Church and State under the Tudors/Chapter 8

by Gilbert William Child

CHAPTER VIII

REIGN OF ELIZABETH

Once again, on the accession of Elizabeth, was there a general outburst of relief and joy throughout England. Similar demonstrations, no doubt, had occurred when Mary began to reign; but the present rejoicings were more general and heartfelt, and far more long-continued. The relief felt at the relaxation of the Protestant tyranny of Edward's Council was slight compared to that experienced at the cessation of Mary's massacres; and the outcries of the Protestants, in the one case, formed a more audible note of discord than did the murmurings of the Popish clergy on the other, so true was the statement of Bishop Bonner's famous lady correspondent, that 'the very Papists themselves begin now to abhor your bloodthirstiness, and speak shame of your tyranny.'

In this reign, also, we shall find religious matters occupying an important—and, as it would appear to modern eyes, a disproportionately important—place; but they do not form the one completely dominant consideration which they did in the last two reigns, and especially in the last. Indeed, it was impossible that they should do so. The perils by which England was surrounded, both at home and abroad, were too pressing, too varied, and too immediate, to permit a new sovereign to rule, as Mary had done, on purely fanatical principles, even if the new sovereign had been—as Elizabeth pre-eminently was not—in anywise disposed to do so. Nevertheless, the reign commenced with an ecclesiastical revolution almost as complete, though not so rapid and violent, as that which we have seen in Mary's reign. Indeed, it could hardly have been otherwise; for while Mary's legislation had replaced the Church, theoretically, in the most authoritative position which it had ever held in England, her administration had tended to reduce the theory to practice in its cruellest and most unmitigated form. This was to bring about a state of things which had never been popular in England; and if, as we see no reason to doubt, all the earlier part of Henry VIII.'s anti-Papal policy had been carried out with the full assent of the bulk of the nation, it is scarcely possible to suppose that Mary's reversal of it could have been permanently acceptable. When, to these general considerations, we add the almost universal disgust occasioned by Mary's continual burnings, and the enthusiasm stirred up by the courage and boldness, for the greater part, of the victims, we need be at no loss to account for the general ill-feeling which existed at the close of her reign. But it must not be supposed that other causes of discontent were wanting. There existed also scarcity, high prices, heavy taxation, and a debased coinage, and, to complete all, a deep feeling of national humiliation at the loss of Calais. These last potent causes were amply sufficient of themselves, as they have often proved, to account for general disaffection; but they were all, as it were, brought to a focus, by the circumstances of the times, upon the one point of religion.

Elizabeth's chief adviser, from the very moment of her accession—and, indeed, even before it—was the celebrated Sir Robert Cecil, afterwards Lord Burleigh, the direct ancestor of the present Marquesses of Exeter and Salisbury. Cecil was a man of the most consummate ability and prudence. He was a man much under the influence of religion, yet totally free from fanaticism—a combination very rarely found in the sixteenth century, and not very common at any time. Like Elizabeth herself, he had outwardly conformed in Mary's days; but in his case, as in hers, nobody doubted that his real attachment was to the Reformed religion. Under his influence, which coincided to a great extent with the natural bent of her own disposition, the religious revolution under Elizabeth was neither so rapid nor so violent as that under Mary. In the first month of her reign very little outward change was effected, and several of Mary's old Ministers kept their seats at the Council Board. Yet it is clear that everybody felt that mighty changes were impending; else why, though the Ritual was apparently unaltered, did the bishops, with only a single exception, steadily refuse to assist at the coronation of Elizabeth? There is, in fact, observable a very curious similarity between the beginning of the two reigns of Mary and of Elizabeth. The earliest steps of the two queens were taken in almost parallel lines, though in opposite directions. Thus, just as Mary waited for the meeting of Parliament before she resorted to revolutionary measures, so also did Elizabeth; but both in the interval put a stop to unlicensed practices, and prohibited unauthorised innovations in Church services. Elizabeth's action was, however, as might be expected, in all this more moderate than Mary's; for while the latter had at once, and without legal authorisation, caused Edward's Prayer-book to be disused, and put some of his bishops in prison, Elizabeth, on the other hand, contented herself with discountenancing the Elevation of the Host, and setting free the prisoners confined for religion at Mary's death, putting an immediate stop to the burnings, and permitting the return of the Protestant exiles. In each case, too, these moderate and apparently necessary acts were generally, and in the main rightly, interpreted as unmistakable indications of what was to follow. The only other overt acts by which Elizabeth displayed the inclination of her own feelings, previously to the meeting of Parliament, appear to have been that she ordered the Litany, the Lord's Prayer, and the Creed to be used in English, and that, when the Marian bishops came to meet her, and offer their congratulations on her accession, she is said to have refused the ordinary royal courtesy to Bonner.

One of the most important transactions of the beginning of Elizabeth's reign was a secret consultation of a number of Protestant divines at the house of Sir Thomas Smith, in Cannon Row, in which the alterations in Edward's second Prayer-book, which were shortly to be submitted to Parliament, were discussed and determined on. An anonymous paper in which this appears to have been suggested to Cecil is given by Burnet, Strype, and others, with several, mostly slight, variations; and the consultation itself was resolved on, and probably took place, before the Parliament met. But the meeting of Elizabeth's first Parliament was not long delayed. Mary had died on November 17, and Parliament met for the despatch of business on January 25.

Parliament and Convocation, as usual, met about the same time, though in this case, in consequence of a slight indisposition of the Queen, Convocation appears to have had the advantage by a day. The gyrations of this latter assembly during the years from 1549 to 1559 are something quite marvellous, and the different policy pursued towards it by Mary and Elizabeth, in the early part of their respective reigns, gave more ample scope for their performance than would have been the case had the latter sovereign acted with the vigorous decision which, in matters ecclesiastical, characterised the former. As we have already seen, in Edward's reign Convocation was becoming steadily more and more Protestant, and almost its last acts were the approval of the Forty-two Articles and Ponet's catechism. Mary showed her true colours, from the very beginning of her reign, by dismissing Edward's bishops, and reinstating Gardiner and Bonner; and Convocation, with a minority of only six, pronounced the latter of the above documents to be 'pestiferous and full of heresies,' and continued to endorse the whole of Mary's reactionary proceedings, until it was itself superseded in a great measure by Pole's Legatine Synod. Again there was a change: Mary died, and Elizabeth succeeded. But Elizabeth proceeded with a caution unknown to Mary, and though, no doubt, every one believed that the Reformed faith would be restored, little or nothing was actually done in the first weeks of her reign which indicated to what extent she would go. Again Convocation met, but this time its conduct was exactly the reverse of what it had been before. It did very little, but that little consisted in a presentation of Articles by the Lower House to the bishops, which comprehended all the chief points in dispute between the Roman and the Protestant Churches, decided in favour of the former, with a request that they should be presented to Parliament. Presented accordingly they seem to have been, at least by Bonner, the President of Convocation, to the Lord Keeper, the Speaker of the House of Lords; but no further direct effect was produced by them.

It is a fact, to which modern historians of the English Church do not frequently draw attention, that the only Convocation during the earlier Reformation period which was evidently elected without any pressure from the Government, and was the freely-chosen representative of the clergy of England, should thus have declared its opinion, to all appearance unanimously, in favour of the Roman faith and the Roman obedience.^[1] It is idle to pretend that this was not, as full}? as any other Convocation, a fair representative body. On the other hand, its out-and-out opposition to the Queen and the Government of the day prove plainly that it was so, and, further, very strongly suggest that it was so in a much greater degree than any other Convocation of the period; while the completeness with which its decisions were ignored shows clearly how very little the opinions of the clergy as a body really affected the course of the reformation of the Church. If we compare this Convocation with its predecessors in the reigns of Edward and Mary, we cannot but be struck with the remarkable opposition which exists between the decisions at which they arrived: nor can we avoid noting the fact, that at no time during the period does there appear to have been any general eviction of the clergy from their livings, such as that which took place a century later, in the reign of Charles II.; and the only possible conclusion seems to be, that the celebrated Vicar of Bray must have been the type of a very large class among the clergy. It is, indeed, a somewhat curious fact that, while every one has heard of, and is ready to Laugh at, or to rebuke, that unfortunate person, few people, comparatively, seem to be aware of the existence of the far more conspicuous example of tergiversation presented by Anthony Kitchin, Bishop of Llandaff, who contrived to continue in possession of that dignity from 1545 to 1567, accommodating himself to all the various changes introduced, and taking, we may add, all the incongruous oaths required by Henry, Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth. Bishop Kitchin, indeed, may probably be taken as a fair type of the clergy who elected the Lower House of this Convocation, for he has left us in no doubt of his real sentiments, since his name appears, with the other bishops, in the list of the minority which voted against the Acts of Supremacy and of Uniformity, and other ecclesiastical measures of Elizabeth's first Parliament; yet, unlike the other bishops, when the Oath of Supremacy was tendered to him, he chose to accept it rather than to lose his see.

But while Convocation thus answered all the burning questions of the time by one general 'Non possumus,' and effectually effaced itself by so doing, the real work of reformation was being performed by Parliament. The work, as we shall presently see, was fairly thorough—more so, indeed, than some of our modern historians are disposed to admit—and when we read the literature of the period, and fully realise the exasperation and bitterness^[2] which existed on both sides, we can only wonder that any moderation at all was observed. It seems, in the main, to Elizabeth herself and Cecil that the avoidance of far greater extremes was due. The Acts actually passed and which brought about the entire ecclesiastical counter-revolution, were but five in number, viz:—

1 Eliz. c. 1. An Act to restore to the Crown the ancient jurisdiction over the estates ecclesiastical and spiritual, and abolishing all foreign powers repugnant to the same.

1 Eliz. c. 2. An Act for the uniformity of Common Prayer and service in the Church, and administration of the Sacraments.

1 Eliz. c. 4. An Act for the restitution of the firstfruits to the Crown.

1 Eliz. c. 19. An Act giving authority to the Queen's Majesty, upon the avoidance of any archbishopric or bishopric, to take into her hands certain of the temporal possessions thereof, recompensing the same with parsonages impropriate and tenths.

1 Eliz. c. 22. An Act giving authority to the Queen during her life to make ordinances in collegiate churches and schools.

It is necessary to examine a little what was the actual effect of the first two of these Acts, in order that we may see how far the state of things established by them differed from that which existed at the death of Edward VI. Mary had, as we have seen, by two sweeping Acts abolished, first, all Edward's Protestant laws; and secondly, all Henry's anti-Papal ones: taking advantage, in the first case, of the reactionary feeling which followed on the death of Edward and the Northumberland fiasco; and in the second, of the temporary improvement in her position and strength which followed upon her marriage with Philip. Elizabeth and her Parliament had neither the will nor the power to carry out a similarly high-handed policy. What they really did by this first year's legislation was this:—

(1.) They restored in full the ecclesiastical supremacy established by Henry VIII., merely avoiding the revival of the style and title of Supreme Head. Thus, while this change was made by the enactment of 1 Eliz. 1, s. 16 to 19 inclusive, the 26 Hen. VIII. c. 1 and 1 Ed. VI. c. 12, s. 7 were not revived in terms; on the other hand, 25 Hen. VIII. c. 19—the Act of the Submission of the Clergy—was restored in full, so that nothing but the mere title was renounced, and the whole power was reserved to the Crown.

(2.) The Act of Uniformity was varied to the extent of two specified alterations in the Book of Common Prayer, but otherwise restored.

(3.) For some reason, not very obvious, the appointment of bishops directly was dropped, and the old method of indirect appointment by means of a merely colourable election was resumed.

(4.) The marriage of the clergy was not yet re-legalised, in deference, apparently, to a private caprice of Elizabeth.

In all other respects the Reformation Statutes of Henry and Edward were restored, with the exception of those which were merely temporary or trivial. One partial and temporary exception, however, may be alleged—viz., that the Act of 3 and 4 Ed. VI. c. 10, for abolishing and putting away divers books and images, which had been included in Mary's repeal, was not revived in terms. It was, however, no doubt partially obsolete, as many of its provisions were, doubtless, pretty completely carried out in the iconoclastic times of Edward, and others were provided for by Elizabeth's Act of Uniformity, and afterwards by later Acts. At this time, however, as is well known, Elizabeth herself retained some taste for crosses and other ecclesiastical ornaments.

It will be well to give a somewhat full and detailed account of the ecclesiastical proceedings of the earliest years of Elizabeth's reign, because, as no further Parliament or Convocation was held until the fifth year, it is clear that, whatever transactions took place before that time, depended solely for their legality upon the Acts of the Parliament just narrated, since Convocation, as we have seen, had no part nor lot in them.

Some time in March, and while Parliament was still in session, one of those formal disputations, of which so many took place in the previous reigns, was held in Westminster Abbey between some bishops and other divines of the Roman Church on the one hand, and an equal number of the champions of the Reformation on the other, with the usual result that, while no one was really convinced on either side, the henchmen of the ruling party were credited with the victory, though in fact it was but a barren display.

One of the earliest of Elizabeth's measures after the dissolution of Parliament was the issue of a Commission to value the bishops' lands, with a view to carrying out the provisions of 1 Eliz. c. 19, which seems to have pleased the Protestants who were likely to become bishops as little as it did their predecessors.^[3]

In the course of the summer Commissioners were appointed under the recent Act to administer the Oath of Supremacy to the bishops and other clergy. Strype tells us, on the authority of a MS. of Sir Henry Sidney, that Elizabeth had an interview with the bishops previously to the Oath being offered to them, and on their spokesman, Archbishop Heath, assuming a high tone, and exhorting her to follow her sister's example, replied in a bold, if somewhat theatrical speech, beginning with a quotation from Joshua, that she and her house would serve the Lord, and continuing with a very plain announcement that she would make no terms with the 'Bishop of Rome.'^[4] It is said, further, that papers left behind by Mary showed that several of the bishops had been, even in Edward's time, carrying on an intrigue with Rome. However this may be—and it certainly closely resembles one of those mere stories which are told of every party or every important person when the spirit of partisanship runs high—it is certain that within a few months the Oath was tendered to all the bishops, and that all, except Kitchin of Llandaff, refused it, and were in consequence deprived by the Commmissioners. Some of these were imprisoned, though without any rigour, for various terms, and afterwards sent to live under the surveillance of various Protestant bishops; others were left at liberty to dwell where they pleased; some went abroad to Rome and elsewhere. Bonner alone was committed to the Marshalsea, there to remain till his death in 1569, though one or two others were imprisoned again at a later time in consequence of new offences.^[5] Towards the end of this year took place a curious interchange of letters between five of the Marian bishops and Queen Elizabeth, in which they urged her to follow the example of her sister, and submit herself and her realm to the Pope; and she, in her reply, attributed the conversion of England, not to the Papal Mission, but to Joseph of Arimathaea—a touch, no doubt, of Archbishop Parker's antiquarianism. The Oath was now exacted gradually from all the beneficed clergy of the kingdom. According to Camden, these numbered 9,400, and out of that number less than 180 refused it altogether! and of these, more than half were dignitaries. It may fairly be asked, why so many dignitaries should have declined to swear, or, if they did so decline, how it was that more than 98 per cent, of all the parochial clergy should have accepted the Oath. Of the former, certainly many, as remarked in the Queen's reply^[6] to a letter of the Emperor in their behalf, had made no difficulty about doing the same thing in Henry's and in Edward's days. In some cases, even their writings remained to prove the fact; and it is not, perhaps, at first sight easy to see why those who had (upon no slight pressure, no doubt) been induced to swallow the revolutionary changes of Henry, and the pronounced Protestantism of Edward, should suddenly resolve to give up place and power and wealth rather than accept the same treatment at the hands of Elizabeth in slightly more moderate doses. They were, assuredly, under no compulsion, and the one instance of Kitchin of Llandaff is enough to show that, had they conformed, they might have retained their sees, as he did, to the end of their lives. Their opponents have shown no want of ingenuity in inventing discreditable motives, both for those who did and for those who did not take the Oaths. Both, probably, had better excuses than have been generally allowed to them. The circumstances of the times were not only cruel and difficult—they were also quite unprecedented. The changes made must have appeared to many minds to involve the very foundations of religion and morality, yet they were made—in England at least—by an authority which, in that king-worshipping age, must have seemed little less than divine; and they were made, and unmade, and remade with a rapidity and violence which must have involved an ordinary mind in the most hopeless perplexity and terror. We must add to this, the general consideration that, in any age of the world, the proportion of men in whom there exists the true stuff of which martyrs are made is but very small, and is found, generally, in larger proportions on the side of new opinions, with new hopes and new aspirations, than on that of old ones, which have become to some extent matters of inheritance, or education, or habit, rather than of intense personal conviction; and also the particular consideration, to which I have already had to refer, and which will be amply proved ere long, that the moral standard of the age was a low one, and was lower, rather than higher, among the clergy of both sides than among other people. Under all these circumstances, it is far from surprising that the recusants were few in number.^[7] Nearly all the clergy, in fact, remained the Papists which they always were.

The action of those few dignitaries who, having conformed under Henry and Edward, refused to do the same under Elizabeth, is easily intelligible, and is certainly creditable to them, as far as it goes. The suddenness and violence of Henry's onslaught took them by surprise, and they yielded to it, doubtless, farther than their consciences justified them in doing; but, in fact, a man with a knife held to his throat is not in a favourable position for either cool judgment or dignified action. Once surprised into yielding, they may well have waited to see what further changes were to come, and the somewhat reactionary character of Henry's later government may have fed their hopes for a time. In Edward's reign, the King's youth, and the mere fact of a regency, and the consequent certainty that the existing system would be but temporary, with the discontent of the people and the misgovernment of the Council, all pointing to a coming change, may well have inclined them to the belief that their strength was to sit still. The accession of Mary seemed to bring the reward of their patience, and they at once rebounded to their old position of Popish priests and prelates inflamed with all the additional zeal born of years of repression and adversity. Then they became agents, or at least accessories, in the persecution which was at once the disgrace of Mary's reign, and the chief cause of the final establishment of Protestantism in England. When, in the midst of this, and of the rising tide of popular indignation against it, Mary died and Elizabeth succeeded, they could no longer buoy themselves up with any reasonable hope that the new changes were temporary: Elizabeth, they knew, could never acknowledge the Pope, since to do so was to proclaim herself a bastard, and her mother a harlot; they themselves were no longer young, and their faith, conscience, consistency, self-respect—every consideration which affects the minds of religious or honourable men—concurred to keep them loyal to the cause for which they had struggled, intrigued, and persecuted through some thirty stormy years.

The bishops being thus all deprived, or in process of deprivation, it became necessary to fill their sees with others.^[8] Matthew Parker was chosen to be Archbishop of Canterbury—a man of learning and moderation, and who, besides his peculiar fitness as a consistent, but not a fanatical, reformer, for the difficult position which he was to fill, may have been supposed to have a sort of personal claim upon the consideration of the Queen, as having once been one of her mother's chaplains. A certain difficulty appears to have arisen in his obtaining regular consecration. His election took place, upon the usual congé d'elire, at the beginning of August, by the Dean (Dr. Wotton) and a portion of the Chapter—the absent members being, probably, recusants. Early in September a warrant was issued to the Bishops of Durham, Bath and Wells, Peterborough, and Llandaff, and also to Bishops Barlow and Scory, requiring them to consecrate him. At this point the proceedings came for a time to a standstill, probably because the first three of these refused, and the fourth either may also have been indisposed to act, or others may have been unwilling to let him, except in the last resort. On December 6 another warrant was issued, in which the first three names were omitted, and to the other three were added those of Coverdale, late Bishop of Exeter; and Hodgkins, Bishop-Suffragan of Bedford; John, Suffragan of Thetford; Bale, Bishop of Ossory, or any four of them. At last, on the 17th of that month, Barlow, Scory, Coverdale, and Hodgkins met, and carried out the consecration at Lambeth Chapel, according to the form contained in King Edward's book. It must have been a curious and suggestive ceremony, with most of the ancient pomp omitted, and with grim old Bishop Coverdale, even on such an occasion, stiffly rejecting the ordinary episcopal vestments, and habited only in a long, woollen gown, reaching down to his ankles; and the Suffragan of Bedford apparently endeavouring to face both ways, by apparelling himself like Scory in the earlier part of the ceremony, and like Coverdale in the later.

The Archbishop once constituted, it became a comparatively simple matter to consecrate bishops to the remaining sees, and, accordingly, sixteen more were made in the course of the next two years, besides Barlow and Scory, who, being bishops already, were settled into their new sees of Chichester and Hereford respectively.

In the meanwhile, the Queen had commenced and proceeded with a General Visitation, for which certain Articles of Enquiry^[9] were drawn up, and in which the famous Injunctions of Queen Elizabeth were delivered to both clergy and laity, ' to receive and truly to observe and keep,' as it is expressed in the preface^[10] printed with them. This Visitation was worked by means of a number of Commissions^[11] appointed for various districts of the country, and each consisting of several noblemen and gentlemen, a divine, a doctor of civil law, and one or more other lawyers, with, in many cases at least, the lord-lieutenant of the county or the president of the district at their heads.

There are various points of considerable interest in these documents. Thus, while, as we have seen, Elizabeth herself had a feeling in favour of the retention of, at any rate, some images and various other adjuncts of the more ancient form of worship, we find in Injunctions 2 and 18 the most ample and uncompromising directions for the doing away with all the old paraphernalia connected with them, and for the abolition of all processions as well. Again, although, as we lately saw, the law of Edward VI. for the marriage of priests had not been revived, yet in the Injunction 29 we find a special clause introduced to permit it, and to fence it round with special safeguards, intended, apparently, not to hinder it, but to ensure it against any possible scandal.

These are evidently the result of the remonstrances of the Protestant divines, some of which are preserved to us by Strype^[12] and Burnet,^[13] and are instances of that remarkable tact which so often enabled Elizabeth to yield her own opinions exactly at the right moment. Two other provisions may be noticed, the source of which is, perhaps, not quite so evident. Thus, in 20 the clergy are bidden to teach their parishioners 'that they may with a safe and quiet conscience, after their common prayer in the time of harvest, labour upon the holy and festival days, and save that thing which God hath sent,' &c. Surely a wholesome and truly Christian doctrine, which must, however, have been as unwelcome to the Puritans of that age as some other provisions in these Injunctions were to the Papists, or as it would now be to the less-excusable Sabbatarians of our own days. In 45, again, there is a direction to the Ordinary to 'exhibit unto our Visitors their books, or a true copy of the same, containing the cause why any person was imprisoned, famished, or put to death for religion'— a provision apparently intended to put on record what had actually taken place in Mary's reign, to be published, probably, should there appear any danger of a serious reaction in favour of the old religion.

Elizabeth's Injunctions are not only anti-Papal—they are thoroughly Protestant, and that is a fact which we shall have to consider when we come to sum up the ecclesiastical results of her reign. To these same early years—the interval between the first and second Parliaments of Elizabeth—belongs also the commencement of that Scottish imbroglio which was to last for so many years, and to occasion so many complications, and to darken Elizabeth's reign with the most piteous tragedy that belongs to it, whatever may be the amount of her own responsibility for the results. Into the full particulars of this it is, happily, not my business to enter—it forms a portion of the foreign policy of the reign; but it is, nevertheless, absolutely necessary to give some consideration to it, in order to form anything like an adequate conception of the situation in which Elizabeth was placed, and which accounted for, and to some extent excused, many of her most questionable actions. Modern Englishmen, accustomed for more than two centuries to regard the whole island as one kingdom, the home of a single nation, though they know, as a fact, that in Elizabeth's reign the affairs of Scotland were as truly foreign affairs as those of France, find a difficulty in fully realising it. True it is, that for more than one generation kings and statesmen on both sides of the Border had begun to recognise the fact that it would be best for both nations could they be amalgamated into one; but even kings and statesmen had hardly come to look at it as more than a remote contingency to be hoped for, rather than as the end and aim of a practicable policy: and, for everyone alike, the hopes which may have begun to dawn with the marriage of James IV. and Mar of are t Tudor had been drowned in the blood of Pinkie Cleugh, and buried, apparently for ever, in the grave of Edward VI. When Elizabeth came to the throne, it was certainly true that the relations of Scotland with France were both far more intimate and far more friendly than they were with England. The King of France, as was truly said, 'bestrode the realm, having one foot in Calais and the other in Scotland.' Its relation to foreign States, and to Scotland among them, formed, as it were, the physical conditions of the life of the England of Elizabeth's reign, and very complex relations they were; and, unless we have a fairly clear comprehension of at least their principal complications, we can no more hope to understand the life of England, than we could understand the life of an animal without knowing something of the atmospheric and other conditions which surround it, and of the part these play in its life. I must repeat too, even at the risk of some tediousness, that in the sixteenth century the religious question was the pivot upon which turned the policy, not of England alone, but of every State in Europe. It is in the light of these facts that we must look at Elizabeth's position, and upon the bearing which her foreign relations had upon it. It is impossible to exaggerate the perils with which she was surrounded: without money, without generals, without trained soldiers, and with her own people divided into two bitter religious factions, to one of which she was herself bound by the conditions of her birth and history, but to offend either of which was to add the danger of rebellion to that of foreign hostility. The most pressing danger at the moment was that of a conquest by France, and this was enormously enhanced by the intimate alliance existing between France and Scotland. Elizabeth's relations with Mary were, from the nature of the case, extremely delicate. Not only was Mary the daughter of a French princess, and the wife of a king of France, but she was also the next heir to the throne of England itself. Moreover, this relation, difficult enough in itself, was complicated by the fact that Mary was a Catholic, and her present title to the Crown appeared to most English Catholics to be better than that of Elizabeth herself; and thus she was likely to become, even without her own consent, if need were, the natural head of the Catholic party in England, and the centre of all their hopes. But that her own consent was not wanting was amply shown by the fact that she and her husband had already assumed the arms and titles of King and Queen of England. Individually, moreover, Mary of Scotland, if once acknowledged as a rival, was the most formidable rival that can be imagined. She is one of those few characters in history the charm of whose personality has been such as to enlist an enthusiastic party in her favour in despite of the most odious crimes, and to retain it to remote generations. She was acknowledged in her lifetime—whatever modern criticism of old portraits may say to the contrary—as the most beautiful woman of her time. She was highly educated and variously accomplished. Intellectually clever, shrewd, and capable, she was on a level with the ablest politicians and statesmen of her time, and she possessed in perfection that fascination and charm of manner which is more effective than beauty itself. To all these womanly graces she added brilliant health, wonderful physical strength and activity, and that light-hearted courage and natural contempt of danger which, in a man, makes a leader the idol of his soldiers, and which, when found in a woman, never fails to arouse the wildest enthusiasm and devotion. Such, then, with the whole power of France at her back, was Elizabeth's most formidable foe.

Her only ally was Philip of Spain. Yet the very circumstances which determined her policy at home, without leaving her any real liberty of action, were of a kind calculated, above all others, to estrange him from her. Philip was the acknowledged champion of orthodoxy, and, as it were, the official leader of the Catholic world. Elizabeth had overthrown the whole polity which he had been at so much pains to establish in England, had slighted his Ambassador's advice, and had refused his own offer of marriage, and was now trifling with that of his cousin and nominee, the Archduke of Austria. The religious policy which, as we have seen, she was compelled to follow, was, therefore, just what was best calculated at once to embitter her enemies and to estrange her single ally. Need we wonder, then, if her policy became a by-word all over Europe for crookedness and duplicity, the perennial resource of the weak and the over-matched? She has been called the evil genius of Scotland, and she may have been so; but self-preservation, we are told, is the first law of Nature, and it is hard to blame a monarch if he saves his own people at the expense only of their enemies. Elizabeth was not a person who overvalued, and many would say that she undervalued, the accessories of religious worship, though it is fairly clear that, as a mere matter of taste and private inclination she liked pomp and ceremony in church, as she did elsewhere. Hence, on the one hand, when she found that her bishops and divines strongly objected to images and such things, she yielded her own wish, and ordered their abolition; but, on the other, it is hardly surprising that she should have retained something of ritual in her own chapel, and the more so when she hoped thereby to disarm the enmity of her Catholic subjects, or to mollify the rising anger of her only ally by holding forth to them a delusive hope that she might possibly be veering towards their opinions. Yet I confess it seems hardly fair to say of her, with Mr. Froude,^[14] that 'she constructed her Church for a present purpose, with a conscious understanding of its hollowness. The next generation might solve its own difficulties—Elizabeth was contented if she could make her way, undethroned, through her own.' Her conduct admits of a more charitable, as well as a more probable, explanation, and one, at the same time, far more consistent with the complete despotism over the Church which she assumed in the years then approaching. Thus, if we take the main alteration made in her Prayer-book—that, namely, in the words used in the administration of the Communion — the words themselves might be understood, as, in fact, they now are, and have been in a greater or less degree ever since her time, in a quasi-Roman, or in a purely Protestant, or in any possible intermediate sense; and they were no doubt intended, as Mr. Froude would have us suppose, to be as comprehensive as possible, the object of the framers being to add one more inducement to conformity, which should smooth the way of the half-hearted Catholics, whose children, it was no doubt expected, would thus, in the course of a few years, become habituated to the Service, with all its Protestant characteristics, and would gradually forget the original gloss which had enabled their fathers to conform. Such conduct may savour more of policy than of godliness, but it is a very different thing from the deliberate construction of a delusive Church for the mere purpose of retaining the Crown, and is far more likely to have been acquiesced in by the divines who actually made the revision of the Prayer-book, and whom, because they were not martyrs, we need not stigmatise as mere knaves. It is common in all such cases, that what appears to a man of moderate views to be but a prudent avoidance of unnecessary offence, will seem to a zealot an unworthy sacrifice of truth to mere worldly expediency; and Elizabeth's revisors had certainly one precedent at least for their moderation, in the case of the Preface to Edward VI.'s Ordinal, which, though suggesting and almost implying the necessity of episcopal ordination, carefully abstains from actually asserting it. This document was composed at a time when there was certainly no thought of conciliating Catholics, but there was, on the other hand, a very strong desire to avoid anything like a direct condemnation of the foreign Protestant Churches. The above words may also have been introduced with a view to conciliate the Lutherans rather than the Catholics. One of Elizabeth's bishops, namely, Cheney of Gloucester, is said to have held Lutheran opinions.

Whatever may have been Elizabeth's private tastes and sentiments, there is no room for doubting the fact that her Visitors did, in the latter half of the year 1559, cause the removal of altars, roods, and other similar ornaments from the churches in London generally, and particularly from St. Paul's; and when this fact is taken in connection with the Acts passed in the previous Parliament, and the Injunctions issued by the Queen on her own authority, there can remain no reasonable doubt of the thoroughness of the Reformation in these her first years.

We may criticise Elizabeth's consistency as much as we please in that, while retaining the crucifix in her own chapel, she yet permitted the destruction of roods and altars in Westminster and St. Paul's; but there are small incidents which seem to point clearly to a genuinely Protestant conviction in her own mind, as, for instance, the story minutely told by Strype of her rebuking the Dean of St. Paul's for having placed in her seat in the cathedral a profusely-illustrated Prayer-book. She would hardly have gone out of her way to notice such an apparent trifle, had she not really felt what she said.

1. Cox, writing to Weidner in May 1559, says that 'none of the clergy' joined the Reforming party. See the Zurich, Letters (Parker Society), vol. i. p. 27.
2. See the letters even of Jewell of about this time—e.g., two quoted by Burnet, vol. iii. pp. 475, 476.
3. Strype, Annals, vol. i. pt. i. 142-9.
4. Strype, Annals, vol. i. pt. i. pp. 206-8.
5. Ibid.
6. Strype, Annals, vol. i. pt. i. p. 221.
7. Jewell says "none of the clergy."
8. Burnet, vol. ii. p. 637.
9. Bishop Sparrow's Collection, edit. 1675, p. 65.
10. Ibid. p. 66.
11. Strype gives lists of several: Annals, vol. i. pt. i. p. 245 et seq.
12. Strype, Annals, vol. i. pt. i. p. 331.
13. Burnet, vol. ii. p. 629.
14. Short Studies, vol. iii. p. 108.