PREFACE THE place of the Marprelate Tracts in the development of ecclesiastical affairs in England must justify the following endeavour to explain their origin and character. The years which come under our observation, the first thirty in the reign of Elizabeth, are vital years in the story of progress, both civil and religious, in our country. The ferment of the intellectual upheaval of the fifteenth century showed itself in England first, as a religious force; then, by necessary consequence, the civil movement followed. But progress, whether in Church or in State, came to a standstill under the reign of Mary. Intellectually this period counts for nothing. Its significance is moral. The reaction following the cruelties of the reign became the dynamic of the reforming creed, and the arrested currents of national progress travelled at an accelerated pace when released at the accession of Elizabeth. There was never a moment's illusion on the part of the Papal Church on the one hand, or of the Church which replaced it under the direction of Elizabeth on the other, that a break had been made in the continuity of the religious story of the country. What the Vatican thought of the proceeding may be seen in the Bull of Pius V. and in the humiliating act of contrition by which the Roman Church still receives the Protestant wanderer back to its fold. What the Elizabethan Protestants thought of the Church they had left may be seen for that matter clearly enough in their Book of Common Prayer. But the literature of the period leaves no ambiguity in the mind of any reader. There was not a bishop nor superior ecclesiastic in the reformed church to whom the Pope was not in very truth the Antichrist. The question of compromise with Rome was in no man's mind. Rome offered no compromise; the English prelates of the period neither desired compromise nor conceived it to be possible. The activity of Rome was political; its culmination was the expedition of the Spanish Armada. On the side of the Reformation the question was, How far shall evangelical progress go? The fierce controversies of the time turn on that point. Elizabeth, caring little for the purely theological issues, desired to retain the external pomp of the Papal Church as befitting the dignity of a sovereign; the men who clambered into high office in the Church wished for the reformed creed, a simplified worship, but retaining all the emoluments and administrative authority of the displaced Roman prelates. The evangelical reformers, however, would have cleared the Prayer Book of all ritual reminiscences of Rome; would have banished the official vestments of ministers; and have purified the Church of all merely nominal members-baptized parishioners who showed no outward sign that they were obedient to any religious faith and discipline. Prelacy they would have utterly destroyed, and all parties among them would have given a varying measure of self-government to each distinct local community. Such was the position. Controversy began early in the reign and gathered strength as Elizabeth felt free from the obsession of the Catholic powers, and as the reforming prelates were corrupted by the privileges of their offices. The culmination of the repressive acts of the episcopacy and of the energy of the reforming apologetic is represented by the Marprelate Tracts. How far they have been misunder stood, and underestimated because misunderstood, I have partly set forth in the following pages. But I might have gone much farther than I have and shown how historians of repute have perpetrated howlers' in writing of these well-known and yet unknown pamphlets. I have been hoping to publish an edition of the Tracts themselves, with necessary historical elucidations, in the preparation of which I have spent the leisure of some years, and now cherish a faint hope that the publication of this Introduction may promote a demand for such an edition. The Tracts are of value as literature, but to the student of ecclesiastical history they are essential. They show by what fortuitous circumstances religious liberty was gradually achieved; and civil liberty is the necessity of religious liberty, which cannot otherwise realise itself. In my work I have had to rely upon the kindness of the custodians of our great public libraries, and in this I have never been disappointed. My studies have been carried on chiefly at our great national library in the British Museum; but I am also under great obligations to the learned librarians at the Lambeth Palace Library, Dr. Williams's Library, Gordon Square, the Cambridge University Library, and the John Rylands Library, Manchester. My first adventures in the present field of history were greatly facilitated by the kindness of Mr. Edward M. Borrajo, the chief librarian at the Guildhall, an authority on all that pertains to the city of London, and throughout my researches I have had the help of the Rev. T. G. Crippen of the Congregational Library, Memorial Hall, London. I have to thank the Archbishop of Canterbury for permission granted, through his Grace's librarian, Mr. S. W. Kershaw, M.A., F.S.A., to photograph the title-pages of two of the Tracts; the Lady Knightley of Fawsley for her favour in allowing me to insert the portrait of Sir Richard Knightley, the friend of the evangelical reformers in Elizabeth's days, and the Right Hon. Lord Calthorpe, D.L., for generously allowing me to consult a volume of the Yelverton MSS. The references which accompany the following pages are to the original editions except where otherwise stated. The edition of John Foxe's Acts and Monuments quoted is that edited by Stoughton and Pratt; and I have used Neale's History of the Puritans in the edition of 1822, in five volumes 8vo. The titles of the Marprelate Tracts, for the convenience of readers unfamiliar with them, are printed throughout in capitals. My indebtedness to previous writers I have desired in every instance to acknowledge, and if in any case I have failed to do this, I express here my unfeigned regret. W. P. |