tion in all the dioceses, and it was published with a royal Ratification,39 which makes no reference to the Act, and therefore, I make no doubt, preceded it. In this Book 40 the Twenty-ninth Article reappears, while the disputed clause in the Twentieth remains excluded. Assent to this was probably the price which Elizabeth had to pay for having the Articles settled, issued, and circulated (as Convocation had ordered) throughout the country without any notice of the action of the Lords and Commons. But prudence did not permit the Queen any longer to baulk her Parliament, and the Bill became an Act. There remains the question, What book or copy of the Articles was that which passed through the Houses? Plainly not that used by the Convocation; for they acted and signed while the House of Lords had in its custody the Book referred to by the Act. In the Book, as Dr. Lamb thinks it was passed by Parliament," the disputed clause does not appear; but neither does the Twenty-ninth Article. It appeared, however, in one or more editions published in that year.42 Until the rule of Laud, it was sometimes included and sometimes omitted. It was then de facto fastened into the body of the Articles. It finally obtained ecclesiastical as well as civil authority in the great settlement of 166243 which finally sealed the effort of Queen Elizabeth. The Act declares the Articles to be the same as those named in the statute of 1571. Besides the case of the Articles, there is another instance in which Elizabeth seems clearly to have gone beyond the legal and constitutional limits of her executive power. Edmund Grindal, successor of Parker, became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1576. His primacy was a very short one. As a man of earnest piety, he was sensible of the grievous defect of preaching power in the clergy, and he appears while Archbishop of York to have encouraged the use of a remedy by what were called the exercises or prophesyings, conferences of the clergy on portions of Scripture, begun and concluded with prayer. His promotion to Canterbury was by some ascribed to the desire of the Queen to have him more under her control. There was much to say for the exercises: which, however, in his first year he had to place under the control of most rigid rules." But this did not avail, and in his second year the Queen prohibited them by proclamation as not warranted by the laws.45 This was in May 1577. In June he was sequestered, on account of non-compliance, for six months, and confined to his house. He appointed vicars-general for his diocese, and was occasionally called upon to act. He remained a nominal primate, without influence or power, until 1583, when he died 29 Ibid. p. 29. 40 Nos. v. and vi. of the copies printed by Dr. Lamb. 41 No. iii. of the forms printed by him. 42 Lamb, p. 37. Hardwick, Hist. of the Articles, pp. 140–5. 43 13 & 14 Car. II. c. 4, sec. xvii. 4 Wilkins, Concilia, iv. 287. 45 Ibid. F. 289. 46 just as the arrangements for his resigning his see were approaching completion. The reigns of Henry the Eighth and Edward the Sixth can exhibit no more remarkable exercise of arbitrary power on the one side, and absolute submission on the other, than we find in the case of Grindal. In 1580, sixteen bishops of his province petitioned for his restoration, but in vain.47 The singular feature of the Queen's conduct is this, that she used arbitrary power in opposition to the sense of her prelates, in order to maintain the strict law and discipline of the Church. She had not disposed of the Marian bishops by prerogative, but by law. So far as I know, this case, and that of her operations on the Articles, are the only instances in ecclesiastical matters of her going beyond the law; and in both cases it was clearly with a view not to weakening, but to securing the Church against what she thought more dangerous illegality. It is right that her motive should be observed, without asking how far it affords justification or excuse. Let us now review, in a summary manner, and according to the best evidence in our possession, the chief acts and attempts of this extraordinary woman, done or attempted with a view to determining the character and position of the Reformed Church of England. 1. She began by a tentative effort to use the Book of 1549 as the basis of reformed worship, but desisted for lack of support; for she had a quick discernment of the practicable. 2. Falling back on the Book of 1552, she made legal provision for continuity as to what met the eye in public worship, by the enactment of the ornaments rubric. 3. She provided against a most palpable breach in the audible and moral continuity of the service of the Church, by the re-insertion of the ancient words of delivery in the ministration of the Holy Sacrament, and by the abandonment of the Zwinglian rubric at the close of the service. 4. She conciliated those of Romeward leanings without offending any man of sense by striking out from the Litany the clause which denounced the Pope. 5. She resisted successfully the attempts of the House of Commons to innovate upon the Prayer Book; and she resisted also the endeavours to enforce the Articles, until the violent hostility of the Pope compelled her to strengthen herself in the quarters opposed to him. 6. She dropped the claim to the headship of the Church, and gave thereby satisfaction to the Puritans, as well as to the friends of the unreformed religion. 7. She limited the supremacy, by defining it to be such as had lawfully belonged from old time to the Sovereigns of England. 8. She provided against the absorption of the spiritual estate in the executive by constituting a separate organ for the disposal in 46 Strype's Life of Grindal, chaps. v., xiv. 47 Wilkins, Concilia, iv. 293. the temporal sphere of ecclesiastical causes, and by confining it to judicial functions. 9. She placed a barrier in the way of dogmatic narrowness by enacting that nothing should be declared anew to be heresy except with the assent both of the spiritualty and the temporalty. 10. She established as her ordinary method of action in Church matters that of communications from herself or her council to the Primate or the bishops, as the actual chief magistrates of the Church, sometimes in the tone of request, sometimes of injunction. 11. Instead of renewing the Act of Edward the Sixth for the appointment of bishops by letters patent, she restored the method of a congé d'élire for their election. 12. She put an end to the system of commissions during pleasure, under which the prelates of Henry the Eighth and Edward the Sixth had acted. 13. She renounced the policy and plan of a new code of laws for the Church which had been actively prosecuted under both those Sovereigns. 14. When driven by the urgency of affairs to allow the Thirtynine Articles to take their place on the statute book as a test, she contrived for their issue to the country on her own authority and that of the clergy, without any notice either of the Act or of its limitations. 15. In her jealousy lest the substance of the Eucharistic doctrine should be impaired, she fought hard for the exclusion of the Twentyninth Article, which asserts non-reception by the wicked. 16. She introduced into the Twentieth Article the declaration not only of the power to decree rites and ceremonies, but that 'the Church hath authority in controversies of faith.' 17. She used every effort to obtain the aid of some of the bishops in possession for filling the vacant sees, and issued her mandate for the election of Parker only on theday 48 when she had secured the official adherence of one at least among them. 18. In clearing the sees by the expulsion of the Marian bishops she acted strictly, as has recently been shown in this Review,49 according to law both of the State as declared by the first Act of her own reign, and of the Church as established by Convocation in 1531, and never thereafter cancelled. I might refer to the retention of the law of Mary on the marriage of the clergy, to the controversy on images, and to other matters, but the heads here enumerated will probably suffice. It is singular, and somewhat disheartening for the student of human action, to note the manner in which this great scheme of effort, so boldly and so persistently undertaken by Queen Elizabeth, has been estimated by some writers on the history of England and the Church of England. Mr. Hallam, a wise and moderate writer, has noticed the personal leanings of Elizabeth, and thinks she may also have been guided by high motives of equity and prudence, yet inclines towards censuring her for not meeting the demands of the Puritans.50 Carwithen commends her for firm resistance on the right hand and the left.51 But neither of these authors appears to perceive or to allow how much there was in her policy of real initiative, of creative or reconstructive energy. Hume accuses the Queen of having by the Act of Supremacy assumed absolute power, among other things, to establish or repeal all canons; 52 of which in the Act there is not a word. More strangely still, Dr. Lamb, to whose investigations of facts and documents we are so much indebted, treats 53 her insertion in the Twentieth Article of the power of the Church to establish rites, and of her authority in controversies of faith, as equivalent to declaring herself to be not only the protector but the sole director of her subjects' faith; and again he speaks of her asserting her 'prerogative as supreme Head of the Church,' which even Hume perceived that she had renounced. Collier censures her for having made beggars in the Church without allowance for service in any other direction.55 Bishop Short appreciates her greatness, gives her credit for personal piety, and blames her love of power.56 None of these writers, I think, have awarded to her exactly that which is her due. And her due is not the praise of an amiable character, or of a friend or promoter of individual freedom as distinguished from national independence. A Tudor from top to toe, her own disposition led her to strong exercises of power, and the real necessities of the case inclined her in the same direction. To modify the Articles of her own motion by insertion and exclusion, to sequester and virtually depose at her will an Archbishop of Canterbury, were lawless acts. But how can we impute general lawlessness to a Princess who made so many laws in restraint of her own power over the Church; or how charge her with despotism in the Church, when even those acts which most savoured of it were, whether in themselves wise or unwise, yet certainly addressed in good faith to the establishment and maintenance of a legal constitution and of an effective authority apart from her Own ? I think it cannot be denied that the acts and abstentions which have here been put together were by no means isolated or impulsive, but were parts of a scheme or system. The essence of this scheme or system, undertaken in concurrence with an arbitrary civil government, it may be in a larger or smaller degree for the sake of it, was to build up the Church, beneath the shadow of the prerogative, which had been used so largely under Henry and Edward to depress and dishonour it as to threaten depriving it of all capacity to so Hallam, Const. Hist. vol. i. c. iv. p. 191, 4to. 52 Hume, V. xlviii. 55 Collier, ix. 438. $1 Vol. ii. c. xv. 53 Dr. Lamb, p. 33. command respect, to train character, or to exercise beneficial influence. Other princes, however, Charlemagne for example, have conceived and pursued a constructive policy in the Church. The point in which Elizabeth stands alone, as far as I know, is this, that she pursued her work from first to last mainly in opposition to the Church's rulers and without a party to support her; that is to say, without a hold in religion on either party except that they liked her better than they liked the idea of change, which might increase the power of their antagonists. Thus it may truly be said that she rode upon the storm and that she had hardly more than one great, faithful, able servant to help to steady her in her seat. It is true, indeed, that Elizabeth made no direct contribution by her religious policy to another essential requisite of the national character, that, namely, which was represented and fostered by Puritanism; and to which we owe it that the doctrine of non-resistance, the birth-sin of the English Reformation and the plague-spot of the Church of England, did not undermine and absorb the political liberties of the nation. The only excuse that can be offered is that if the policy of the Queen was the only one which in those days could have secured the independence of the kingdom, then she took a certain, though, it must be admitted, a circuitous road towards the establishment of religious freedom. Nothing can be further from the ideal than the English Church has been in its practical development. Perhaps even in its ideal it is assailable enough. Yet it has been a solid and not trifling piece of human history, and has had a large share in moulding the character and determining the fortunes of a great nation. This paper, this brief study, if it may so be called, is not a panegyric either upon an institution or a human being; it simply aims at the exhibition, by the enumeration of facts in one among many aspects, of a mind persistent in its work, and singularly powerful while clad in female form. That this nation is what it is, and this Church is what it is, may without praise or blame, but only in acknowledgment of the fact, be owned due to Queen Elizabeth as much as to any human being, that has ever in this island enjoyed or suffered the stern and bracing experience of life. W. E. GLADSTONE. The Editor of THE NINETEENTH CENTURY cannot undertake |
