common worship. The clergyman who adopts any other, even in a private chapel, commits a crime; so does he who procures this aberration from conformity. Everyone must go to church on Sunday and bide prayer and preaching or forfeit twelve pence to the use of the poor. Much also can be done to ensure conformity by excommunication which has imprisonment behind it. The papal authority is abolished. Clergy and office-holders can be required to swear that it is naught; if they refuse the oath, they lose office and benefice. If anyone advisedly maintains that authority, he forfeits his goods; on a third conviction he is a traitor. The service book is not such as will satisfy all ardent Reformers; but their foreign fathers in the faith think it not intolerable, and the glad news goes out that the Mass is abolished. TSte word " Protestant," which is rapidly spreading from Germany, comes as a welcome name. In the view of an officially inspired apologist of the Elizabethan settlement, those who are not Papists are Protestants.
The requisite laws had been made, but whether they would take effect was very uncertain. The new oath was not tendered to the judges; and some of them were decided Romanists. Nor was the validity of the statutes unquestioned, for it was by no means so plain as it now is that an Act against which the spiritual Lords have voted in a body may still be an Act of the three Estates. Gradually in the summer and autumn the Bishops were called upon to swear; they refused and were deprived. It is not certain that the one weak brother, Kitchin of Llandaff, actually swore the oath, though he promised to exact it from others. Futile hopes seem to have been entertained that Tunstall and Heath would at least take part in the consecration of their Protestant successors. Such successors were nominated by the Queen; but to make Bishops of them was not easy. Apparently a government bill dealing with this matter had come to naught. Probably the Queen's advisers had intended to abolish the canonical election; they procured its abolition in Ireland on the ground that it was inconsistent with the Royal Supremacy; but for some cause or another the English Parliament had restored that grotesque Henrican device, the compulsory election of a royal nominee. By a personal interview Elizabeth secured the conversion of the dean of the two metropolitan churches, that pliant old diplomat Nicholas Wotton. When sees and benefices were rapidly falling vacant, his adhesion was of great importance if all was to be done in an orderly way.
But given the election, there must still be confirmation and consecration; statute required it. The cooperation of four "Bishops" would be necessary if Matthew Parker was to sit where Reginald Pole had sat. Four men in episcopal Orders might be found: for instance, William Barlow, of whose Protestant religion there could be no doubt, since Albert of Prussia had lately attested it; but these men would not be in possession of English sees. Moreover, it seems to have been doubted
