"What man so wise, what earthly wit so ware,

As to descry the crafty cunning train,
By which Deceit doth mask in visor fair,
And cast her colours dyed deep in grain,

To seem like Truth, whose shape she well can feign,
And fitting gestures to her purpose frame,
The guiltless man with guile to entertain?
Great mistress of her art was that false dame,
The false Duessa, clokéd with Fidessa's name.

"Who when, returning from the dreary night,
She found not in that perilous house of Pride,
Where she had left the noble Red Cross Knight,
Her hoped prey; she would no longer bide,
But forth she went, to seek him far and wide.
Ere long she found whereas he weary sate,
To rest himself, foreby a fountain side,
Disarmed all of iron-coated plate,

And by his side his steed the grassy forage ate.

"He feeds upon the cooling shade, and bays

His sweaty forehead in the breathing wind
Which through the trembling leaves full gently plays,
Wherein the cheerful birds of sundry kind
Do chaunt sweet musick, to delight his mind:
The witch approaching, gan him fairly greet,
And with reproach of carelessness unkind
Upbraid, for leaving her in place unmeet,

With foul words tempting fair, sour gall with honey

sweet.

"Unkindness past, they gan of solace treat,

And bathe in pleasaunce of the joyous shade, Which shielded them against the boiling heat And, with green boughs decking a gloomy glade, About the fountain like a garland made; Whose bubbling wave did ever freshly well, Ne ever would through fervent summer fade: The sacred nymph, which therein wont to dwell, Was out of Dian's favour, as it then befell.

"The cause was this: One day when Phoebe fair
With all her band was following the chace,
This nymph, quite tir'd with heat of scorching air,
Sat down to rest in middest of the race.
The goddess wroth, gan foully her disgrace,
And bade the waters which from her did flow

Be such as she herself was then in place.
Thenceforth her waters waxéd dull and slow,
And all that drunk thereof did faint and feeble grow.

"Hereof this gentle knight unweeting was,

And lying down upon the sandy grail,1 Drunk of the stream, as clear as crystal glass: Eftsoons his manly forces gan to fail, And mighty strong was turned to feeble frail. His changéd powers at first themselves not felt, Till crudled cold his courage gan assail, And cheerful blood in faintness chill did melt, Which like a fever-fit through all his body swelt.2

1 Grail, gravel.

Swelt, burned. First-English "swélan," to burn, burn slowly; whence "swelter."

could make no valid stand. Duessa pleaded that he might live Orgoglio's bond-slave, whereupon the Red Cross Knight was thrown without remorse into a dungeon of Orgoglio's castle, while Orgoglio made Duessa his, and set her "to make her dreaded more of men upon the beast with seven heads.

The Red Cross Knight in the dungeon of Orgoglio was the Puritan poet's image of the Church of his own time. To that condition it had been brought by resting in midst of the race, by stopping short of root and branch reform. Spenser's Puritanism, like that of Milton's after him, looked to essentials, and did not make war upon any of the outward graces of life. As he had shown by his rebuke of Aylmer and his open admiration of Grindal in "The Shepherds' Calendar," he laid stress upon the need of faithful preaching, and he desired to see the lowly spirit of an apostle in the bishop who was set over the Church. He believed that we had dallied too much with Rome, and that we had not escaped the thraldom of pride, but he did not find pride in what he terms "the seemly form and comely order of the Church," to which he says, in his "View of the State of Ireland," "our late too nice fools" had objected. He speaks there of the building only, but as to the vestments he certainly could not share the extreme Puritan opinions.

The first important sign of that division in the English Church, which began with the retaining of some pomps of Rome, was in the year 1550. John Hooper, who was a Cistercian before he became a Reformer, and was driven into exile by the Statute of the Six Articles, had returned to England, and in 1550 offer was made to him of the bishopric of Gloucester. He refused it for two reasons. One of his reasons touched a point not within contro

3 Nice, particular about trifles.

versy among the Reformers. An appeal to the saints was in the oath of supremacy; by chance it had not yet been removed. The young king passed his pen through it, and that difficulty was at an end. The other touched the very point upon which opinion in the Reformed Church of England was divided. Hooper would not consent to be attired in episcopal robes-Aaronical habits, as he called them-because they had no countenance in Scripture, and were not used in the primitive Church, but were associated with Roman corruptions and idolatries, as with the pompous celebration of mass. John Hooper-then a grave man, fifty-five years old- -was supported in his objections by Martin Bucer at Cambridge and by Peter Martyr at Oxford. The Reformation abroad had begun among the people, and where it was established popular feeling had dispensed with pomp of Roman ceremonial. The Reformed clergy abroad wore sober habits that marked their office, but they put away the vestments of the Church from which they had seceded. The Reformation in England had begun with the Crown; and in many parts of England was imposed, at first by bishops and privy councillors, on an unwilling people. It seemed wise, therefore, to those in power to change only what they held to be essentially corrupt, and otherwise to leave the outward accidents of public worship unaffected. John Hooper was firm against persuasion, even when he was advised from Geneva to be a bishop with the vestments, that as bishop he might have influence to get them put away. Men called him harsh and rough, but, says Thomas Fuller,' "to speak truth, all Hooper's ill nature consisted in other men's little acquaintance with him. Such as visited him once, condemned him of over-austerity; who repaired to him twice, only suspected him of the same; who conversed with him constantly, not only acquitted him of all morosity, but commended him for sweetness of manners." He was committed by his brother Reformers-Ridley being a chief opponent to the Fleet prison, "persecuted about clothes," as another Church historian puts it, "by men of the same faith with himself, and losing his liberty because he would not be a bishop." At last, however, a compromise was made. He was to wear the vestments only upon certain occasions, and to be dispensed from ordinary use of them. Then John Hooper became Bishop of Gloucester, preaching, visiting, and labouring with much zeal in his diocese. The persecutions under Mary brought him, in February, 1555, to the martyr-fire before his own cathedral, upon the spot now marked by his statue. and his opponent Ridley were friends in the face of death. "We have been two in white," said Hooper; "let us be one in red." At the very last, his recantation was urged on him by Sir Anthony Kingston, whom he had saved from a life of profligacy, and who was made one of the commissioners charged with his execution. "Death is bitter," said Sir Anthony; "Life is sweet." True," Hooper replied; "but the Death to come is more bitter, the Life to come more sweet." His death was indeed bitter.

66

1 Quoting Francis Godwin.

He

His legs and thighs were roasted, and one of his hands dropped off before he died. Such men as this within the Church, ready to die that they might live -one of the first of them a bishop-marked by their strong protests the beginning of that question about vestments which vexed the Reformed Church of England, and no other Reformed Church, after the accession of Elizabeth. The political reason for retaining them was not accepted by those who magnified their danger. Bishop Jewel spoke of the contest over them as contest on a trivial matter, though he said, "they are the relics of the Amorites: that cannot be denied." But others saw in them the bondage to Orgoglio, whose leman was Duessa on. the seven-headed beast.

In the third year of Elizabeth, it was moved in a convocation of the Church that Saints' days should be abolished; that in common prayer the minister should turn his face towards the people; that making the sign of the cross in baptism should be omitted; that kneeling at the sacrament should be left to the discretion of the minister; that organs should be removed; and that it should suffice if the minister wore the surplice once, provided that he ministered in a comely garment or habit. Of the members of convocation present when these resolutions were discussed, fifty-three voted for, and thirty-five against them, but proxies caused their defeat by a majority of one. Among those who voted for them was Alexander Nowell, Dean of St. Paul's, author of the Church Catechism, which was submitted to Convocation and approved by it in the same year, 1562, although not printed until 1570. Ceremonies thus accepted by the clergy only by a casting vote, were then, with the hope of securing unity, by the strong hand firmly enforced. Thus disaffection was increased, and, still within the pale of the reformed Church of England, objection to its system multiplied and strengthened. The rise of the Presbyterians is thus indicated in a letter from Edwin Sandys, Bishop of London, written to Henry Bullinger, in August, 1573

New orators are rising up from among us: foolish young men who despise authority and admit of no superior. They are seeking the complete overthrow and uprooting of the whole of our ecclesiastical polity, and striving to shape out for us I know not what new platform of a church. That you may be better acquainted with the whole matter, accept this summary of the question at issue, reduced under certain heads.

i. The civil magistrate has no authority in ecclesiastical matters. He is only a member of the Church, the government of which ought to be committed to the clergy.

ii. The Church of Christ admits of no other government than that by Presbyteries: viz., by the Minister, Elders, and Deacons.

iii. The names and authority of Archbishops, Archdeacons, Deans, Chancellors, Commissaries, and other titles and dignitaries of the like kind, should be altogether removed from the Church of Christ.

iv. Each parish should have its own Presbytery.

v. The choice of Ministers of necessity belongs to the people.

vi. The goods, possessions, lands, revenues, tithes, honours, authorities, and all other things relating either to Bishops or

Cathedrals, and which now of right belong to them, should be taken away forthwith and for ever.

vii. No one should be allowed to preach who is not a pastor of some Congregation; and he ought to preach to his own flock exclusively, and nowhere else..

viii. The infants of Papists are not to be baptised.

ix. The judicial Laws of Moses are binding upon Christian Princes, and they ought not in the slightest degree to depart from them.

In the year before this was written, the first separate Presbyterian congregation had been formed at Wandsworth, and among its founders was Walter Travers, afterwards indirectly the cause of the production of Hooker's "Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity." Travers is described by Izaak Walton, who had no sympathy with his opinions, as "a man of competent learning, of a winning behaviour, and of a blameless life," who "had taken orders by the Presbytery in Antwerp-and with them some opinions that could never be eradicated-and if in anything he was transported, it was in an extreme desire to set up that government in this nation; for the promoting of which he had a correspondence with Theodore Beza at Geneva, and others in Scotland; and was one of the chiefest assistants to Mr. Cartwright in that design." The conventicle at Wandsworth was suppressed, but afterwards revived, and presbyteries were formed in other places with private meetings for worship.

Thomas Cartwright, to whom Izaak Walton refers as head of the Puritan movement, was born in Hertfordshire in 1535, and educated at St John's College, Cambridge. As a young scholar, and in all his after life, Thomas Cartwright worked so hard that he reduced the daily hours of sleep to five. In 1569 he became Lady Margaret's Professor of Divinity, and he excited so much enthusiasm, that when he preached at St. Mary's Church the windows were removed, that he might be heard by the crowd outside as well as by the crowd within. His church doctrine was Puritan. John Whitgift, a Lincolnshire man, about five years older than Cartwright, was his chief opponent in the University. Whitgift, whose college was Pembroke Hall, and who obtained a Fellowship of Peterhouse, often answered Cartwright in the pulpit at St. Mary's: so that practically the two men submitted the two sides of a chief controversy of the time to the judgment of the congregation. Whitgift also acquired fame as a preacher, and when he first preached before Elizabeth she said of him, hearing his name, that he had a white-gift indeed. In 1567 he was made Master of Trinity Hall and her Majesty's chaplain. He soon afterwards caused Cartwright to be deprived of his Fellowship at Trinity, and also, having become ViceChancellor of the University, deprived his antagonist of the Lady Margaret's lecture. Thomas Cartwright Thomas Cartwright then went abroad for a couple of years, and was minister to the English merchants, first at Antwerp, afterwards at Middelburg. When he returned he was again foremost in the controversy. Ministers of the Church condemned as Puritans had been degraded and imprisoned, and in the year 1572, the year of the opening of the Presbyterian church at Wands

worth, an appeal was made to Parliament by two Puritan leaders, Field and Wilcocks, one of them, Field, being the Wandsworth lecturer. They published, in 1572, "An Admonition to the Parliament for the Reformation of Church Discipline." With it was printed a letter from Theodore Beza to the Earl of Leicester, who aided the Puritan cause, upon the need of another Reformation in England. Its authors were committed to Newgate, but their pamphlet could not be suppressed. Thomas Cartwright published at once a "Second Admonition." Whitgift produced, in the same year, "An Answer to a certain Libel, intituled, An Admonition to the Parliament." This was the ablest defence of the ecclesiastical system of the reformed Church of England, before Richard Hooker's work upon the subject. In the following year, 1573, Thomas Cartwright published "A Reply to an Answer made of Master Doctor Whitgift against the Admonitions of Parliament." In the next year, 1574, appeared "The Defence of the Answer to the Admonition against the Reply of T. C., by John Whitgift, D.D." In 1575, appeared Thomas Cartwright's second reply; and other controversial writings followed. The questions then stirring the Church, and the chief arguments on either side, are best to be studied in these Admonitions to Parliament, and the succeeding debate between Cartwright and Whitgift.

John Whitgift had authority with him; he had already been made Dean of Lincoln, and was made, in 1577, Bishop of Worcester. Thomas Cartwright had authority against him, and he was obliged again to quit his country. If Whitgift would have taken the office, he might have become Archbishop of Canterbury during the lifetime of Spenser's "wise Algrind,” the disgraced Archbishop Grindal. It was due to Whitgift's sense of duty that the Queen left Grindal in nominal possession of his office, saying that "she had made him an Archbishop, so he should die an Archbishop." But on Grindal's death, in the year 1583, Whitgift succeeded him, and as Whitgift lived till 1604, the Queen had in him, during all the rest of her reign, an Archbishop who would carry out her policy, maintain the reformed Church of England as she had established it, by strict enforcement of conformity, and repress extremes on either side in Roman Catholic and Puritan. He at once issued to the bishops of his province instructions that all clergy were to acknowledge the Queen's supremacy to be ecclesiastical as well as civil, and to conform to the Book of Common Prayer and to the Thirty-nine Articles; that wearing of the vestments was to be enforced; and that all preaching, catechizing, and praying in private families where strangers were present that is to say, every assembly of the nature of a Puritan "conventicle"-was to be utterly extinguished. Hundreds of Puritan clergy were thus suspended and driven out into nonconformity. A petition from the magistrates of Suffolk urged that "the laborious ministers of the Word are marshalled with the worst malefactors, presented, indicted, arraigned, and condemned for matters, as we presume, of very slender moment: some for leaving the holidays (saints' days) unbidden; some for singing the psalm Nunc Dimittis' instead of chanting it; some for leaving out the cross in

baptism, &c." At the same time the Queen issued a new Commission for the suppression of sedition and heresy. The power now given to the High Court of Commission enabled the Commissioners to convict by witnesses if a jury would not convict, and to convict by other means if they had not witnesses; to test by oath whomsoever they suspected, and punish at will whoever refused the oath, by fine or imprisonment. Archbishop Whitgift drew up a set of four-andtwenty articles, contrived to include all points of disagreement on which suspected Puritans might be examined upon oath. Petitions were sent to the Privy Council. The clerk of the Privy Council, in sending them on to the Archbishop, told him "that he would be the overthrow of this Church and the cause of tumult," and the Privy Council remonstrated both with Archbishop Whitgift and with Aylmer, Bishop of London. Whitgift himself, in reply to Lord Burleigh's censure of a procedure that he considered to be "too much savouring the Romish inquisition, and rather a device to seek for offenders than to reform any," answered that he was so far from inclining to Rome in such procedure, that "the Papists are rather pained at my proceedings, because they tend to the taking away of their chief argument, that is, that we cannot agree among ourselves; and that we are not of the Church because we lack

Unity."

It is not likely that Elizabeth looked much below the surface of the "Faerie Queene;" and if she had seen under the allegory of its first book how heartily Spenser sympathised with the higher objects of those who felt a larger Reformation to be necessary, she would not have troubled herself about that. Spenser was not a minister of the Church resisting her supreme authority. He was an Irish civil servant, thoroughly in sympathy with her political ideas. When her minister Burleigh considered her Archbishop wanting in charity, and when her favourite Leicester and others of her council were undisguised friends to the Puritans and she often listened patiently to rough assertion of opinions she would not hold-Spenser's allegory of the Red Cross Knight, and his peril from the giant Orgoglio after escape from Lucifera's House of Pride, might mean what he pleased without displeasing her. Loyal homage to her, full recognition of her earnestness, hearty assent to her public policy in many things, stern maintenance of her authority, the sweetest praise poet had ever given her, she had from Spenser, and it all came from his heart. He gave all that, and was a poet who addressed his verse to cultivated minds. He did not seek with it to stir the people. If he had been a minister of her Church, acting and preaching as she said he should not act or preach, he would nevertheless have been sacrificed to her belief that force could secure the desired Unity within the Church, and make its Religion what it ought to be, the source of peace within her realm.

The Red Cross Knight being thrall to Orgoglio, the English Church being as Spenser saw it when the "Faerie Queene" was being written, here was the time when need was felt of the intervention of

heavenly grace for its rescue. Spenser, therefore,

1 "Thou, O Lord, art a shield for me; my glory, and the lifter up of my head." (Ps. iii. 3.) "The Lord God is a sun and shield: the Lord will give grace and glory." (Ps. lxxxiv. 11.) "O Israel, trust thou in the Lord: he is their help and their shield. O house of Aaron, trust in the Lord: he is their help and their shield. Ye that fear the Lord, trust in the Lord: he is their help and their shield." (Ps. cxv.) "The shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked." (Ephes. vi. 16.)

Still the argument is now of Divine grace, that enables the weak mortal to attain, and it is emphasized with an image of Despair. The Red Cross Knight and Una meet an armed knight, with a rope on his neck, flying in terror from that man of hell who had lured his friend and him to hasty death by taking away from them all hope. "To me," says the knight, "he lent this rope, to him a rusty knife." This knight flying from Despair is Trevisan-his name means gloom or darkness (Portuguese "trévas," privation of light, formed from the Latin "tenebræ”). He will lead the Red Cross Knight and Una to the cave of Despair, but will not abide by them, he says, So "for liever had I die than see his deadly face." the Red Cross Knight, who has failed through weakness and needed rescue, is led into the presence of Despair :