Constitutional History of England Volume I Part 14

The gentry of Kent and other countries strongly interposed in their behalf. They had powerful friends at court, especially Knollys, who wrote a warm letter to the archbishop.[318] But, secure of the queen's support, who was now chiefly under the influence of Sir Christopher Hatton, a decided enemy to the puritans, Whitgift relented not a jot of his resolution, and went far greater lengths than Parker had ever ventured, or perhaps had desired, to proceed.

_High commission court._--The Act of Supremacy, while it restored all ecclesiastical jurisdiction to the Crown, empowered the queen to execute it by commissioners appointed under the great seal, in such manner and for such time as she should direct; whose power should extend to visit, correct, and amend all heresies, schisms, abuses, and offences whatever, which fall under the cognisance and are subject to the correction of spiritual authority. Several temporary commissions had sat under this act with continually augmented powers, before that appointed in 1583, wherein the jurisdiction of this anomalous court almost reached its zenith. It consisted of forty-four commissioners, twelve of whom were bishops, many more privy-counsellors, and the rest either clergymen or civilians. This commission, after reciting the acts of supremacy, uniformity, and two others, directs them to inquire from time to time, as well by the oaths of twelve good and lawful men, as by witnesses and all other means they can devise, of all offences, contempts, or misdemeanours done and committed contrary to the tenor of the said several acts and statutes; and also to inquire of all heretical opinions, seditious books, contempts, conspiracies, false rumours or talk, slanderous words and sayings, etc., contrary to the aforesaid laws. Power is given to any three commissioners, of whom one must be a bishop, to punish all persons absent from church, according to the Act of Uniformity, or to visit and reform heresies and schisms according to law; to deprive all beneficed persons holding any doctrine contrary to the thirty-nine articles; to punish incests, adulteries, and all offences of the kind; to examine all suspected persons on their oaths, and to punish all who should refuse to appear or to obey their orders, by spiritual censure or by discretionary fine or imprisonment; to alter and amend the statutes of colleges, cathedrals, schools, and other foundations, and to tender the oath of supremacy according to the act of parliament.[319]

Master of such tremendous machinery, the archbishop proceeded to call into action one of its powers contained for the first time in the present commission, by tendering what was technically styled the oath _ex officio_, to such of the clergy as were surmised to harbour a spirit of puritanical disaffection. This procedure, which was wholly founded on the canon law, consisted in a series of interrogations, so comprehensive as to embrace the whole scope of clerical uniformity, yet so precise and minute as to leave no room for evasion, to which the suspected party was bound to answer upon oath.[320] So repugnant was this to the rules of our English law, and to the principles of natural equity, that no species of ecclesiastical tyranny seems to have excited so much indignation.

_Lord Burleigh averse to severity._--Lord Burleigh, who, though at first rather friendly to Whitgift, was soon disgusted by his intolerant and arbitrary behaviour, wrote in strong terms of remonstrance against these articles of examination, as "so curiously penned, so full of branches and circ.u.mstances, as he thought the inquisitors of Spain used not so many questions to comprehend and to trap their preys." The primate replied by alleging reasons in behalf of the mode of examination, but very frivolous, and such as a man determined to persevere in an unwarrantable course of action may commonly find.[321] They had little effect on the calm and sagacious mind of the treasurer, who continued to express his dissatisfaction, both individually and as one of the privy council.[322] But the extensive jurisdiction improvidently granted to the ecclesiastical commissioners, and which the queen was not at all likely to recall, placed Whitgift beyond the control of the temporal administration.

The Archbishop, however, did not stand alone in this impracticable endeavour to overcome the stubborn sectaries by dint of hard usage.

Several other bishops were engaged in the same uncharitable course;[323] but especially Aylmer of London, who has left a worse name in this respect than any prelate of Elizabeth's reign.[324] The violence of Aylmer's temper was not redeemed by many virtues; it is impossible to exonerate his character from the imputations of covetousness and of plundering the revenues of his see; faults very prevalent among the bishops of that period. The privy council wrote sometimes to expostulate with Aylmer, in a tone which could hardly have been employed towards a man in his station who had not forfeited the general esteem. Thus, upon occasion of one Benison, whom he had imprisoned without cause, we find a letter signed by Burleigh, Leicester, Walsingham, and even Hatton, besides several others, urging the bishop to give the man a sum of money, since he would recover damages at law, which might hurt his lordship's credit. Aylmer, however, who was of a stout disposition, especially when his purse was interested, objected strongly to this suggestion, offering rather to confer on Benison a small living, or to let him take his action at law. The result does not appear; but probably the bishop did not yield.[325] He had worse success in an information laid against him for felling his woods, which ended not only in an injunction, but a sharp reprimand from Cecil in the star-chamber.[326]

What Lord Burleigh thought of these proceedings may be seen in the memorial to the queen on matters of religion and state, from which I have, in the last chapter, made an extract to show the tolerance of his disposition with respect to catholics. Protesting that he was not in the least addicted to the preciser sort of preachers, he declares himself "bold to think that the bishops, in these dangerous times, take a very ill and unadvised course in driving them from their cures;" first, because it must discredit the reputation of her majesty's power, when foreign princes should perceive that even among her protestant subjects, in whom consisted all her force, strength, and power, there was so great a heart-burning and division; and secondly, "because," he says, "though they were over squeamish and nice in their opinions, and more scrupulous than they need; yet with their careful catechising and diligent preaching, they bring forth that fruit which your most excellent majesty is to desire and wish; namely, the lessening and diminishing the papistical numbers."[327] But this great minister's knowledge of the queen's temper, and excessive anxiety to retain her favour, made him sometimes fearful to act according to his own judgment.

"It is well known," Lord Bacon says of him, in a treatise published in 1591, "that as to her majesty, there was never a counsellor of his lordship's long continuance that was so appliable to her majesty's princely resolutions, endeavouring always after faithful propositions and remonstrances, and these in the best words and the most grateful manner, to rest upon such conclusions as her majesty in her own wisdom determineth, and them to execute to the best; so far hath he been from contestation, or drawing her majesty into any of his own courses."[328]

Statesmen who betray this unfortunate infirmity of clinging too fondly to power, become the slaves of the princes they serve. Burleigh used to complain of the harshness with which the queen treated him.[329] And though, more lucky than most of his cla.s.s, he kept the white staff of treasurer down to his death, he was reduced in his latter years to court a rising favourite more submissively than became his own dignity.[330]

From such a disposition we could not expect any decided resistance to those measures of severity towards the puritans which fell in so entirely with Elizabeth's temper.

There is no middle course, in dealing with religious sectaries, between the persecution that exterminates, and the toleration that satisfies.

They were wise in their generation, the Loaisas and Valdes of Spain, who kindled the fires of the inquisition, and quenched the rising spirit of protestantism in the blood of a Seso and a Cazalla. But sustained by the favouring voice of his a.s.sociates, and still more by that firm persuasion which bigots never know how to appreciate in their adversaries, a puritan minister set at nought the vexatious and arrogant tribunal before which he was summoned. Exasperated, not overawed, the sectaries threw off what little respect they had hitherto paid to the hierarchy. They had learned, in the earlier controversies of the reformation, the use, or, more truly, the abuse, of that powerful lever of human bosoms, the press. He who in Saxony had sounded the first trumpet-peal against the battlements of Rome, had often turned aside from his graver labours to excite the rude pa.s.sions of the populace by low ribaldry and exaggerated invective; nor had the English reformers ever scrupled to win proselytes by the same arts. What had been accounted holy zeal in the mitred Bale and martyred Latimer, might plead some apology from example in the aggrieved puritan. Pamphlets, chiefly anonymous, were rapidly circulated throughout the kingdom, inveighing against the prelacy. Of these libels the most famous went under the name of Martin Mar-prelate, a vizored knight of those lists, behind whose shield a host of st.u.r.dy puritans were supposed to fight. These were printed at a movable press, shifted to different parts of the country as the pursuit grew hot, and contained little serious argument, but the unwarrantable invectives of angry men, who stuck at no calumny to blacken their enemies.[331] If these insults upon authority are apt sometimes to shock us even now, when long usage has rendered such licentiousness of seditious and profligate libellers almost our daily food, what must they have seemed in the reign of Elizabeth, when the press had no acknowledged liberty, and while the accustomed tone in addressing those in power was little better than servile adulation?

A law had been enacted some years before, levelled at the books dispersed by the seminary priests, which rendered the publication of seditious libels against the queen's government a capital felony.[332]

This act, by one of those strained constructions which the judges were commonly ready to put upon any political crime, was brought to bear on some of these puritanical writings. The authors of Martin Mar-prelate could not be traced with certainty; but strong suspicions having fallen on one Penry, a young Welshman, he was tried some time after for another pamphlet, containing some sharp reflections on the queen herself, and received sentence of death, which it was thought proper to carry into execution.[333] Udal, a puritan minister, fell into the grasp of the same statute for an alleged libel on the bishops, which had surely a very indirect reference to the queen's administration. His trial, like most other political trials of the age, disgraces the name of English justice. It consisted mainly in a pitiful attempt by the court to entrap him into a confession that the imputed libel was of his writing, as to which their proof was deficient. Though he avoided this snare, the jury did not fail to obey the directions they received to convict him. So far from being concerned in Martin's writings, Udal professed his disapprobation of them and his ignorance of the author. This sentence appeared too iniquitous to be executed even in the eyes of Whitgift, who interceded for his life; but he died of the effects of confinement.[334]

_Attempt to set up a Presbyterian system._--If the libellous pen of Martin Mar-prelate was a thorn to the rulers of the church, they had still more cause to take alarm at an overt measure of revolution which the discontented party began to effect about the year 1590. They set up, by common agreement, their own platform of government by synods and cla.s.ses; the former being a sort of general a.s.semblies, the latter held in particular shires or dioceses, agreeably to the presbyterian model established in Scotland. In these meetings debates were had, and determinations usually made, sufficiently unfavourable to the established system. The ministers composing them subscribed to the puritan book of discipline. These a.s.sociations had been formed in several counties, but chiefly in those of Northampton and Warwick, under the direction of Cartwright, the legislator of their republic, who possessed, by the Earl of Leicester's patronage, the mastership of a hospital in the latter town.[335] It would be unjust to censure the archbishop for interfering to protect the discipline of his church against these innovators, had but the means adopted for that purpose been more consonant to equity. Cartwright with several of his sect were summoned before the ecclesiastical commission; where refusing to inculpate themselves by taking the oath _ex officio_, they were committed to the Fleet. This punishment not satisfying the rigid churchmen, and the authority of the ecclesiastical commission being incompetent to inflict any heavier judgment, it was thought fit the next year to remove the proceedings into the court of star-chamber. The judges, on being consulted, gave it as their opinion, that since far less crimes had been punished by condemnation to the galleys or perpetual banishment, the latter would be fittest for their offence. But several of the council had more tender regards to sincere, though intractable, men; and in the end they were admitted to bail upon a promise to be quiet, after answering some interrogatories respecting the queen's supremacy and other points, with civility and an evident wish to avoid offence.[336] It may be observed that Cartwright explicitly declared his disapprobation of the libels under the name of Martin Mar-prelate.[337] Every political party, however honourable may be its objects and character, is liable to be disgraced by the a.s.sociation of such unscrupulous zealots. But, though it is an uncandid sophism to charge the leaders with the excesses they profess to disapprove in their followers, it must be confessed that few chiefs of faction have had the virtue to condemn with sufficient energy the misrepresentations which are intended for their benefit.

It was imputed to the puritan faction with more or less of truth, that, not content with the subversion of episcopacy and of the whole ecclesiastical polity established in the kingdom, they maintained principles that would essentially affect its civil inst.i.tutions. Their denial indeed of the queen's supremacy, carried to such lengths as I have shown above, might justly be considered as a derogation of her temporal sovereignty. Many of them a.s.serted the obligation of the judicial law of Moses, at least in criminal cases; and deduced from this the duty of putting idolaters (that is, papists), adulterers, witches and demoniacs, sabbath-breakers, and several other cla.s.ses of offenders, to death.[338] They claimed to their ecclesiastical a.s.semblies the right of determining "all matters wherein breach of charity may be, and all matters of doctrine and manners, so far as appertaineth to conscience."

They took away the temporal right of patronage to churches, leaving the choice of ministers to general suffrage.[339] There are even pa.s.sages in Cartwright's Admonition, which intimate that the commonwealth ought to be fashioned after the model of the church.[340] But these it would not be candid to press against the more explicit declarations of all the puritans in favour of a limited monarchy, though they grounded its legitimacy on the republican principles of popular consent.[341] And with respect to the former opinions, they appear to have been by no means common to the whole puritan body; some of the deprived and imprisoned ministers even acknowledging the queen's supremacy in as full a manner as the law conferred it on her, and as she professed to claim it.[342]

The pretensions advanced by the school of Cartwright did not seem the less dangerous to those who cast their eyes upon what was pa.s.sing in Scotland, where they received a practical ill.u.s.tration. In that kingdom, a form of polity very nearly conforming to the puritanical platform had become established at the reformation of 1560; except that the office of bishop or superintendent still continued, but with no paramount, far less arbitrary dominion, and subject even to the provincial synod, much more to the general a.s.sembly of the Scottish church. Even this very limited episcopacy was abolished in 1592. The presbyterian clergy, individually and collectively, displayed the intrepid, haughty, and untractable spirit of the English puritans. Though Elizabeth had from policy abetted the Scottish clergy in their attacks upon the civil administration, this connection itself had probably given her such an insight into their temper as well as their influence, that she must have shuddered at the thought of seeing a republican a.s.sembly subst.i.tuted for those faithful satraps, her bishops, so ready to do her bidding, and so patient under the hard usage she sometimes bestowed on them.

_House of Commons averse to episcopal authority._--These prelates did not however obtain so much support from the House of Commons as from their sovereign. In that a.s.sembly a determined band of puritans frequently carried the victory against the courtiers. Every session exhibited proofs of their dissatisfaction with the state of the church.

The Crown's influence would have been too weak without stretches of its prerogative. The Commons in 1575 received a message forbidding them to meddle with religious concerns. For five years afterwards the queen did not convoke parliament, of which her dislike to their puritanical temper might in all probability be the chief reason. But, when they met again in 1580, the same topic of ecclesiastical grievances, which had by no means abated during the interval, was revived. The Commons appointed a committee, formed only of the princ.i.p.al officers of the Crown who sat in the house, to confer with some of the bishops, according to the irregular and imperfect course of parliamentary proceedings in that age, "touching the griefs of this house for some things very requisite to be reformed in the church, as the great number of unlearned and unable ministers, the great abuse of excommunications for every matter of small moment, the commutation of penances, and the great mult.i.tude of dispensations and pluralities, and other things very hurtful to the church."[343] The committee reported that they found some of the bishops desirous of a remedy for the abuses they confessed, and of joining in a pet.i.tion for that purpose to her majesty; which had accordingly been done, and a gracious answer, promising all convenient reformation, by laying the blame of remissness upon some prelates, had been received. This the house took with great thankfulness. It was exactly the course which pleased Elizabeth, who had no regard for her bishops, and a real anxiety that her ecclesiastical as well as temporal government should be well administered, provided her subjects would intrust the sole care of it to herself, or limit their interference to modest pet.i.tioning.

A new parliament having been a.s.sembled, soon after Whitgift on his elevation to the primacy had begun to enforce an universal conformity, the lower house drew up a pet.i.tion in sixteen articles, to which they requested the Lords' concurrence, complaining of the oath _ex officio_, the subscription to the three new articles, the abuses of excommunication, licences for non-residence, and other ecclesiastical grievances. The Lords replied coolly, that they conceived many of those articles, which the Commons had proposed, to be unnecessary, and that others of them were already provided for; and that the uniformity of the common prayer, the use of which the Commons had requested to leave in certain respects to the minister's discretion, had been established by parliament. The two archbishops, Whitgift and Sandys, made a more particular answer to each article of the pet.i.tion, in the name of their brethren.[344] But, in order to show some willingness towards reformation, they proposed themselves in convocation a few regulations for redress of abuses, none of which, however, on this occasion, though they received the royal a.s.sent, were submitted to the legislature;[345]

the queen in fact maintaining an insuperable jealousy of all intermeddling on the part of parliament with her exclusive supremacy over the church. Excluded by Elizabeth's jealousy from entertaining these religious innovations, which would probably have met no unfavourable reception from a free parliament, the Commons vented their ill-will towards the dominant hierarchy in complaints of ecclesiastical grievances, and measures to redress them; as to which, even with the low notions of parliamentary right prevailing at court, it was impossible to deny their competence. Several bills were introduced this session of 1584-5 into the lower house, which, though they had little chance of receiving the queen's a.s.sent, manifest the sense of that a.s.sembly, and in all likelihood of their const.i.tuents. One of these imported that bishops should be sworn in one of the courts of justice to do nothing in their office contrary to the common law. Another went to restrain pluralities, as to which the prelates would very reluctantly admit of any limitation.[346] A bill of the same nature pa.s.sed the Commons in 1589, though not without some opposition. The clergy took so great alarm at this measure, that the convocation addressed the queen in vehement language against it; and the archbishop throwing all the weight of his advice and authority into the same scale, the bill expired in the upper house.[347] A similar proposition in the session of 1601 seems to have miscarried in the Commons.[348] In the next chapter will be found other instances of the Commons' reforming temper in ecclesiastical concerns, and the queen's determined a.s.sertion of her supremacy.

The oath _ex officio_, binding the taker to answer all questions that should be put to him, inasmuch as it contravened the generous maxim of English law that no one is obliged to criminate himself, provoked very just animadversion. Morice, attorney of the court of wards, not only attacked its legality with arguments of no slight force, but introduced a bill to take it away. This was on the whole well received by the house; and Sir Francis Knollys, the stanch enemy of episcopacy, though in high office, spoke in its favour. But the queen put a stop to the proceeding, and Morice lay some time in prison for his boldness. The civilians, of whom several sat in the lower house, defended a mode of procedure that had been borrowed from their own jurisprudence. This revived the ancient animosity between them and the common lawyers. The latter had always manifested a great jealousy of the spiritual jurisdiction, and had early learned to restrain its exorbitances by writs of prohibition from the temporal courts. Whitgift, as tenacious of power as the most ambitious of his predecessors, murmured like them at this subordination, for such it evidently was, to a lay tribunal.[349]

But the judges, who found as much gratification in exerting their power as the bishops, paid little regard to the remonstrances of the latter.

We find the reports of this and the succeeding reign full of cases of prohibition. Nor did other abuses imputed to these obnoxious judicatures fail to provoke censure, such as the unreasonable fees of their officers, and the usage of granting licences, and commuting penances for money.[350] The ecclesiastical courts indeed have generally been reckoned more dilatory, vexatious, and expensive than those of the common law. But in the present age that part of their jurisdiction, which, though coercive, is professedly spiritual, and wherein the greatest abuses have been alleged to exist, has gone very much into disuse. In matrimonial and testamentary causes, their course of proceeding may not be open to any censure, so far as the essential administration of justice is concerned; though in the latter of these, a most inconvenient division of jurisdictions, following not only the unequal boundaries of episcopal dioceses, but the various peculiars or exempt districts which the church of England has continued to retain, is productive of a good deal of trouble and needless expense.

_Independents liable to severe laws._--Notwithstanding the tendency towards puritanism which the House of Commons generally displayed, the court succeeded in procuring an act, which eventually pressed with very great severity upon that cla.s.s. This pa.s.sed in 1593, and enacted the penalty of imprisonment against any person above the age of sixteen, who should forbear for the s.p.a.ce of a month to repair to some church, until he should make such open submission and declaration of conformity as the act appoints. Those who refused to submit to these conditions were to abjure the realm, and if they should return without the queen's licence, to suffer death as felons.[351] As this, on the one hand, like so many former statutes, helped to crush the unfortunate adherents to the Romish faith, so too did it bear an obvious application to such protestant sectaries as had professedly separated from the Anglican church. But it is here worthy of remark, that the puritan ministers throughout this reign disclaimed the imputation of schism, and acknowledged the lawfulness of continuing in the established church, while they demanded a further reformation of her discipline.[352] The real separatists, who were also a numerous body, were denominated Brownists or Barrowists, from the names of their founders, afterwards lost in the more general appellation of Independents. These went far beyond the puritans in their aversion to the legal ministry, and were deemed in consequence still more proper subjects for persecution. Mult.i.tudes of them fled to Holland from the rigour of the bishops in enforcing this statute.[353] But two of this persuasion, Barrow and Greenwood, experienced a still severer fate. They were indicted on that perilous law of the 23rd of the queen, mentioned in the last chapter, for spreading seditious writings, and executed at Bury. They died, Neal tells us, with such expressions of piety and loyalty that Elizabeth regretted the consent she had given to their deaths.[354]

_Hooker's "Ecclesiastical Polity." Its character._--But, while these scenes of pride and persecution on one hand, and of sectarian insolence on the other, were deforming the bosom of the English church, she found a defender of her inst.i.tutions in one who mingled in these vulgar controversies like a knight of romance among caitiff brawlers, with arms of finer temper and worthy to be proved in a n.o.bler field. Richard Hooker, master of the Temple, published the first four books of his _Ecclesiastical Polity_ in 1594; the fifth three years afterwards; and dying in 1600, left behind three which did not see the light till 1647.

This eminent work may justly be reckoned to mark an aera in our literature. For if pa.s.sages of much good sense and even of a vigorous eloquence are scattered in several earlier writers in prose, yet none of these, except perhaps Latimer and Ascham, and Sir Philip Sidney in his _Arcadia_, can be said to have acquired enough reputation to be generally known even by name, much less are read in the present day; and it is indeed not a little remarkable that England, until near the end of the sixteenth century, had given few proofs in literature of that intellectual power which was about to develop itself with such unmatchable energy in Shakspeare and Bacon. We cannot indeed place Hooker (but whom dare we to place?) by the side of these master spirits; yet he has abundant claims to be counted among the luminaries of English literature. He not only opened the mine, but explored the depths, of our native eloquence. So stately and graceful is the march of his periods, so various the fall of his musical cadences upon the ear, so rich in images, so condensed in sentences, so grave and n.o.ble his diction, so little is there of vulgarity in his racy idiom, of pedantry in his learned phrase, that I know not whether any later writer has more admirably displayed the capacities of our language, or produced pa.s.sages more worthy of comparison with the splendid monuments of antiquity. If we compare the first book of the _Ecclesiastical Polity_ with what bears perhaps most resemblance to it of any thing extant, the treatise of Cicero de Legibus, it will appear somewhat perhaps inferior, through the imperfection of our language, which with all its force and dignity does not equal the Latin in either of these qualities, and certainly more tedious and diffuse in some of its reasonings, but by no means less high-toned in sentiment, or less bright in fancy, and far more comprehensive and profound in the foundations of its philosophy.

The advocates of a presbyterian church had always thought it sufficient to prove that it was conformable to the apostolical scheme as deduced merely from the scriptures. A pious reverence for the sacred writings, which they made almost their exclusive study, had degenerated into very narrow views on the great themes of natural religion and the moral law, as deducible from reason and sentiment. These, as most of the various families of their descendants continue to do, they greatly slighted, or even treated as the mere chimeras of heathen philosophy. If they looked to the Mosaic law as the standard of criminal jurisprudence, if they sought precedents from scripture for all matters of temporal policy, much more would they deem the practice of the apostles an unerring and immutable rule for the discipline of the Christian church.[355] To encounter these adversaries, Hooker took a far more original course than the ordinary controvertists, who fought their battle with conflicting interpretations of scriptural texts or pa.s.sages from the fathers. He enquired into the nature and foundation of law itself as the rule of operation to all created beings, yielding thereto obedience by unconscious necessity, or sensitive appet.i.te, or reasonable choice; reviewing especially those laws that regulate human agency, as they arise out of moral relations, common to our species, or the inst.i.tutions of politic societies, or the inter-community of independent nations; and having thoroughly established the fundamental distinction between laws natural and positive, eternal and temporary, immutable and variable, he came with all this strength of moral philosophy to discriminate by the same criterion the various rules and precepts contained in the scriptures. It was a kind of maxim among the puritans, that scripture was so much the exclusive rule of human actions, that whatever, in matters at least concerning religion, could not be found to have its authority, was unlawful. Hooker devoted the whole second book of his work to the refutation of this principle. He proceeded afterwards to attack its application more particularly to the episcopal scheme of church government, and to the various ceremonies or usages which those sectaries treated as either absolutely superst.i.tious, or at least as impositions without authority. It was maintained by this great writer, not only that ritual observances are variable according to the discretion of ecclesiastical rulers, but that no certain form of polity is set down in scripture as generally indispensable for a Christian church. Far, however, from conceding to his antagonists the fact which they a.s.sumed, he contended for episcopacy as an apostolical inst.i.tution, and always preferable, when circ.u.mstances would allow its preservation, to the more democratical model of the Calvinistic congregations. "If we did seek," he says, "to maintain that which most advantageth our own cause, the very best way for us and the strongest against them were to hold, even as they do, that in scripture there must needs be found some particular form of church polity which G.o.d hath inst.i.tuted, and which for that very cause belongeth to all churches at all times. But with any such partial eye to respect ourselves, and by cunning to make those things seem the truest, which are the fittest to serve our purpose, is a thing which we neither like nor mean to follow."

The richness of Hooker's eloquence is chiefly displayed in his first book; beyond which perhaps few who want a taste for ecclesiastical reading are likely to proceed. The second and third, however, though less brilliant, are not inferior in the force and comprehensiveness of reasoning. The eighth and last returns to the subject of civil government, and expands, with remarkable liberality, the principles he had laid down as to its nature in the first book. Those that intervene are mostly confined to a more minute discussion of the questions mooted between the church and puritans; and in these, as far as I have looked into them, though Hooker's argument is always vigorous and logical, and he seems to be exempt from that abusive insolence to which polemical writers were then even more p.r.o.ne than at present, yet he has not altogether the terseness or lucidity, which long habits of literary warfare, and perhaps a natural turn of mind, have given to some expert dialecticians. In respect of language, the three posthumous books, partly from having never received the author's last touches, and partly, perhaps, from his weariness of the labour, are beyond comparison less elegantly written than the preceding.

The better parts of the _Ecclesiastical Polity_ bear a resemblance to the philosophical writings of antiquity, in their defects as well as their excellencies. Hooker is often too vague in the use of general terms, too inconsiderate in the admission of principles, too apt to acquiesce in the scholastic pseudo-philosophy, and indeed in all received tenets; he is comprehensive rather than sagacious, and more fitted to sift the truth from the stores of acc.u.mulated learning than to seize it by an original impulse of his own mind; somewhat also impeded, like many other great men of that and the succeeding century, by too much acquaintance with books, and too much deference for their authors.

It may be justly objected to some pa.s.sages, that they elevate ecclesiastical authority, even in matters of belief, with an exaggeration not easily reconciled to the protestant right of private judgment, and even of dangerous consequence in those times; as when he inclines to give a decisive voice in theological controversies to general councils; not indeed on the principles of the church of Rome, but on such as must end in the same conclusion, the high probability that the aggregate judgment of many grave and learned men should be well founded.[356] Nor would it be difficult to point out several other subjects, such as religious toleration, as to which he did not emanc.i.p.ate himself from the trammels of prejudice. But, whatever may be the imperfections of his _Ecclesiastical Polity_, they are far more than compensated by its eloquence and its reasoning, and above all by that deep pervading sense of the relation between man and his Creator, as the groundwork of all eternal law, which rendered the first book of this work a rampart, on the one hand against the puritan school who shunned the light of nature as a deceitful meteor; and on the other against that immoral philosophy which, displayed in the dark precepts of Machiavel, or lurking in the desultory sallies of Montaigne, and not always rejected by writers of more apparent seriousness, threatened to destroy the sense of intrinsic distinctions in the quality of actions, and to convert the maxims of state-craft and dissembling policy into the rule of life and manners.

Nothing perhaps is more striking to a reader of the _Ecclesiastical Polity_ than the constant and almost excessive predilection of Hooker for those liberal principles of civil government, which are sometimes so just and always so attractive. Upon these subjects, his theory absolutely coincides with that of Locke. The origin of government, both in right and in fact, he explicitly derives from a primary contract; "without which consent, there were no reason that one should take upon him to be lord or judge over another; because, although there be, according to the opinion of some very great and judicious men, a kind of natural right in the n.o.ble, wise, and virtuous, to govern them which are of servile disposition; nevertheless, for manifestation of this their right, and men's more peaceable contentment on both sides, the a.s.sent of them who are to be governed seemeth necessary." "The lawful power," he observes elsewhere, "of making laws to command whole politic societies of men, belongeth so properly unto the same entire societies, that for any prince or potentate of what kind soever upon earth to exercise the same of himself, and not either by express commission immediately and personally received from G.o.d, or else by authority received at first from their consent upon whose persons they impose laws, it is no better than mere tyranny. Laws they are not, therefore, which public approbation hath not made so. But approbation not only they give, who personally declare their a.s.sent by voice, sign, or act; but also when others do it in their names, by right originally, at the least, derived from them. As in parliaments, councils, and the like a.s.semblies, although we be not personally ourselves present, notwithstanding our a.s.sent is by reason of other agents there in our behalf. And what we do by others, no reason but that it should stand as our deed, no less effectually to bind us, than if ourselves had done it in person." And in another place still more peremptorily: "Of this thing no man doubteth, namely, that in all societies, companies, and corporations, what severally each shall be bound unto, it must be with all their a.s.sents ratified. Against all equity it were that a man should suffer detriment at the hands of men, for not observing that which he never did either by himself or others mediately or immediately agree unto."

These notions respecting the basis of political society, so far unlike what prevailed among the next generation of churchmen, are chiefly developed and dwelt upon in Hooker's concluding book, the eighth; and gave rise to a rumour, very sedulously propagated soon after the time of its publication, and still sometimes repeated, that the posthumous portion of his work had been interpolated or altered by the puritans.[357] For this surmise, however, I am persuaded that there is no foundation. The three latter books are doubtless imperfect, and it is possible that verbal changes may have been made by their transcribers or editors; but the testimony that has been brought forward to throw a doubt over their authenticity consists in those vague and self-contradictory stories, which gossiping compilers of literary anecdote can easily acc.u.mulate; while the intrinsic evidence arising from the work itself, on which, in this branch of criticism, I am apt chiefly to rely, seems altogether to repel every suspicion. For not only the principles of civil government, presented in a more expanded form by Hooker in the eighth book, are precisely what he laid down in the first; but there is a peculiar chain of consecutive reasoning running through it, wherein it would be difficult to point out any pa.s.sages that could be rejected without dismembering the context. It was his business in this part of the _Ecclesiastical Polity_, to vindicate the queen's supremacy over the church: and this he has done by identifying the church with the commonwealth; no one, according to him, being a member of the one who was not also a member of the other. But as the const.i.tution of the Christian church, so far as the laity partook in its government, by choice of pastors or otherwise, was undeniably democratical, he laboured to show, through the medium of the original compact of civil society, that the sovereign had received this, as well as all other powers, at the hands of the people. "Laws being made among us," he affirms, "are not by any of us so taken or interpreted, as if they did receive their force from power which the prince doth communicate unto the parliament, or unto any other court under him, but from power which the whole body of the realm being naturally possessed with, hath by free and deliberate a.s.sent derived unto him that ruleth over them so far forth as hath been declared; so that our laws made concerning religion do take originally their essence from the power of the whole realm and church of England."

In this system of Hooker and Locke, for it will be obvious to the reader that their principles were the same, there is much, if I am not mistaken, to disapprove. That no man can be justly bound by laws which his own a.s.sent has not ratified, appears to me a position incompatible with the existence of society in its literal sense, or illusory in the sophistical interpretations by which it is usual to evade its meaning.

It will be more satisfactory and important to remark the views which this great writer entertained of our own const.i.tution, to which he frequently and fearlessly appeals, as the standing ill.u.s.tration of a government restrained by law. "I cannot choose," he says, "but commend highly their wisdom, by whom the foundation of the commonwealth hath been laid; wherein though no manner of person or cause be unsubject unto the king's power, yet so is the power of the king over all, and in all limited, that unto all his proceedings the law itself is a rule. The axioms of our regal government are these: 'Lex facit regem'--the king's grant of any favour made contrary to the law is void;-'Rex nihil potest nisi quod jure potest'--what power the king hath, he hath it by law: the bounds and limits of it are known, the entire community giveth general order by law, how all things publicly are to be done; and the king, as the head thereof, the highest in authority over all, causeth, according to the same law, every particular to be framed and ordered thereby. The whole body politic maketh laws, which laws give power unto the king; and the king having bound himself to use according to law that power, it so falleth out, that the execution of the one is accomplished by the other." These doctrines of limited monarchy recur perpetually in the eighth book; and though Hooker, as may be supposed, does not enter upon the perilous question of resistance, and even intimates that he does not see how the people can limit the extent of power once granted, unless where it escheats to them, yet he positively lays it down, that usurpers of power, that is, lawful rulers arrogating more than the law gives to them, cannot in conscience bind any man to obedience.

It would perhaps have been a deviation from my subject to enlarge so much on these political principles in a writer of any later age, when they had been openly sustained in the councils of the nation. But as the reigns of the Tudor family were so inauspicious to liberty that some have been apt to imagine its recollection to have been almost effaced, it becomes of more importance to show that absolute monarchy was, in the eyes of so eminent an author as Hooker, both pernicious in itself, and contrary to the fundamental laws of the English commonwealth. Nor would such sentiments, we may surely presume, have been avowed by a man of singular humility, and whom we might charge with somewhat of an excessive deference to authority, unless they had obtained more currency, both among divines and lawyers, than the complaisance of courtiers in these two professions might lead us to conclude; Hooker being not p.r.o.ne to deal in paradoxes, nor to borrow from his adversaries that st.u.r.dy republicanism of the school of Geneva which had been their scandal. I cannot indeed but suspect that his whig principles, in the last book, are announced with a temerity that would have startled his superiors; and that its authenticity, however called in question, has been better preserved by the circ.u.mstance of a posthumous publication than if he had lived to give it to the world. Whitgift would probably have induced him to suppress a few pa.s.sages incompatible with the servile theories already in vogue. It is far more usual that an author's genuine sentiments are perverted by means of his friends and patrons than of his adversaries.

_Spoliation of church revenues._--The prelates of the English church, while they inflicted so many severities on others, had not always cause to exult in their own condition. From the time when Henry taught his courtiers to revel in the spoil of monasteries, there had been a perpetual appet.i.te for ecclesiastical possessions. Endowed by a prodigal superst.i.tion with pomp and wealth beyond all reasonable measure, and far beyond what the new system of religion appeared to prescribe, the church of England still excited the covetousness of the powerful, and the scandal of the austere.[358] I have mentioned in another place how the bishoprics were impoverished in the first reformation under Edward VI.

The catholic bishops who followed made haste to plunder, from a consciousness that the goods of their church were speedily to pa.s.s into the hands of heretics.[359] Hence the alienation of their estates had gone so far that in the beginning of Elizabeth's reign statutes were made, disabling ecclesiastical proprietors from granting away their lands, except on leases for three lives, or twenty-one years.[360] But an unfortunate reservation was introduced in favour of the Crown. The queen, therefore, and her courtiers, who obtained grants from her, continued to prey upon their succulent victim. Few of her council imitated the n.o.ble disinterestedness of Walsingham, who spent his own estate in her service, and left not sufficient to pay his debts. The doc.u.ments of that age contain ample proofs of their rapacity. Thus Cecil surrounded his mansion-house at Burleigh with estates, once belonging to the see of Peterborough. Thus Hatton built his house in Holborn on the Bishop of Ely's garden. c.o.x, on making resistance to this spoliation, received a singular epistle from the queen.[361] This bishop, in consequence of such vexations, was desirous of retiring from the see before his death. After that event, Elizabeth kept it vacant eighteen years. During this period we have a pet.i.tion to her from Lord Keeper Puckering, that she would confer it on Scambler, Bishop of Norwich, then eighty-eight years old, and notorious for simony, in order that he might give him a lease of part of the lands.[362] These transactions denote the mercenary and rapacious spirit which leavened almost all Elizabeth's courtiers.

The bishops of this reign do not appear, with some distinguished exceptions, to have reflected so much honour on the established church as those who attach a superst.i.tious reverence to the age of the reformation are apt to conceive. In the plunder that went forward, they took good care of themselves. Charges against them of simony, corruption, covetousness, and especially destruction of their church estates for the benefit of their families, are very common--sometimes no doubt unjust, but too frequent to be absolutely without foundation.[363]

The council often wrote to them, as well as concerning them, with a sort of asperity which would astonish one of their successors. And the queen never restrained herself in treating them on any provocation with a good deal of rudeness, of which I have just mentioned an egregious example.[364] In her speech to parliament on closing the session of 1584, when many complaints against the rulers of the church had rung in her ears, she told the bishops that if they did not amend what was wrong, she meant to depose them.[365] For there seems to have been no question in that age but that this might be done by virtue of the Crown's supremacy.

The church of England was not left by Elizabeth in circ.u.mstances that demanded applause for the policy of her rulers. After forty years of constantly aggravated molestation of the nonconforming clergy, their numbers were become greater, their popularity more deeply rooted, their enmity to the established order more irreconcilable. It was doubtless a problem of no slight difficulty, by what means so obstinate and opinionated a cla.s.s of sectaries could have been managed; nor are we perhaps, at this distance of time, altogether competent to decide upon the fittest course of policy in that respect.[366] But it is manifest that the obstinacy of bold and sincere men is not to be quelled by any punishments that do not exterminate them, and that they were not likely to entertain a less conceit of their own reason when they found no arguments so much relied on to refute it as that of force. Statesmen invariably take a better view of such questions than churchmen; and we may well believe that Cecil and Walsingham judged more sagaciously than Whitgift and Aylmer. The best apology that can be made for Elizabeth's tenaciousness of those ceremonies which produced this fatal contention I have already suggested, without much express authority from the records of that age; namely, the justice and expediency of winning over the catholics to conformity, by retaining as much as possible of their accustomed rites. But in the latter period of the queen's reign, this policy had lost a great deal of its application; or rather the same principle of policy would have dictated numerous concessions in order to satisfy the people. It appears by no means unlikely that, by reforming the abuses and corruption of the spiritual courts, by abandoning a part of their jurisdiction, so heterogeneous and so unduly obtained, by abrogating obnoxious and at best frivolous ceremonies, by restraining pluralities of benefices, by ceasing to discountenance the most diligent ministers, and by more temper and disinterestedness in their own behaviour, the bishops would have palliated, to an indefinite degree, that dissatisfaction with the established scheme of polity, which its want of resemblance to that of other protestant churches must more or less have produced. Such a reformation would at least have contented those reasonable and moderate persons who occupy sometimes a more extensive ground between contending factions than the zealots of either are willing to believe or acknowledge.

_General remarks._--I am very sensible that such freedom as I have used in this chapter cannot be pleasing to such as have sworn allegiance to either the Anglican or the puritan party; and that even candid and liberal minds may be inclined to suspect that I have not sufficiently admitted the excesses of one side to furnish an excuse for those of the other. Such readers I would gladly refer to Lord Bacon's "Advertis.e.m.e.nt touching the Controversies of the Church of England;" a treatise written under Elizabeth, in that tone of dispa.s.sionate philosophy which the precepts of Burleigh sown in his own deep and fertile mind had taught him to apply. This treatise, to which I did not turn my attention in writing the present chapter, appears to coincide in every respect with the views it displays. If he censures the pride and obstinacy of the puritan teachers, their indecent and libellous style of writing, their affected imitation of foreign churches, their extravagance of receding from everything formerly practised, he animadverts with no less plainness on the faults of the episcopal party, on the bad example of some prelates, on their peevish opposition to every improvement, their unjust accusations, their contempt of foreign churches, their persecuting spirit.[367]

_Letter of Walsingham in defence of the queen's government._--Yet that we may not deprive this great queen's administration, in what concerned her dealings with the two religious parties opposed to the established church, of what vindication may best be offered for it, I will refer the reader to a letter of Sir Francis Walsingham, written to a person in France, after the year 1580.[368] It is a very able apology for her government; and if the reader should detect, as he doubtless may, somewhat of sophistry in reasoning, and of mis-statement in matter of fact, he will ascribe both one and the other to the narrow spirit of the age with respect to civil and religious freedom, or to the circ.u.mstances of the writer, an advocate whose sovereign was his client.

FOOTNOTES:

[266] Sleidan, _Hist. de la Reformation_ (par Courayer), ii. 74.

[267] Strype's _Cranmer_, 354.

[268] These transactions have been perpetuated by a tract, ent.i.tled "Discourse of the Troubles at Frankfort," first published in 1575, and reprinted in the well-known collection ent.i.tled _The Phoenix_. It is fairly and temperately written, though with an avowed bias towards the puritan party. Whatever we read in any historian on the subject, is derived from this authority; but the refraction is of course very different through the pages of Collier and of Neal.

[269] Strype, ii. 1. There was a Lutheran party at the beginning of her reign, to which the queen may be said to have inclined, not altogether from religion, but from policy. _Id._ i. 53. Her situation was very hazardous; and in order to connect herself with sincere allies, she had thoughts of joining the Smalcaldic league of the German princes, whose bigotry would admit none but members of the Augsburg confession. Jewel's letters to Peter Martyr, in the appendix to Burnet's third volume, throw considerable light on the first two years of Elizabeth's reign; and show that famous prelate to have been what afterwards would have been called a precisian or puritan. He even approved a scruple Elizabeth entertained about her t.i.tle of head of the church, as appertaining only to Christ.

But the unreasonableness of the discontented party, and the natural tendency of a man who has joined the side of power to deal severely with those he has left, made him afterwards their enemy.

[270] Roods and relics accordingly were broken to pieces and burned throughout the kingdom, of which Collier makes loud complaint. This, Strype says, gave much offence to the catholics; and it was not the most obvious method of inducing them to conform.

[271] Burnet, iii. Appendix, 290; Strype's _Parker_, 46.

[272] Quantum auguror, non scribam ad te posthac episcopus. Eo enim jam res pervenit, ut aut cruces argenteae et stanneae, quas nos ubique confregimus, rest.i.tuendae sint, aut episcopatus relinquendi. Burnet, 294.

Sandys writes, that he had nearly been deprived for expressing himself warmly against images. _Id._ 296. Other proofs of the text may be found in the same collection, as well as in Strype's _Annals_, and his _Life of Parker_. Even Parker seems, on one occasion, to have expected the queen to make such a retrograde movement in religion as would compel them all to disobey her. _Life of Parker_, Appendix, 29; a very remarkable letter.

[273] Strype's _Parker_, 310. The archbishop seems to disapprove this as inexpedient, but rather coldly; he was far from sharing the usual opinions on this subject. A puritan pamphleteer took the liberty to name the queen's chapel as "the pattern and precedent of all superst.i.tion."

Strype's _Annals_, i. 471.

[274] Burnet, ii. 395.

[275] One of the injunctions to the visitors of 1559, reciting the offence and slander to the church that had arisen by lack of discreet and sober behaviour in many ministers, both in choosing of their wives, and in living with them, directs that no priest or deacon shall marry without the allowance of the bishops, and two justices of the peace, dwelling near the woman's abode, nor without the consent of her parents or kinsfolk, or, for want of these, of her master or mistress, on pain of not being permitted to exercise the ministry, or hold any benefice; and that the marriages of bishops should be approved by the metropolitan, and also by commissioners appointed by the queen. _Somers Tracts_, i. 65; Burnet, ii. 398. It is reasonable to suppose, that when a host of low-bred and illiterate priests were at once released from the obligation to celibacy, many of them would abuse their liberty improvidently, or even scandalously; and this probably had increased Elizabeth's prejudice against clerical matrimony. But I do not suppose that this injunction was ever much regarded. Some time afterwards (Aug.

1561) she put forth another extraordinary injunction, that no member of a college or cathedral should have his wife living within its precincts, under pain of forfeiting all his preferments. Cecil sent this to Parker, telling him at the same time that it was with great difficulty he had prevented the queen from altogether forbidding the marriage of priests.

_Life of P._ 107. And the archbishop himself says, in the letter above mentioned, "I was in a horror to hear such words to come from her mild nature and Christianly learned conscience, as she spake concerning G.o.d's holy ordinance and inst.i.tution of matrimony."

[276] Sandys writes to Parker, April 1559, "The queen's majesty will wink at it, but not stablish it by law, which is nothing else but to b.a.s.t.a.r.d our children." And decisive proofs are brought by Strype, that the marriages of the clergy were not held legal, in the first part at least of the queen's reign. Elizabeth herself, after having been sumptuously entertained by the archbishop at Lambeth, took leave of Mrs.