Church and State under the Tudors/Chapter 11

by Gilbert William Child

CHAPTER XI

REIGN OF ELIZABETH (continued)

Let us endeavour now to sum up the results produced by the long and important reign of Elizabeth upon the relations between Church and State in England then and since her time. In so doing we must be careful to include in our record not only the effects produced, but also the means, and the power, and the authorities, by which they were brought about. No ruler of England has ever, since Elizabeth's day had opportunities similar to hers. At no time since has an equal amount of power rested in the hands of a single individual. Theoretically, no doubt, the power of the Crown was as great under James and Charles as under Elizabeth, but the Parliament in the one case was far less submissive, and in the other claimed and succeeded in establishing (for the moment) a power far greater than that of the Crown. And, again, the circumstances under which Elizabeth came to the throne were unusually favourable to a new departure. Mary's legislation had reduced the law and the constitution of England to a condition which practically gave her successor a liberty of action in ecclesiastical matters unexampled before or since. Not only had Mary, by two successive statutes, swept away the whole ecclesiastical legislation of the two previous reigns, but by further legislation, and by despotic acts of government unwarranted by any law, she had re-established the papal power in England to an extent unknown since the time of Henry III., and even then of at least doubtful legality. But Elizabeth was not, properly speaking, at liberty to inaugurate a great change: she was positively compelled to do so, and at liberty only to a limited degree as to the direction in which she made it. There is ample evidence that the disgust and discontent produced by Mary's government was by no means confined to the Protestant party alone, but was shared in to a great extent even by the Catholics, and was universal throughout that large portion of the nation which was neither bigotedly Catholic nor fanatically Protestant.

The first characteristic feature, then, of the whole relation of Church and State in Elizabeth's reign, is what would now be called its pure and undiluted Erastianism. From the beginning to the end of the reign the Church is subject to the State, and never pretends to be anything else. By far the greatest part of the ecclesiastical revolution was accomplished, as we have seen, in the first three years of her reign, not only altogether without the assistance of Convocation, but—so far as that body can be said to have acted at all—in the teeth of its unanimous opposition. Convocation apart, the only organ of the Church was its representatives in Parliament, the Bishops and Abbots in the Upper House; and their names—when they appear in the division list at all—appear constantly in Opposition, and as constantly in the minority. When—after the principal changes were effected, and, by means of them, the personality of the Upper House entirely changed, and both Houses effectually muzzled by the oath of Supremacy—Convocation was permitted to resume its functions, not only did it accept with meekness all the changes already made, but it appended to the results of its own labours the humble protestation already quoted.^[1] There is, in point of fact, throughout the reign a unanimity amongst all parties (the Catholics always excepted) in exalting the royal power over the Church, and an entire agreement between theory and practice which it is difficult in the present day completely to realise. We find, first, the phraseology of the Act of Supremacy claiming authority in the most unmeasured terms; then we find this authority carried out avowedly under the sanction of that Act, at first by specially-appointed Commissions, and, after 1583, also by the constitution of the High Commission as a permanent court; and we find all sorts of functionaries, on all sorts of occasions, referring to that authority as a settled principle of the constitution. The whole ecclesiastical constitution of the country was revolutionised by the first two Acts of Elizabeth's first Parliament, and by the Commissions appointed under that first Act which carried out her visitation and enforced her famous 'injunctions.' All this was done in the year 1559, and entirely without either authority from, or reference to, any clerical or distinctively ecclesiastical authority whatsoever, other than that which belonged to the Crown itself. Indeed, as we have seen, Convocation was for all intents and purposes in abeyance, and had done nothing except express in a more or less informal, but in a perfectly unmistakable, manner its entire satisfaction with the state of things left by Mary, and its consequent disapproval of the whole of Elizabeth's ecclesiastical acts. And as the reign began so it continued to the end; the whole government of the Church was carried on by Commissions similar to the first one, composed, like it, of mingled clerics and laymen; and deriving its authority direct from the Crown under the Great Seal, and, in fact, held responsible not to the Church in any sense, nor even to Parliament, but to the Privy Council. Thus, as far as law and practice could make it, the Church was completely subject to the State, and was, as I have said, incorporated with it; and how complete this subjection was, and how it was accepted in all good faith by the divines and functionaries of Elizabeth, may easily be seen by reference to contemporary records whether official or private.

Thus, in the instance given above, in which Calvin opened negotiations with Archbishop Parker for a union of all Protestant Churches, the latter, as we have seen, took instructions as to his reply, not from Convocation nor any assembly of bishops, but from the Privy Council.^[2] It was by the Crown, again, that the congregations of foreign Protestants were permitted to organise themselves in London, Norwich, Canterbury, and elsewhere, and that the Bishop of London was set up as their official and acknowledged superintendent.^[3] Later in the reign we find Wliitoift writing to the heads of colleges in Cambridge,^[4] and telling them, 'It is a most vain conceit to think that you have authority, in matters of controversy, to judge what is agreeable to the doctrines of the Church of England, what not—the law expressly laying that upon her Majesty and upon such as she shall by Commission appoint to that purpose'; and Bancroft,^[5] in his famous sermon already quoted, claiming for the Crown ' all the authority and jurisdiction which by usurpation at any time did appertain to the Pope.' Further still, as the quarrel between the Puritans and the bishops is becoming exacerbated, we find each party in turn charging the other with being disloyal to the supremacy.^[6] Thus, one of the commonest charges against the former party is that 'they attribute in effect no more to her Majesty and all other civil magistrates in these causes than the Papists do, which is potestatem facti non juris; and, on the other hand, we find Sir Francis Knollys—who is holding a brief, as his manner was, for the Puritans—writing to Lord Burleigh^[7] in complaint of the assumption of the bishops, 'Her Majesty is not supreme governor over the clergy if so be that our bishops be not under-governors to her Majesty, but superior governors by a higher claim than directly from her Majesty.' We see here how, during the latter part of the reign, each party was charged with putting forth claims which were felt to be incompatible with the old idea of the extent and character of the royal supremacy which, nevertheless, both parties represented as the undoubtedly orthodox and constitutional view. The explanation is probably to be found in the fact that thought upon every subject grows and ripens like a herb of the field, and, like that, its growth is favoured, checked, or altered, by the circumstances around it; and thus the ideas of these two parties developed by natural growth and were cramped and distorted by the different conditions in which they grew, by their opposition to one another and the different favour which they found with the Queen or with the people, until both of them arrived, sooner or later, by mere spontaneous development at the conclusion that, however much it might be the theory of the Tudor sovereignty that the will of the monarch for the time being was the standard of orthodoxy, it was yet impossible to build permanently on so uncertain a foundation. The result has been that the party which ultimately broke with the State, while it has shaken itself free from this impracticable theory, has gradually lost position and dignity by so doing, and that which adhered to it has maintained the theory as a theory, but has kept it carefully in the background, and studiously avoided bringing it into view, except on the rarest occasions; and in so doing, while retaining a position of dignity and importance, has lost its influence with the people, and is in danger, in its frantic efforts in our own day to reach a more defensible position, of breaking, in its turn, with the State, and losing its own raison d'être at the same moment.

The next fact which the history makes evident to us is that in this reign, at least, the supremacy really meant not any idea of State power in the abstract, but simply the concrete will-—too often, indeed, the mere caprice—of the individual sovereign for the time being.

In this instance, again, we find theory and practice, in these early days of the Reformed Church, very much at one. The Elizabethan Act of Supremacy (1 Eliz. c. 1) provides for the government of the Church by the sovereign herself, by the machinery of Commissions under the Great Seal; and Elizabeth accordingly, and her next two successors after her, looked upon the government of the Church as their own individual prerogative, and invariably resented any attempt on the part of Parliament to interfere with it.^[8] Proof of this has already been given in these pages in abundance, and if it were not, it lies on the surface of every document, public or private, which deals with the subject throughout the reign. In the beginning of the reign we find Jewell stating that it is to the Queen's own determined dislike of change that the maintenance of the vestments and ceremonies objected to by the Puritans, and disliked only a little less by the bishops themselves, is due. Later on we have seen her personal objection to the 'prophesyings' leading to their prohibition by the bishops, and to the suspension of the archbishop himself, because he declined to acquiesce; and towards the end we have seen her rebuking Archbishop Whitgift for permitting the predestinarian controversy to emerge, and giving him an intimation which led at once to the virtual withdrawal of his Lambeth Articles, after he had already sent them down to the heads at Cambridge, as a sort of quasi-authoritative document: and throughout the reign we find any attempt on the part of Parliament to deal with ecclesiastical matters of any kind checked and rebuked in no measured terms, even in cases in which the Queen took the same view as the Commons themselves.

Since Elizabeth, then, was to so great an extent both in theory and practice Pope of England, it is of importance that we should consider, with the best light we can find, what kind of a Pope she was, what were the real acts which she did, and whether she deserves altogether the discredit of that deliberate and organised system of hypocrisy which Mr. Froude attributes to her. Elizabeth, then, we have to remember, besides being a woman of great natural abilities and quite exceptional force of character, and very wide culture, also had an experience of life almost unexampled. True, she was born in the purple, but it was purple in which were some very coarse threads; for at her birth Katherine of Arragon was still living, and, when she was but three years old, her own mother was attainted, divorced, and executed, and herself stigmatised as a bastard. That in essential and important matters she suffered less from this than we should expect, seems clear from the fact that her education was conducted with the most jealous care, and that she was at a later time included among the heirs to the throne appointed in her father's will; but, even so, it is incredible that she did not receive vastly different treatment, as the King's natural daughter, from that which had been her due as the heiress-apparent to the throne. Edward and his more important counsellors were all, either in fact or profession, Protestant bigots, and from them it is no secret that she received far more consideration than her sister; but this was counter-balanced in a great measure by the fact that Mary was before her in the order of succession, and, when the time came to attempt to set Mary aside, they seemed to feel no scruple in including Elizabeth in the same proscription. When the attempt failed, and Mary ascended the throne, Elizabeth, at the age of twenty, entered upon a term of trial, persecution, and actual danger, during which her individual liberty was constantly restrained, her personal attendants were appointed by others, and continually tampered with, and her own life was in such danger that she had no security from day to day that she might not be committed to the Tower or ordered for execution. Elizabeth was far from being destitute of religious feeling or of Christian belief. It was no mere acting that when Mary died, and the announcement was made to her that she was delivered from her thraldom and was herself a queen, she fell on her knees and exclaimed, 'It is the Lord's doing, and is marvellous in our eyes!' But while her life, with its rapid changes and constant danger, had been calculated to keep alive a sense of religion within her, yet she had lived through a time of the most exasperated religious controversy, and the controversialists of both sides had tried their skill upon her to the utmost. Moreover, if she had seen, and to some extent felt, the bitterness, cruelty, and relentless brutality of Mary's rule, not less had she also seen the selfish hypocrisy and unscrupulous greed of Edward's Protestant counsellors; and was in no danger of falling under the delusion that in the controversy of the times all the good was on one side and all the evil on the other.

Equally by nature and education Elizabeth was a woman of broad mind and clear understanding, but, like other people, her conduct was not always dictated by her understanding alone. She was biassed by her inordinate vanity, by her love of power, and not less by her self-will, her taste for display, and not unfrequently by mere feminine caprice and perversity. Added to all this, she stood constantly in most difficult situations, and was swayed by innumerable considerations of safety and policy. Considering the number and the force of the temptations to which she was exposed, the wonder is that her course was not even more erratic than it actually was. In regard to Church matters it was, in truth, singularly consistent. Having accepted the state of things established during the first years of her reign, which allowed a certain latitude of opinion in the more mysterious doctrines of the faith, while it maintained some outward decency and order in the worship of the Church, her constant endeavour afterwards, as we have seen, was to maintain uniformity in externals and to check controversy upon difficult and recondite questions. It is abundantly clear that it was to Elizabeth's personal opposition alone it is due that the demands of the earlier Puritans for the abolition of vestments and ceremonies were not conceded. That policy, as well as taste, may have conduced to this result is not unlikely, nor is it inconsistent with Elizabeth's habitual duplicity and dissimulation; but there is quite sufficient evidence to show that her apparent disposition towards the old religion was but skin deep, and that she was in the main a partisan of the Reformation.^[9] In the early years of her reign, the terrible dangers by which the country was surrounded may well have made her hesitate to estrange and irritate her only ally, and not improbably add him to the already formidable number of her enemies, when, by merely talking in a vague manner to his ambassador, and leaving the cross standing in her private chapel, she might keep up in his constantly vacillating mind the idea of her possible conversion; but from the day when she published her famous Injunctions to that on which she spoke to the Privy Council about the Irish rebellion, of ' extirpating that monster who colours his traitorous ingratitude with a desire to plant the Romish superstition to the extirpation of God's true religion, wherein we will live and die,'^[10] and to that further day when she actually did die, receiving her final consolation from the mouth of the Calvinist Whitgift, there is no reason to believe that Elizabeth was other than a Protestant in belief as well as in action. That times of great excitement, whether religious or political, lead many men to the adoption of extreme opinions, either on one side or the other, may be true; but it is not true, even in such times, that a man must of necessity be either a fanatic or an unbeliever: and a person with the intellect, the education, the experience, and, above all, the temperament, of Elizabeth, is predestined, by disposition and circumstances alike, to take the middle course, and does not deserve the stigma of hypocrisy for so doing.

If we now turn from Elizabeth's character to her work, we shall find that, whether good or bad—for on that point men will differ till the end of time—it was great and characteristic, it was of inestimable importance to the English nation, and it has been most wonderfully permanent—for it has not changed in any important feature since her time—and it was her own. That the Church of England as we now see it is as we now see it, is due to Elizabeth herself and to none other. The share of her counsellors was great, and amongst them in this matter, as in others, the foremost place must be assigned to Cecil; but it was not to her counsellors, and certainly not to Cecil, that it was due that the moderate and, at least theoretically, unobjectionable demands of the early Puritans were not conceded. The letters of Jewell and others of the early Elizabethan bishops, show plainly not only that there would have been no great opposition on their part, but that it was the Queen herself and the Queen only who stood between them and concession. To estimate the whole effect of such concession, had it been made, is of course impossible; but it seems clear that it must have changed the whole subsequent history of the Church of England. A large proportion of the nominal members of the English Church in the early part of Elizabeth's reign must have consisted of those more or less indifferent persons who had been brought up in childhood as Catholics, who had lacked ability or inclination to form opinions for themselves, and who complied more or less unwillingly with the law which compelled them to attend the English services. The loss of the vestments and ceremonies still retained, might no doubt have disgusted many of these, and have driven them back to the old faith; and of anything calculated to add strength to the Catholic party Elizabeth had throughout her reign a well-founded fear, and this fear came in aid of her own taste and feeling- to prevent the concession. On the other hand, had the concession been made when first demanded, it would have conciliated the bulk of the early Puritans at the time, and it may doubtless be argued that it would have taken at once the brain and the heart out of the Puritan movement, would have enlisted the ablest and best of the Puritans on the side of the Church, and so prevented the formation of that great half-organised body of nonconformity which has played so considerable a part, for evil as well as for good, in the subsequent history of this country^[11] But it may be replied that it is by no means certain that all this would have happened.^[12] It is at least as likely that the Puritan demands would have grown with the concession just as they did grow without it; that, having obtained the abolition of the vestments and ceremonies, they would have proceeded, as they actually did, to demand, one after another, the abolition of the liturgy, the establishment of lay elders, the abolition of bishops, and the equality of ministers; and thence to that complete exaltation of the ministry above the Parliament and the sovereign which, as we have seen, they proposed, and which a century or so later was actually realised to no slight degree in Scotland. All this could not, of course, be patent to the eyes of Elizabeth and her advisers, but they may well have felt that concession is often a two-edged weapon, and, in the act of disposing of one enemy, not unfrequently arouses others.

As we read the evidence in contemporary documents, it appears almost incredible that Elizabeth could have maintained as she did throughout her reign, with constantly increasing narrowness and rigidity, the system of universal repression which it displays to us. But the era of toleration had not yet dawned: none but a very few of the most enlightened minds had even dreamed of it: and the Puritans themselves insisted upon the universal obligation of their own system as strongly as did the Papists on theirs. Elizabeth's religious system, which was, in the first instance, merely a revival of Edward VI. 's, and is so spoken of constantly by those most intimately concerned in its establishment,^[13] was treated from the first by the Papists as mere Protestantism, and was accepted as such by the foreign Protestants; but it retained a sufficient amount of the external forms and ceremonies of the old religion to maintain the decency and order of public worship, while the definitions of doctrine were elastic enough to admit considerable diversity of opinion and belief on points on which different minds can in general arrive at a similar conclusion only by a tacit agreement to accept words without too close inquiry as to their meaning. The bishops, though retaining their old position and dignity, and though permitted to revive many of their old courts and jurisdictions, nevertheless did so only as officers under the Grown, and the only one who ventured to oppose the Queen's views found himself, as we have seen, reduced to utter helplessness for the remainder of his life; and when, some quarter of a century later, the earliest attempt was made to claim Divine right for them, it was done under the pressure of controversy, and was guarded by a distinct claim of the whole Papal power for the Crown. The limitations on the Protestant side of the line, which occupy so prominent a position in the latter part of the reign, were in themselves nothing new. There was a heresy commission, in the days of Edward, against the Anabaptists, and Joan Bocher was put to death in the same reign; but in Elizabeth's time the extension of Puritan opinions among the ruling classes—Sir Francis Knollys, Leicester, and Burleigh himself being more or less affected by them—gave them more importance, and rendered her repressive policy more difficult.

Whatever moral criticisms we may make upon Queen Elizabeth's ecclesiastical policy, it must be admitted that she contrived to establish a system which has been in many respects wonderfully successful. If it satisfied the extreme of neither party, it has certainly continued, for three centuries and a half, so to conciliate to itself a large portion oi the English people, that it has followed them to whatever parts of the world they have since spread, and now reckons among its members not only a larger number—for that it could not but do—but a larger proportion of professing Christians than it ever did before. In any case, it is certain that but for Elizabeth herself the subsequent history of the English Church must have been very different from what it has actually been.

1. See above, p. 201.
2. See above, p. 203.
3. See above, p. 202.
4. Strype, Whitgift, vol. ii. p. 252.
5. Bancroft's sermon on trying the spirits (the very sermon in which divine authority was first claimed for the bishops).
6. Bancroft, same sermon.
7. Strype, Annals, vol. iv. p. 8.
8. See above, p. 219.
9. On these points further evidence from contemporary sources will be found in the Appendix, note vii.
10. State Papers, vol. cclxxv. No. 10, June 20, 1600.
11. It is argued, by no less a writer than Hallam, that up to the appearance of Cartwright as the leader of the Puritans, concessions to them would have been safe and judicious.
12. Cartwright was not an isolated portent totally unconnected with other men, or with the circumstances of the times. Had he been so, he would have produced no effect; and the difficulty, or rather the impossibility, is to determine how far Cartwright was himself produced by Elizabeth's high-pressure system, or was the natural result of that very peculiar theology which her system had entirely failed to check; and with the example of the Scotch Church before us, we are naturally inclined to the latter explanation rather than the former.
13. E.g., Parkhurst to Bullinger, Zurich Letters, p. 29; Jewell to the same, ib. p. 33.