CHAPTER VIII.

THE NAVY.

The Navy a Permanent Institution.-Penal Code.-Marines.-Military Wills.— Privileges in case of Debt.-Impressment.-No Purchase.-Precedence.

THE Navy has always been popular in England, and has not, as in the case of the army, ever had to contend with the national distrust. Since the last century* it has become a permanent institution, and is not merely allowed on sufferance, and renewed from year to year. Since the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, the Navy has possessed a fixed penal code, wherein the respective offences are fully detailed, the limitation and determination whereof is not left to the crown.† Since 22 and 23 Vict. c. 123, a new penal code for the Navy is in force. The marines are under the same code while on board; on land, however, they are subject to the "Mutiny Act" annually passed. Corporal punishment may, however, on an order of the captain, and without any further proceeding, be carried out as a means of enforcing discipline.‡ Sailors enjoy the privilege of making wills with fewer formalities. No seaman can be arrested on board his ship for debts under £20. In all other respects, however, the crews are completely subject to the civil law.

Whether impressment, the practical consequence of the general liability to serve at sea, was ever legal has been greatly contested. No statute ever introduced it; the statute 2 Rich. II. c. 4, merely speaks of it as a custom and the undoubted prerogative of the crown. Impressment of sailors has not been abolished, but since 5 and 6 Will. IV. c. 24, has been practically laid aside by voluntary service.

The purchase system does not obtain in the Navy, "seniority," as a rule, determines the promotion. The following is the order of precedence in the Navy :-admiral, vice-admiral, rear-admiral, captain, commodore, lieutenant. In 1862, 76,000sailors, marines, and coast-guards were voted by Parliament.

* 22 Geo. II., c. 23; 19 Geo. III. c. 17; and 10 and 11 Vict. c. 59.

+ Bl. i., 420.
Bowyer, 503.

BOOK IV.

The State Church.

CHAPTER I.

THE POLITICAL POSITION OF THE STATE CHURCH AND ITS CLERGY.

Character of the English Reformation.-Premunire.-Internal Reformation.-Henry VIII. Supported by the Gentry.-The Catholic Element in the English Church. -Thirty-nine Articles.-Comparison of the English with the "Catholic" Church. -Divorce.-Canning and the Pope.-The Sovereign's supremacy.-The “Catholic" Church Unrecognised.-" Titles" Bill.-Ecclesiastical Power of Parliament. -Political Character of the English Church.-Parties in the Church.-Puseyites. -Cardinal Wiseman Respecting the Same.-Unpopularity of the Church.Exclusiveness of the Clergy.

THE English State Church regards itself as the rightful successor of the Roman Catholic Church.* Like the Roman Church she is exclusive, and, considering herself a church "Catholic," is unable, as a matter of course, to recognize any other religious community in juxtaposition as a Church.† The English Reformation should be mainly regarded as a sundering of the English provinces of the Church from the great Mother-Church in Rome. The haughty sentiment of the Englishman, fancying for himself, as far as may be, a national God of his own, a Deity providing for the affairs of other nations by the way merely, was loth to endure that a foreign prince beyond the realm should, in concerns spiritual, exercise any jurisdiction whatever, a jurisdiction based, furthermore, upon foreign law. Singularly unacquainted with English history must he be who is not aware that the struggle for liberties, civil and political as well as religious, has been most closely connected with resistance to the influence of the Papacy. With this intent it was enacted by the statute 27 Edw. III., that the punishment of such as appealed to the Papal court should be imprisonment during the king's pleasure; and a forfeiture of lands,

In an act of 1838, regulating the canons of the Episcopal Church in Scotland, she is styled "The Episcopal Church in Scotland, as a branch of the Holy and Apostolic Church of Christ."

+ Canon 3 of 1603, "Whoever shall

hereafter affirm, that the Church of England by law established is not a true Apostolic Church teaching and maintaining the doctrine of the Apostles; let him be excommunicated ipso facto."

Parl. Rem. v. 88."

goods, and chattels was incurred by such as did not appear before the king and his council, or in his chancery, or before the justices of either bench, to answer in their proper persons for the contempt done in that behalf.* In the like spirit the celebrated statute of "pramunire" was passed in the reign of Richard II. to punish those who should appeal to Rome. Bulls in contravention of statutes might not be brought into the kingdom; in the year 1427, the Pope's collector was obliged by the privy council to find bail for having delivered such bulls.† In like manner the king's council promised, in 1428, to protect the Archbishop of Canterbury, who had been misrepresented at Rome, against all the decrees of the Holy Father. It was hence but a sequence of the range of English history that Henry VIII. abolished the right of appeal to Rome, and, inasmuch as he submitted the ecclesiastical courts to the sway of the sovereign, he simply secularised them. By the assumption of supreme judicial power, and by the control which the king arrogated over the jurisdiction of the bishops and archbishops he became, in fact, and in view of the law, the chief head of the Church

The Reformation in England partook of none of the characteristics that marked that of Germany, which was a thing of national growth developed by an inner religious impulse; this internal reformation first began in England under Elizabeth and the Stuarts, by an energizing of the puritanic elements.

in England.

Violently as Henry VIII. carried out the Reformation, they who pretend that it was developed out of the sullen humour of a despot are completely at fault. Henry VIII.'s material power was too narrowed for such an issue; the avarice of the gentry who despoiled the rich monasteries contributed substantially thereto, by upholding the king in his first grand usurpation. The clergy would also appear to have offered but feeble resistance. The breach with Rome, as has been intimated, was one to which the course of events had for centuries been tending.

All the English sovereigns, whilst severing from the Roman Church, strove, on the other hand, to maintain as much as possible the internal organization of the Catholic Church as an instrument of their authority. Henry VIII. proscribed, it is true, the up

*Palgrave, The King's Council, 39.

+ Proceedings and Ordinances, iii. 268.

Ibid. iii. 301.