Page:Church and State under the Tudors.djvu/270

ness all the changes already made, but it appended to the results of its own labours the humble protestation already quoted.^[1] There is, in point of fact, throughout the reign a unanimity amongst all parties (the Catholics always excepted) in exalting the royal power over the Church, and an entire agreement between theory and practice which it is difficult in the present day completely to realise. We find, first, the phraseology of the Act of Supremacy claiming authority in the most unmeasured terms; then we find this authority carried out avowedly under the sanction of that Act, at first by specially-appointed Commissions, and, after 1583, also by the constitution of the High Commission as a permanent court; and we find all sorts of functionaries, on all sorts of occasions, referring to that authority as a settled principle of the constitution. The whole ecclesiastical constitution of the country was revolutionised by the first two Acts of Elizabeth's first Parliament, and by the Commissions appointed under that first Act which carried out her visitation and enforced her famous 'injunctions.' All this was done in the year 1559, and entirely without either authority from, or reference to, any clerical or distinctively ecclesiastical authority whatsoever, other than that which belonged to the Crown itself. Indeed, as we have seen, Convocation was for all intents and purposes in abeyance, and had done nothing except express in a more or less informal, but in a perfectly unmistakable, manner its entire satisfaction with the state of things left by Mary, and its consequent disapproval of the whole of Elizabeth's ecclesiastical acts. And as the reign began so it continued to the end; the whole government of the Church was carried on by Commissions similar to the first one,

1. See above, p. 201.