licence of the queen, or of six of her privy council, or of her ecclesiastical commissioners, or the two archbishops, the Bishop of London, the chancellors of the universities, and the bishop and archdeacons of the place where it was produced. All persons were commanded to attend their parish churches under severe penalties. In 1562 the articles of religion of King Edward were reduced from forty-two to thirty-nine. In 1571 they underwent a further revision, and were made binding on the clergy before they could be admitted to orders.
A Friar.
Like her father, the longer she lived the more resolute she became to enforce her own dogmas on the whole body of her subjects. In the twenty-third year of her reign the penalty for non-attendance of the Established Church was raised to £20 per month. In the same year another Act was passed, declaring it high treason to attempt to draw any one to the Church of Rome; and the persons thus drawn were equally guilty of treason, and all their aiders, abettors, and concealers were made guilty of misprision of treason. These arbitrary laws against the freedom of opinion went on increasing in severity. In 1585 an Act was passed, which made traitors of all Jesuits and other Popish priests who had been ordained abroad, and all subjects whatever educated in Papal seminaries who did not immediately return home and take the oath of supremacy. The receivers of any such persons were declared felons without benefit of clergy. Whoever sent money to any foreign Jesuits or priests were liable to præmunire; and parents sending their children to school abroad without licence from Her Majesty, were liable to a penalty of £100. Fresh Acts were added in 1581 and 1593, the former to make void all conveyances of property by Popish recusants, with the object of escaping the penalties imposed upon them, and to decree that the penalty of £20 a month for non-attendance at church should be levied by distress to the extent of all the offenders' goods and two-thirds of their lands; the latter ordered all Popish recusants above sixteen to repair to their proper places of abode, and never more to go more than five miles from them without special licence from the bishop of the diocese or lieutenant of the county, under penalty of forfeiture of their goods and of the profits of their lands for life; those having no goods or lands to be deemed felons.
Sanctuary, Westminster.
But if the atrocities committed by the Roman Catholics in the reign of Mary, and the fears of their recurrence should they regain the power, afforded some plea for these persecutions, what is to be said of the same rigour applied to the Reformers, who simply desired to form their religious opinions on the sacred volume—the divine charter of humanity? Thousands of these, from the earliest days of the Reformation, had claimed this privilege as their plain birthright; and many of those who came back from the Continent on the termination of the Marian persecution, were no little surprised and discouraged to find themselves equally excluded from the exercise of their own judgments by a Protestant queen. They were required to attend the preaching of those against whose doctrines they protested, and suffered the same monstrous fines if they absented themselves. Instead of that "glorious liberty of the gospel" which they had promised themselves, they found themselves required to accept with all homage the cut out and prescribed pattern of opinion dictated by an individual woman, who made a desperate stand against the removal of images from the churches, and practised many Popish ceremonies in her own private chapel. Instead of the form of service which the English refugees had established at Geneva, in which there was no Litany, no responses, and scarcely any rites or ceremonies, they were commanded to adopt a form which appeared to them little removed from Popery. The Genevan refugees, who, from their demand for the utmost purity and primitive simplicity in worship, were styled Puritans, would, had they been permitted, have planted a church far more like the church as it came to exist in Scotland than that which was and is established for England. They opposed the claims of the bishops to a superior rank or authority to the presbyters; they denied that they possessed the sole right of ordination, and exercise of church discipline; they objected to the titles and dignities which had been copied by the Anglican Church from the Roman, of archdeacons, deans, canons, prebendaries; to the jurisdiction of Spiritual Courts; to an indiscriminate admission of all persons to the communion; to many parts of the liturgy, and of the offices of marriage and burial, including the use of the ring in marriage; they repudiated set forms of prayers, and the use of godfathers
