comburendo was again called into use, and the stake and the fagot were employed by Elizabeth to punish a mere religious opinion, exactly in the same manner as they had been employed by her father and her sister. On Easterday, 1575, twenty-seven German Anabaptists, as they were called, were apprehended in the city of London, having been found assembled at worship in a private house beyond Aldersgate. The errors which they were accused of holding appear to have been the four following:-1. That Christ took not flesh of the substance of the Virgin 2. That infants born of faithful parents ought to be rebaptized: 3. That no Christian man ought to be a magistrate: 4. That it is not lawful for a Christian man to take an oath. Four of them consented to recant these opinions; the others, refusing to abjure, were brought to trial in the Consistory Court, by which eleven of them were condemned to be burned. Nine of the eleven were banished; but the remaining two, named John Wielmacker and Hendrick Ter Woort, were actually, on the 22nd of July, consigned to the flames in Smithfield. This execution was Elizabeth's own act: to his eternal honour, John Fox, the venerable martyrologist, ventured to interfere in behalf of the unfortunate men, and wrote an earnest and eloquent letter in Latin to the queen, beseeching her to spare their lives; but his supplication was sternly rejected. Fox seems to have been almost the only man of his time who was at all shocked at the notion of destroying these poor Anabaptists; and yet he merely objected to the degree, and more especially to the kind, of the punishment. His argument is not so much for toleration as against capital punishments, and above all against the punishment of burning. "There are excommunications," he "and close imprisonments; there are bonds; there is perpetual banishment, burning of the hand, and whipping, or even slavery itself. This one thing I most earnestly beg, that the piles and flames in Smithfield, so long ago extinguished by your happy government, may not now be again revived."* says, * Translation in Crosby's History of the English Baptists. After the full narrative which has been given in the preceding chapter of the course of transactions in Scotland during the latter part of this period, which almost all turned upon the contest between the old and new religion, it will be sufficient here merely to recapitulate the leading epochs of the progress of the Reformation in that country. The execution of Patrick Hamilton, styled abbot or pensionary of Ferme, properly the first martyr of the Reformation in Scotland, took place at St. Andrew's on the 29th of February, 1528. He was burned before the gate of St. Salvator's College on the afternoon of the same day on which he was condemned; and the meek heroism with which he endured his terrible death stirred a feeling far and wide among his countrymen which made that hour a memorable and fatal one for the ancient church. Among several persons who were soon after sent to the stake for having expressed their sympathy or admiration, one was a Benedictine friar named Henry Forest, who was also burned at St. Andrew's. In 1543, in the first parliament held after the appointment of the Earl of Arran to the regency, an act was passed, permitting the people, for the first time, to read the Scriptures in their mother-tongue. This measure gave a great impulse to the progress of the Reformed doctrines, which was little checked either by the regent's recantation of Protestantism that immediately followed, or by the frequent executions for heresy by which the church still vainly sought to prop its tottering power. On the 2nd of March, 1545, George Wisheart was burned in front of the castle of St. Andrew's; in which, on the 29th of May of the following year, the great head of the papal party, the archbishop and chancellor, Cardinal Beaton, was assassinated by Norman Lesley and his confederates. The death of the cardinal was a fatal blow to the cause of the ancient religion in Scotland. At a provincial council which met at Linlithgow, and then adjourned to Edinburgh, in 1549, under the presidency of James Hamilton, the new primate, a reformation of the manners of ecclesiastical persons was attempted to be en forced by the publication of a new code of fifty-seven canons; in the preamble to which it was admitted that the two prime causes of the prevailing heresies were, the corruption and profane lewdness of the clergy of almost every degree, and their gross ignorance in all branches of learning. Other councils, held in 1551 and 1552, laboured in the carrying forward and completion of the same design. On the 29th of April, 1558, the last of the Scottish martyrs suffered at St. Andrew's, an old, infirm priest, named Walter Mill. But people and nobles alike were now banded and arrayed in force no longer to be resisted against the doomed church. The next year Knox returned from Geneva, and, roused by his eloquence, the popular fury swept some of the wealthiest provinces of the land like a hurricane, and in a few days covered the earth with the ruins of all their stateliest temples and most venerated shrines. On the 29th of June the Lords of the Congregation entered Edinburgh in arms and took possession of that capital. On the 1st of August, 1560, a parliament assembled, which, in the course of that month, abolished for ever the pope's jurisdiction and authority, and annulled all statutes made in preceding times for the maintenance of the old religion. An act was also passed for demolishing all such cloisters and abbey-churches as were not yet pulled down. There is probably nothing to match this act to be found in the records of legislation. No form of church polity, however, was established either by this parliament or by that of 1567, in the first year of James VI., by which its proceedings were ratified, and the doubts removed which were occasioned by their validity never having been acknowledged by the lately deposed queen. In these circumstances the church, of its own authority, established, as far as it had the means of so doing, the order of things laid down in a scheme drawn up by Knox, and known by the name of the First Book of Discipline."* The principal peculiarity *The First Book of Discipline is given in Spotswood's History, p. 152—174. VOL. IX. I of this arrangement was the appointment of twelve provincial chiefs of the clergy, with the title of Superintendents in other respects it was copied from the Presbyterian model established at Geneva. The government of the church was carried on by presbyteries, synods, and general assemblies. Still, however, the bishops, not having been formally deprived by the parliament, retained their sees; and successors even continued, for some time, to be appointed to those of them who died, with the consent of the church. But the General Assembly soon began to set itself against that anomaly. In 1574 they enacted that the jurisdiction of bishops should not exceed that of superintendents; in 1576 they declared the title of bishop to be common to every one that hath a particular flock over which he hath a peculiar charge; in 1577 they ordained that all bishops should be in future called by their own names instead of by those of their dioceses; and in 1580 they unanimously voted episcopacy to be unscriptural and unlawful. In 1581 they drew up and agreed upon a new Book of Policy, wherein no mention was made of either bishops or superintendents, except that pastors or ministers of congregations were stated to be sometimes called bishops, "because they watch over their flock."* At last, in 1592, the Presbyterian form of church government by general assemblies, provincial synods, presbyteries, and kirk sessions, received the full sanction of parliament. In 1597, however, an act was passed, to which the General Assembly assented the following year, for the appointment to seats in parliament of certain representatives of the clergy-an innovation which in some degree restored the order of bishops substantially, though not in name. This was the legal constitution of the Scottish church at the close of the present period. *See this scheme, which is called the 'Second Book of Discipline,' in Calderwood, pp. 102-116. |