withheld from the faithful the blessings which Christ confers in the sacrament when properly administered; that according to the form in the Prayer-Book there was no true consecration of the bread and wine, and therefore no Real Presence of Christ in the sacramental elements. He also pointed out that there was no provision for "the offering" of the body and blood of Christ to the Father. He protested against the competency of Parliament to pronounce on the questions in debate :—

"The body of the Parliament consists mostly of the temporal nobility, and the commons, which though persons of great judgment and learning in civil matters, yet divinity is none of their profession. The exposition of the Scriptures, the reading of the ancients, has been none of their employment. These things considered, they cannot be supposed to be rightly qualified to pronounce upon the doctrines and practice of the Church. Neither, indeed, do these things belong to their function or lie within their character." 16

This was manly and courageous speaking. On his own theory of the episcopal office-the theory which had been accepted by Christendom for a thousand years, the theory which underlies the whole system of Anglo-Catholicism-he was wholly in the right. He and his brethren on the bench were entrusted with the defence of the faith and the government of the Church, and the action of Parliament was a sacrilegious invasion of their functions. But the theory of Elizabeth and her advisers was wholly different. They assumed that the political rulers of the English nation had the authority to regulate the religious faith and practices of the English people.

IV

All the bishops except Llandaff refused to take the Oath of Supremacy, and were deprived. Thirteen deans, fourteen archdeacons, fifteen heads of colleges, fifty prebendaries, eighty rectors of Churches, six abbots, priors, and abbesses were also deprived-in all 192.17 According to another account, the number of the deprived clergy was about 243.

16 Collier, vi. 238-248.

17 MS. in the Cotton Library, quoted by Strype, Annals, i. (1), 106.

Several explanations may be given of the small number of the clergy that were removed from their livings.

(1) It is probable that the Oath of Supremacy was, for some time, pressed only on the higher ecclesiastical dignitaries : the inferior clergy were let alone.

(2) It seems certain that for some time after the Act of Uniformity was passed, it was very generally disregarded. In some of the remoter parts of the kingdom, especially in Lancashire, the clergy continued to celebrate the mass, and were not disturbed.

(3) The religious changes through which the nation had passed during the previous thirty years had been so great and so rapid that large numbers of the clergy who clung to the old faith were willing to read the new service, hoping that before long the ancient rites would be restored. The Queen's Prayer-Book might be defective-according to the Bishop of Chester it was fatally defective in the form it prescribed for the most sacred and awful of the Christian sacraments-but it contained little or nothing that was positively offensive to the conscience of a devout Romanist. It was also possible so to celebrate the new ritual as to make it hardly distinguishable from the old, except that it was in English instead of Latin. Till 1570, when the Pope issued a bull excommunicating the Queen and releasing her subjects from their allegiance, there was hope of reconciliation between England and Rome. Till then, it is probable that most of the Romish laity attended the English services, and that large numbers of priests, who at heart were loyal to the Pope, persuaded themselves that they might use the PrayerBook without separating themselves from the Catholic Church.

(4) It was not till 1571 that the Queen permitted Parliament to enforce subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles, in which some of the most conspicuous Romish doctrines are explicitly condemned. This was immediately after the Pope excommunicated her.

For nearly thirteen years after her accession, the Romish priests who remained in the Church had only to read the English service; now they were required to renounce the Romish creed. The Act of 1571 enacts, not only that the articles shall be subscribed in future by all clergymen

on admission to a benefice, but that they shall be subscribed by

every person under the degree of a bishop, which doth or shall pretend to be a priest or minister of God's holy Word and Sacraments, by reason of any other form of institution, consecration, or ordering, than the form set forth by Parliament in the time of the late King of most worthy memory, King Edward the Sixth, or now used in the reign of our most gracious Sovereign Lady." 18

This enforced subscription on the Puritans, some of whom had received only a Presbyterian ordination; but the Act was passed in a Parliament which was vehemently in favour of Puritanism. Presbyterian ordination was implicitly recognised as valid, and the subscription which the Act required was only to those articles" which concern the Christian faith and the doctrine of the Sacraments." 19 In these articles, which are strongly Protestant, the Puritans found nothing to trouble them; they were exempted from subscribing those articles which concern the polity of the Church to which they objected.

But to the Romish clergy who had been ordained by Romish bishops, and according to the Roman form, the Act was a severe blow. It recognised their ordination as valid, and of this the Puritans complained; but in requiring them to subscribe the doctrinal articles, it compelled them to abjure some of the principal points of the Romish creed. A considerable number of the clergy were deprived. The Pope's excommunication of the Queen, and this Act, compelled them to choose between the new faith and the old. Till now the choice might have been evaded.

This new policy was forced upon the Queen by grave perils. Towards the end of 1569 the Catholic north had broken out into revolt. In 1570 the Pope had excommunicated her, released her Catholic subjects from their allegiance, dissolved the obligation of their oaths, and pronounced them excommunicated if they continued to recognise the Queen's authority. To the Earls of Northumberland and Westmorland-the leaders of the recent rebellion-he addressed a

18

i3 Eliz. cap. I2, § I. An Act for the Ministers of the Church

to be of sound Religion. It is to be found in G. W. Prothero's Select Statutes, 64-65.

19 Ibid., § I.

letter, honouring their piety, giving them his blessing, and promising, not only to move the princes of Catholic Christendom on their behalf, but to send them at once all the money he could command, and to assist them in their holy purpose to the utmost of his power. Soon after Parliament met in 1571, a great plot was detected for liberating the Queen of Scots from confinement and placing her on the English throne. In this plot the Pope, Philip of Spain, the Duke of Alva, and the Duke of Norfolk were implicated.

It was necessary, not only to strike hard at the Queen's enemies, but to do something for the Queen's friends. Bills were passed making it high treason to introduce Papal bulls into England; high treason for any man claiming to be a priest to receive an English subject into the Romish Church ; high treason for English subjects to be so received; and high treason to call the Queen a heretic, a schismatic, a tyrant, an infidel, or a usurper of the crown, even if these treasonable words were followed by no treasonable act.20 The Queen's friends, the Puritans, received satisfaction from the measure which compelled the clergy to subscribe to Protestant articles of faith. She was reluctant to make this concession to themit was a violation of the central principle of her ecclesiastical policy; but her necessities compelled her to yield.

V

Elizabeth is one of the few English sovereigns who have acquired a lasting ascendency over the imagination of the English people. She has become a national legend. She has won a place in the heart of the English nation which removes her beyond the reach of historical criticism. We may condemn the hastiness and cruelty with which she persecuted the Puritans and the Separatists on the one hand and the Roman Catholics on the other; we may think bitterly and speak bitterly of the vacillation and treachery with which she acted towards foreign Protestants; vanity, meanness, lying, a hard, merciless temper in working out her purposesall these vices may be proved against her, and yet the spell of her name is unbroken. That she was great notwithstanding 13 Eliz. capp. I, 2.

20

these vices, is perhaps the last proof of the solid quality of her greatness. To discover the secret of her power is not easy. But she had robust courage; she cared for the greatness of England; she had a lofty pride in the English Crown. Above all, she never doubted the firmness of her hold on the affection and loyalty of the English people; she took it for granted and relied on it, just as we rely on the law of gravitation. She could therefore make concessions to her subjects in a style which transformed her very concessions into fresh proofs and guarantees of her authority. Whatever we mean when we speak of the royal spirit-this she had. And so, good statesmen did her bidding; and though she often brought trouble and dishonour both on herself and them by following her own wayward and wilful impulses rather than their counsel, by trusting her own craft rather than their capacity, this never destroyed, it never lessened, their devotion to her; and they continued to the end to regard it as the proudest of earthly distinctions to be her servants. Gallant sailors, heroes of romance, fought for her glory and made the English name terrible in distant seas. It was her extraordinary felicity that during her reign English genius revealed a sudden and unexpected splendour. Spenser, Shakespeare, and Hooker have contributed to her renown.

But what has done most of all to enthrone her in the imagination of the English race is the impression that she was the great Protestant queen whose accession extinguished the fires of Smithfield and liberated the country from the tyranny of priests and popes, and whose long reign secured the triumph of Protestantism in England and prevented the destruction of Protestantism in Europe.

The popular impression is substantially true. To an Evangelical Nonconformist, a descendant of the Puritans, the policy of Elizabeth may seem monstrous; and it was unquestionably her own policy. It was she who was responsible for arresting the progress of the English Reformation, and who threw back the English Church to a point short of that which it had reached under Edward VI.21 She hectored her bishops

21 In revising the Liturgy of King Edward VI., the rubric was struck out which declared that by kneeling at the sacrament no adoration was intended to any corporal presence of Christ in the elements. In the Litany, the petition "From the tyranny of the Bishop of