OBSERVATIONS UPON ABP. GRINDAL. 437 CHAP. XVI. Observations AND thus I have brought to an end my relation of this qua He was of a mild and subdued temper, and friendly dis- His temper. position; (a good groundwork to build true religion upon:) in his deportment courteous and affable: not touchy, nor soon angry: well spoken and easy of access; and that even in his elation: always obliging in his carriage, loving and grateful to his servants, and of a free and liberal heart. His fear of God, and sincere love of religion, evidently His reliappeared in his willingly foregoing of his own country, his gion. ease, his presidentship in Pembroke hall, his good prebends in the churches of St. Paul's and Westminster, and all his preferments and hopes; and living abroad in a strange land, that he might preserve his conscience, and serve God in purity and truth, cheerfully comporting with narrower and straiter circumstances of living. BOOK II. A great preacher. Dreads Po pery. His govern Provides He was a great preacher in King Edward the Sixth's time, and one of the eminentest in that faculty both at Court and University. And at the beginning of Queen Elizabeth's reign, when the Protestant religion was to be declared and inculcated to the people, he was one of the chief, employed to that end frequently in the pulpit at Paul's, and before the Queen and nobility. Whereby at that unsteady, ticklish time, he did good service to religion, the minds of men being more enlightened in religious matters, then controverted, and their judgments rectified and confirmed. Upon his first coming over from his exile, Queen Elizabeth being possessed of the crown, when preferment in the Church was to be laid upon him, his dread of Popery created him some demur in accepting the same; fearing to comply with the very appearances and shadows of it in the habits and some other rites appointed, till he had satisfaction, partly by serious consideration with himself, and partly by the advice of certain foreign Divines, chiefly P. Martyr and Henry Bullinger, men of the greatest learning in divinity that age afforded: being instructed, that many things, yea inconveniences, were to be borne with for the Church's peace and safety. And therefore afterwards, when some for these external matters in religious worship made seditions, and brake the Church's quiet, he thought himself bound, as a faithful and careful overseer of the Church of Christ in England, when all his mild persuasions and arguments proved ineffectual, to prosecute the refusers, and to use the severer methods warranted by the laws against them. And this leads us to consider him in his government, ment. when ecclesiastical power and conduct was committed to him. the Church One of his chief cares in this station was to supply the preachers. churches under him with preachers; of which there was a with great scarcity everywhere in his time; and the people then especially needing them, when so much superstition and 296 ignorance, by the industry of the late Popish policy, had overspread them. Yet withal our Archbishop took special care what preachers he allowed. Of this he once made this 66 XVI. letter. did in York shire. protestation to the Queen: "That for his own part, (and CHAP. " he spoke it without ostentation,) he was very careful in al"lowing such persons only as were able and sufficient to be Vide his "preachers, both for their knowledge in the Scriptures, "and also for testimony of their good life and conversation. "And that he gave great charge to the rest of the Bishops "of the province to do the like. That he admitted no man "to the office that professed either Papistry or Puritanism. "And that generally the Graduates of the University were only admitted to be preachers; unless it were some few "that had excellent gifts of knowledge in the Scriptures, 'joined with good utterance and godly persuasion." Therefore while he was at York, he procured above forty What he learned preachers, and they Graduates, within less than six years, to be placed in that diocese, (a great number in those times,) besides those he found there; and there he left them. "The fruits of whose travails in preaching," as he told the Queen, "she was like to reap daily, by most as"sured dutiful obedience of her subjects in those parts. "For his opinion firmly was, that by frequent preaching "the word of God two very good things would prevail "among the people, viz. true religion towards God, and "obedience and loyalty towards the Prince." And for the proof of the latter, he mentioned a remarkable instance that once happened in Queen Elizabeth's reign: which was, that Anno 1569. when all the north, almost, had made an insurrection and rebellion, the town of Hallifax (where had been a considerable while good preaching) remained firm and loyal to her, and set forth four thousand men armed, to resist and quell these seditious persons. make a learned Another thing which in his high station he laboured to Labours to redress, was the ignorance and sloth of the Clergy. And in order to this reformation, and for the furtherance of the Clergy. Priests and Curates in knowledge, and for the provoking them to the study of the Scripture, upon his first coming to the see of Canterbury, he earnestly set himself to encourage and regulate the exercises, called prophesyings, which had been used before, but with some abuses, in most dioceses, II. BOOK and had the countenance of the respective Bishops. But the well-meaning Archbishop could not succeed in this his purpose; being checked in it very angrily by the Queen, who had no good opinion of them, as being practised also more privately by the Puritans, to confirm them in their dislike of the established religion, and out of policy, (too accurate, perhaps,) supposing the heads of most who resorted to these exercises, by the declarations and expositions of Scripture that were then made, would be filled with notions and opinions, that might render them at length turbulent in the state. The Archbishop, on the other hand, had quite different sentiments of them, and that they would tend much to the improving of the Clergy and edifying of the people, as had been by good experience already found. So that he would never be brought to give forth his orders for the putting them down. Hence the 297 Queen conceived a prejudice against him; hardly ever after Sir J. Har blowing over. And which the Earl of Leicester, we are told rington in by an author, by his artifice blew up more and more in the Queen against him, till she had suspended him from his function, and would not be persuaded to take off his sequestration for a long while, whatever inconveniences the Church lay under by it. And that, that which provoked that great Earl was the Archbishop's immoveable justice towards one Julio, an Italian physician, his favourite, whom Grindal resolved to prosecute, notwithstanding the Earl's intercession for him, and the Queen's too, for a grievous. crime, viz. in having two wives, and one of them another man's. But I suspend my belief, whether Leicester were his enemy for this, or whether he were now his enemy at all. But the Queen certainly was. And therefore among his chief misfortunes may be reckoned his advancement to the chair of Canterbury, which almost as soon as he enjoyed, occasionally brought him into dislike with the Queen, who before was mightily esteemed and valued by her, for his innate goodness, excellent abilities, and great services. King James appoints his Brief View. And here I shall make some stop, to observe something prophecies further concerning these prophecies: it was not much above in Scotland. XVI. seven or eight years after the Queen's offence with our CHAP. Archbishop, that King James, the learned Monarch of Scotland, publicly allowed and encouraged them in his kingdom, as excellently conducive to Christian knowledge, (in the Clergy especially,) without any jealousy of the inconveniency of them, since his Bishops were concerned in the appointing and regulating them. This so apposite to our purpose may deserve to be related. 66 of the and Mean. of Parlam. "For when in his Parliament, anno 1584, (in the fourth Declaration "act thereof,) the King had shewn his resolution for the Kinges In"maintenance of Bishops in his kingdom, (whose govern- tentioun, "ment in his Church, some of his subjects, for a time, had tow. the intercepted,) and had removed and discharged a form late last Actis "invented, (as it ran in a certain Declaration of that King,) Impr. at "called the Presbytery: whereby a number of Ministers of Edinb. an. "certain precincts and bounds, accounting themselves all to Penes Re"be equal without any difference; and gathering to them- verend. "selves certain gentlemen and others of the King's sub-Joan. Ep. jects, usurped all the whole ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and "altered the laws at their own appetite: 66 66 “And when, in the twentieth act of that Parliament, the King ratified and approved, and reestablished the state "of Bishops within his realm, to have the oversight and jurisdiction every one in his own diocese: which form of government and rule in ecclesiastical affairs (as the De"claration went on) had not only continued in his Kirk "from the days of the Apostles by continual succession of "time, and many martyrs in that calling shed their blood "for the truth; but also since that realm embraced and "received the Christian religion, the same state had been "maintained, to the welfare of the Kirk, and quietness of "the realm, without any interruption, while within this "few years some curious and busy men practised to intro"duce into the Ministry an equality and parity in all "things." 1585. Patr. D. Then at length, in the conclusion of the said Declaration, 298 the King proceeds to his intentions, which are digested The King's into fourteen articles. Whereof the first was, that his inten intentions. |