# Church and State under the Tudors/Chapter 12

CHAPTER XII
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
I have now brought down a brief account of the history of the relations of Church and State during the earlier half of the Reformation period, to the end of the sixteenth century, and the almost simultaneous end of that wonderful dynasty which ruled England during the whole of that century and presided over the birth and youth of the Reformation. It has been my endeavour throughout to make no statement of fact which was not either admitted by a general consent of the best authorities, or at least supported by good contemporary evidence. Of the deductions which I have drawn or shall draw from these facts, my readers must judge for themselves how far they are or are not legitimate. I shall now attempt, in a concluding chapter, to sum up the results to which all these facts and deductions appear to lead us with as much impartiality as I can command, and without regard to any of those remote and ultimate consequences which so constantly tend to transform historical essays into mere party pamphlets.
The preliminary sketch which formed the necessary introduction to the proper subject of the book may serve to place in their fair light a few matters which are often forgotten or misrepresented in their bearing upon subsequent events.
It may serve to remind us how the Church was planted in England by the Roman missionary Augustine, ​and how, though possibly more than half the country was converted from an independent source, yet the whole deliberately submitted to the Roman Primacy, and from thenceforth became one with itself and with the rest of the Western Church: how the Norman conquest did but cement the union by eliminating much that was Saxon and insular in the law and the practice of the Church courts: and how the Papal power and influence, instead of being less in England than elsewhere, was in reality greater; and this not only in the times of Pope Innocent and King John, but generally throughout the whole period extending down to Henry VII. himself. It may serve also to place us on our guard against that peculiar second intention in which the word national is commonly used by English ecclesiastical historians, writing either with the general object of magnifying and glorifying everything English as such, or with the more specific intention of making out what they consider a more satisfactory pedigree for the modern English Church establishment. To an unsophisticated reader it might appear that the phrase National Church must at least imply the previous existence of a nation and a Church in the country of which it is used. Yet in the very last book which has been published on the subject we find ourselves called upon to admire the specially national character of the English Church, at a time when there existed in England at least two Churches and no nation at all. Much has been made in this relation of the fact—or the alleged fact—already referred to, that a larger portion of England was converted by Scoto-Irish missionaries than by Roman. This appears difficult to ​determine with certainty, and very unimportant when it is determined. Let it be admitted for the sake of the argument. It still remains true that the first primate, whose successor, after a sort, still sits at Canterbury, was a missionary sent direct from Pope Gregory the Great, in 597; that Theodore, the great reorganiser of the see, was also a papal missionary; that the Scoto-Irish converts in the North under Wilfrid's primacy formally submitted to Rome at the Synod of Whitby in 664, Colman, the leader on the other side, and those who would not submit, shaking off the dust from their feet and departing; and that Saxon England for the first time became a nation some 150 years later. These few facts alone—and there are others like them—serve to show plainly that national, in modern English ecclesiastical history, has often the same meaning as non-national elsewhere. Could we call the civil government of any country national, if its highest Court of Appeal was foreign, its highest officers were often appointed by a foreign power, and always paid tribute to it, and if its highest native judge, when by indirect means he had succeeded in getting the final appeals mostly into his own hands, yet always gave his decisions avowedly as the delegate of a foreign potentate? Clearly, if we use the word national to describe such a state of things, we use it in a sense not only differing from, but contrary to, its common acceptation. The result, then, of our review of the history of the Church in England before the reign of Henry VIII. is, that we find that up to that time there was not, and indeed could not be, a National Church in any intelligible sense of the words.
Positively the only historical facts which tend ​to support the now prevalent theory of the national character of the Church in England during the Middle Ages, are to be found in the series of antipapal statutes enacted under the Plantagenet and later kings. The true explanation of these is that quoted above from Bishop Stubbs, and amounts to the fact that they were intended to prevent the encroachment of the popes into the region of temporal government. Even in this, as we have seen, they were not remarkably successful. They were continually infringed by the kings themselves, and sometimes by their subjects; they had an incurable tendency to fall into abeyance; and moreover they were all passed at a time in which the Papacy was in a state of depression, and as soon as it revived, under Martin V., they were almost forgotten—to such an extent, at least, that when Henry VIII. suddenly revived the Statute of Præmunire, no one knew what it meant, and he was able to attach to it just what value pleased him.
Under Henry VIII. all this was completely changed. On the fall of Wolsey, he undertook on his own account a reform of the Church, which ended in nothing short of a revolution. By an ingenious application of the Statute of Præmunire he drove the clergy into a submission to himself which was practically unconditional, and he induced Parliament, by a series of measures culminating in the Act of Appeals and the Act of Supremacy, to simply transfer the whole of the papal power from the Pope to himself and his successors.
These Acts for the first time made the Church in England a National Church; but, at the same time, they incurred the excommunication of the Pope, and made it also, in ecclesiastical parlance, schismatical. Here ​Henry would possibly have stopped. His immediate object had been to obtain his divorce from Katherine. That he could not obtain from the Pope, and therefore he abolished the Pope as far as his own domains extended, in order to get it. He was no Protestant, neither did he sympathise with Protestants; but Protestantism was at the moment on the rise, and it was difficult to break with the Pope without, in a greater or less degree, indirectly if not directly, encouraging Protestants. Again, he was sensible of the abuses of pilgrimages and shrines and magic images, thing;s which had excited the anger of men like Colet and Erasmus and More, who were no more Protestants than he; and his appreciation of these matters was doubtless quickened by the further consideration that the cult of Thomas à Becket was a standing memorial of the victory of papal over regal power. It was therefore advisable that Becket should be abolished, as in truth a traitor rather than a saint; and, having proceeded so far, he found the gold and jewels of Becket's shrine so agreeable a remedy for his impecuniosity, that other saints, whose claims to reverence were in themselves not so obnoxious to royalty, had to share the same fate notwithstanding. The same mixture of motives—desire to depreciate the Pope in the eyes of his subjects, and desire to fill his own chronically empty exchequer—contributed in no small degree to produce his crusade against the monks and friars, who formed, as they have been often called, a kind of militia of the Papacy and possessed—even on the lowest computation—a vast amount of wealth. But ​Henry did not, or perhaps could not, stop short in his course at the precise point which he would have chosen. He seems to have proposed to himself to establish a Church which, though repudiating the Pope, and separating itself from the Catholic Church of which the Pope was the head, should yet remain orthodox in doctrine and Catholic in ritual. In this he found two obstacles—first that the Pope excommunicated him, and secondly that, as remarked by Marillac in a passage already quoted, it was far from an easy task to keep men orthodox apart from the Catholic Church; and thus he was led to carry his assumption of papal power further than at that time, or for long after, the popes themselves had carried it, and in his Ten Articles first, and his Six afterwards, began to prescribe the doctrines which his people were to believe, as well as the authority to which they were to defer. That those doctrines differed comparatively little from the Catholic standard of the time, is a matter of relatively small importance. They were the doctrines of the King, not of the Church, and were enforced upon the Church in England by the authority of the State alone. Convocation, bridled by the Submission and presided over by Cromwell or Cromwell's lay deputy, could be in no sense a legitimate organ of the Church. Thus when Henry died a complete revolution had been effected in the position of the Church. Instead of the Church in England, it had become in good truth the Church of England: instead, that is, of an integral part of that great Western province of Christendom to which it owed its first conversion, and with which it had been one ever since—for nearly a thousand years—it had become, for the first time in its history, a separate Christian community, of which little could be affirmed but that, for the time being at ​any rate, it agreed with no other, that it retained an anomalous and decapitated form of Catholicism, and that, in practice, if not in theory too, it owed its doctrine, as well as whatever of discipline it retained, to its lay supreme head.
This was the situation at the end of the reign; but the fact that its establishment coincided, in point of time, with the general rise of Protestantism throughout Europe and its extension into England, complicated it still further. Henry's death took off, in a great degree, the pressure which alone kept the two rival religious parties from flying atone another's throats; but the subjection of the Church to the State still continued, and, as circumstances now threw the power into the hands of the reforming party, the result was a revolution in the doctrines of the Church almost as complete as that which Henry had already brought about in its constitution: indeed, the prevalent idea on the subject at the time, and for long after, appears to have been that suggested in the passage already quoted from Archbishop Bramhall—that of the two great changes of which the Reformation consisted, that in the constitution of the Church was the work of Henry VIII., and that in its doctrine of Edward VI. 's Council. This, in the main, is a true account of the history; but it requires some modification, for Henry did not confine himself so entirely to matters of external constitution as this view suggests, and both these revolutionary changes were for the time entirely swept away by Mary; so that, in point of fact, Elizabeth began her government with a complete tabula rasa in the matter of religion; and the permanent importance of the constitutional changes of Henry's reign, and the doctrinal changes of Edward's, is limited to the degree in which they respectively served ​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 ​advanced form of Protestantism than the first—Mr. Pocock attributes to deliberate dishonesty on their part; but, as it seems to me, it may be accounted for more naturally, as well as more charitably, by regarding it as the simple result of that natural progress of thought in their own minds, which is apt to be more rapid under the stimulus of party excitement than it is at other times. Something like this appears to be the rational interpretation of the facts of the Edwardian portion of the great religious revolution, if sentimental prepossessions and ecclesiastical theories be laid aside.
When Mary succeeded, in full age and in full possession of her powers, such as they were, and with the Tudor temper and more than the Tudor obstinacy, irritated by a life-long course of ill-treatment and annoyance, a furious reaction was the consequence. But what is of importance for us to notice in this place is that in Mary's government the personal element once more revived, and that the reaction, as we have seen, was almost entirely her own act and deed. Her methods were very much those employed by her father and Cromwell. She bribed the lay lords, deprived the Edwardian bishops, and packed the House of Commons; and when these vigorous methods proved insufficient for her purpose, she supplemented them by purely arbitrary acts of power: and finally she instituted that bloody persecution which filled all England at once with horror by its cruelty, and with disgust and contempt by the baseness with which it glutted itself upon poor, mean, harmless, and ignorant victims—tailors, peasants, cripples, and old women—while it left well-known and noble heretics in Parliament and at the council-board unimpeached and unassailed. The persecution was as fatal a mistake in policy as it was an ​immoral act in itself; but even had that mistake not been made, it is very doubtful whether Mary could ever have succeeded in her aim. Henry VIII. 's policy in destroying the monasteries and using their lands for the purpose of raising up a new territorial nobility, whether we believe it to have been deliberate and far-sighted or not, was that which made the successful re-establishment of the old Church system in England almost, if not altogether, impossible. The new families had risen to wealth and importance solely on the plunder of the Church; they could defend their own newly-acquired possessions only by a steady resistance to the claims of the Church, and the readiest means of making good that resistance was to take sides with the anti-Church or Protestant faction. Hence the new nobles—most of whom had probably first risen into importance by showing some useful abilities—formed, as a whole, the backbone of the Protestant party, and were pledged, by every consideration which ordinarily governs human actions, to oppose the rehabilitation of the old Church to the utmost.
With the accession of Elizabeth the Reformation entered upon a new phase. There was never any real doubt felt by the nation in general but that she would take the Protestant side, while there was comparatively little danger of a re-establishment of the Protestant misrule which had existed in her brother's time; for with Elizabeth there was no lack of personal will or force of character. That she did not in every particular re-enact the whole of her brother's ecclesiastical legislation, is a fact which has been dwelt upon with no little insistance by many modern historians; but they have been less careful to observe to how great an extent she ​really did so, or how, in the main, her own contemporaries, friends and foes alike, constantly thought and spoke of religion as being restored to that form which it had in the time of Edward VI. The supremacy was restored, and the Prayer-book—with but slight alteration—also; and both by authority of the State alone, not only without but against the strongly-declared wishes of the bishops and clergy.
The first of these measures, it should be observed, dropped nothing of Henry's claim except the title of supreme head, and, in fact, re-established to the full the national papacy of which I have spoken, and the claim to which, as we have seen, was put forward in the plainest terms by Dr. Bancroft towards the end of the reign, in the very same sermon in which he made a mild suggestion of some sort of Divine right in the bishops for the first time since the separation from Rome.
Another important feature in this reign also is the complete subjection of Convocation to the Queen and the Parliament. In the instance just referred to, it must be observed that the Convocation of 1559 was as much a Convocation as that of four years later, yet the Reformation was re-established in spite of its efforts to the contrary. From that time forth throughout the reign Convocation accepted its position, and confined itself strictly within the limits assigned to it. In 1563, indeed, a formal attempt was made by Bishop Sandys to obtain the concession of the whole of the early Puritan demands, which was defeated only, after counting proxies, by the narrow majority of one. When we consider the strong inducements to those in favour of such a measure to abstain from voting for it, arising ​from the fact that the Queen was well known to be opposed to it, and that its passing would have involved the unsettlement of the law as established by Parliament only four years before, and after much debate and difficulty, such a majority can only be taken to represent a real minority. It constituted, nevertheless, a technical majority, and it is perhaps well that it did so, since that one shy and absent 'odd man' is all that stood between the maintenance of the system already established and a collision with the Crown, which could only have led to a second 'submission of the clergy,' entailing renewed loss of position and authority. A similar lesson is taught by almost every important ecclesiastical transaction of the reign.
Thus the revision of the Prayer-book at the beginning of the reign was carried through by a committee of divines appointed apparently by the Privy Council. Again, when De Quadra was negotiating with Elizabeth about receiving a papal nuncio and sending representatives to the Council of Trent, Elizabeth herself and Cecil appear to have managed the whole matter, and 'the Church ' was in no way consulted. When Calvin reopened with Parker his previous negotiation for the unification of the Reformed Churches, Parker never once appears to have thought of taking Convocation or even his brother bishops into his confidence: and Whitgift, many years later, when he was anxious to settle the predestinarian controversy at Cambridge, first arranged the Lambeth Articles with the help of a few of his friends; and when compelled by the Queen's personal interference to withdraw them, informed the heads of colleges, as we have seen, that the final decision of what is or is not the doctrine of the Church of England lay with ' the Queen and those whom she has commissioned,' ​and not with them: that Convocation had anything to do with the matter it never once occurs to him to suggest. Lastly, the whole Puritan controversy arose, and was maintained throughout the reign, by the personal determination of Elizabeth to make no concessions, even in points which the majority of the bishops were quite willing to yield. But Elizabeth's bishops were no free agents. In the earlier part of her reign they had but little power: in the later, when Whitgift was primate, they obtained a great deal more; but they obtained it by consenting to become simply the Queen's agents in her ecclesiastical policy, when she carried that personal power over the Church, which the Act of Supremacy had given her, to its full development under the Court of High Commission. Thus in this reign, almost as much as under Henry and Mary, the personal will of the sovereign was the chief agency in developing the ecclesiastical policy of the reign; and it led under Elizabeth as directly and completely to the development of nonconformity, as under Henry to the separation from Rome, or under Mary to the persecution first and the reaction afterwards.
Thus from the date of the Submission of the Clergy, 1-331, to the end of the Tudor dynasty with the death of Elizabeth, the relations of Church and State, which we have been following through all their vicissitudes, may be summed up in the two correlative words, dominion and subjection. Throughout the whole period, whatever may have been the variation of phraseology, the fact had been that the Church, as soon as it became emancipated from the Pope, became and remained the thrall of the sovereign. Under Henry its subjection had been thorough and undisguised; under Mary it had been just as complete, only Mary had used her own arbitrary ​power for the purpose of installing the Pope in her place. Elizabeth's system had been more like her father's, but she had greater difficulties to contend with, and less absolutely submissive implements with which to work. A different state of things existed in Edward's reign, because his youth interfered with his personal action, and consequently the element of party was introduced to an extent otherwise unknown in the Tudor age: but it was essentially a transitory condition, and if it had not been brought to an end by his death, would have been so very little later by his majority; and there is every reason to believe that he would have displayed the Tudor self-will to the full as much as the other members of his house.
It is difficult to study the actual facts of sixteenth-century history, putting apart preconceived ecclesiastical theories, without arriving at the conclusion that the English National Church was as completely the creation of Henry VIII., Edward's Council, and Elizabeth, as Saxon Protestantism was of Luther, or Swiss of Calvin or of Zwingle, Obviously no man who sets forth a distinctive form of Christianity can proclaim himself the founder of a new religion or a new Church as such. So long as the new organisation claims to be Christian at all, it must go back for its foundation to Jesus Christ and His Apostles, and he himself can appear only as a reformer, a restorer of what professes, and must profess, to be the religion which they delivered to mankind. In this particular the claim of the English Reformers of the sixteenth century was the same as that of Luther and Calvin, or of Cartwright and Travers, and the whole question about what is to be recognised as 'primitive' or 'catholic' is one of interpretation and historical theory. ​The history of the Church in England was continuous from the Mission of Augustine—or, if we prefer it, from the Synod of Whitby—to the time when Henry VIII., upon a disagreement with the Pope about his divorce, cast off his allegiance to the Papacy. From that time to the present, with the short interval between the reconciliation under Mary, and Elizabeth's first Parliament, it has been severed from and excommunicated by the great body of the Catholic Church: and as the latter was before precisely that which it has continued since, it is clear that the former must have been something not the same; and it is not the mere retention of a few names and titles, used in a kind of 'second intention,' and a few more or less maimed and amputated rites, which will ever make persons intelligently instructed believe that an establishment which obviously is the mere creature of a single State, is the legitimate and adequate representative of that imposing and magnificent Western Church, which is older than any existing State in Europe and grander than anything that the world has ever seen, and which has been picturesquely described by an old writer as 'the ghost of the old Roman Empire sitting robed and crowned upon the grave thereof.' A fair consideration of the actual facts of the Tudor history serves further to show that a theory like that which prevails so widely at present—which represents the English Church in any other light than that of one (though it may, perhaps, be admitted, the greatest and the most dignified) of the many Protestant Churches which arose in the sixteenth century—is a novelty which took its very earliest rise some half-century or more after the separation from Rome, as a direct consequence of Elizabeth's determination to give no quarter to the ​earlier Puritans, and which made little or no progress for another half-century still. The evidence is simply overwhelming which shows, that during the whole period from 1552 onwards the English Church was considered, by friends and foes alike, to be for all intents and purposes one with the Swiss churches of Zurich and Geneva. The divines of the Church of England during the period in question differed, no doubt, among themselves on those minor points, which, as we have seen, were so nearly carried in favour of the Puritans in the Convocation of 1562; but their great anxieties were two only, viz., to shake themselves free from 'the tyranny of the Bishop of Rome and all his detestable enormities,'—to use words which once were sounded forth in all the churches in the land as one of the petitions in the Litany—and, secondly, to claim brotherhood and sympathy with the Protestant leaders in Switzerland and on the Upper Rhine. This remains true notwithstanding the equal truth of the fact that Henry VIII., who gave the first impulse to the Reformation in England, was no Protestant and no friend to Protestants. He had, as I have already suggested, been led on by circumstances to make further changes than he at first intended, and among them were those in parts of the Church Services from the use of the. Latin to that of the English language, the arranging of which he committed to Cranmer in 1545. These were the beginnings of the English Liturgy, and since there was at that time little or no design of a change in doctrine, it was natural that they should be, as they were, mainly translations from the Roman Breviary. It is doubtless this natural history of the Liturgy which accounts, in part at least, for the discrepancies which have been discovered between it and the Articles of the Church of England. ​Both were the work of the same master workman, though under different circumstances, and with the aid of different assistants. When Cranmer undertook the work at first, lie was not yet a Protestant; when he finished it, in Edward's reign, he was a somewhat advanced one. In the latter years of his life, under the influence of Ridley and Peter Martyr, Cranmer's opinions had advanced rapidly, and he had become, as is shown in the Articles and the second Prayer-book of Edward, and as he himself tacitly admitted in his second examination at Oxford, Zwinglian in doctrine. Nevertheless he remained true to the conservative instincts characteristic of the English Reformation throughout, and altered as little as his new principles would permit. He may doubtless also have considered that a manual of devotion is one thing and a formula of doctrine another. The Liturgy he composed, as the beauty of its language and its reverential tone suggests, under the full influence of these feelings, retaining as much as possible of whatever was calculated to soothe the feelings and excite the devotion of the worshippers, and to suggest as little as might be the changes and controversies of the day; and without a thought that it also would one day be subjected to the torturing processes of controversial theologians and ecclesiastical lawyers, endeavouring to screw out of its rhetorical expressions and time-honoured metaphors, a constructive licence for holding doctrines which it was the one object of his later years to oppose and to denounce, and, if possible, to obliterate.
The Articles, on the other hand, he drew up distinctly as a formula of faith, intended to express the doctrines of the Church as accurately as was consistent with sufficient comprehensiveness to avoid splitting up ​the Protestant body into as many differing sects as there existed, or might exist, shades of opinion on obscure theological doctrines; and certainly without any foresight of those 'non-natural senses' to which the ingenuity of later times would compel them to submit, with the evident and even avowed object of forcing them to admit those very doctrines which the whole history, both of the documents and of their framers, shows that they were intended to exclude. It was no doubt a stroke of genius on the part of those who, in after years, desired to undo Cranmer's work, when they claimed the right to interpret the Articles by the language of the Liturgy; but that the latter never was intended to be used for such a purpose may be considered to be historically proved by the following facts: (1) That while both were the work of the same hand, the Articles were the later composition of the two; (2) that a new edition of the Liturgy was published in the very same year with the Articles, in which the very few changes made were of such a kind as to bring it into accord with them in the one or two points which appeared to the compilers to be important; and (3) that, as just pointed out, the rhetorical and devotional tone of the older document, compared with the scholastic and argumentative style of the later, shows plainly which of the two was meant to serve a controversial or polemical purpose, and also which was not so intended. The final conclusions, then, at which we must arrive from the history of Church and State in England under the Tudor Dynasty appear to be as follows:—
(1.) That during the earlier part of the period—i.e., during the whole reigns of Henry VII. and of Henry VIII. ​until the fall of Wolsey, no change of importance took place, but there were many indications of the overbearing character of the clergy of the period, and of their unpopularity and evil repute among the laity, and of their generally corrupt condition.
(2.) That the primary motive of Henry VIII. in separating from Eome was his desire to obtain a divorce from Katherine, which the Pope refused.
(3.) That the separation was purely and simply the act of the King and the Parliament, the share of the clergy in it, such as it was, being entirely involuntary.
(4.) That the Act of Supremacy transferred the whole power—whatever that might have been—of the Pope, to the King, while the Submission of the Clergy bound them to entire dependence upon him.
(5.) That Henry thus for the first time created a National Church which was in truth schismatical, and of which he himself was, in all but name. Pope.
(6.) That he made some, but slight and few, changes in the doctrine and ritual of the Church thus established. Of these probably the most important, at least for the subsequent history of the Church, was the introduction, to some extent, of services in the English tongue.
(7.) That Henry, though he made the Church schismatical, did not make it in any appreciable degree Protestant.
(8.) That on Edward's accession the personal royal papacy fell of necessity into abeyance, and its powers were taken up by the predominant Protestant faction in the Council, which took a Zwinglian direction and retained it to the end of the reign.
(9.) That Mary, by two Acts of Parliament, swept away first the Protestant legislation of Edward's reign, ​and then the anti-Roman Acts of Henry's, and re-established the Roman Church in greater power than it had enjoyed since Henry HI.; that she also, by setting up a violent persecution, gave occasion to a great and general reaction against that Church; and, further, she was unable to restore its wealth, which had been permanently taken from it by the abolition of the monastic system.
(10.) That Elizabeth, in the first year of her reign, restored the use of Edward's second Prayer-book with but two alterations, permitted the return of the Protestant divines who had gone into exile under Mary, and by means of the Act of Supremacy deprived all Mary's bishops with one only exception.
(11.) That the above Act, together with the Act of Uniformity, was passed by Elizabeth's first Parliament against the unanimous opposition of the Spiritual peers in the Upper House; and that Convocation took no part in the matter, except so far as the Lower House passed resolutions approving the whole of Mary's legislation.
(12.) That almost all the prominent Elizabethan bishops and divines were in doctrine Zwinglian or Calvinist, and were at much pains to declare themselves at one with the leading Swiss reformers, especially with Bullinger and Peter Martyr.
(13.) It was due to Elizabeth herself, and not to them, that the demands of the earlier Puritans were not complied with.
(14.) Bancroft in 1588, and Bilson some three years later, are the first writers who suggest any Divine right of bishops in the English Church, and of them the first accompanies his suggestion by a claim, in so many words, of the whole papal power for the Queen. It was plainly ​as a set-off against the Puritan claim of Divine right for their discipline that this counter-claim was made.
It may perhaps be said that some of these conclusions appertain to Church history exclusively and not to a history of the relations of Church and State. The reply is that, whatever may have happened later, up to the time with which we are now dealing, the distinction is trivial. From the time of Henry VIII.'s Acts of Supremacy and of Submission of the Clergy, the Church of England was, as its whole history shows, simply a department of the State. If, during that time, we wish to follow the history of an independent ecclesiastical organisation, we must look for it either in the proscribed Church of Rome, or among the unlicensed and persecuted Nonconformist sects. Anabaptists or other. It may further be objected that, in presenting this view, I have omitted many facts which seem to point in an opposite direction, such as the importance which has been attached in certain cases to the decisions of Convocation, the solemn form and language in which they have been framed, and the vast amount of learning and research which has been expended on the question of whether this, that, or the other important ecclesiastical act or document has or has not the authority of Convocation.
To this the answer is, that it has been a habit of governments generally to recommend every new ordinance by alleging every conceivable warrant in its defence, and that this habit never prevailed to a greater extent than in the Tudor age, when the civil government had taken upon itself a new set of functions, which it was endeavouring by every possible means to persuade men were but the natural developments of old ones, and consequently, wherever it could obtain, by whatever process of coercion, a colourable sanction ​from the clergy, for ecclesiastical enactments which, in former times, would have proceeded from the clergy themselves as a matter of course, it was glad enough to do so, but when it could not, it very simply, as we have seen, did without it. We have also seen that those early measures of Elizabeth, on which the permanent establishment of the Reformation hangs, were carried out in the teeth of the unanimous opposition of the clergy both in the House of Lords and in the Convocation—the only Convocation of the age which is above suspicion of having yielded to governmental pressure.
In the foregoing pages it has been my endeavour to confine myself as much as possible to facts, to what was actually done, said, or written by the actors in the great ecclesiastical revolution of the sixteenth century, and to what appear to be the necessary deductions from those facts. Except, perhaps, in the description of what their acts appear to me to show of the characters of some of the most important actors in the drama, I have as much as possible avoided both opinions and theories. How far the facts and the deductions hang together, and whether they accord best with the view of the whole transaction which was taken by contemporaries, and which remained general amongst Englishmen until our own days, or with those of that special party which arose in the seventeenth century, and all but expired with the non-jurors early in the eighteenth, but whose ideas have been revived and exaggerated within the last fifty years, it will be for my readers to determine for themselves. The earliest forms of those opinions we have seen arose about the year 1588 or '90. They were totally unknown before, and remained almost entirely inoperative for many years after—in fact, during ​nearly the whole of the period with which I have dealt.
In closing this work with what may fairly be considered to be the end of the first half of the Reformation period, I leave a state of things vastly different from that which existed at its beginning, and different also from that which it was to reach at its end. Nevertheless, the accession of a new dynasty brought many new things with it, and though the actual great changes which were to follow belong to the reign of Charles I. rather than to his father's, yet the reign of James was in many respects transitional: the causes which led to the great Rebellion became first plainly visible in that reign, and the characteristics of the Stuart dynasty stand in such marked contrast with those of the Tudors, that the time at which the monarchy passed from the one house to the other seems to afford a natural resting-place. If life and opportunity be given me, I shall hope one day to be able to trace the history of the relations of Church and State in England to the end of the period of great changes in their relations, towards the close of the seventeenth century.
* ↑ The English Church in the Middle Ages, by W. Hunt, in Prof. Creighton's Epochs of Church History.
* ↑ Wolsey.
* ↑ It is worthy of notice that Ranke used the words 'schism' and 'schis- 'schismatical' in describing the events of the sixteenth century in England, though his translators have kindly modified it in the English edition into 'separation.'
* ↑ De Feria, quoted by Froude, vol. vii. pp. 13-14.
* ↑ E.g., Grindal to Hubert in Zurich Letters, series 2, p. 19.
* ↑ See Froude, vol. vii. pp. 330-4.
* ↑ Compare Newman's Apologia, p. 242, and indeed the whole argument of Parts v. and vi. of that work.