NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS.

(A) TREATMENT OF THE PURITANS would get some more knowledge in reli

CHAPTER XXI.

THE WORK OF CONVOCATION-RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

DURING THIS REIGN.

1563-1603.

§ 1. Review of the work of Convocation up to 1586. § 2. Directions given in 1586 for promotion of clerical learning, preaching, etc. § 3. A Benevolence voted by the two Convocations. § 4. Non-residence forbidden in 1589. § 5. Canons of 1597 to reform Ecclesiastical Courts. § 6. Further attempts at this in 1601. § 7. Commencement of Prohibitions. § 8. The Church popular at the end of this reign. § 9. Review of the controversy on Church government. § 10. Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity. §11. Bilson's Perpetual Government of Christ's Church. § 12. Bancroft's Survey of the Holy Discipline. § 13. The Sabbatarian Controversy. §14. The Predestinarian Controversy. §15. Mr. Barret's sermon. § 16. The Lambeth Articles. § 17. Condemned by the Queen and Lord Burleigh. § 18. Baro, the Margaret professor, preaches against them. § 19. Proceedings taken against him. § 20. Whitgift brought round to support him. § 21. State of the Universities during this reign: Oxford. § 22. Cambridge. § 23. The reaction against Puritanism.

1. CONVOCATION (at least that of Canterbury) was actively employed during the reign of Elizabeth, and did much useful work for the Church. In 1563 it settled and subscribed the Confession of Doctrine, which has ever since remained the authoritative teaching of the English Church. It also set forth, with synodical authority, a second Book of Homilies. In 1571 it reviewed and again subscribed this Confession. At the same time it drew up a body of canons, prescribing the duties of bishops, deans, archdeacons, chancellors, the clergy, churchwardens, schoolmasters, and the patrons of livings. This very useful body of laws, complete as far as the action of Convocation went, did not receive the sanction of the queen, and so failed to become law for the Church. In 1576 many of the provisions which were found in these canons were put into a body of fifteen articles which passed Convocation, and, with certain alterations, received the queen's sanction. In 1585 another body of articles or canons was accepted by Convocation, embodying certain resolutions which had been accepted by Convocation in 1581, and which were now again passed by that body. To these the queen gave her assent. In this Convocation the clergy also made some regulations for encouraging and promoting learning in the clerical body. To this subject the Convocation of 1586 again addressed itself.

§ 2. Various expedients had from time to time been tried to

promote learning amongst the clergy. Sometimes they were to be set a certain portion of Scripture to be learned by heart. Sometimes they were bid to make notes on certain portions of Scripture, which notes were to be examined by the bishops. The directions given in 1586 are remarkable, not only for enjoining this, but also as directing that each of the clergy should possess himself of a copy of Bullinger's Decades in Latin or English, and should, every week, read one of the sermons and make notes of it "in a paper book." The notes on the Scripture and Bullinger were to be examined by certain divines selected by the bishop, so that the ministers might not have to travel above six or seven miles. The orders then make arrangement for a transition stage between the reading and preaching minister. The archdeacon and ordinaries were to allow a reading minister, if they judged him competent, to expound, standing in his stall, the points of the catechism, with the additional explanations set forth in Nowell's book. It was also ordered that every licensed preacher was to preach twelve sermons each year in the diocese where his benefice lay, of which twelve, eight were to be in his own cure, and the archdeacon was to appoint six or seven preachers to preach "by course" every Sunday in those parishes within a convenient distance of their homes where no licensed preacher was, so that in each parish there might be one sermon at least every quarter. The incumbent of the parish to provide "his dinner and horse meat for the preacher," and to provide some one to serve his church.

§ 3. This Convocation not only voted the usual subsidies, but also gave to the queen a benevolence of three shillings in the pound. The York Convocation did the same. This extraordinary liberality caused much discontent, and probably no little suffering among the clergy. It was afterwards quoted and used as a precedent in the year 1640. This synod also made a formal protest against the Book of the Holy Discipline.

§ 4. In the synod of 1589 some orders were promulged by the archbishop and accepted by the synod as to the better enforcement of clerical residence. Non-residence due to the system of pluralities appears to have been still prevalent, and was violently attacked in the Parliament. The synod addressed her Majesty, explaining that pluralities were necessitated by the smallness of livings, that there were scarce 600 benefices in England the stipend of which was sufficient to support a learned clerk.3

1 Bullinger's Decades must thus be put into the class of works having a quasi-convocational sanction, together with Foxe's Martyrs, Jewel's Apology, and Nowell's Catechism.

2 Joyce, Sacred Synods, pp. 592, 596.

3 Joyce, p. 604.

§ 5. In the Parliament of 1593 a violent attack was made on the ecclesiastical courts; and though the archbishop soon afterwards took some steps in endeavouring to reform them, the Parliamentary attacks were renewed with greater bitterness in 1597. One great and crying grievance was the ease with which licenses to marry could be procured. An incestuous marriage which had lately taken place had caused much scandal. Enormous fees, infinite delays, abuses of every kind, were charged against these courts, which would seem not to have much improved since the days of Henry VIII. and Archbishop Warham. Some more decided attempts at reform were now made by the Church authorities. In the Convocation of 1597 a body of canons was passed and ratified under the great seal, which undertook to reform all the grievances complained of. These embody, with more stringent additions, previous canons as to residence. They forbid marriage licenses to be issued until proof had been furnished of no pre-contract, consanguinity, or affinity, of no suit pending in the ecclesiastical courts, and of consent of parents and guardians; the marriage to be solemnised at a proper time and in the face of the Church. Banns to be published at the lawful intervals. Divorces only to be granted by the judge ecclesiastical; the divorced persons not to re-marry. Tables of fees, as settled by the archbishop, to be the only fees allowed. The registers to be written on parchment. Copies of the old paper books having been made, each leaf to be signed by the minister ; the entries to be read out each Sunday by the clerk. The registers to be kept in a chest with three keys; attested copies to be sent each year to the Diocesan Registry.1

§ 6. In the Convocation of 1601 Whitgift again brought forward the subject of the courts, giving the bishops 2 strict orders— (1) not to proceed in their courts merely upon the promoting of apparitors, and without presentment from the churchwardens; (2) not to allow their judges to hold courts oftener than once in five weeks; (3) not to allow men to be cited into different courts for the same fault; (4) not to allow presentments more than once a year; (5) to be careful as to the ability of the curates licensed ; (6) to allow none but their chancellors to grant licenses to marry.3 These points were further enforced upon the bishops in a circular letter (January 7, 1602), in which the Primate calls their attention to the fact that the very existence of their courts is threatened, and that unless they be carefully watched and diligently reformed they must fall.

1 Cardwell, Synodalia, i. 147-163.

2 The Primate makes some very severe reflections on the negligence of the bishops in his letter to them. 3 Ib. ii. 583.

§ 7. It was evident, indeed, from the continued and violent attack made upon the Church courts, that a thorough distrust and dislike of them had grown up in the minds of the laity. Foiled in their attempts to deal with them in Parliament, the opponents of the Church courts now bethought them of a more efficacious manner of curbing them and diminishing their power. A plan now began to be introduced of stopping, by means of prohibitions issued out of the courts of common law, the procedure in cases brought into the courts ecclesiastical. The Court of High Commission even was not exempt from these prohibitions,1 and a struggle now commenced between the judges ecclesiastical and the judges secular, which lasted far on into the next reign.

§ 8. Upon the whole, though some causes of complaint existed against the Church authorities, the Church may be regarded as being popular and generally accepted in the country during the latter years of Elizabeth. The Puritan faction was biding its time in silence; the Romanists were still actively plotting, though broken in power and influence; but the majority of the nation were satisfied with the Church of England. "Those to whom comely forms and decent order were attractive qualities gathered round the institutions which had been established in the Church under the auspices of Elizabeth. In the place of her first bishops, who were content to admit these institutions as a matter of necessity, a body of prelates grew up who were ready to defend them for their own sake, and who believed that, at least in their main features, they were framed in accordance with the will of God. Amongst the laity, too, these expressions met with considerable support." To win this place in the regard of the nation the Church had passed through a long struggle, not only externally but internally also, in working out and asserting her true doctrines and legitimate claims.

"2

§ 9. The divines of the earlier part of the reign of Elizabeth had defended episcopacy and the institutions of the Church mainly on Erastian grounds-that it was within the competence of the sovereign, by virtue of her ecclesiastical supremacy, to appoint and sanction a form of Church government and order, and that the form thus sanctioned in England was not against the Word of God and the usages of the primitive church, but in accordance with them. In thus basing their religious system upon the will of the sovereign, the Church divines laid themselves open to the retort that what the sovereign appointed the sovereign might take away, that such a system had no elements of continuance in it, and therefore nothing of the divine. Yet the topic that "the magistrate might lawfully 1 Strype's Whitgift, b. iv. c. 24. 2 Gardiner, Hist. of Eng, i. 156. 3 "Ha' ye any work for a Cooper ?"—Maskell, p. 104; Epitome, pp. 10, 11.