as models for the Elizabethan legislation. In thus speaking, I refer, of course, to the legal and constitutional position of the Church. No one could for a moment suppose that even such legislative somersaults as were performed in these successive reigns could do away with the political, social, or religious results of events like the suppression of the monasteries, or the Marian persecution, or the varying relations of England towards Spain, France, Scotland, and the Papacy.
On the accession of Edward YI., not yet ten years of age, the personal element of government, which, with Henry, had been everything, fell into abeyance—the national papacy which he had established was of necessity placed for the time in commission: the Council, in fact, reigned. Almost its first act was to reduce the bishops formally, as Henry had already done in fact, to the condition of mere State officials. The next result was an important change in the direction and course of the Reformation. Henry's personal views and personal action had hitherto pervaded every part of it, and the very Articles which expressed provisionally the doctrines of the English Church, were either his own work, or at least corrected by his hand. Edward's counsellors, for the most part, cared for none of these things, and were content to leave them in the hands of a knot of highly-placed divines, whose one qualification, from their point of view, was that they should belong to that Protestant faction with which their own interests were bound up. Hence, while Cranmer and Ridley, with the help of Peter Martyr and Bucer, compiled the Prayer-book and drew up the Articles, Gardiner and Bonner, and subsequently Heath and Day, went to prison or were deprived. That these men proceeded further as they went on—the second Prayer-book of Edward VI. showing a more ad-
