THE ELIZABETHAN CLERGY.'
STUDENTS of English Church history will remember the valuable collection of original documents which Mr. Gee, in collaboration with another writer, put forth some little time ago. He now gives us a more laborious and more important (1.) The Elizabethan Clergy and the Settlement of B.eligion. By Henry Gee, B.D. Oxford: The Clarendon Press.—(2.) Lives of the Elizabethan Bishops. By the Rev. F. 0. White, M.A. London : Skehington and Bon.
work. The settlement of Church matters which followed the accession of Elizabeth was, from the necessity of the case, of a revolutionary character. It succeeded a reaction, recent in date, and carried out with a ferocity which is happily rare, at least in our Church history. Being such, it could not itself be very gentle. Partisan writers have naturally dwelt on the severities used by the authorities, and on the suffer- ings endured by those who adhered to the old order. Could we accept the judgments of some Roman Catholic writers, Elizabeth and her advisers carried out a persecution merciless in character and wholesale in extent. Mr. Gee applies the test of documentary evidence, laboriously collected and care- fully compared; the conclusions to which be comes are of very great interest.
With regard to the Bishops, the facts are easily stated. What was practically a clean sweep was made of the Bench both by Mary and by Elizabeth. The difference between the two revolutions lies in the way in which they were carried out. It is needless to dwell on the proceedings of Mary. Five Bishops were burnt; others escaped death by timely flight, or by conformity ; some were left alone, not so much out of mercy as out of contempt. When Queen Elizabeth came to the throne on November 17th, 1558, there were twenty Bishops alive (the total number of Sees was twenty-six); four of these twenty died before the end of the year. Six- teen were therefore left to take their seats when Eliza- beth's first Parliament met in January, 1559. Only nine were present in their places. These all resisted to the utmost of their power the Bills of Supremacy and Uniformity, which occupied much of the time of Parliament during its Session. Their courage was praiseworthy, but some credit is due to the Government which gave them the liberty to oppose. It had not been so in the Marian times. Then the leaders of the reforming party had been silenced by arrest on a charge of treason, or had been terrorised into flight or acquiescence. Only two of the Edwardian prelates even attended in the Parliament summoned by Mary, and these were soon deprived. In 1558 the Opposition was allowed freedom of action. Only when the Bills which they had done their best to delay had become law were they called upon to obey. It is only right, indeed, to acknowledge that, for some reason which we do not understand, two of the Bishops who were among the champions of the Old Learning in the Westminster Disputation were harshly treated. These were Dr. White of Winchester and Dr. Watson of Lincoln. Neither of these is found among the dissentients from the Uni- formity Bill (read for the third time April 28th), though the list contains the names of three who had to give recogni- sauces at the same time. One of these, Scott of Chester, made a vigorous speech in Opposition which, five years before, would certainly have cost him his life, if, indeed, he had found any opportunity of delivering it.
It is needless to dwell long on the subsequent treatment of the Bishops. One, Kitchen of Llandaff, conformed; the others were sooner or later deprived. We are not surprised to find that Bonner was the first victim. He, too, was the most harshly treated, being kept in the Marshalsea till his death in 1569. White of Lincoln was set free for a time, but entering into suspicious correspondence, again lost his liberty. It was commonly believed that in one case at least (Bonner's) the death penalty which the Government refused to exact would have been exacted by the people if the persecutor had not been protected by his prison walls.
The fate of the inferior clergy is a matter of controversy. One Roman Catholic writer declares that the majority (if this be meant by" the better part ") suffered with the Bishops.
Other accounts reduce the number to less than two hundred. Mr. Gee is inclined to the smaller number, though he allows for some possible excess. About half as many more acquiesced for a time, and then changed their minds; but the conclusion to which our author comes is that "we cannot believe that many more than 200 were deprived for such refusal [to accept the new regime] within the limits we have taken [the years 1558-1564]." At the beginning of Mary's reign there had been many times as many sufferers, as there were also at the not dissimilar disturbance in 1662.
Mr. Gee has not arrived at this conclusion without much painstaking labour. Out of the twenty-six English and Welsh dioeeses, eleven only possess complete lists of the vacancies occurring during these years. But the lacuna can be made up from various sources, for which we v. could refer our readers to Mr. Gee's pages. One may be mentioned, and it is in itself strongly confirmatory of Mr. Gee's view. There is in the Public Record Office a list, belonging to the year 1564, of benefices then vacant. The total number is four hundred and twenty-seven; one-third of these were vacant because they were too poor to find an incumbent (propter ezilitatem); another third per mortem ; cessio and resignatio account for sixty-two ; three were sequestered; and in eighty-one no reason is assigned. Some of the matters that come out inci- dentally in the course of Mr. Gee's inquiries are not a little curious. He prints, following his excellent custom, the more important documents at full length, and we get a fresh light on various matters. The alleged insult to the clergy, for instance, that they could not marry unless the bride was approved by the Bishop and two Justices of the Peace, is somewhat mitigated when we find that the Bishop himself had in the same circumstances to obtain the Archbishop's approval, and the head of a College that of the Visitor.
Mr. White aims at too much. He has included in his volume no less than seventy-six Lives, many of them of persons whose only title to remembrance is that they filled episcopal seats in England and Wales. If he had taken some two or three characteristic examples of the good and the bad, Parker and Grindal, for instance, on the one side, and some of the obscure prelates whom he dismisses in a few lines as incorrigible time-servers and practisers of simony, he would have expended his labour more serviceably. Now and then he seems to rely somewhat too confidently on his authorities. Aylmer, Bishop of London, for instance, is said to have suspended thirty-eight beneficed ministers for "scrupling at an exact conformity," and quotes in a footnote Neal's History of the Puritans, as giving their names and benefices. Now Neal's book is a useful one, but it has to be used very carefully, for Neal was a very strong partisan, and not always as careful or as candid as he might have been. The "disingenuous Neal," he has been called, and we should be very much surprised if Mr. White, who is not by any means of Nears way of thinking, is generally disposed to follow his lead. But if he supplies missiles to hurl against an Elizabethan Bishop, he is found useful.
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