Struggle of Elizabeth with the Puritan party : source of of the New Lollard ideas live on until of Henry VIII.; royal supremacy, for exercising the functions of the priesthood, or for becoming reconciled to the See of Rome. Thus it appears that while ecclesiastical persecution by burning was suspended at the queen's accession, the number of deaths resulting from what may be called political persecution, carried on under statutes extending the penalties of treason to offences against the state church, closely approximates that which occurred under the heresy statutes in the reign of Mary.1 4. The fact has heretofore been emphasized that the spirit of restlessness and discontent with the doctrines and practices of the medieval church which Lollardry had left behind it, and which had its root in the idea that each individual should look The Bible to the Bible alone as the source of religious truth, was strengthas the only ened and intensified in the ranks of the common people by inspiration; the importation into England, in 1526, of Tyndale's translation Tyndale's translation of the New Testament, which had been made in Lutheran Testament; strongholds at Luther's instance and solicitation. The principles of dissent from the ancient ecclesiastical order, which the Lollards had promulgated two centuries before the English Reformation really began, thus lived on until the reign of the reign Henry VIII., when the repudiation of the papal supremacy gave a fresh impulse to the attack long before begun against the whole system of theology which the papacy embodied. The tendency thus manifested by the revived Lollardry to unite itself with the Lutheran movement ceased, however, with the fall of Cromwell, and with the rise of a new apostle, who about that time became the great intellectual light of the protestant world. In 1535 Calvin produced at Basle his "Institutes of the Christian Religion;" in the next year he became the spiritual head of the protestant community which had become dominant at Geneva; and from his return to that city in 1541 down to his death in 1564, he reigned as the pontiff of Calvinistic protestant opinion. In the new theology which he promulsystem of gated was embodied an elastic and adaptable system of church goverment; government, which, ignoring the Lutheran theory of national religion, rested upon the assumption that the reformers as a influence of Luther supplanted by that of Calvin; church 1 See above, p. 148. 2 See above, p. 51. 8 "From the hour of Cromwell's fall the sympathies of the English reformers had drawn them, not to the Lutheran churches of North Germany, but to the more progressive churches of the Rhineland and the Netherlands."- Green, Hist. of the Eng. People, vol. ii. p. 281. wealth of governing the source man; his private Christian religious of kings; whole, regardless of nationality, constituted a vast Christian a commoncommonwealth, subdivided into independent and self-governing independ churches, in which the source of all power and authority was ent, selfthe sovereign Christian man, elect of God and predestined churches; to eternal life, whose most sacred duty involved the assertion of authoreven unto death of his private judgment in all matters of con- sovereign ity the science against any form of religious belief that princes or Christian states might attempt to force upon him. Thus it was that right of the church as embodied in this new Christian democracy was judgment; thrown into hostile relations with the state by virtue of the the new doctrine which claimed that the religious supremacy of kings democracy should yield to the higher sovereignty of the individual con- denied the science. While the principles of the new system thus assailed supremacy from without the spiritual supremacy of the state, they still more sharply menaced from within the supremacy of the epis- also the authority copate through the substitution of a new system of church of the government, in which all power came from below from the episcopate; church members, in whom was vested the right to elect the lay elders and deacons who, with the existing body of pastors, were to elect new ministers.3 The avowed purpose of this reformers school of reform was to substitute in the place of the pomp their and power of the ancient ecclesiastical system a simple and purpose to "pure" form of doctrine and discipline, a claim out of which for the probably arose the later name of "Puritan." The theology simple and of Calvin, which reasserted the right, always maintained by the papacy, of the subject to draw the sword against ungodly doctrine; princes, soon took vigorous hold in Scotland, where the pro- the Scotch testant party led the way in its application by the making of "cove"a covenant" at the close of 1557, in which the members 1557; rior order to presbyters, and claiming the sole right of ordination and the use of the Neal's Hist. of the Puritans, vol. i. pp. 211, 235-240. 8 Calvin's Inst. 1 "Both the Calvinists and the Papists, widely as they differed in other respects, regarded with extreme jealousy all encroachments of the temporal power on the domain of the spiritual power. Both Calvinists and Papists maintained that subjects might justifiably draw the sword against ungodly rulers. . . . The Church of England meantime condemned both Calvinists and Papists, and loudly boasted that no duty was more constantly or earnestly inculcated by her than that of submission to princes."- Macaulay, Hist. Eng., vol. i. p. 29. 246 Affecting to be thought a supe declared substitute ancient a "pure" form of nant" of ideas in exiles sought refuge at Zurich and Geneva. The inevit between ideas and bound themselves to defy the religion of the state, and to maintain "even unto death" that of the "congregation."1 In Calvinistic a less aggressive form the ideas of Calvin took so firm a hold England; in England during the reign of Edward VI. that upon the accession of Mary, when persecution drove many of the rethe Marian formers beyond the sea, they sought a refuge not with the Lutheran churches of North Germany, but with the Calvinistic churches of Zurich and Geneva,2 whence they returned at the accession of Elizabeth, fired with the zeal which personal contact with the leaders of the new movement naturally excited. Nothing could have been more inevitable than the conflict able conflict that ensued between the returning exiles thus pledged to a Calvinistic radical programme which repudiated the religious supremacy of the crown, the episcopacy as a form of church government, together with the ceremonies of the older faith, and that conservative system of church reform reëstablished by the statutes of Elizabeth, which recognized nearly every principle against which the Calvinists protested. Not only was the royal supremacy, the episcopal system, and much of the ancient ritual jealously preserved by law, but the fact was also known that the queen's the queen herself, who never would consent to a legal recognipersonal tion of the right of the clergy to marry, possessed a strong personal predilection for many forms of worship which the extreme protestants denounced as the "leavings of idolatry." As the strict enforcement of the Acts of Supremacy prevented for a time the formation of sects outside of the state church, the first opposition to the established system came from within, the state church as reëstablished by Elizabeth; predilections; 1 Keith, p. 66; Knox, pp. 98-100. The subscribers had the earls of Argyle, Morton, and Glencairn at their head. 2 As to some of the eminent divines who went at that time, see Burnet, vol. i. p. 471. See also as to their return from Zurich and Geneva, Ibid., vol. ii. pp. 808, 809. 8"In the eye of the Presbyterian clergy, the king and the beggar were of equal importance, and ought to be possessed of only equal influence, as soon as they entered the church doors. Noble as this idea was, it may safely be said that this organized ecclesiastical democracy could not flourish upon English soil." S. R. Gardiner, Hist. Eng., vol. i. p. 23. "5 4 Permission had been given by 2 & 3 Edw. VI. c. 21, and confirmed by 5 & 6 Edw. VI. c. 12. These acts were repealed by 1 Mary, s. 2, c. 2. While the marriage of bishops and priests was connived at during Elizabeth's reign, the queen would never consent to disturb Mary's act, which was never repealed until the first year of James I. In one diocese it was the custom after Elizabeth's accession to pay the bishop for a license to keep a concubine. Strype's Parker, p. 203. The offspring of all clergymen during that reign were in legal contemplation illegitimate. 5 Elizabeth even went so far as to quiz the Puritans as "brethren in Christ." tion to the within from called measures against clergymen ; refused to from a church party which about the year 1564 was designated first opposias Puritan,1 a term so extended a few years later as to embrace state church many who had then separated from the Church of England. arose from In 1565 it was that the first coercive measures were taken a party against the Puritan sympathizers among the clergy who had Puritan; for some time, with the connivance of some of the bishops, coercive ventured to deviate from the uniformity established by law by taken in refusing to observe many ceremonies which they deemed either 1565 as superfluous or superstitious. To suppress such irregulari- Puritan ties, the archbishop in the year last named put forward, without the royal sanction formally given,2 a set of regulations for the discipline of the clergy called "Advertisements;" and through the authority of the ecclesiastical commission many of the leading Puritan divines who still refused to conform those who were either deprived of their preferments, or suspended from conform the ministry under threat of deprivation. Thus it was that were deprived; the Puritans were driven to the open schism which manifested thus driven itself by their withdrawal from the state church, and by the to open establishment of separate conventicles. In June, 1567, an as- a separate sembly of that character which had met in Plummer's Hall in suppressed London was dispersed, and out of a hundred or more brought in 1567; before the court of high commission, thirty or more were imprisoned, the first punishment to which protestant dissenters were actually subjected. Five years later, the attack which was confined at first to what the Puritans regarded as obnox- Puritan ious church ceremonies was expanded by them into an assault assault upon the bishops, led by Cartwright, a professor of divinity at episcopate Cambridge, who boldly advocated an abolition of the episcopal wright; in favor of the presbyterian system. This demand was presented in an "Admonition to the Parliament" published in 1572, the year in which appeared a "Book of Discipline "advocating the same idea, written by Walter Travers, a lecturer at the Temple, with whose master, Hooker, he had a controversy, 1 Fuller's Church Hist., vol. ix. p. 66. their ministry. Wilkins, Conc., vol. iv. 2 Strype's Annals, p. 416; Life of Pp. 246, 247. Parker, p. 159. 8 Examples were made in that way of Sampson, dean of Christchurch, and Humphrey, professor of divinity and president of Magdalen College, Oxford, while thirty-seven London clergymen, who refused to comply with legal ceremonies, were suspended from Strype's Parker, p. 242; Lingard, vol. vi. p. 247. 5 As to Cartwright's views as expressed in his lectures, see Strype's Annals, vol. ii. p. 379; and Brooke's Memoir of Cartwright, 1845. 6 With an introduction by Cartwright. schism; conventicle upon the led by Cart Hooker's "Ecclesiastical Polity" an answer to Puritan dogmatism; ical discus ings;" who refused to suppress questered; memorable by reason of the fact that from it resulted the immortal work known as the "Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity," in which its author met the narrow dogmatism of the Puritan by arguments based upon the broad principles of moral and political science as embodied in the eternal obligations of natural law. In order to imbue the younger clergy as well as the laity with the ideas which they now aggressively advocated, the Puritans organized within the church a set of religious the polem- meetings called "prophesyings,"1 devoted mainly to polemical sions called discussions, whose participants were required to subscribe a "prophesy confession of faith in which they pledged themselves to a general reform of the established system. For his refusal to Grindal, suppress these "prophesyings" Grindal, who with strong Puritan tendencies had succeeded Parker as primate in 1575, them, se- was sequestered from his see for five years; which sequestration was not removed until a short time before his death, which succeeded took place in 1583. In that year it was that the new archgift, who bishop Whitgift, a leader of the orthodox school, began with proceeded the aid of the court of high commission, permanently established not long after his consecration, that systematic attempt to punish such of the clergy as were imbued with Puritan principles which finally resulted in the bitter assault upon the bishops, embodied in the series of pamphlets published under late tracts; the pseudonym of Martin Mar-Prelate. In order to punish the authors of these Puritan "libels," as they were called, resort was had to an act,5 passed in 1581, originally directed against the seminary priests, in which it was made a capital felony to "write, print, or set forth any manner of book, rhyme, terpretation ballad, letter, or writing, containing any false or seditious matter to the defamation of the queen's majesty, or the encouraging of insurrection or rebellion within the realm." By a punish forced interpretation of the judges, it was held that the libels "libellers;" ;" in question came within the terms of the act, because they by Whit with the aid of the high commission; Martin forced in put upon the act of 1581 in order to Puritan |