СНАР.
VI.

SII. Mary.

in order to enclose the land for their sheep, the wool of which fetched a high price. In Henry's days there had been an effort to redress the evil, though the effort had been harsh and violent. The crowds of sturdy vagrants and robbers which poured forth over the land were pitilessly flogged and hanged. But at least an attempt was made to prohibit the practice of converting arable land into pasture. In the days of Edward the prohibition was abandoned, and those who sought under Ket, the tanner of Norwich, to redress the mischief with their own hands, were cut down without mercy. At last Edward died, and the shouts which welcomed Mary expressed the resolution of the nation to submit no longer to a handful of religious theorists, supported by an unprincipled band of robbers who chose to style themselves a govern

ment.

The reaction of Mary's reign was too severe to last. The fierce persecution to which the Protestants were subjected predisposed the spectators of their sufferings to pity. Yet it was not pity alone which swung the nation round to its final breach with the papacy. If in the days of Edward VI. Protestantism had been associated with selfish greed at home, in the days of Mary Catholicism was associated with incompetence in the domestic government and with a subservient cringing to foreigners. The Church was laid at the feet of the pope, a foreign ecclesiastic. The State was laid at the feet of the king of Spain, a foreign potentate. The Queen neither understood the English character, nor cared for the things for which Englishmen cared. Calais, the pride of many generations of Englishmen, was thrown away by her negligence. All she thought of was the success of her beloved Philip, by whom she was regarded with loathing. In England itself, the debased coinage continued to afflict the poor and the man of business alike, whilst the

wealthy were frightened by the evident desire of the queen to place once more the confiscated ecclesiastical lands in the hands of the clergy. Mary's death, like Edward's, came at a moment fortunate for herself, when a revolution was preparing to sweep away all that she held most dear.

Elizabeth at once took up the position which had been occupied by Henry VIII. Her reign was indeed the continuation of her father's. The last two reigns had shown the impossibility of governing England by the help of either of the extreme parties, and the queen was therefore well advised in taking up her ground between them. Yet prudent as her course was, it was one surrounded with immediate difficulty and danger. Late events had so embittered the strife between Catholics and Protestants, that the central party on which Henry had relied was scarcely any longer in existence. The theory that it was possible to entrust the guidance of the English Church to a lay sovereign without giving it over to change, had been proved by the stern trial of experiment to be no more than a dream. Almost everyone, therefore, who clung to the old forms and the old doctrines was driven into the arms of the papacy. On the other hand, almost everyone who disliked those forms and doctrines, and who regarded it as the highest of duties to combat them, was driven to the opposite extreme. It seemed but a poor thing to follow in the steps of Cranmer, to separate slowly the wheat from the chaff, by boulting it through some intellectual sieve, the texture of which depended very much upon the mental characteristics of the operator. It was a far more attractive course to accept the Protestant doctrine as a whole from the lips of Calvin, the Genevan reformer, who had drawn up a whole system of dogmatic theology and had supported it by a thoroughly organised eccle

I

СНАР.

VI.

§ 12. The Religious Difficulty a the AccesElizabeth.

sion of

СНАР.

VI.

13. The Eliza

bethan Com promise.

siastical system; especially as it happened that a con-
siderable number of the reformed clergy, who had gone
into exile during Mary's reign, had fallen at Frankfort
under the influences of Calvinism, and were dissatisfied
even with the last revision of the Prayer-Book which
had been made under Cranmer's guidance at the close
of Edward's reign. In the Calvinistic churches the
theory that nothing was to be accepted but that which
could be proved from scripture to be true was opposed
to the theory of the English reformers, that nothing was
to be rejected which could not be proved by scripture
to be false, and gained a hold upon men by the logical
completeness of Calvin's system. They opened the
Bible to find there above all things the doctrine of pre-
destination, and the presbyterian institutions. In the
Genevan Church the ministers, supporting themselves on
the democracy of the congregations, in reality swayed
the congregations by the authority of their teaching.

Naturally Elizabeth felt ill at ease between these
rival systems. The Catholics would look first to the
pope and only secondarily to herself. The Calvinist
would pay her respect so far as she favoured the growth
of his special form of religion. Nor was this all. The
Catholic expected her to suppress and persecute the
Calvinist. The Calvinist expected her to suppress and
persecute the Catholic. It was here that her private

interest coincided with the interest of the nation at
large. It would have been a great calamity if England
had been divided into hostile parties opposing one
another to the death, like the factions by which France
was for half-a-century to be miserably distracted. It
was this consideration which formed. the justification
of Elizabeth in taking the Church into her own hand.
The episcopal constitution was maintained as a means
by which she might keep the clergy in order. But

she was too wise to attempt, and too little of a theologian to wish to reduce the doctrine taught by them to a narrow and consistent orthodoxy. The work done by Cranmer in the days of her father and her brother had laid the foundations of a wider and more comprehensive teaching. The habit of taking all that existed for granted till it was proved to be untrue, on the one hand gave encouragement to intellectual vigour, and on the other hand left free scope to the various mental and spiritual tendencies of the Englishmen of the day. In the outward forms and ceremonies of the Elizabethan Church, its clinging to the old words and to many of the old thoughts, there was that which would attract those who were half Catholics in heart, whilst by its spirit of personal religion, its careful cherishing of individual responsibility, its honour paid to domestic life by its permission to the marriage of the clergy, as well as by the tone of its doctrinal articles, it would attract those who were inclined to Calvinism without being thorough going disciples of the Genevan reformer.

CHAP.

VI.

bethan

Such a compromise would have had no chance of $14. The establishing itself if all men in England had been Elizareligious, and if those who were religious had thought Commonof nothing but religion. In point of fact, there were wealth. many men who cared for the greatness of the State and for the independence of the nation far more than they cared for the prevalence of one doctrine rather than of another, and a far larger number of men who were willing that a government should allow what doctrines it pleased to be taught, provided that it secured peace and plenty to the community. In this way an ecclesiastical system, weak in ecclesiastical support, was strengthened by all the forces of a government which was popular upon other grounds than its religious views, and held its ground till it had lasted long enough to avail

CHAP.
VI.

$15. Elizabeth on

her Defence against the

itself of the strength given by the respect which surrounds all institutions to which men have been long accustomed. Nor was it only upon a mere calculation of advantages that the Church maintained its footing. The protection of the Church by the State, which is a weakness in our own days, was a strength in the days of Elizabeth. To those who were neither Catholics nor Calvinists, the predominance of the Commonwealth over every other form of association formed an ideal which was almost a religion, and of this Commonwealth the queen herself became the embodiment. The homage, absurd as it came to be, which was paid to the imaginary beauties of the royal person was in the main only an expression of the consciousness that peace and justice, the punishment of wickedness. and vice, and the maintenance of good order and virtue, came primarily from the queen and secondarily from the Church. If Englishmen were not flying in one another's faces, and driving swords through one another's bodies, it was to the queen that this happy result was owing. Her strength lay in her representative character. She claimed the powers which she exercised in her owr right, but she was able to employ them because sh exercised them in the name not of a party, but of the State.

It was impossible that a compromise so prepared should be equally satisfactory to all. The great secular conflict of the age was the conflict between the jurisdiction of the temporal princes and the jurisdiction of the pope. To take her part in this, Elizabeth would have been obliged, even if she had not wished to do so, to lean towards the Protestants. The English Protestants had no help to expect from their brethren on the Continent, and were therefore obliged to trust for support entirely to themselves. The English Catholics belonged to a