curious question why they did not, before Elizabeth had re-purged the Convocations by means of the oath of supremacy, avail themselves of their legal standing by some attempt at synodical action in the Roman sense and it is a question of still greater interest for what reasons no such action was taken during the Marian period, when the episcopate and priesthood had been effectually purged, and the nation at large had been acquiescent in the restoration of the Roman form of worship.

Such is the subject which I have endeavoured to present under an aspect free from colour, and with the dryness which properly belongs to an argument upon law. I ought perhaps to make two small additions. First, that my account of the proceedings in the first Elizabethan Convocation, although brief, contains all that is material. Secondly, that I have carefully perused an able article in the Dublin Review for May, 1840, which is believed to have been written by Dr. Lingard, and bears the title "Did the Anglican Church reform herself?" It covers the ground of the argument advanced in these pages; but supplies no reason, I believe, for altering anything that I have written.

VI.

QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE CHURCH OF

ENGLAND.*

1888.

CONSIDERATIONS of religion were the chief determining elements, at least for England, in the public affairs of the sixteenth century. Parallel or counter to these ran the motives of private rapine, European influence, and other forces, variously distributed in various countries; but religion was the principal factor. And yet not religion conceived as an affair of the private conscience : not the yearning and the search for the "pearl of great price: not an increased predominance of "otherworldliness: but the instinct of national freedom, and the determination to have nothing in religion that should impair it. The penetrating insight of Shakespeare taught him, in delineating King John's defiance to the Pope, to base it, not on the monarch's own very indifferent individuality, but on the national sentiment.

دو

"Tell him this tale: and from the mouth of England
Add thus much more; that no Italian priest

Shall tithe or toll in our dominions." +

*Reprinted from the Nineteenth Century.
King John,' iii. 1.

In these words is set down probably the most powerful element of the anti-Roman movement in England for the sixteenth century. It was in the seventeenth that the forms of personal religion were, for the bulk of the English people, principally determined.*

Henry the Eighth did not create this hostility, but turned it to account; added to it the force of his own imperious and powerful will; and supplied a new ground of action upon which its energies could be mustered and arrayed, in order to sustain a sound or plausible appeal to Scripture against papal prerogative. Henry was, in truth, one of the most papally minded men in England. Sir Thomas More warned him that he had strained the claims of the see of Rome in his book against Luther. But the atmosphere of his soul, like the bag of Aiolos, was charged with violence and tempest, and the stronger blast prevailed. Nothing, Mr. Brewer seems to believe,† but the extravagance of his passion for Ann Boleyn could have overcome the propensity next in vehemence, which was that of attachment to the Pope. In any case, the King showed a great sagacity in the adaptation of his means to his ends. He never questioned the position of the Pope as the head of the Western Church, but he denied that this headship or primacy invested him with ordinary jurisdiction in this realm of England. And this great practical change, which effectually removed the Pope from the daily view of the English clergy and people, was effected without any shock to the stability of the throne, and even carried with it the

* On this not yet fully explored subject, see Weingarten, 'Revolutions-Kirchen Englands.'

† Papers of Henry VIII.,' iv., Introd. p. cxli.

general assent of the bishops and their clergy. At no time, says Hume,* was he hated by his subjects, and the judgment of our historians from the date of Mr. Hallam † has been that the abolition of the papal jurisdiction corresponded, on the whole, with the bent of the national mind.

Elizabeth was reported by the Count de Feria, a very competent observer, to have a great admiration for her father's mode of ruling. Had the course of nature been such as to set her upon the throne at his death, and had she been inclined to pursue a religious policy in some essential points resembling his, she would probably have been more largely supported by the people than were either of the intervening sovereigns in the pursuit of opposite extremes. But the reigns both of Edward and of Mary concurred in this single point—that each of them powerfully tended to develop in the public mind the more unmitigated forms of the two beliefs that were in conflict throughout Europe. The Marian bishops occupied a ground widely apart from that of the prelacy which under Warham accepted, and even enacted, the royal supremacy. The Protestant divines, with whom Elizabeth had to deal on her accession, were for the most part men addicted not to Luther, not even to

*Hist.,' ch. xxxiii.

† 'Constit. History,' i. 113 n. Green's History,' ii. 178, 219. Mr. Gairdner says ('Papers of Henry VIII.,' vol. viii., Preface, p. 11) that the nation disliked the change. I do not know whether he would speak thus of that portion only of the change which abolished the ordinary jurisdiction of the Pope. The divorce, the modes of proceeding with the monasteries, the cruel executions, and finally the despotic government of the Church, are separable from those measures of the reign which seem to have carried national approval.

Froude's Hist.,' vi. 525.

Calvin, but more to Zwingli. An independent orthodox Anglicanism, as Mr. Froude has happily phrased it, which was once a reality, had become almost a dream. At the moment of Mary's death, though large masses of the population were without decided leanings, the active religion of the country was divided between purely Roman and strongly puritan opinions. Even Tunstal had been converted to at least an acquiescence in the papal supremacy. As papist or as Zwinglian, the great Queen would at least have had a strong party at her back. To the one and to the other she was inflexibly opposed. If she was resolved to make bricks after her own fashion, she had to make them without straw. For the purposes of religion, she had no party at her back. But she knew that sovereignty in England was a strong reality, and that the will of every Tudor had counted for much in the determination of national policy. She knew, she could not but know, that in strength of volition she was at least their equal, and that in the endowments of her intellect, as well as through the preparatory discipline of her life, she excelled them all. In no portion of her proceedings did she more clearly exhibit sagacious discernment and relentless energy of purpose than in her cautious but never wearying effort to manipulate the religion of the country in a sense which should be national, but should not be that either of the Zwinglian or Calvinian exiles, or of the Roman court. She told the Spanish ambassador on her accession, says Strype, that she acknowledged the Real Presence, and "did now and then pray to the Virgin Mary."*