That they deliberately intended it to mean at least the ornaments used under the First Prayer Book is clear from the character of those who secured its insertion at each revision. In 1559, shortly after Elizabeth’s accession, she secured its insertion, ‘until other order shall therein be taken,’ which order was never taken. She was notoriously in favour of keeping up the old ceremonial, though she was also anxious to avoid offence, and to rally round her the whole people, many of whom had been strongly moved in the Protestant direction by Mary’s persecutions.[1] All the alterations, too, of this third Prayer Book were of a markedly Catholic character. In 1604 the Rubric was again inserted. That the exposition of the Sacraments was added to the Catechism at this time, and the Canons issued which enforced the use of copes in cathedrals (in spite of the growing strength of Puritanism and the opposition at the Hampton Court Conference), shows that this second insertion also was deliberately made. In 1662 the Ornaments Rubric was again inserted for the third and last time, with the significant alteration that it was made explicitly to cover the vestments as well as the ornaments of the Church. Its reinsertion was thus very deliberately made, and was accompanied at this
- ↑ That this Prayer Book was not regarded as abolishing the old religion is shown by the fact that, of 9400 Marian clergy, only about 200 refused to take the oath of supremacy and accept the new Prayer Book. Elizabeth indignantly refused to send a representative to the Council of Trent because England was summoned as a Protestant, and not as a Catholic, country. She said, in her letter to the Roman Catholic princes, ‘that there was no new faith propagated in England; no new religion set up but that which was commanded by our Saviour, practised by the primitive Church, and approved by the Fathers of the best antiquity.’
Of Elizabeth’s first and favourite Archbishop, Parker, so dispassionate a historian as Mr. Gardiner says:—’ He fully grasped the principle that the Church of England was to test its doctrines and practices by those of the Church of the first six hundred years of Christianity, and he, therefore, claimed for it catholicity, which he denied to the Church of Rome; whilst he had all Cranmer’s feeling for the maintenance of external rites which did not directly imply the existence of beliefs repudiated by the Church of England.’—Students History, 430.
