my power shall assist and defend all Jurisdictions, Privileges, Preheminences and Authorities, granted or belonging to the Queens Highness, her Heirs and Successors, or united and annexed to the Imperial Crown of this Realm, So help me God, and by the contents of this Book." 5

Persons refusing to take the oath are to lose their offices, whether ecclesiastical or civil. In future the taking of the oath is to be a necessary qualification for holding any office under the Crown, whether ecclesiastical or civil, and for all university degrees.

To maintain, by preaching, writing, or in any other way, the Papal supremacy is made a crime: the first offence is to be punished by forfeiture of all goods and chattels, or, if these are not worth £20, by a year's imprisonment; the second offence is to render the offenders liable to the "dangers, penalties, and forfeitures" of the Statute of Provision and Præmunire; the third offence is to be "deemed and adjudged High Treason ; and the offender being "lawfully convicted and attainted, according to the Laws of this Realm," is to suffer pains of death, and other penalties, forfeitures, and losses, as in case of High Treason by the Laws of this Realm." 7

66

The Bill was delayed for a few weeks, while the Queen was endeavouring to secure the aid of Philip in her troubles with France. It reappeared as soon as the Peace of Cambray was signed and, though resolutely opposed by all the bishops, became law.

8

II

The Act of Uniformity, like the earlier Acts of Edward VI. (1549 and 1552) and the later Act of Charles II. (1662), did not merely provide that public worship in cathedrals and parish churches should be conducted according to the forms provided in the Book of Common Prayer, which was a schedule to the Act; it made any other form of worship penal. For a Catholic priest to celebrate mass was a crime for a Catholic layman to be present at the celebration of mass was a crime. For an Anabaptist "minister to baptize an adult by immersion was

5

I Eliz. cap. 1, §§ 16, 17, 19.

7 Ibid., §§ 27-30.

• Ibid., §§ 19, 20-25.

1 Eliz. cap. 2; and see Gibson, Codex, 267–272.

a crime; to submit to such baptism was a crime. For a Presbyterian minister to baptize a child, administer the Lord's Supper, or conduct public worship after the custom of the Church at Geneva was a crime; and it was a crime to be present at any of these illegal services."

The same political authorities that tried to compel all persons over six years of age, with some exceptions, to wear woollen caps instead of felt hats; that made it a penal offence for ordinary Englishmen to use foreign drugs and costly spices at their christenings and weddings, or to wear the fine clothes allowed to dukes, earls, landed gentlemen, and other persons of great estate-this same political authority ventured on a still more daring and surprising interference with the freedom of the English people. When they met to confess their sins to Almighty God and to implore His mercy, the only words they were allowed to use were the words provided for them by the Queen and the Parliament. The Queen and the Parliament also determined what prayers and thanksgivings they should offer when they baptized their children and met at the table of the Lord. It was not enough that the Queen's clergy when celebrating worship in the Queen's churches should use the Queen's prayers; no other prayers could be legally offered by any congregation of Englishmen.

Nor was this all. The Act of Uniformity required that every Englishman should be present every Sunday at the religious services which the Queen and Parliament had set up. The following was one of the clauses of this memorable Act:

"From and after the said Feast of the Nativity of Saint John Baptist next coming, all and every person and persons inhabiting within this Realm, or any other the Queens Majesty's Dominions, shall diligently and faithfully, having no lawful or reasonable excuse to be absent, endeavour themselves to resort to their Parish Church or Chapel accustomed, or upon reasonable let thereof, to some usual place where Common Prayer, and such Service of God shall be used in such time of let, upon every Sunday, and other Days ordained and used to be kept as Holy-days, and then and

9 1 Eliz. cap. 2, § 4; and see the case of Dyer cited by Gibson, l.c., 269, note b. It was held, That the Indictment was good, not only against him who said mass, but also against those queux oyent et mainteine le dit Masse, implying, That to hear is to maintain.”

there to abide orderly and soberly, during the time of the Common Prayer, Preaching, or other Service of God there to be used and ministered."

"10

The penalty for absence from church was ecclesiastical censure and a fine of twelve pence for every offence; and the fine of twelve pence in Elizabeth's time was equal to a fine of twelve shillings in our own. As the religious services were instituted by the Queen and Parliament, and attendance at church was an ordinary legal obligation like the payment of rates and taxes, the execution of the law was entrusted not merely to the ecclesiastical courts; judges of assize, and in some cases mayors and other magistrates, as well as bishops, were empowered to inflict the penalties of the Act.11

III

The history of the process by which the English Church, which had been Roman Catholic under Mary, assumed its present form under Elizabeth illustrates the real nature of the existing ecclesiastical establishment. It was not the Church, as represented either by the bishops or by Convocation, that effected this great and memorable revolution. It was caused by the State-by the Queen and Parliamentin the teeth of the bishops and in the teeth of Convocation.

The accession of Elizabeth, and her selection of statesmen who were known to be favourable to Protestantism as her advisers, filled the clergy with alarm. At the meeting of Convocation, the Lower House drew up an address to the bishops, declaring the faith of the clergy on the principal points of controversy between the Protestant Churches and Rome, and requested that it might be laid by the bishops before the Lords in Parliament. They affirmed :—

"(1) That in the sacrament of the altar, by virtue of the words of Christ, duly spoken by the priest, is present realiter, under the kinds of bread and wine, the natural body of Christ, conceived of the Virgin Mary, and also his natural blood.

"(2) That after the consecration there remains not the substance of bread and wine, nor any other substance but the substance of God and man.

10

I Eliz. cap. 2, § 14.

11 Ibid., §§ 17, 22.

(3) That in the mass is offered the true body of Christ, and his true blood, a propitiatory sacrifice for the living and dead.

"(4) That to Peter the apostle, and his lawful successors in the apostolic see, as Christ's vicars, is given the supreme power of feeding and ruling the church of Christ militant, and confirming their brethren.

"(5) That the authority of handling and defining concerning the things belonging to faith, sacraments, and discipline ecclesiastical, hath hitherto ever belonged, and ought to belong, only to the pastor of the church, whom the Holy Ghost for this purpose hath set in the church, and not to laymen.'

12

The address was presented by Bonner, Bishop of London, to the lord keeper Bacon.13 But the lords were not disposed to allow to the clergy the power they claimed under the fourth article, and proceeded to arrange in their own way the creed, the worship, and the polity of the national establishment. The bishops were as powerless as their clergy to arrest the action of the Queen and Parliament. According to the Catholic theory, a theory which has lately been revived in the English Church, the bishops are the divinely ordained guardians of "the faith which was once for all delivered unto the saints," the successors of the apostles, invested with august and awful powers as the rulers of the Church. If there is any fragment of truth in this theory, it was for them to determine whether the Pope had any authority over the English Church and was the true head of Christendom. There were nine bishops in the House of Lords when the Supremacy Bill was read a third time, and they all voted against the Bill which excluded the authority of the Pope and vested in the Crown what was described as "its ancient jurisdiction over the state ecclesiastical and spiritual," and abolished "all foreign powers repugnant to the same." No bishop voted in its favour. No bishop was even neutral.14

12 Strype, Annals, 1 (1), 81, and Fuller, iv. 272–273.

13 Bacon had now succeeded Heath, the Archbishop of York. Strype, ibid., 78.

14 Collier gives the following list of lords spiritual summoned to Elizabeth's first Parliament: "Heath, Archbishop of York; Bonner, Bishop of London; White, of Winchester; Pate, of Worcester; Kitchen, of Llandaff; Bayne, of Coventry and Lichfield; Turberville, of Exeter; Scot, of Chester; Oglethorpe, of Carlisle; and Fecknam, lord abbot of Westminster. The bishops of Durham, Peterborough, Ely (now ambassador), Bath and Wells, and St. David's, sent their proxies the other sees were vacant by death (vi. 223).

The Abbot of Westminster voted with the bishops against the

It was the same when the Uniformity Bill was read a third time. Seven eminent divines and a layman, a doctor of civil law, had been appointed to revise the Second PrayerBook of Edward VI. their authority to revise it came, not from the Church, but from the Crown. They were selected by the Queen and her advisers. Their powers were of the same kind as the powers of any ordinary royal commission. The revised Prayer-Book was the schedule of the Uniformity Bill. It regulated the ordinary worship of the Church; it provided forms for the administration of baptism, for the celebration of the Lord's Supper, for the burial of the dead, and for other religious observances. The result of their labours was so unacceptable to the bishops that all the bishops in the House of Lords voted against the Bill by which the Prayer-Book was imposed upon the English nation. The question at issue was critical. Fecknam, in his speech on the Bill, said that-" two different religions being the subject of their inquiry, he looked upon it as a point of the last importance to resolve on the right side of the question." The Bishop of Chester spoke with great dignity and earnestness. He said :

"The business of this bill is to bring on a change of religion, or more properly a total suppression of what was anciently professed. . . . I have no intention to say anything to lessen the authority of Parliament. I own the acts of this honourable court are not to be contested, when passed upon matters within your jurisdiction. But as to religion, I humbly conceive that is a subject altogether foreign to the business of Parliament. For faith, as I have observed before, ought to have a firm basis, to be unalterable as the laws of the Medes and Persians, and not stand liable to amendments and repeals, and all other casualties of the statute-book. . . . (As to) the importance of the matter nothing can be greater. It is no temporal interest, no money business, no branch of property; no, it is of much higher consideration. The fate of eternity, life and death, heaven and hell, are concerned in it."

He proceeded to criticise severely the new order for the celebration of the Holy Communion; maintained that it Supremacy Bill. He appears to have been absent on the third reading of the Act of Uniformity. If the proxies were used, they were used on the same side. The ecclesiastical vote was solid against the ecclesiastical change.

15 See an extended report of his speech in Collier, vi. 234-8.