CHAPTER VII

THE ELIZABETHAN SETTLEMENT IN THE CHURCH

It is difficult to estimate the forces which swept England into Protestantism after the Catholic reaction was broken by the death of Queen Mary. The entire Tudor period needs a treatment comparable to that which Mr. Gardiner gave the portion of the seventeenth century covered in his great works. The sudden ecclesiastical oscillations will be understood only when a detailed and patient analysis is made. At all events, we do know that the State which had adopted the Catholic faith with apparent readiness in 1553 turned to the established Protestant faith with the same readiness five years later.

§ 1. The Opening of Elizabeth's First Parliament 1

Ten days after her coronation, Elizabeth returned to Westminster to open her first Parliament. The two houses assembled themselves within the Abbey to hear the accustomed mass of the Holy Ghost, but found that the mass had been sung early that morning, without the elevation. The Queen arrived at the Abbey, after a midday dinner, in her ordinary open litter, accompanied by the court in their coronation robes. She had been turning and smiling to the people, with "gramercy, good people," all the way, in answer to shouts of "God save and maintain thee." The bishops were in her train. At the Abbey door the Abbot Feckenham, with all his monks in procession, each having a lighted torch in his hand, received her with incense and holy water; but when she saw the torches she exclaimed, "Away with those torches, for we see very well." Her choristers uplifted the Litany in English, and she was accompanied to the high altar under her

1 Dixon, History of the Church of England, Vol. V, pp. 51 ff. By permission of the Delegates of the Clarendon Press, Oxford.

canopy. Not a bishop, but a returned exile ascended the pulpit; not an indifferently chosen returned exile, but he who had been dean of Westminster before Feckenham was abbot, whom Feckenham had displaced; not any other pulpit ascended he than that from which a little time ago had sounded from the lips of Bishop White of Winchester the funeral oration of Mary; and both White and Feckenham were compelled to abide the eloquence of Dr. Cox. The conqueror of Frankfort and of Knox was equal to himself. For an hour and a half he held the audience spellbound, denouncing the iniquities of monks and the persecution in which so many innocent persons had been burnt under pretence of heresy; praising the queen and exhorting her no longer to tolerate the past iniquities, but to put down images and monasteries. At the end of this sermon the queen proceeded to the House of Lords, and the business of the session was begun by the new Lord Chancellor Bacon in an elaborate oration, dealing with three great matters, the reformation of religion, the mitigation of the penal laws, the supplies. He exhorted to uniformity, spoke in a masterly manner of the imperfection and abuse of laws, and lamented the necessities of the sovereign whose graces he was insufficient to extol. To the measures to be taken for such a settlement he seemed to predict opposition when he deprecated contumelious words, as heretic, schismatic, papist, which he termed the nurses of seditious factions and sects. He seemed to indicate the sort of opposition to be feared when he exhorted them in that assembly to avoid "all sophistical, captious, and frivolous arguments and quiddities, meeter for ostentation of wit than consultation of weighty matters, comelier for scholars than counsellors, more beseeming for schools than for Parliament houses." The Parliament which was opened with this preamble recovered tenths and firstfruits to the crown, declared the royal supremacy in a new statute, expelled the pope once more from England, was illustrated by the arguments of prelates, and was suspended to listen to a theological debate in Westminster Abbey. It was accompanied by a remarkable convocation; it was dissolved in May.

§ 2. Early Acts of Parliament

No Tudor House of Commons but was packed; this was an assembly of nominees of the crown. The first thing that it did was to restore firstfruits and tenths, and the patronage of all impropriate livings to the crown, and to erect again the courts of

firstfruits and augmentations, undoing the righteous work of Mary in a very hypocritical strain. They preluded that they "conceived at the bottom of their hearts great sorrow and heaviness when they called to remembrance the huge, innumerable, and inestimable charges of the royal estate and imperial crown of this realm"; that her Majesty's dearest sister the late queen had restored goods to the Church "upon certain zealous and inconvenient respects, not sufficiently nor politically enough weighing the matter." All the bishops present and an abbot, Feckenham, were dissentient from this act: the puisne Bishop of Carlisle, and in ascending order the Bishops of Chester, Exeter, Coventry, Llandaff, Worcester, London, and York; all lay lords were for it. Another act supplemented or developed it, enabling the queen, whose necessities were again deplored, to take in possession on every avoidance as much of the lands of the see as the yearly value of her tenths and impropriate parsonages within the see came to. This measure is reckoned a great starting-point in ecclesiastical property. It went through the Commons with difficulty late in the session. The next necessity was the recognition of the queen's title, a declaration that she was the heir to the crown, lawfully descended from the blood royal. In this neither was the validity of Anne Boleyn's marriage affirmed, nor the former act against the legitimacy of Anne Boleyn's daughter repealed; dignity was consulted by neither reflecting implicitly in such a manner on the memory of the father nor on the birth of the sister of the queen; the assembly was spared the pain of censuring the work of predecessors, and the adhesion of the bishops. was secured. Another act made it treason to depose the queen; another extended to freedom of speech against her the same penalties of pillory, loss of ears, loss of hand, which had been ordained for the protection of Philip and Mary.

83. The Passing of the Monks

Another, a private act of Elizabeth's first Parliament, annexed again to the crown the religious houses refounded so laboriously by Mary, the inhabitants began to disperse, and the final dissolution of the monasteries occupied the summer. Pensions awaited those who would renounce their profession and accept the oath against foreign jurisdiction; but some departed, some passed the seas, before the application of the statute. The Spanish ambassador, De Feria, who quitted the country in May, in his final interview

with the queen pathetically requested as a parting gift a passport to carry them all with him to Flanders; but, instead of a train of monks, nuns, and friars, he bore away a beautiful English bride, and after his departure the queen's concession was limited to those religious persons who had been living in the time of the great suppression of monasteries, of whom but few were left. The greater part of the rest remained in the kingdom. The Black Monks of Westminster were said to have "changed their coats," the most of them, by the end of May. Their abbot, Feckenham, a man of wealth and benevolence, passed into private life, spreading benefits wherever he dwelt. The Friars Observant of Greenwich were discharged in June; in July the Black Friars of Smithfield, the nuns of Sion, and the monks of the Charterhouse. So passed away the last survivors of the religious life in England.

84. The Establishment of Royal Supremacy

The great religious enactments of this Parliament, the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity, vast and permanent, the base of the whole ecclesiastical legislation of the reign, took their beginning in the House of Commons. The House prepared itself by religious exercises. On Ash Wednesday, February 8, they adjourned to hear a sermon which was preached before the court by the favorite orator, Dr. Cox. On the following Saturday the English Litany was said by the clerk of the House kneeling, and answered by the whole House on their knees with divers prayers. The next time that they met, Monday, February 13, they had the second reading of the first draft of a bill "for annexing the supremacy to the crown." A great debate ensued, and the bill was dashed; a new bill was drawn, and after many arguments passed the House, February 25. This was the act which stands among statutes with the title of "An act to restore to the crown the ancient jurisdiction over the estate ecclesiastical and spiritual, and abolishing all foreign power repugnant to the same." It repealed the great statute of Philip and Mary which revived the papal jurisdiction, by which it is said that "the subjects were eftsoons brought under an usurped foreign power and authority, and did yet remain in that bondage." It repealed the reënacted statutes of heresy of the same reign. It revived ten great statutes of Henry the Eighth specifically, and on the other hand it confirmed the repeal of all the other laws of Henry which had been repealed by Philip and Mary. The effect of this confirmation of repeal

was to annul the title of supreme head, and at the same time to render necessary some new machinery to secure the royal supremacy in things ecclesiastical. Supreme head died irksomely. Not having been assumed by the queen in the writs for this Parliament, the first question that engaged the Commons when they met was whether through this omission the writs had been well issued and the Parliament were to be held. They decided it on the precedent of Mary's own Parliaments, which had been well summoned, though Mary latterly omitted the title; and they silently dismissed the tasteless denomination which had done so much to perplex history. They proceeded to abolish all usurped and foreign jurisdiction, to unite to the crown all jurisdiction visitatorial or corrective that had been or might lawfully be exercised by any spiritual power or authority, and to authorize the queen. to exercise by commissioners, whom she might assign, the power thus recognized. The commissioners, who might be appointed, were to adjudge no matters to be heresy but upon the authority of the canonical Scriptures, of the first four general councils, of any other general council acting on the plain words of the canonical Scriptures, or such matter as should thereafter be determined to be heresy by the high court of Parliament with the assent of the clergy in convocation. Such was the origin of the celebrated court of high commission. This statute was penal; it made maintenance of foreign authority treason for the third offence. It contained a form of oath in which the queen was acknowledged, more properly than supreme head, supreme governor of the realm as well in all spiritual or ecclesiastical things or causes as in temporal. This oath, which was presently to play an important part in history, simply denied the jurisdiction of any foreign power or person, without mention of the Bishop of Rome. It may be added that the act ended with a provision for a pending appeal to Rome "from a pretenced sentence given in consistory in Paul's" by Pole's judges delegate by legatine authority - a matrimonial cause, which was characteristically settled thus: If Rome gave answer within threescore days, Rome's answer should be allowed to supersede Pole's sentence and stand good; but if Rome gave no answer within threescore days, Richard and Agnes might transfer their appeal against Pole's sentence to the court of the archbishop within the realm.