulty of working with the Puritan leaders. Other motives, no doubt, combined with taste in directing Elizabeth's action against the Puritans. She had scarcely the materials for arriving at James I.'s subsequent formula, 'no bishop, no king'; but a Tudor had ever a keen scent for disobedience, and the general revolt against authority which was implied in Puritanism, would of itself have been sufficient to secure it her disfavour, while its direct tendency to split up the Protestant body was a manifest disadvantage in the struggle against the old Church. Elizabeth liked no authority but her own, and as she found herself often compelled to yield in matters of State, she became all the more arbitrary in her government of the Church. It should further be considered that during nearly the whole of Elizabeth's reign, as also in the latter part of Edward's, there had been and was no doubt as to the essentially Protestant character of the Church of England. The whole of the lives and writings of the Elizabethan divines, with the single and perhaps doubtful exception of Bishop Cheney, of Gloucester, agreed in doctrine with the Churches of Zurich and Geneva, and would almost certainly have followed them in practice also, but for the personal predilections of the Queen.^[4] The passage already quoted from Jewell is sufficient to show this, and innumerable others might be cited. They constantly refer to themselves as of the same religion with their Swiss correspondents, and as constantly speak of the Pope as antichrist, and even sometimes use the phrase ' Christian religion of Protestantism,' in a way which, by implication, excludes Romanism from the name. Indeed, it must be evident to any candid reader of the English divines of the sixteenth century,^[5] that it was a doubtful point with them whether the Roman Church were within the pale of salvation. With regard to ritual also, and whatever is implied by it, it should be observed that Hooker,^[6] in his answer to Travers, refers incidentally to the fact that in the Temple Church in his time the practice was to receive the Communion sitting, and that Travers had introduced the use of the standing position. Hooker refers to it as in itself a matter of indifference.

Perhaps the most perfect instance of Elizabeth's personal government of the Church is to be found in her treatment of Archbishop Grindal,^[7] who had succeeded Parker at Canterbury in 1576. The clergy, in several places, had adopted a habit of meeting together from time to time to explain and discuss the Scriptures, one being elected as Moderator, and each member of the assembly taking his own part in the discussion. These meetings, it appears, were more or less of a public character, taking place in the principal church of the town in which they were held, and not excluding the laity as spectators and hearers. Grindal, who was shocked at the ignorance of many of the clergy, encouraged these meetings as likely to improve their learning, though, at the same time, he imposed rules upon them in order to avoid scandals. The Queen, however, who hated liberty of speech, and did not care for overmuch preaching, was dissatisfied with Grindal's rules,^[8] and required him to suppress these meetings (exercises or prophesyings, as they were called) altogether. Grindal, like an honest man, refused, and intimated, in his letter to the Queen, in very plain terms, that he was a better judge in the matter than herself, and had a higher duty than that towards her. The result was that the Queen suppressed the prophesyings herself by a letter addressed to the bishops, and sequestrated the archbishop and confined him to his house, and would, if she had been able, have deprived him. This last proceeding, however, she found to be difficult, and was compelled to content herself with the former; and Grindal accordingly remained in disgrace, and practically suspended, until his death in July 1583.^[9]

Thus Elizabeth's reign went on. The Catholics, most of whom probably had conformed up to the time of Pope Pius V.'s bull, became less conformable every day, and the Puritans set the example, so fatally followed by their opponents since, of obstinately retaining their preferments in the Church while deliberately violating the conditions on which they held them. Many of both parties were deprived, but it is obvious from such passages as that just quoted from Hooker, from the report of Archbishop Sandys on the condition of things in the North, and many similar writings of the time, that conformity was not so strictly enforced as the law required, or as Elizabeth wished, and that irregularities in both directions were winked at.

In 1581 the 'English Mission' organised by Cardinal Allen and his abettors had borne its sufficient fruit in treason and plots of assassination and gave occasion to the passing of another Act (23 Eliz. c. 1) 'to retain the Queen's Majesty's subjects in their due obedience.' This Act makes it treason to convert or to be converted from the established religion to that of Rome, and involves all abettors of such conversions in the guilt of misprision of treason. It also enacts penalties for the saying or hearing of Mass, and reiterates and strengthens the penalties against persons absenting themselves from church, and against Nonconformists in general. It was followed some few years later by a still more stringent Act (27 Eliz. c. 2) called, 'An Act against Jesuits, Seminary Priests, and other such like disobedient persons,' in which the persons named were forbidden the realm, or, if remaining in or returning to it, treated as traitors, and persons harbouring or relieving such subjected to the penalties of præmunire; and other penalties are denounced against those who send their children to be educated in foreign seminaries, or who, knowing of the presence of Jesuits or the like in the country, conceal the facts. There is a saving clause for such, if they should submit and take the oath prescribed in 1 Eliz. c. 1, provided that they do not come within ten miles of the place in which the Queen happens to be.

A still further enactment of a somewhat similar character followed in this year, 1587 (viz. 29 Eliz. c. 6), called 'An Act for the more speedy and due execution of certain branches of the statutes made in the twenty-third year of the Queen's Majesty's reign, and entitled "An Act to retain the Queen's Majesty's subjects in their due obedience,"' and two others in the year 1593 (35 Eliz. c. 1 and 2) called respectively 'An Act to retain the Queen's Majesty's subjects in their due obedience,' which inflicted penalties on those who did not come to church, on those who persuaded others to impugn the Queen's authority in ecclesiastical causes, or who were present at unlawful conventicles for religious purposes, and required any such person, if he did not conform within three months, to abjure the realm or to forfeit to the Queen all his lands, tenements, and goods during his life; and 'An Act for restraining Popish recusants to some certain places of abode'—a measure whose scope is pretty fairly indicated by its title. These also, it should be observed, were to abjure the realm if they refused to submit themselves.

Such measures as these are certainly vigorous, and to modern ears they sound arbitrary and even tyrannical to an extreme degree, but they have at least the merit of dealing pretty equal measure to offenders on both sides, and showing little or no more favour to the Protestant Nonconformist than to the Popish. They bear evident witness also to the truth of what has already been stated as to the increasing bitterness of the Puritan leaders and how they progressed from one thing to another; and whereas they had begun with few or no objections to the doctrines of the Church, but merely to the habits and a few of the ceremonies, the two parties had by this time talked and written themselves gradually wider apart, until in some of Cartwright's diatribes against it we find the Church of England spoken of in language little different from that which was commonly applied to Rome.

Whitgift succeeded Grindal as Archbishop of Canterbury in the year 1583, the twenty-fifth of Elizabeth, and his primacy lasted during the remainder of her reign. It was a period of very great importance to the Church of England. The series of Acts just enumerated made Nonconformity almost as penal as Popery, and without the same provocation which could be alleged in excuse for severity in the latter case. Nonconformists, in Tudor times at least, always professed to l^e and probably were loyal subjects; their quarrel, according to their own account, was not with the Queen but with the bishops. Yet it is sufficiently evident that the bishops were but the tools of the State, and that to quarrel with them was to quarrel with the State, and, further, that in this particular department even more than in any other, Elizabeth herself was the State. To arrive at any sound conclusion on this matter it is necessary to look at the reign as a whole and then to see wherein the latter half of it differed from the earlier. We shall find on so doing that Elizabeth herself retained the same disposition, the same tastes and inclinations throughout, but that as times changed and opinions progressed, so the action of this constant force became modified, and the results which it produced modified still more. The opinions and wishes of most of Elizabeth's earlier bishops, Grindal, Jewell, and others, differed, as we have seen, little or nothing from those of the earlier Puritans, and there can be no reasonable doubt that but for the personal distaste of Elizabeth herself, very great modifications in the ceremonies and ecclesiastical habits in use in the English Church would have been introduced.^[10] Certain it is that in the Convocation of 1562 the proposal to accept the principal Puritan modifications was defeated in the Lower House by one vote only, and this in the face of the fact that its acceptance would have involved all the difficulties of procuring a change in the law but recently passed in Parliament, as well as overcoming the opposition of the Queen herself. But as time went on further changes took place. Both parties gradually hardened in their opinions. Whitgift may be taken as the typical bishop of the latter part of Elizabeth's reign almost as completely as Jewell was in the early part, and Whitgift is looked upon justly as the great enemy (they themselves said the great persecutor) of the Puritans. Yet Whitgift was as extreme a Protestant as any who was ever made a bishop, and not only an extreme Protestant, but an extreme Calvinist; and in fact it was freely admitted on both sides, that Puritans and bishops alike were agreed to accept the Thirty-nine Articles as the true exponent of the doctrine of the Church of England.

There are certain occurrences which took place during the latter half of Elizabeth's reign which will serve so well to illustrate the position and progress of the Church of England, that it is well to state them in this place, although their relation to its position in the State is but indirect. The first of these has to do with the proposed deprivation of Mr. Whittingham, the Dean of Durham, and with the actual deprivation of Mr. Travers, the Afternoon Lecturer at the Temple. These two events, it is true, took place at intervals of several years, and the agents, both active and passive, were different, yet they are so closely connected in their causes and throw so much light upon one another that it is both easier and better to consider them together.

Almost from the beginning of his primacy at York Archbishop Sandys had been dissatisfied with the condition of the Cathedral of Durham, and in 3 578, at his instance, a commission was appointed to visit that body 'as well in its head as its members.'^[11] 'Orders' are a special point to be investigated, and the commission is directed, 'if they find them ' (i.e. the Dean or any of the Canons) 'insufficient in that behalf, to dismiss them from their offices and benefices.' The Archbishop's Chancellor expressly says that Dean Whittingham 'confessed that he was neither deacon nor minister according to the order and law of this realm,' but that he says 'he was ordered in Queen Mary's time in Geneva, according to the form there used.' This last statement is, however, expressly denied by the Archbishop himself, who says that Whittingham 'hath not proved that he was orderly made minister at Geneva, and as far as appears that he did not allege that he had received any imposition of hands.' The Chancellor also further quotes the words of the first certificate which Whittingham displayed to the Commission, saying that 'he was made a minister by lot and election of the whole English congregation at Geneva.' This certificate he afterwards attempted to amend, but to very little purpose. But there are two other letters quoted by Strype,^[12] viz. one from the Archbishop of York to Lord Burghley, and the other from Lord Huntingdon, who was one of the commissioners in the case, to the same statesman. The Archbishop says: 'The Dean hath gotten more friends than the matter deserveth.' The discredit of the Church of Geneva is hotly alleged. 'Verily, my Lord, that Church is not touched. For he hath not received his ministry in that Church, or by any authority or order from that Church, so far as yet can appear;' and Lord Huntingdon says that 'the commission would much differ in opinion for this matter' (viz. the deprivation of the Dean), and that 'for himself—he thought in conscience he might not agree to this sentence of deprivation for that cause only.' Further on in the same letter he goes on to suggest that the commission had better turn its attention to other matters, and put off this one of the Dean's deprivation indefinitely. As a fact, so it did; no further steps were taken in the matter, and Whittingham died some six months later, still in possession of his deanery. It is thus clear that Dean Whittingham was not deprived, that it is at least doubtful whether he would have been so, and, what is of far more importance than either, if he had been, it would have been not because he had Genevan orders instead of Anglican, but because he had them not.^[13]

The case^[14] of Travers occurred shortly after Whitgift's accession to the primacy. Walter Travers ranks second only to Cartwright as a leader of the Puritan party. He was confessedly a man of learning and ability, and apparently also of a disposition which attached many persons warmly to him. He had been a Fellow of Trinity, Cambridge, during Whitgift's mastership, and had then got into trouble by reason of his unbending Puritanism. He seems to have been thought well of by Lord Burghley and other great persons, and had many friends among the lawyers of the Temple. He was the author—though not confessedly—of the book entitled 'De Disciplina Ecclesiastica,' which was and continued to be the acknowledged text-book of the Puritans, and was afterwards publicly adopted and authorised by the Parliament in 1644 as a Directory of Government. The Mastership of the Temple becoming vacant in 1584, Travers' name was mentioned as a candidate, and he was in the first instance supported by Lord Burghley. Whitgift not unnaturally objected, and wrote to Lord Burghley that 'unless he (Travers) would testify his conformity by subscription as all others did which now entered into ecclesiastical livings, and would also make proof unto him that he is a minister, ordered according to the laws of this Church of England (as he verily believed he was not, because he forsook his place in the college upon that occasion), he could by no means yield to consent to the placing him there, or elsewhere in any function of this Church.'

Travers on this also wrote a letter to Lord Burghley, in which he demurs to re-ordination, but expresses his readiness to subscribe the Articles, 'which most willingly and with all my heart I assent unto as agreeable to God's word.'^[15] The appointment was given to Richard Hooker, but Travers remained for some time lecturer at the Temple, where he used to employ himself in controverting in the afternoon the statements made by Hooker in the morning. To this scandal, after some time, Whitgift put an end, by abruptly prohibiting Travers from preaching any more. Travers made an appeal to Lord ]3urgliley and to the Privy Council, but without success. The document in which the appeal was made, or a copy thereof, was sent by Cecil to Whitgift, and has been preserved, together with Whitgift's annotations upon it. In this form it was published by Strype, and is of much interest and some importance. It must be borne in mind in reading it that Lord Burghley was throughout far more favourable to Travers than Whitgift was, and that the latter was in these annotations making out his case to the best of his ability, in excuse for his somewhat sharp treatment of the former. On the whole, he makes out a good case. It was obvious that no discipline could be maintained at all if a man holding, as Travers did, the constituted authorities of his own Church in utter contempt, repudiating their discipline, and despising their orders, could go abroad on purpose to free himself from their authority, receive his commission there from the hands of a mere set of malcontents like himself, and then come back and claim that he held any office or cure in the Church of England which might fall to his lot, by as good a title as the best there. In the main, Whitgift's position was so strong that he had no difficulty in maintaining it, and Travers remained silenced, but he was shortly after called to Dublin by Archbishop Loftus and made Master of Trinity College.

There are, however, some incidental points touched by these disputants which are of value as showing the state of things in the English Church at the period. In the course of an argument that ordination in one Church was always held good in others, Travers says, 'Afore Mr. Whittingham's case there was never any question moved in this Church to the contrary,' and to this historical statement Whitgift takes no objection.^[16] Travers proceeds: 'The question being moved about him, yet was neither the word of God nor the law of the land found to be against him. But notwithstanding that exception, he continued in his place and ministry after to his death.' Whitgift rejoins: 'This is untrue, for if Mr. Whittingham had lived he had been deprived, without special grace and dispensation.' Now, as we have just seen, Travers was right in this point, as to the fact: Whittingham was not condemned, and did retain his deanery for the few months he lived. Whether he would have been condemned is a matter of opinion, in which it is at least as likely that Lord Huntingdon, one of his judges, should have been right as Whitgift, who had nothing at all to do with the case.

These two cases, taken together, serve to show how the rise of Puritanism, together with Elizabeth's determination to give it no quarter, were gradually hardening Anglicanism, and while leaving it still in its old attitude of uncompromising opposition to Eome, were gradually compelling or inducing it to take up a position of exclusiveness towards other Protestant churches, to which, for nearly the first half-century of its existence, it was a stranger.^[17]

Another important event belonging to this period was the publication of the famous Martin Marprelate tracts, which began to be secretly printed in the year 1590.^[18] These tracts and the literature arising out of them serve very well to show both what the relative situation of the Bishop's party and the Puritans was at the time, and how far it had changed from what it had previously been. It is impossible to read any of them, for instance, the 'Epistle to the Terrible Priests,' or even the far more serious Puritan writings of the time such as Udall's 'Demonstration of the Truth,' without being struck at the same time by the bitter and cantankerous style adopted by the writers, and the perverse and impracticable character of the party whose spokesman they are. The hopeless narrowness with which they assume that opposition to Rome or Roman practice is of itself the test of right, and conformity to it an invariable proof of wrong, and that the mere words of the Bible—or more often their own conclusions as to the applicability of those words—are to settle every controverted point in their favour, without the shadow of an appeal, and the bitter and unsparing denunciation of every attempt at such appeal, as 'devilish practices against God his saints,' and of the bishops and others who thought better of the existing state of things, than they did, as 'impudent, shameless, and wainscote-faced bishops;'^[19] all these are the marks of a bitter and unreasoning fanaticism, with which it is difficult if not impossible to deal, except with the strong hand. On the other hand, it appears certain that the bishops did use strong measures with these men, to an extent which to modern ideas appears harsh to an inexcusable degree. Mr. Arber, in his introduction, quotes contemporary documents showing twenty-five men in various prisons in London for ecclesiastical offences, many of whom appear to have been committed without warrants or kept in prison for months together without trial, and some beaten and 'cast in little ease,' and several to have died in prison, leaving their families destitute. To all this it must be added that printing was not permitted them; these very tracts were printed by stealth and under hiding, and the printers and authors hunted, imprisoned, and sometimes, as in the case of John Penry, even executed. And the means used by the bishops were as unscrupulous and unfair as their acts were harsh and arbitrary.^[20] In particular, what was called the 'oath ex officio' was a method of investigation worthy only of the Spanish Inquisition. Under it a man could be called before the Bishop or the Court of High Commission without a charge and without an accuser, and there have an oath administered to him to reveal whatsoever he knew, whether of himself or anyone else; and if he refused the oath he was sent to prison at once. What will strike any modern reader as at once the most remarkable, and from a moral point of view the most lamentable, feature in this bitter and important controversy, is that the points in dispute not only were really unimportant, but were admitted on both sides to be so. If we examine^[21] Anthony Gilby's 'One Hundred Points of Poperie yet remaining which deform the English Reformation' (he enumerates in fact 151), omitting those concerning the administration of justice in the Bishop's Courts, which were only indirectly a religious question, we shall find that no one of the real doctrines of the Anglican Church is in question, but trifling matters of vestments or ceremonies, to which, as we have seen, the Anglican divines of that age attached no importance, and many of which they would willingly and even gladly have given up.^[22] Yet neither party would yield an inch. The malcontents would not yield, for they had, as we have just seen, worked themselves up into a profound belief that everyone of their own crotchets was directed by the infallible word of God; and the bishops could not yield because to them to yield was to give up the cause altogether. They held their places simply on the condition that they maintained the state of Church doctrine and discipline which had been established by law and which Elizabeth was determined should not be changed. Many of them believed, and not unreasonably believed, that it was far better, in itself, than that which the Puritans would substitute for it, and even those who sympathised most strongly with the latter party, saw plainly that, if they proposed to yield, Elizabeth would simply get rid of them, and supply their places with any men she could find who would undertake to carry out her views, and such men, they might not unreasonably argue, were likely to be worse rather than better than themselves. And thus in the curious mélange of human motives the most disinterested anxiety for the safety of the Christian religion in England may have mingled in the most varying proportion, in the minds of the Elizabethan bishops, with a sordid and worldly care for their own personal profit and dignity.

That a moderate party did exist, and that it numbered, as may be expected, among its members many of the ablest and best men in the country, is evident. At Cambridge, where the influence of Cartwright and Travers had been greatest, we are told: ' We may clearly discern the existence of a not inconsiderable section whose retirement from the ranks of Puritanism was the result of a genuine and far from irrational conviction of the disastrous tendency of the consequences to which that movement was leading.'^[23] Chaderton, the first Master of the recently founded Emmanuel College, and Whitaker, Master of St. John's, both leading men in the University, are mentioned as examples of this moderate party. Like almost all the earlier Elizabethan bishops, they sympathised with the Puritans in the main, but were unwilling to accept the consequences of doing so openly, and they utterly condemned the violence, intemperance, and coarseness of the polemics; but in those days, as in all times in which party spirit, and especially religious party spirit, runs high, moderation is the unpardonable sin, and a theologian who ventures to suggest that a question has two sides, is consigned by both parties to the bottomless pit, as a hopeless example of Laodicean tepidity.

The Puritans insisted strongly on the absolute and divine right of their 'discipline' or form of Church government. It was, according to them, taken direct from Holy Scripture, and had an exclusive claim to the obedience of all Christian men.^[24] Whitgift, and Hooker himself, in common with all the earlier defenders of the English Church against them, had insisted that the Church was free in these matters, as also in that of rites and ceremonies; and also on the necessity for some degrees of authority in the Church, and the consequent absurdity of requiring equality among all ministers. Now, for the first time, in February 1588, a sermon was preached by Dr. Bancroft (afterwards Archbishop) at Paul's Cross, in which he suggested, rather than asserted, the divine right of bishops in the Church of England, thus, as he supposed, making good its position against the asserted divine right of the Pope on the one hand and of the Puritan 'discipline' on the other. This sermon of Bancroft's has attained to a fame out of all proportion to its intrinsic merits. It owes its immortality to the fact that in it for the first time, more than half a century after the separation from Rome, the above doctrine is maintained. It is put forward in a mild and scarcely more than suggestive tone, and to a modern reader appears scarcely noticeable as compared with the blast of unqualified asseveration with which the royal supremacy is asserted in its most unmitigated form; the preacher maintaining, almost in the words of Henry VIII.'s Act of Supremacy, that 'not only the title of supreme governor over all persons and in all causes, as well ecclesiastical as civil, did appertain and ought to be annexed to the Crown, but likewise all honours, dignities, pre-eminences, jurisdiction, privileges, authorities, immunities, profits and commodities, which by usurpation at any time did appertain to the Pope.'^[25] Nevertheless, at the time when the sermon was preached, and for many years afterwards, it was the former and not the latter assertion which excited attention; because, while the latter was a mere every-day doctrine, with which mankind had been familiar since Cromwell's time, the former, at the time entirely novel, was a desertion of the ground hitherto held by Jewell, Whitgift, and Hooker, and appeared to have been enunciated simply, as one may say, in order to overtrump Cartwright's trick. A similar doctrine was, however, shortly after maintained in a much more serious work by Dr. Bilson, at that time Warden of Winchester College, and subsequently Bishop of Winchester. His treatise on the 'Perpetual Government of Christ's Church' is a careful and well-reasoned work, but the arguments, though familiar in the present day, must, as applied to the Church of England, have been both new and startling in Elizabeth's reign, inasmuch as it was, if I mistake not, the first controversial work which dealt with the constitution of the Church, without specific reference to the points in dispute between the Reformed and the Roman Churches. The constant thesis of earlier works had been those differences—the consequent justification of the Reformation, and the substantial unity of the reformed communions in different countries. Here, for the first time, we have a work by a divine of the English Church, in which the Puritans are the avowed adversaries, Rome is practically left out of the account, and, by implication at least, the non-Episcopal Protestant Churches are rated as no Churches at all.^[26] The work, as far as can be now judged, took its place for the moment simply as one among the many anti-Puritan polemics of the time; had it been looked on as anything more it could scarcely have failed to arouse the anger, not only of those against whom it was written, but also of the majority of the Churchmen whose cause it espoused. The two controversies—that with the Romanists on the one hand and that with the Puritans on the other—continued with varying degrees of vigour during the rest of the reign and for long years afterwards. It has been held that the adversaries in both cases were persecuted, and that both persecutions were alike blots upon the credit of the English Church. In point of fact, however, so far as they were persecuted at all—and that they were so it seems impossible to deny—both were persecuted by the State rather than by the Church, and for reasons of State rather than for entertaining wrong opinions. Romanism, as has been already said, was constantly associated with the idea of treason, Puritanism with that of sedition; and not unreasonably. Not only did fanatical Romanists actually attempt the Queen's life, but Roman statesmen plotted and Roman theologians defended these attempted assassinations. Nor were the Puritans much less obnoxious to the State than these when we remember what the State proposed to do and to be in the sixteenth century.^[27] They maintained the superiority of the clergy—i.e. of their elders and assemblies—over the civil power in ecclesiastical matters, to the extent of making the ministers the judges of what is law in all matters, and civil magistrates judges only of the facts, making the sovereign subject to the censures and excommunications of their elderships and assemblies, and establishing officers analogous to the Ephors at Sparta, with power to depose the sovereign if he seem to them to break the covenant, with many other similar extravagances. All these matters bore a vastly different appearance to the eye of a sovereign or a statesman in any State, in the sixteenth century, from that which they bear now; and in England we have to bear in mind that there was, as we have frequently had occasion to notice, a very special and close connection, almost an identification, of the Church with the State. The Sovereign had, as we have just seen stated in so many words by Dr. Bancroft, all the authority in the Church which 'by usurpation did ever at any time appertain to the Pope.'

Two other controversies arose in these closing years of Elizabeth's reign, both of which had certain relations, direct or indirect, with the governing powers of the State. One of these, viz. the predestinarian controversy, arose with a sermon by a Fellow of Caius College Cambridge, Barret by name, who called in question in the University pulpit some of the dogmas of the prevailing Calvinism of the period. This sermon, and the disputes which followed it, showed how completely these opinions were at the time in possession of the field in the English Church; Whitgift himself, Whitaker (the Regius Professor of Divinity), together with the great majority of the bishops and heads of houses, taking part against Barret. It showed also, at the same time, that there were, even then, especially among the younger divines, a few who were beginning to revolt against them, with one notable leader among the seniors in the person of Dr. Baro, the Margaret Professor. The point, however, with which we are concerned is this, that the controversy gave rise to a somewhat singular proceeding on the part of the archbishop, who seems to have assembled a meeting of bishops and clergy at Lambeth, which drew up a series of Calvinistic propositions since known as the 'Lambeth Articles.' It is impossible to read Strype's account of the proceeding, and especially the archbishop's letter^[28] to the heads of houses at Cambridge, without a feeling that he must have been conscious that he was dealing with the whole matter in a perfunctory and irregular way, and endeavouring to keep matters quiet by a tacit assumption of an authority which he felt to be more than doubtful In any case, however, he was reckoning without his host, and was brought up somewhat abruptly by a letter from Sir R. Cecil, written by the Queen's order, which completes the view of the situation so graphically that I give it at length as it is quoted by Strype:—

'That her Majesty had heard, as of Mr. Whitaker's death, so of some business that he came up about. And that she had commanded him to send unto his Grace to acquaint him that she misliked that any allowance had been given by his Grace and the rest of any such points to be disputed: being a matter tender and dangerous to weak, ignorant minds. And thereupon that she required of his Grace to suspend them. That he could not tell what to answer, but did this at Her Majesty's commandment and left the matter to his Grace, who, he knew, could best satisfy her in these things. And thus he humbly took his leave. From the Court, the 5th December, 1595.

'Your Grace's to command,⁠

'Ro. Cecill.'

The Sabbatarian controversy^[29] also arose towards the close of this reign, certain preachers, more or less inclined to the Puritan party, having begun to preach in various parts of the country that the command to observe the Sabbath was moral and perpetual, and that infringements of it were to be put upon the same level with crimes such as murder and adultery. This doctrine was met by the archbishop and the Lord Chief Justice with their usual methods— viz., citations before the courts and prohibition of printing. The intervention of the latter functionary serves to show that in this, as in other cases, the Church and State were at one. As usual, however, the doctrine which was only now beginning to excite attention continued to spread, and led, as we know, in the following reign, to serious disorders and difficulties. And thus, with the constantly attempted suppression of her adversaries on the one side and the other, in these last years of Elizabeth's reign, the Church of England was more and more differentiating herself from the Roman Church on the one hand, and from the Churches of the Reformation on the other; but as she was forced into this position in the first instance mainly by the individual will of the sovereign, so she has maintained it ever since by close connection with and intimate dependence on the existing civil power for the time being. But the consideration of the total results of Elizabeth's reign may well require a chapter to itself.

1. This Act is sometimes referred to as in no way admitting non-Episcopal orders, and it is said to be a disabling Act, aimed at the surviving Catholic clergy, and requiring them, so to speak, to give security for their loyal behaviour towards the Queen and the Established Church. This, no doubt, is true, but not the whole truth. An Act of Parliament is judged by what it says, and the same words admitted non-Episcopal as well as Roman orders. That it was considered so to do is proved by two passages from the works of Bishop Cosin, vol. iv. pp. 403-7 and 449-50.
2. Lewis, Reformation Settlement, p. 267, note.
3. Grindal's answer to Bullinger's letter on the 'habit' question. He says that when the bishops who had been exiles in Germany could not persuade the Queen and Parliament to remove these habits out of the Church, though they had long endeavoured it, by common consent they thought it best not to leave the Church for some rites, which were not many nor in themselves wicked, especially since the purity of the Gospel remained safe and free to them. Nor had they to this present time repented themselves of this counsel; for their churches, God giving the increase, were augmented much, which otherwise had been prey to Lutherans and Semi-papists. Strype, Grindal, p. 156.
4. See, for example, Norton's letter to Whitgift in Strype, Whitgift, vol. i. pp. 58-9. See also Archbishop Hutton's letter to Lord Cranborn at the beginning of the next reign; Strype, Whitgift, vol. iii. p. 420. Also extract from Archbishop Sandy's will in Strype, Whitgift, vol. i. p. 548. Also An7ials, vol. iii. pt. ii. pp. 67-8.
5. The controversy between Hooker and Travers, and Archbishop Whitgift's remarks upon it, in Walton's life of Hooker, Keble's Hooker, vol. i. pp. 54-65.
6. Keble's Hooker, vol. iii. pp. 573-4.
7. Strype, Grindal, pp. 325-36.
8. See her letter to Whitgift, Bishop of Worcester, In Strype, Whitgift, vol. i. pp. 163-4.
9. Convocation had petitioned for the removal of Grindal's sequestration in 1581, and in 1582 he made a submission, and was restored. The Queen even then wished him to resign, but the arrangements for his doing so were not completed at the time of his death, in July 1583.
10. Burnet, vol. iii. p. 513, and Strype as there referred to.
11. Strype, Annals, vol. ii. pt. ii. p. 169.
12. Annals, vol. ii. pt. ii. Appendix xiii. p. 620.
13. For the Archbishop's letter plainly suggests that he would not have dreamed of questioning the sufficiency of orders duly conferred by the Church of Geneva, and in so doing accords with the tone universal throughout the correspondence between the Elizabethan divines and their friends in Geneva and Zurich.
14. Strype, Whitgift, vol. i. pp. 342–6.
15. See the whole letter in Strype, Whitgift (Appendix), vol, iii. pp. 115.
16. Any person who reads these papers, as given by Strype, will see that Whitgift is taking every point he can against Travers, and would have been most unlikely to let such a statement pass, had he been able to question it.
17. The evidence of a great High Churchman of a later age, Dr. John Cosin, afterwards Bishop of Durham, may be taken to show what the practice of the Church of England in this matter had been and was. (See Appendix, note vi.)
18. This was the year of the publication of Penry's Appellation.
19. See, e.g., Martin's Epistle, Arber's edit. pp. 30-1.
20. Arber's Introductory Sketch, p. 73.
21. Ibid. p. 28.
22. Mr. Mullinger (University of Cambridge from the Royal Injunctions of 1535 to the Accession of Charles I., p. 263), quotes Travers himself as saying in his Eccles. Discip. Explicatio, ' The Universities are set on fire by causes most trivial in themselves,' and, as we have already seen, Travers professed himself entirely satisfied with the Thirty-nine Articles.
23. Mullinger, op. cit. p. 299.
24. See Hunt's Religious Thought in England, vol. i. pp. 54-60, for a short résumé of these arguments.
25. Perry, vol. i. pp. 16, 19.
26. The latest notice of Bilson that I have found—viz. that in the Dictionary of National Biography—speaks of his writing generally as 'halting in its logic and commonplace in its proofs.' His theory of Episcopacy, though not uncommon in the present day, was far too thoroughgoing, not only for Jewell and Whitgift before him, but for Andrewes afterwards. (See Appendix, note vi.)
27. See, e.g., a paper (No. III.) in the Appendix to Strype, Whitgift, Book IV., entitled, 'The Doctrine with some of the Practices of sundry troublesome Ministers in England.'
28. Strype, Whitgift, vol. ii. p. 282.
29. Strype, Whifgift, vol. ii. p. 415.