and not with them: that Convocation had anything to do with the matter it never once occurs to him to suggest. Lastly, the whole Puritan controversy arose, and was maintained throughout the reign, by the personal determination of Elizabeth to make no concessions, even in points which the majority of the bishops were quite willing to yield. But Elizabeth's bishops were no free agents. In the earlier part of her reign they had but little power: in the later, when Whitgift was primate, they obtained a great deal more; but they obtained it by consenting to become simply the Queen's agents in her ecclesiastical policy, when she carried that personal power over the Church, which the Act of Supremacy had given her, to its full development under the Court of High Commission. Thus in this reign, almost as much as under Henry and Mary, the personal will of the sovereign was the chief agency in developing the ecclesiastical policy of the reign; and it led under Elizabeth as directly and completely to the development of nonconformity, as under Henry to the separation from Rome, or under Mary to the persecution first and the reaction afterwards.
Thus from the date of the Submission of the Clergy, 1-331, to the end of the Tudor dynasty with the death of Elizabeth, the relations of Church and State, which we have been following through all their vicissitudes, may be summed up in the two correlative words, dominion and subjection. Throughout the whole period, whatever may have been the variation of phraseology, the fact had been that the Church, as soon as it became emancipated from the Pope, became and remained the thrall of the sovereign. Under Henry its subjection had been thorough and undisguised; under Mary it had been just as complete, only Mary had used her own arbitrary
