desire to relieve his Romanist subjects of at least some portion of the intolerable oppression from which they suffered. In his first speech to Parliament (p. 283) he held out hopes of a compromise, and, so far as in him lay, relaxed the severity of the laws. Parliament, it is true, was by no means willing to see its legislative work undone by the dispensing power, and passed an Act (1 Jac. I. 4) confirming the penal statutes of the previous reign. Still the execution of the laws depended on the crown, and toleration would probably have received unprecedented extension, had not the Gunpowder Plot rudely startled the king from his attitude of tolerant composure and driven the Parliament to take measures in some respects more violent than any that had hitherto been adopted. The laws of Elizabeth excluded the conscientious Romanist from politics and the Universities, as well as from the educational and legal professions; they forbade the exercise of his religion and banished his ministers from the realm. The laws of James went further: they not only heightened the penalties and multiplied the public disabilities under which Popish recusants lay, but they interfered with the relations of domestic and private life.

An Act of the year 1606 (3 & 4 Jac. I. 4) obliged the popish recusant, under heavy penalties, not merely to attend church, but to receive the sacrament yearly according to the Anglican rite. It enabled the king to seize twothirds of the offender's lands, not only (as under the Act of 1587) in default of the pecuniary fine, but whenever he saw fit to do so. It imposed a new oath, more stringent than that of Supremacy, known as the oath of allegiance, and it rendered liable to the penalties of praemunire, that is, to outlawry and forfeiture, any recusant who should twice refuse this oath. It extended the punishment of death for conversion to Romanism, already imposed on the agent, to the convert himself. Another Act of the same session (3 & 4 Jac. I. 5), intended to facilitate the execution of these laws, offered a large bribe to any who

should disclose the names of recusants or other offenders. It banished recusants from court, and, except under special conditions, from the city of London. It debarred them from the legal and medical professions, from posts in the army and the navy, and from the lower public offices. It inflicted severe penalties on the Romanist wife of a Protestant husband, and punished marriage, baptism, or burial performed by other rites than those of the English church. It handed over the inheritance of recusants educated abroad to the Protestant next of kin. It deprived recusants of their ecclesiastical patronage, it debarred them from acting as trustees or guardians, it violated the very privacy of their dwellings by authorizing the justices of the peace to search them for Popish books and relics, and it took away from them all arms beyond the minimum requisite for self-defence. Finally, an Act of 1610 (7 & 8 Jac. I. 6), extended the provisions of the Act of 1606. The oath of allegiance was now made incumbent not only upon recusants but upon all persons of whatsoever rank or description, under the penalty of exclusion from places of trust and from all the liberal professions, while the husband of a recusant was subjected to the alternative of paying a heavy fine or of seeing his wife torn from him and imprisoned till she should conform.

However eager in the cause of persecution the government might have been, the inherent difficulty of putting into action a coercive and inquisitorial system of such minuteness and universality would have rendered it practically impossible to carry out the law. No doubt these merely physical obstacles had much to do with the slackness of the administration, but its energies were benumbed by moral reluctance, arising from various motives of foreign and domestic policy, and from the personal disinclination of the king. Hence a constant source of friction which hampered the relations of crown and Parliament throughout the reign. The fear of excessive lenity, amounting to a practical suspension of the laws, called forth the strongest

expression of opinion (p. 290) touching the limitation of royal power which is to be found in that remarkable document, the Apology of 1604. The laxity of government in this respect heads the list of religious grievances in the petition of 1610 (p. 300), and it is dwelt upon at length in the first petition of 1621 (p. 307). The complications of James' diplomacy in the latter year necessitated a policy of toleration which roused all the old anxieties of Parlia ment, and the persistence of that body in its demands (p. 311) led to an open breach with the king. That there was good ground for Protestant fears is clear from the instructions issued to the judges in 1622 (p. 422). Even without so overt a declaration of indulgence as this, it was obviously easy for the government to mitigate the rigour of the law. Parliament might legislate as it pleased, but petitions and remonstrances were far from being adequate to enforce strictness or hinder evasion, and the lot of Romanists was no doubt less intolerable than a mere survey of the law would lead us to suppose. It is probable that the religious tests were seldom exacted and that the disabilities were often forgotten in cases where the oaths had been taken and political submission made. Nevertheless, with all deductions, the penal code imposed limitations upon the rights and liberties of the subject, both public and private, which the deepest conviction of danger to the State can hardly justify.

(e) The Church, the Puritans, and the sects.

The condition of the Protestant nonconformists, though exposed to serious inconveniences, was a long way from being so painful as that of the Romanists. The penalties and disabilities imposed upon the former were far less severe, they were not being constantly increased by legislation, and they were less dependent on circumstances beyond their own control. The troubles of the English Romanists were to a great extent due to the action of the Pope, the Jesuits, and

the King of Spain: those of the Puritans were largely of their own making, and were due to divergences of doctrine or opinion less significant in themselves than those which divided Romanists and Protestants. But here again we are struck by the fusion of religious and political questions, a fusion which does not appear so early as in the struggle with Rome, but which, in the results which it eventually produced, became even more important.

At the outset of Elizabeth's reign the Act of Supremacy was welcomed by all Protestants alike, and the Prayer-Book was regarded with favour as substituting a purer form of worship for the breviary and the mass. But dissatisfaction soon began to show itself among that advanced section of Protestants which was most strongly imbued with foreign ideas. As early as 1563, objections were raised to certain ceremonial observances and restraints used in the Church, which seemed to savour of popery, and a proposal to give effect to these objections was rejected in the lower house of Convocation by a bare majority of one (p. 191). Seldom has a single vote been more important. Beaten in the assembly, the malcontents took the law into their own hands, and in their parochial ministrations omitted to observe the rubrics or to use the forms of prayer which they disliked. To check these irregularities, Parker and his colleagues issued the body of directions known as the Advertisements (p. 191). The attempt to enforce these rules led to the resignation of some thirty per cent. of the London clergy and of many others elsewhere. But the tide of Protestant fervour, naturally running in the direction of violent antagonism to Rome, was too strong for the bishops. The tenets of the Puritans, as the reformers were now called (p. 195), spread far and wide. The laity, unable to find contentment in the authorized services of the Church, began to meet in 'conventicles' of their own, thus coming into collision with the spirit, if not the letter, of the law.

Thus arose the 'vestiarian controversy,' a dispute which raged apparently round outward symbols, but which really

turned on grave differences of opinion (p. 199). For some ten years after Elizabeth's accession, this movement went on within the bounds of the Church. There was little sign of a tendency to schism, or of a desire to overthrow the existing ecclesiastical system. But about the year 1570, just when the publication of the Papal bull rendered the conflict with Rome irreconcilable, the dispute with the advanced wing of Protestantism entered upon a new and more acute stage. The principles of church-government advocated by Calvin were not the necessary outcome of his religious teaching, but the adoption of one half of the master's views naturally led his disciples to support the other. Moreover it was clear that the chief obstacle to the spread of Calvinistic doctrines in this country was the existence of a hierarchy hostile to the school of Geneva. Thus respect for a great teacher combined with the exigencies of the situation to foster Presbyterian views, and led a large section of the Puritan party to attack the bishops. The new doctrines were openly preached by Cartwright and others (p. 196), at Cambridge and elsewhere, and were urged in able but extravagant pamphlets such as the two Admonitions to Parliament (p. 198). About the same time great encouragement was given to the Calvinists by the triumph of their organization in Scotland, and the first Book of Discipline (pp. 247, 248), in which that system had been set forth some ten years earlier, was adopted by Cartwright as the manifesto of his party. This was a step fraught with grave political consequences, and brought Cartwright and his followers into direct collision with the crown. The resistance of the Puritans to the queen's Injunctions was an act of insubordination which could hardly be passed over, but the antiepiscopal doctrines of Presbyterianism involved an overt attack on the ecclesiastical supremacy, while its democratic tendencies threatened the stability of the State.

It is therefore not surprising that at this juncture the queen interfered. She allowed an Act (13 Eliz. 12) to be passed sanctioning the Thirty-nine Articles and empowering the