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 association 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 institutions. 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 asserted 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 classes of offenders, to death.338 They claimed to their ecclesiastical assemblies 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 passages 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 passing in Scotland, where they received a practical illustration. 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 assembly 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 assembly substituted 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 assembly 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 principal 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 multitude 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 petition 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 petitioning.
A new parliament having been assembled, soon after Whitgift on his elevation to the primacy had begun to enforce an universal conformity, the lower house drew up a petition 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 petition, 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 assent, 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 assent, manifest the sense of that assembly, and in all likelihood of their constituents. 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 passed 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 assertion 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