incur a premunire. But election even under these restraints has proved to be of value. For, first, it is a relic and symbol of the popular as well as clerical powers embodied in the ancient constitution of the Church with regard to episcopal elections.24 And, secondly, experience has shown that in England, during times of laxity, the prerogative of the Crown has been exercised with greater moderation and discernment than in the sister kingdom of Ireland, where the bishops were appointed by letters patent.

It is scarcely necessary to add that, after the accession of Elizabeth, no more was heard of the issue of the commissions subsisting during pleasure, under which the bishops had been content to act during the later years of Henry the Eighth and the reign of his son Edward. There was, however, much negative action, embraced by the policy of Elizabeth, which was not less important than the positive.

In the reign of Henry the Eighth there had grown up an apprehension sufficiently reasonable lest some of the canons, 'provincial or synodal' (so they were described), might clash with the statutes of the realm, and might be much prejudiced to the King's prerogative royal' and onerous both to him and to his subjects.25 Accordingly, the clergy had petitioned for the appointment of thirty-two persons -one half to be of their own body, and the other moiety members of one or the other House of Parliament--to examine the said canons, and to present for the King's assent such of them as should be deemed meet to stand. An Act was passed accordingly; but with a strict proviso that none of the approved canons should be contrariant to prerogative, custom, or statute. This law was confirmed by subsequent Acts in 1535 and 1542-3. The appointments were made, and the work was ready, so that when the King died letters patent had been prepared for giving it effect. Another Act was passed in 1549 for the prosecution of the enterprise.

There is some confusion in the account of the proceedings at this stage, and there are differences of opinion among the authorities. What appears probable is that a commission of thirty-two was reconstituted under the Act of Edward for purposes of form, but that the work was delegated in the first place to eight among them, under the name of a preliminary work of preparation; and then that, as Dr. Cardwell states, there was a further delegation to twonamely, Archbishop Cranmer and, proh pudor, Peter Martyr.26 By these two the work was remodelled or corrected. England must indeed have been poor when such a share in such a work was accorded to a foreign divine.

For it must be observed that, like most other projects of the period, this particular project had now completely changed its face. It was

24 Phillimore, Eccl. Law, i. 38.

25 25 Hen. VIII. c. xix. sec. 1.

26 See Cardwell's Reformatio Leg. Eccles., pp. viii., xxv., xxvi., 325 (Oxford, 1850); Stephen's Eccles. Statutes, I.

now no longer the reasonable plan for reforming our synodal and provincial canons, and placing them under due restraint of law. We cannot be altogether surprised to find that the original definition of the aim had been found too narrow; for, besides native canons, much foreign matter relating to the Church had by use hardened into British law, and required without doubt the application of the pruning hand. But much more was now intended than a corrective work. The title of the Edwardian Act 27 " was An Act that the King's majesty may nominate and appoint two and thirty persons to peruse and make Ecclesiastical Laws.' A material change of plan had been at least theoretically made in 1543, when the title and purpose of the Act were enlarged by the addition of the words 'and to establish all such laws ecclesiastical as shall be thought by the King and them convenient to be used in all Spiritual Courts.' When to these extensions of project was added the change of agents, as it stood in 1552, we see plainly that not only had the liberty of the subject been seriously imperilled by foregoing the sanction of Parliament, but the ground had been laid for cutting off this country from all community with Christendom in its laws of religion. It was no longer a plan for a correcting or amending statute, however extensive: the aim, as we find it in the Reformatio Legum, was to establish by a complete scheme, newly hatched, a new point of departure. This mode of action was utterly alien to the conservative spirit of British legislation. The ecclesiastical law of the country was, like its temporal law, a gradual growth. There was a common law of the Church, as well as a common law of the State. The new method of procedure seemed to cut away every bond of union with the past, and to establish a kind of legislation absolutely unknown to the national traditions. Accordingly the Preface, which has the merit of being written in admirable Latin, by Cheke or Haddon, decries the old laws in the mass, and describes the provisions of the work as absolutely new: quarum materia ab optimis undique legibus petita videtur; non solum ecclesiasticis, sed civilibus etiam, veterumque Romanarum præcipuâ antiquitate.

This spirit of novelty commended, naturally enough, the Reformatio Legum to the extreme party, which had become so powerful in the Convocation of Elizabeth that it nearly accomplished a fresh revolution in the Prayer Book. In 1562, an obscure statement of Bishop Gibson appears to intimate that the Convocation, or its Lower House, moved in favour of the scheme, but without any practical result. In 1571, the Bull of Pope Pius the Fifth against the Queen had brought about a crisis, and attempts were made, both in the House of Commons and in Convocation, to procure the adoption of the work. Gibson states that this movement was promoted by Archbishop Parker.28 It is, however, quite impossible that this statement can apply to the text of the volume as we have it now, and as in the main it left the hands 27 3 & 4 Ed. VI., c. xi. 28 Gibson's Codex, p. 952.

of Cranmer or of Martyr. For it was in this very Convocation that Parker procured the adoption, by the whole body of his comprovincial bishops, of a canon, by which preachers were enjoined to teach nothing to their people except what was agreeable to Scripture and had been collected therefrom by 'the Catholic Fathers and ancient bishops.' 29 Whereas the Reformatio virtually sweeps away the whole doctrine of the Church and the ministry, and expounds the sacraments in a manner wholly incompatible with the Prayer Book and the Articles, and recognises no interpretative office in the Church Universal. Hook says 30 that the measure failed through the joint opposition of the Archbishop and the Queen. Cardwell says,31 So little does the Queen appear either to have approved of the book or to have been in favour of the general measure, that no attempt apparently was made during her reign to revive the Act of 1549, and it seems probable, from the jealousy with which the Queen all along viewed the action of the reforming preachers, that she may have suggested as well as approved the remarkable canon of 1571 which was intended to guarantee their orthodoxy.

On the one hand, the Queen may have regarded this code as importing, by the precision of its terms, an abridgment of her ecclesiastical jurisdiction; on the other, there were strong reasons for desiring the enactment of a book of discipline which might raise the standard of practice in the Church. But we cannot suppose the Queen to have overlooked what is obviously the main point in the whole question, namely this: A new code, intended not to consolidate the existing law, but to uproot and replace it, meant a new Church. The Elizabethan policy was to maintain both the personal succession in the Church and the continuity of its law, subject to control from the civil power and to all necessary amendments. What she seems to have desired was, that the amending laws in the Church should hold the same place for the Church, as great reforming and reconstructing statutes for the State: they maintain the ancient constitution, while they alter and improve it.

I have dwelt at some length on what may be called the shelving of the Reformatio, because it was not an omission, but a renunciation, and because its extreme importance as a determining condition in the history of the actual Church of England has not, I think, been sufficiently exhibited by our historians in general.

Among the minor inconveniences of such a code, it may be remarked that it would have required, first, a new tradition of interpretation, and, secondly, continual amendment. When we reject wholesale the aid which the labour of preceding generations has provided, we expose our own work to the severest treatment from the generations that are to follow. The legislator, as such, is compelled by his 20 Hook's Parker, p. 362.

2 Wilkins, Concilii, iii. 267.

Cardwell, pref. p. xii.; Stephen's Ecclesiastical Statutes, i. 331 n.

VOL. XXIV.-No. 141.

3 G

office to judge on their behalf as to particular points. But if he chooses to judge for them on all points, that is his own fault and folly. Men so acting are apt to tumble into pitfalls. Thus, to take a minute instance, the Reformatio orders that where the Old Testament is found obscure it shall be cleared 32 from the Hebrew text; its compilers doubtless being unaware of the fact that the youngest Hebrew MS., from which the LXX worked, was by many centuries older than the oldest of those upon which the present Hebrew text is based; and perhaps also that the Septuagint is cited as freely as the Hebrew in the Books of the New Testament. Such objections, however, are only accessory to those which lie against the principle or initial conception of the scheme.

It still remains to examine the Elizabethan policy in its relation to the creed of the Church. And here again we have to notice both a negative and an affirmative side of this policy. Negatively, the Queen not only withstood all overtures for further change in the Prayer Book, but, during the first twelve years of her reign, she would not suffer the Thirty-nine Articles to be imposed by law even on the clergy. Evidently she regarded them as an instrument which had been required and justified by the circumstances of the time, but one which ought to be kept in hand in a ductile condition, and might be dealt with according as any change in those circumstances might thereafter require. But, when the Pope had launched his Bull of Deposition, she met it by falling back all the more frankly upon her people, and took a step acceptable to the reforming party by allowing the Articles to find a place upon the statute book.33 Even then the obligation was confined to persons under the degree of a bishop and to the Articles which concern the 'true Christian faith' and the sacraments.

But she had included in her proceedings as to the Articles perhaps the boldest of all her strokes of ecclesiastical policy, and had acted in excess of law with a far-sighted view to the recognition and consolidation of other law which rested on a deeper and more secure foundation.

The twentieth of the Articles of the Church of England begins in these words: The Church hath power to decree rites or ceremonies, and authority in controversies of faith.'

These words were not in the original draft of the Articles of 1562; and the reference in the statute is not to that original, but to a printed book and to its title, which is not yet perhaps fully identified. It was only as we approached the middle of the present century that Dr. Lamb, Master of Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, published his 'Historical Account of the Thirty-nine Articles' from 1553 to 1571,34 and for the first time placed beyond

32 Tit. I. c. 12.

33 13 Eliz. c. 12.

34 Cambridge; Deightons, 1829.

dispute the question how this most important clause first found its way into the body of the book.

Dr. Lamb observes 35 that the clause appears in the first printed copy of the Articles, which was issued under the Queen's authority in 1563. It was inserted there after the Articles had passed the Convocation, and before they could be published with authority. In order to have authority under the Act of Submission, they required the Great Seal to be attached to them, and thus came into the hands of the Queen. That she was personally the author of this clause becomes almost a certainty from circumstantial evidence. In the first place, she kept the book in her hands for a twelvemonth. In the second place, when it came forth, she appended to the book a statement that she had assented to it 'after diligent reading and scrutiny by herself:' quibus omnibus... per seipsam diligenter priùs lectis et examinatis, regium suum assensum præbuit.

Nor was this the only point in which the Queen laboured for the cause of religious reaction and reconstruction through the Articles. She obtained for the time the exclusion from the Book of the Twenty-ninth Article (on non-reception by the wicked), which of the whole number was perhaps the most markedly Protestant. Cecil, who may be regarded as practically one with the Queen in religious position and belief, as well as by general conformity of mind, laboured to bring Archbishop Parker to the excision of this Article. He failed; but the Article was struck out of the Book, and only reappeared in 1571 when, after the Deposing Bull of the Pope, the reforming party had become too strong for the Queen, and she was compelled partially to beat a retreat.

I have said partially, because, when she could no longer prevent the Parliament from intermeddling in the matter, she endeavoured by a side movement in some considerable degree to neutralise their action.

The Commons had passed in 1566 a Bill for Subscription; 36 but the Queen stopped its progress in the Lords. In 1571 the Parliament again met. It was on April 2; and on the 7th a similar Bill was introduced, together with other Bills into the House of Commons. Two of them the Bill for Subscription being one-appeared on May 3 in the House of Lords. This was in defiance of the Queen, who on May 1 37 had given them to understand that she 'liked very well of the Articles' and would publish them, but not to have the same dealt in by Parliament.' She gave her assent to the Bill on May 29. But in the meantime it had been adopted (in a form not identical with that of 1562 38) and subscribed in Convocation on the 11th, with an order for circula

35 Historical Account, p. 33. Hardwick in 1851 followed Lamb (1829). He examines the subject more at large (pp. 129-52). Various points still remain open to discussion. My attempt is to deal with any of them only so far as they regard the Queen. 38 Ibid. p. 28.

36 Dr. Lamb, p. 24.

$7 Ibid. p. 27.