sophical religion in which, though there might be no fanaticism, there would be but little life.'* Cotton, if we may trust the assertion of Gondamar, once told that ambassador in the course of the negotiations on the marriage treaty, that he was delighted with the prospect of being able to live and die a professed Catholic, as his ancestors had done before him. Cotton was probably laughing at the ambassador in his sleeve, but his words were not the words of a Puritan.

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Sir Edwin Sandys was on the same side as Cotton and Selden, and his name in some respects is even more significant. He was a very moderate-minded, observant, intelligent man. Anticipating Ranke in modern times in his View of the State of Religion,' † he has traced out the causes of the reaction which had taken place on the Continent in favour of the Roman Catholic faith. He draws attention to the careful selection of preachers made by Catholics; their books of devotion, from which Protestants themselves were compelled to borrow; the revival of the Inquisition, as a bridle of freedom of mind and liberty of speech; the establishment of the order of the Jesuits, with their free schools and care of education; the readiness of the Catholics to fight the Reformers with their own weapons, instanced in the reform of their own Church and their martyrologies, lives of reformers, and other books written in imitation of Protestant works; last, but not least, the miserable divisions existing between Lutherans and Calvinists, which contrasted so painfully with the care taken by Catholics to conceal their own divisions from the eyes of the world. A man able to form such a clear and correct judgment on the facts of his own time was not likely to be a violent partisan. Nor was Sandys such. He had travelled in France and Italy, conversed with Jesuits, attended Catholic services, and had found much to approve as well as much to blame in Catholicism. A preacher of that charity which recognises and approves what is good in enemies, the dogmatism of Calvinism was exceedingly distasteful to him. Ceremonial in services he approved as tending to quicken and nourish reverence and devotion.' He did not doubt that the practice of confession was a benefit to many, though he dreaded its introduction into the reformed churches, because of the abuse to which he had observed it to be liable in Catholic countries. In short, Sandys, though a determined enemy of Rome, had a

* Prince Charles and the Spanish Marriage, ii. 61.

+ Europe Speculum, or a View or Survey of the State of Religion in the Western Parts of the World. 1629.

High Churchman's sympathy for many of the ceremonies and practices of that Church.

In such feelings Pym and Eliot did not share. Yet they were not Puritans, even in the modified sense of rigid or dogmatic Calvinists. In Eliot's nature there was nothing of the fanatic. He was a man eminently intelligent, eminently capable of discerning goodness under whatever guise of creed, and one whose range of friendship was wide enough to include alike the secular-minded Cotton and the pious though tolerant Bishop Hall. Pym even less than Eliot was a devotee to any particular form of faith. If he desired to put penal laws in force against Catholics or to silence the mouths of Arminians, it was not because he was thinking of the welfare of their souls or the falseness of their creed, but because he was thinking of the welfare of the State. Every utterance he made on the religious question from first to last of his long political career contains practically the same grounds of policy. He did not 'wish,' he said in the short Parliament of 1640, any new 'laws against popery, or any rigorous courses in the execu'tion of those already in force; he was far from seeking the 'ruin of their persons or estates; only he wished they might 'be kept in such a condition as should restrain them from 'doing hurt.'

It is not our purpose to endeavour to justify the policy adopted by the Commons in the first years of the reign of Charles I. We wish merely to render it more intelligible by bringing into notice motives which exerted a strong influence at the time, and to which no prominence whatever is given in Mr. Gardiner's book. We shall begin by tracing the gradual rise and formation of the High Church party.

Though the English Reformation was inaugurated and carried through by the sovereign, a glance at the Statute-book shows us that Parliament was the means by which the religious changes were in the main effected. After the year 1571, however, the Reformation having proceeded as far as Elizabeth cared that it should go, she interpreted her supremacy to mean that Parliament had no voice in ecclesiastical affairs. followed that, as soon as the accord previously existing between sovereign, clergy, and laity began to give way, the queen's interpretation of the royal supremacy was contested.

It

The changes desired by the Commons may be divided into two classes. The first, the reform of abuses such as attached to the ecclesiastical courts and the system of pluralities and non-residence; the second, alterations in the Prayer-book. That abuses existed was a generally admitted fact, but it

was by means of Convocation, not of Parliament, that the queen wished reform to be made. The canons, however, which were passed for this purpose, like the orders of the Lord Chancellors, either applied ineffective remedies, or soon fell into abeyance. Archbishop Whitgift, who had to meet the complaints of the Commons, sharply rebuked the Bishops because so little was done. I would rather with ' severity reform an officer than hear these complaints, which ' in the end may turn to the scandal of our ecclesiastical juris'diction.' On the question of alterations in the Prayer-book the queen would make no concessions. On the contrary, she made use of Convocation to prevent non-conformists from creeping into the Church. Canons were passed requiring subscription to the Articles generally (1571, 1575), and Whitgift demanded subscription on three points, the Royal Supremacy, the lawfulness of the Book of Common Prayer and the Ordination Service, and the truth of the Thirty-nine Articles. The Act of 1571, however, the last instance of Parliamentary interference, was understood to mean that the clergy should subscribe to those articles only which concerned the confession of the Christian faith and the doctrine of the sacraments. The consequences of two sources of legislation, not in union with one another, were at once apparent. Bills were brought into the Lower House to prohibit the use of any oath. or subscription except according to statute; while ministers, doubtless acting on legal advice, refused to sign Whitgift's Articles, on the plea that the requirement could not be borne out by law.

Though Elizabeth would not allow Parliament to share in ecclesiastical affairs, she did not allow the Bishops any independent authority. They were merely her instruments to carry out her policy, and she never let them forget their position. She robbed the bishoprics; she issued commissions for hunting out concealed crown lands held by the clergy; she threatened to 'unfrock' the Bishop of Ely; she rated Whitgift for allowing the Lambeth Articles to be drawn up without her knowledge or consent. Such a galling dependence the Bishops preferred to bear rather than submit to the interference of statute law in ecclesiastical affairs; but their successors reaped the benefit of their submission and patience. The conception which James I. and Charles I. formed of the ecclesiastical supremacy was quite distinct from that held by Elizabeth. These princes were both religious in the sense that they could not with a safe conscience have robbed the Church of her lands to gratify a courtier's avarice. Bancroft and Laud never reminded them, as Whitgift in terror for church property reminded Elizabeth,

that there were statutes which pronounced a curse against the breakers of Magna Charta. In the hands of Elizabeth the ecclesiastical supremacy had been a weapon of offence by which to compel submission from the clergy to the royal will; in the hands of the Stuarts it became a shield of defence to preserve inviolate a church as sacred as the monarchy itself.

The theory of the divine right of episcopacy was not unknown during the last decade of the sixteenth century. It was evidently, however, not very compatible with the doctrine of the royal supremacy; and Elizabeth's Bishops did not venture to say in plain words that the powers they exercised had any other source than the crown. In Elizabeth's Council were to be found representatives of all parties, and the Bishops knew they had powerful enemies ever ready to seize an opportunity of bringing them into disfavour with their mistress. Thus, when Bancroft, in a sermon preached at Paul's Cross in 1588, said that Arius was condemned as a heretic for holding that there was no difference by the word of God between a priest and a bishop, Sir Francis Knollys, the Privy Councillor, accused the preacher of asserting by inference that bishops exercised authority jure divino, and of thereby denying the royal supremacy. Elizabeth had not been dead many years before the Divine Right of Bishops became an article in the creed of the higher classes of the clergy. To make amends for any injury done to the royal supremacy they adopted that inflated theory of the Divine Right of Kings, which taught that the monarch was above the control of law. The theories were dovetailed into one another, and for all that the King gave the Bishops, the Bishops made an ample return to the King. The consequence of this union was that James followed out the policy of Elizabeth only more consistently in yielding nothing to the Parliament, while he forsook her policy in allowing the Church to have a platform of her own and a spiritual existence independent of the royal will. He gained the support of a party amongst the clergy, but he lost the confidence of the country gentlemen and the lawyers.

When James came to the throne the term Puritan was no longer applicable to the House of Commons. For though still bent on the reform of abuses, the laity as a body had ceased to care about introducing alterations in the Prayerbook or in the system of Church government. Bacon, to whom Puritan preciseness, Puritan pride and exclusiveness, Puritan intolerance, even Puritan zeal, were all thoroughly distasteful, himself shared the views of the Lower House on the ecclesiastical question. He proposed to James that means

VOL. CXLIII. NO. CCXCI.

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should be taken by Parliament to remedy the principal abuses complained of, and that some few concessions should be made in matters of ritual to satisfy the zealots. I would ask why the civil state should be purged and restored by good and wholesome laws made every third or fourth year in Parliaments assembled, and contrariwise the ecclesiastical 'state should still continue upon the dregs of time, and receive no alteration now for these five-and-forty years and more.' A policy which opened wider the doors of the Church and revived the action of Parliament might have borne noble fruits. But James had not the courage to carry it out. He was afraid of the Puritans, and he could not trust the Parliament. Drifting with circumstances rather than pursuing any settled principle, he took the reverse course. He urged on a fresh persecution of ministers who refused to sign to the truth of the Articles. The settlement of the religious question he left to Convocation, which under the guidance of Bancroft drew up a large body of canons. Of these some concerned ecclesiastical abuses; others more especially concerned the clergy; Whitgift's three articles were inserted, and ordination and preferment made dependent on subscription. The framers of the canons, however, did not stop at this point. Not content with legislating for the clergy, they proceeded to legislate for the laity also. Thus they declared excommunicate all who asserted that the Prayer-book or the Thirty-nine Articles contained anything superstitious or contrary to the word of God; all who denied that Convocation was the representative of the true Church of England, or that those who were not present in Convocation, laymen or clergy, were bound by its decrees in ecclesiastical causes. The sentence of excommunication, it must be remembered, incurred temporal penalties, for the excommunicated person could not enforce the payment of debts, and was liable to imprisonment. James ratified the canons, ordering them to be observed, executed, and equally kept by all our loving subjects,' and thus allowing the claim of Convocation to legislate with himself for the nation. The Commons met this challenge by a clear and decided statement of their view of the royal supremacy. In matters of religion,' they said to the king, it will appear by examination of the 'truth and right that your Majesty should be misinformed if any man should deliver that the kings of England have any absolute power in themselves either to alter religion (which • God forefend should be in the power of mortal man whatsoever), or to make any laws concerning the same, ' otherwise than in temporal causes by consent of Parliament.

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