slow to express their resentment. One of them, however, selected an inopportune time to express his indignation. Parker, one of the Canons of Lincoln Cathedral and a member of Convocation, preached at Paul's Cross on May 25, and stigmatised the action of the House of Commons as confused and disorderly. The House was presumptuous, he said, in dealing thus with matters over which it had no jurisdiction. Such behaviour was little short of "trespass and sedition." He illustrated this screed with the parable from IX Judges: where the trees, desirous of choosing a King, applied in vain to the olive, the fig, and the grape vine, and found only the bramble willing to accept the post; Convocation was the olive, he insinuated, and the House of Commons the bramble. After having harped on these strings for some time with more zeal than discretion, he at last shouted out, "Doth the Church totter? Let it totter! You have nothing to do withall!" Next morning, the House of Commons was in an uproar and would very likely have handled him "shrewdly," had the bishops not already acted in the matter and had Parliament not been prorogued. 1 The session was over and the Puritan gentry had accomplished very little of the "good" so confidently anticipated by their ministerial friends. Their main difficulty had been an unwillingness to recognise the facts of the situation, for, while they insisted that they asked only for mercy, they asserted either explicitly or tacitly, that the ministers had committed no offence which would justify their deprivation or suspension. Although Yelverton's speech was by far the most moderate yet made in their behalf, he had not only defended by line and precept the legality of their conduct, but had also attempted to prove the episcopal proceedings null and void; and had affirmed as usual that the refusal to subscribe was, in any case, not an offence of consequence.2 Such a request for 1 Commons' Journals, I, May 26, 1606. 2 They had also tried to impeach the legality of the bishops' deprivations on the ground that they had used their own seals instead of the King's. To their chagrin they found that they had been too hasty, for it presently developed that the bishops had been proceeding under the Act of 25 Henry VIII c. 20, as explicitly revived by 1 Elizabeth c. 1, a statute later than the acts of both Edward VI and Mary, and one which the legislation of James I had not disturbed. (See the Case in Parliament, 4 Jacobi Regis, S. P. Dom. Jac. I, XXI, no. 19, also in Cotton MSS. Cleopatra, F, II, f. 37. Also a paper in XII Reports, 7. These same arguments were later launched against Laud. See Registrum Laud: f. 272 a, at Lambeth Palace and also the Report of the Judges to the Star Chamber on July 4, 1637 and the proclamation of August 18, 1637, in Rymer, Foedera, XX, mercy was equivalent to a demand for complete capitulation, and by granting it, the bishops would have confessed that their proceedings had been unjustifiable. So long as the petition for mercy was couched in such terms, the Church simply could not grant it, and maintain its self-respect. The Canons sanctioned the deprivation; the King had explicitly ordered it; the Judges of the Common Law had solemnly affirmed its legality in the Star Chamber; and, so far as anything could be, the deprivation was an accomplished fact. The bishops had "engaged their credit," and the very least that could be asked from the ministers and their supporters was some acknowledgement that they had been at fault. But the ministers, collectively and individually, refused to admit anything of the kind; the House of Commons, as a body and in committee, declined even tacitly to concede the point; the petitions of the gentry and the tracts of the ministers were equally firm. They had been in the right from the first, and what they meant by "mercy" was a public acknowledgement of that fact by the bishops, and the annulling of all the proceedings of the last two years, not as a concession to grace and clemency, but as a right, as a recognition of the true legal view of the case. 1 This had been all very well in 1604 before the Canons had been confirmed and the Church had taken its stand. But in 1606 the whole matter was res adjudicata, a question no longer open to debate, an issue which had been deliberately and consciously decided by the Church with all the pomp and legal ceremony of which the institution was capable. Even if the deprivation had been inexpedient and unjust to the last degree, it would have been still more inexpedient for the Church to admit that it had erred. The Puritans demanded, then, what it was not in the power of the bishops to grant. Nor had the actions of the House conformed to its protestations. Many bills condemning the condition 156, 168-9.) To Bancroft and the Council the incident was another demonstration of the "factious" and "seditious' behaviour of the Puri tans. 1 His Majestie to the lower hous supplications for the ministers said that before mercie must go subscriptions and thairfore they must acknowledge their fault if they looked for mercie. If it can be prooved they offended his Majestie, they are reddie to acknowledge their fault, but they ar most loyallie affected to God and to thaire soveraigne." James regarded disobedience to the Church as equivalent to disloyalty to him: the Puritans did not. The parties were therefore talking at cross purposes. A Christian and Modest Offer of a Most Indifferent Disputation, (1606). of the clergy, instituting a modified Presbyterianism, abolishing the necessities of ecclesiastical administration, had been revived and passed. Bancroft's bill for the reform of excommunication had, on the other hand, been as quickly shelved, and all the indications showed that the desire to make the administration of the Church by the bishops an impossibility had not in the least abated. Unconsciously, both sides derived support from the sanctions of the time. Bancroft and the Churchmen were filled with the new idea of the administrative needs of the Church, which required that the men in office, as well as candidates for induction, should be thoroughly sifted to winnow the fit from the unfit. A certain leaven of individual dissent was expected and was treated according to the medieval notion that a man's personal convictions made no difference when he took an oath or a test for the weal of the Church. The Puritans, on the other hand, were weighed down with the belief in their individual responsibility for their own salvation, and felt that, in swearing to anything which they did not conscientiously approve, they jeopardised their chance of eternal happiness. Their consciences would not allow them to subscribe or conform, and would not permit them, when they honestly believed in their own innocence of real guilt, to declare that they had been in error. Meanwhile, the clergy in Convocation under the guidance of Dr. Overall, the Dean of St. Paul's, had been busy drawing up the Canons of 1606.1 To establish the Divine Right, either of kings or of bishops, was not their aim, but the formulation of a ? logical and historical basis for the Royal Supremacy. The Disciplinarians, the Catholics, and the new political theorists, like Buchanan, Bodin, and the author of the Vindicia contra Tyrannos, had derived support for many of their most telling arguments from the Old and New Testaments. They had, of course, not given the passages they extracted from those sources an interpretation which Bancroft and James could approve, and, therefore, to furnish an authoritative rendering of Scriptural history in its relation to the Royal Supremacy, in its relation to the authority of the King over his people, and in its relation to the link between Church and State, was the object of the new Canons. They were therefore entirely speculative and theological; and, although each statement closed 1 Printed in Cardwell's Synodalia, I. with words signifying that all who disapproved of it were in error, there was no requirement in the whole volume that any one should ever be put to the test whether or not he assented to its propositions, and no penalties were assigned in case he refused. It was not expected that the Canons would do more than give the English Church a definite position upon the hotly debated question of ecclesiastical history between Baronius and Bellarmine, on the one hand, and Beza and Raignolds, on the other. Whether or not Bancroft had any share in the drafting of the Canons, is unknown: he was certainly not in Convocation this year, having delegated his presidency to a commission headed by Overall. Presumably, both he and James had approved the general scheme, or the clergy would never have been allowed to undertake such a compilation; the King, however, refused to confirm the final product and made no secret of his belief that the clergy had dipped too far into the mysteries reserved for kings alone: Bancroft approved the first division, but it is not at all certain what he thought of the Canons as a whole The leaven of Arminianism had begun to appear: it was asserted, with increasing frequency, that priests were made by "God's ordinance" and were not elected by the people; that government came to the State from God, and not from the grant of the people; and that the Kings of Judah were "elected and named by God himself." Nevertheless, the whole document is impregnated with the Archbishop's ideas. The description of the rise of Episcopacy, as the product of natural causes, and not of divine decree, closely tallies with his statements in the Sermon of 1588. Nowhere do we find the words "Divine Right" applied either to kings or bishops, and the fundamental part of that theory is lacking, for it is everywhere declared that, although the present State and Church possess God's approval, (they are not the only possible forms of government which might receive His commendation? The Laudian theory of the Divine Right of bishops declared not only that no other form of government was possible, but that without Episcopacy, no salvation was to be hoped for; that it was the one indispensable link between God and man. No trace of this idea appears in any writing with which Bancroft had any connection. He always stoutly claimed that 1 Articles II, and VI, Part I, VII; XVII. 2 Part II, Article VI. men could be saved in any of the Reformed Churches; and that those who lived in the Middle Ages under the corrupt papal dispensation, had not been utterly condemned. Government as understood by the Church at this time, justly observes Dr. Gardiner,1 "was of far too high a nature to be allowed to depend upon the arbitrary will of the Pope or of any body of clergy whatever; still less should it depend upon the equally arbitrary will of the people; it ought not to be based upon will at all; it was only upon right that it could rest securely. Such a theory had evidently a better side than those are accustomed to perceive who malign the Church of England as a mere handmaid of tyranny. It was a recognition, in the only way which in that age was possible, of the truth that society is a whole and that religious teachers cannot rightfully claim a place apart from it, as if they were removed from the errors and failings of human nature." During all these sessions of Parliament, Bancroft had been very diligent in performing the routine work of the House of Lords; and, in fact, if the scanty records are to be trusted, was the most prominent member, the chairman of most of the committees, and a frequent speaker in debate. The debates in the Lords and conferences with the Commons over the Union with Scotland, over purveyance, wardship, and the tenures, occupied a great deal of the time during all the sessions of James's first Parliament; and in all Bancroft was active. But he did not by any means limit himself to matters of national importance. He was chairman of committees to restrain the multitude of buildings in and about Westminster; to confirm the lands of Sir William Smith against the claims of All Souls College, Oxford; to remedy defective titles; to repress usury; to preserve wood and timber; to confirm the lands of companies in London; to remedy the abuses resulting from unlicensed alehouses;-all these within three months besides ecclesiastical business.3 His regularity of attendance was as remarkable as the scope of his interests: in 1597 he was present at thirty-one, out of thirty-six sittings; in 1601, at thirty-five out of thirty-six sittings; in 1604 at fifty-one out of seventy sittings, 1 History of England, I, 289-290. 2 See especially April 12, 1606; December 18, 1606. He was also one of the Commissioners to confer with the Scottish Commissioners about Union. 3 These examples have been drawn from the months December to January and February, 1606-7. |