6

not to marry, the succession must remain unsettled. The Queen of Scots wept her fill;' but tears in those eyes were no sign of happy promise. Randolph so little liked the atmosphere that he petitioned for his own recall. Lennox had gathered about him a knot of wild and desperate youths-Cassilis, Eglinton, Montgomery, and Bothwell-the worst and fiercest of all. Darnley had found a second friend and adviser besides Rizzio in Lord Robert Stuart, the Queen's half-brother, 'a man full of all evil.' The Queen's own marriage with him. was now generally spoken of; and Chatelherault, Argyle, and Murray gave the English ambassador notice that mischief was in the wind, and joined themselves in a new bond to defend each other's quarrels.'1

'To help all these unhappy ones,' Randolph wrote to Cecil, I doubt not but you will take the best way; and this I can assure you, that contrary to my sovereign's will, let them attempt, let them seek, let them send to all the cardinals and devils in hell, it shall exceed their power to bring anything to pass, so that be not refused the Queen of Scots which in reason ought to content her.' 2

The elements of uncertainty and danger were already too many, when it pleased Elizabeth to introduce another which completed the chaos and shook the three kingdoms. Despising doctrinal Protestantism too keenly to do justice to its professors, Elizabeth had been long growing impatient of excesses like that which had

1 Randolph to Cecil, March 20: Cotton. MSS. CALIG. B. 10.

2 Ibid.

shocked her at Cambridge, and had many times expressed her determination to bring the Church to order. Her own creed was a perplexity to herself and to the world. With no tinge of the meaner forms of superstition, she clung to practices which exasperated the Reformers, while the Catholics laughed at their inconsistency; her crucifixes and candles, if adopted partly from a politic motive of conciliation, were in part also an expression of that half belief with which she regarded the symbols of the faith; and while ruling the clergy with a rod of iron, and refusing as sternly as her father to tolerate their pretensions to independence, she desired to force upon them a special and semi-mysterious character; to dress them up as counterfeits of the Catholic hierarchy; and half in reverence, half in contempt, compel them to assume the name and character of a priesthood, which both she and they in their heart of hearts knew to be an illusion and a dream.

Elizabeth's view of this subject cannot be called a fault. It was the result of her peculiar temperament; and in principle was but an anticipation of the eventual attitude into which the minds of the laity would subside. But the theory in itself is suited only to settled times, when it is safe from the shock of external trials: from the first it has been endured with impatience by those nobler minds to whom sincerity is a necessity of existence; and in the first establishment of the English Church, and especially when Elizabeth attempted to insist on conditions which overstrained the position, she tried the patience of the most enduring clergy in the world.

Her first and greatest objection was to their marriage. The holy state of matrimony was one which she could not contemplate without bitterness; and although she could not at the time of her accession prevent the clergy from taking wives, and dared not re-enact the prohibitory laws of her sister, she refused to revive the permissive statutes of Edward. She preferred to leave the archbishops and bishops with their children legally illegitimate and themselves under the imputation of concubinage. Nor did time tend to remove her objections. Cecil alone in 1561 prevented her from making an attempt to enforce celibacy. To the Archbishop of Canterbury himself 'she expressed a repentance that he and the other married bishops were in office, wishing it had been otherwise;' she thought them worse as they were, 'than in the glorious shame of a counterfeited chastity;' 'I was in horror,' the Archbishop wrote after a conversation with her on the subject, 'to hear such words come from her mild nature as she spake concerning God's holy ordinance of matrimony.' 'Princes hitherto had thought it better to cherish their ecclesiastical state as conservators of religion; the English bishops alone were openly brought in hatred, shunned and traduced before the malicious and ignorant people as beasts without knowledge, as men of effrenate intem

Her Majesty continues very ill-affected towards the state of matrimony in the clergy; and if I were not therein very stiff, her Majesty

would utterly and openly condemn and forbid it.'-Cecil to Archbishop Parker, August 12, 1561: STRYPE'S Life of Parker.

perancy, without discretion or any godly disposition worthy to serve in their state.'1

In the same spirit the Queen attempted to force her crucifixes into the parish churches; and she provoked by it immediate rebellion. The bishops replied with one voice that they would give their lives for her; but they would not set a trap for the ignorant and make themselves guilty of the blood of their brethren ;' ' if by the Queen's authority they established images, they would blemish the fame of their notable fathers who had given their lives for the testimony of God's truth.'

Thus the antagonism went on, irritating Elizabeth on her side into dangerous traffickings with the Bishop of Aquila and his successor; while Parker declared openly that he must obey God rather than man; and, that however the Queen might despise him and his brethren, there were enough of that contemptible flock that would not shrink to offer their blood for the defence of Christ's verity.' 2

The right however, as has been already pointed out, was not wholly on the Protestant side. The recollections of Protestant ascendancy in the days of Edward were not yet effaced; and the inability of the Reformers to keep in check the coarser forms of irreverence and irreligion was as visible as before. They were themselves aggressive and tyrannical; and when prebendaries'

1 Parker to Cecil: STRYPE'S Life of Parker.

2 Ibid.

wives melted the cathedral organ-pipes into dish-covers and cut the frames into bedsteads, there was something to be said even in favour of clerical celibacy. The bad relations between the Crown and the spiritual estate prevented the clergy from settling down into healthy activity. The Queen insulted her bishops on one side; the Puritans denounced them on the other as imps of Antichrist; and thus without effective authority—with its rulers brought deliberately into contempt-the Church of England sunk deeper day by day into anarchy.

Something no doubt it had become necessary to do; but Elizabeth took a line which however it might be defended in theory was approved of only by the Catholies-and by them in the hope that it would prove the ruin of the institution which they hated.

At the close of 1564, after the return of the Court from Cambridge, an intimation went abroad that the Queen intended to enforce uniformity in the administration of the services and to insist especially on the use of the surplice and cap-the badges which distinguished the priest from the Genevan minister. The Puritan clergy would sooner have walked to the stake in the yellow robes of Sanbenitos. But it was in vain that the Dean of Durham insisted that it was cruel to use force against Protestants while 'so many Papists, who had never sworn obedience to the Queen nor yet did any part of their duty to their flocks, enjoyed their liberty and livings.' It was in vain that Pilkington and others of the bishops exclaimed against disturbing the peace