from the fact that the Queen was well known to be opposed to it, and that its passing would have involved the unsettlement of the law as established by Parliament only four years before, and after much debate and difficulty, such a majority can only be taken to represent a real minority. It constituted, nevertheless, a technical majority, and it is perhaps well that it did so, since that one shy and absent 'odd man' is all that stood between the maintenance of the system already established and a collision with the Crown, which could only have led to a second 'submission of the clergy,' entailing renewed loss of position and authority. A similar lesson is taught by almost every important ecclesiastical transaction of the reign.
Thus the revision of the Prayer-book at the beginning of the reign was carried through by a committee of divines appointed apparently by the Privy Council. Again, when De Quadra was negotiating with Elizabeth about receiving a papal nuncio and sending representatives to the Council of Trent, Elizabeth herself and Cecil appear to have managed the whole matter, and 'the Church ' was in no way consulted. When Calvin reopened with Parker his previous negotiation for the unification of the Reformed Churches, Parker never once appears to have thought of taking Convocation or even his brother bishops into his confidence: and Whitgift, many years later, when he was anxious to settle the predestinarian controversy at Cambridge, first arranged the Lambeth Articles with the help of a few of his friends; and when compelled by the Queen's personal interference to withdraw them, informed the heads of colleges, as we have seen, that the final decision of what is or is not the doctrine of the Church of England lay with ' the Queen and those whom she has commissioned,'
