as some of them were violent assailants of the established order. In virtue of a clause in the Act of Supremacy the queen erected a Court of High Commission. Though many laymen were members of the new Court, they seldom attended its sittings, and it was therefore practically managed by bishops and ecclesiastical lawyers. Its business was to enforce conformity on the clergy, and under Whitgift it acted most energetically, driving from their livings and committing to prison clergymen who refused to conform.

14. The House of Commons and Puritanism. 1584.-The severity of the High Commission roused some of the Puritan clergy to attempt-in private meetings-to bring into existence something of the system of Presbyterianism, but the attempt was soon abandoned. Few amongst the Protestant laity had any liking for Presbyterianism, which they regarded as oppressive and intolerant, and it had no deep roots even amongst the Puritan clergy. If many members of the House of Commons were attracted to Puritanism, as opposed to Presbyterianism, it was partly because at the time of a national struggle against Rome, they preferred those amongst the clergy whose views were most antagonistic to those of Rome; but still more because they admired the Puritans as defenders of morality. Not only were the Church courts oppressive and meddlesome, but plain men were disgusted at a system in which ignorant and lazy ministers who conformed to the Prayer Book were left untouched, whilst able and energetic preachers who refused to adopt its ceremonies were silenced.

15. The Separatists.-The desire for a higher standard of morality, which made so many support the Puritan demand for a further reformation of the Church, drove others to denounce the Church as apostate. Robert Browne, a clergyman, was the first to declare in favour of a system which was neither Episcopal nor Presbyterian. He held it to be the duty of all true Christians to separate themselves from the Church, and to form congregations apart, to which only those whose religion and morality were beyond question should be admitted. These separatists, as they called themselves, were known as Brownists in common speech. Unfortunately their zeal made them uncharitably contemptuous of those who were less zealous than themselves, and it was from amongst them that there came forth--beginning in 1588—a series of virulent and libellous attacks on the bishops, known as the Marprelate Tracts, printed anonymously at a secret press. Browne and his followers advocated complete religious liberty-denying the right of the State to interfere with the conscience. The doctrine

ELIZABETHAN ARCHITECTURE

was too advanced for general acceptance, and the violence of the Marprelate Tracts gave offence even to the Puritans. Englishmen might differ as to what sort of church the national church should be, but almost all were as yet agreed that there ought to be one national church and not a number of disconnected sects. In 1593 an act of Parliament was passed imposing punishment on those who attended conventicles or private religious assemblies, and in the course of the year three of the leading separatists-Barrow, Greenwood, and Penry-were hanged, on charges of sedition.

16. Whitgift and Hooker.-The Church of England would certainly not have sustained itself against the Puritans unless it had found a champion of a higher order than Whitgift. Whitgift maintained its organisation, but he did no more. Cranmer, at the beginning of the Reformation, had declared the Bible as interpreted by the writers of the first six centuries to be the test of doctrine, but this assertion had been met during the greater part of Elizabeth's reign, on the one hand by the Catholics, who asserted that the Church of the first six centuries differed much from the Church of England of their day, and on the other hand by the Puritans, who asserted that the testimony of the first six centuries was irrelevant, and that the Bible alone was to be consulted. Whitgift had called both parties to obedience, on the ground that they ought to submit to the queen in indifferent matters. Hooker in the opening of his Ecclesiastical Polity called the Puritans to peace. This unhappy controversy," he declared, "about the received ceremonies and discipline of the Church of England, which hath so long time withdrawn so many of her ministers from their principal work and employed their studies in contentious oppositions, hath, by the unnatural growth and dangerous fruits thereof, made known to the world that it never received blessing from the Father of peace.” Hooker's teaching was distinguished by the importance which he assigned to 'law,' as against the blind acceptance of Papal decisions on the one side and against the Puritan reverence for the letter of the scriptures on the other. The Puritans were wrong, as he taught, not because they disobeyed the queen, but because they did not recognise that God revealed Himself in the natural laws of the world as well as in the letter or Scripture. "Of law," he wrote, "there can be no less acknowledged than that her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world all things in heaven and earth do her homage-the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempted from her power: both angels and men and creatures of what condition

1588-1603

ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE

473

soever though each in different sort and manner, yet all with universal consent--admiring her as the mother of their peace and joy." It was therefore unnecessary, according to Hooker's teaching, to defend certain usages on the ground of their sanction by tradition or by Papal authority, as it was unreasonable to attack them on the ground that they were not mentioned in Scripture. It was sufficient that they were fitting expressions of the feelings of reverence which had been implanted by God in human nature itself.

Coaches in the reign of Elizabeth: from Archæologia

17. Spenser, Shakspere, and Bacon.-With the stately periods of Hooker English prose entered on a new stage. For the first time it sought to charm and to invigorate, as well as to inform the world. In Spenser and Shakspere are to be discerned the same influences as those which made Hooker great. They, too, are filled with reverence for the reign of law. Spenser, in his Faerie Queen, set forth the greatness of man in following the laws which