in by Parliament'; and when a member (Mr. Strickland) brought in a bill to amend the liturgy, the House resolved not to proceed with it until the Queen's pleasure were known. Even so, however, at the dissolution, the Lord Keeper, by the Queen's command, administered a sharp rebuke to those members who had meddled with matters not pertaining to them, and above their understanding, as well as contrary to her express admonition.
In Convocation, the Articles were once more reviewed, and subscriptions of all clergy who had not already subscribed was insisted on, and some canons were passed, which, however, were not ratified by royal authority.
The rule of conformity was now more and more rigidly enforced against those, on the one hand, who held too much to the old customs of the unreformed Church, especially in the northern and midland counties, and against the Puritans also, who seemed more than ever bent upon assimilating the English worship and discipline to that of Geneva. Cartwright, who was Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, and Fellow of Trinity, and at this time the most conspicuous Puritan leader, was deprived and expelled the University.
A careful consideration of the extravagances of both sides during the years intervening between the thirteenth of Elizabeth and the next epoch of serious ecclesiastical legislation—viz., the twenty-third of her reign—would surely go far to relieve Elizabeth and her counsellors from that charge of deliberate hypocrisy which Mr. Froude so constantly brings against them.[1]
- ↑ Grindal's answer to Bullinger's letter on the 'habit' question. He says that when the bishops who had been exiles in Germany could not persuade the Queen and Parliament to remove these habits out of the Church, though they had long endeavoured it, by common consent they thought it best not to leave the Church for some rites, which were not
