Like her father, the longer she lived the more resolute she became to enforce her own dogmas on the whole body of her subjects. In the twenty-third year of her reign the penalty for non-attendance of the Established Church was raised to £20 per month. In the same year another Act was passed, declaring it high treason to attempt to draw any one to the Church of Rome; and the persons thus drawn were equally guilty of treason, and all their aiders, abettors, and concealers were made guilty of misprision of treason. These arbitrary laws against the freedom of opinion went on increasing in severity. In 1585 an Act was passed which made traitors of all Jesuits and other Popish priests who had been ordained abroad, and of all subjects whatever educated in Papal seminaries who did not immediately return home and take the oath of supremacy. The receivers of any such persons were declared felons without benefit of clergy. Whoever sent money to any foreign Jesuits or priests was liable to Præmunire; and parents sending their children to school abroad without licence from her Majesty were liable to a penalty of £100. Fresh Acts were added in 1581 and 1593, the former to make void all conveyances of property by Popish recusants, with the object of escaping the penalties imposed upon them, and to decree that the penalty of £20 a month for non-attendance at church should be levied by distress to the extent of all the offenders' goods and two-thirds of their lands; the latter ordered all Popish recusants above sixteen to repair to their proper places of abode, and never more to go more than five miles from them without special licence from the bishop of the diocese or lieutenant of the county, under penalty of forfeiture of their goods and of the profits of their lands for life; those having no goods or lands to be deemed felons.
But if the atrocities committed by the Roman Catholics in the reign of Mary, and the fears of their recurrence should the Papists regain the power, afforded some plea for these persecutions, what is to be said of the same rigours applied to the Reformers, who simply desired to form their religious opinions on the Bible—the Divine charter of Humanity? Thousands of these, from the earliest days of the Reformation, had claimed this privilege as their birthright; and many of those who came back from the Continent on the termination of the Marian persecution, were surprised and discouraged to find themselves equally excluded with the Catholics from the exercise of their own judgments by a Protestant queen. They were required to attend the preaching of those against whose doctrines they protested, and suffered the same monstrous fines if they absented themselves. Instead of that "glorious liberty of the gospel" which they had promised themselves, they had to accept with all homage the cut out and prescribed pattern of opinion dictated by an autocratic woman, who made a desperate stand against the removal of images from the churches, and practised many Popish ceremonies in her own private chapel. Instead of the form of service which the English refugees had established at Geneva, in which there were no Litany, no responses, and scarcely any rites or ceremonies, they were commanded to adopt a form which appeared to them little removed from Popery. The Genevan refugees—who, from their demand for the utmost purity and primitive simplicity in worship, were styled Puritans—would, had they been permitted, have planted a church far more like the church as it came to exist in Scotland than that which was established for England. They opposed the claims of the bishops to a superior rank or authority to the presbyters; they denied that they possessed the sole right of ordination, and exercise of church discipline; they objected to the titles and dignities which had been copied by the Anglican Church from the Roman, of archdeacons, deans, canons, prebendaries; to the jurisdiction of Spiritual Courts; to an indiscriminate admission of all persons to the Communion; to many parts of the liturgy, and of the offices of marriage and burial, including the use of the ring in marriage; they repudiated set forms of prayers, and the use of godfathers and godmothers, the rite of confirmation, the observance of Lent and holidays, the cathedral worship, the use of the organ, the retention of the reading of apocryphal books in church, pluralities, non-residence, the presentation to livings by the Crown, or any other patron, or by any mode but the free election of the people.
But in that age no conception of religious liberty was entertained. The Puritans were as resolute in their ideas of conformity to their notions as Elizabeth was to hers; and had they had the power, would have used the same compulsion. Knox exhibited that spirit of exclusiveness to the extreme in Scotland, even calling for the deposition of the queen as a "Jezebel" and "an idolatress," because she would not adopt his peculiar tenets and view of things. The Puritans exhibited the same spirit long after in America for the exercise of their faith. In fact, the great and divine principle of the entire liberty of the gospel was too elevated to be arrived at suddenly after so many ages of spiritual despotism, and required long and earnest study of the spirit and example of Christ. Severe struggles, bloody deaths, and incredible sufferings in those who came to see the truth, had to be undergone before the battle of religious freedom was fought out, and all parties could admit the plain fact which had revealed itself to Charles V. after his abdication of the throne, when he amused himself with clock making—that as no two clocks can be made to go precisely alike, it is folly to expect all men to think precisely alike. "Both parties," says Neal, in his "History of the Puritans," "agreed too well in asserting the necessity of a uniformity of public worship, and in using the sword of the magistrate for the support and defence of their respective principles, which they made an ill use of in their turns whenever they could grasp the power in their hands. The standard of uniformity, according to the bishops, was the queen's supremacy, and the laws of the land; according to the Puritans, the decrees of provincial and national synods, allowed and enforced by the civil magistrate: but neither party were for admitting that liberty of conscience and freedom of profession which is every man's right as far as is consistent with the peace of the civil Government he lives under." Heresy was, in fact, punished by the Government as a purely political offence.
Elizabeth, having the power, compelled all those clergymen who conformed sufficiently to accept livings and bishoprics, not only to conform but more or less to persecute their brethren. Even men like Parker and Grindal, naturally averse from compulsion, were obliged to do her bidding, till Grindal rebelled and was set aside; but their places were supplied by Sandys, who had himself fled from Popish compulsion, and by Whitgift, who rigorously enforced the laws. Sandys actually sentenced the anabaptists who, in 1575, were burnt at the stake by order of the queen—for to this pass it came: Hammond, a ploughman, being burnt at Norwich in 1579, and Kett, a member of one of the universities, in the same place, ten years afterwards, under Elizabeth.
Such was the state of the Protestant Church at the termination of the period we are now reviewing. The queen discouraged preaching and instruction of the people, allowing many bishoprics, prebends, and livings to be vacant, and receiving their incomes. She declared that one or two preachers in a county was enough, probably fearing the prevalence of the more advanced opinions. Parker in his time had been ordered to enforce strict compliance with the rubric, and numbers of the most eminent and eloquent clergymen resigned their livings and travelled over the country, and preached where they could, "as if," says Bishop Jewell, "they were apostles; and so they were with regard to their poverty, for silver and gold they had none." Being, however, continually brought before the authorities and fined and otherwise punished, they determined to break off all connection with the public churches, and form themselves into an avowed separate communion, worshipping God in their own way and being ready to suffer for His sake. Here, then, commenced the great cause of Nonconformity, and the formation of all those sects which from time to time have since appeared, each claiming—and justly—the right to worship God and to regulate their particular church as seems conformable to their understanding of the Scriptures. These separate assemblies, however, were stigmatised as conventicles, and from this time many were the laws passed to put them down, as we shall hereafter find. Among the Nonconformists a most zealous and resolute sect arose called Brownists, from Robert Brown, a preacher in the diocese of Norwich, a man of good family, and said to be a relative of Lord Burleigh. His followers soon acquired the name of Independents, which they afterwards changed for that of Congregationalists, from their denial of all ecclesiastical dignities and authority whatever, asserting that each congregation constitutes a complete church, with the right to nominate their own minister and conduct their own affairs. This body of Christians, at this day so extensive and respectable, of course felt the especial weight of the persecution of the Established Church, with which it refused to hold the slightest communion; yet to such a degree did it flourish—a proof of the onward spirit of the time, that Sir Walter Raleigh declared in Parliament that there were before the death of Elizabeth not less than 20,000 members of that body in Norfolk, Essex, and the neighbourhood of London.
REDUCED FACSIMILE OF THE TITLE-PAGE OF THE GREAT BIBLE, ALSO CALLED CROMWELL'S BIBLE.
In the narration of the struggles of this period in Scotland we have sufficiently traced the persecution of the Protestants by the Romish Church—the martyrdom of Patrick Hamilton, George Wishart, Walter Mill, and others; the murder of Cardinal Beaton, and the final triumph of Knox and his compeers, from which period the organisation of the Protestant Church of Scotland went on rapidly. In 1560 the Lords of the Congregation entered Edinburgh in arms; and Parliament assembling, abolished for ever the Pope's jurisdiction, abolished the celebration of Mass, and authorised "The Confession of the Faith and Doctrine believed and professed by the Protestants of Scotland." An Act also was passed to pull down all cloisters and abbey-churches still left standing: and the Church, not waiting for any further enactment of the Parliament or Crown, went on exercising its own proper functions as an independent church, governed, not by the State, but by presbyteries, synods, and general assemblies. In 1580 the General Assembly, after having at various times diminished the power and rank of bishops, declared that episcopacy was unscriptural and unlawful—a dictum which the Parliament fully ratified in 1592, establishing the Presbyterian Church as the national one, with general assembly, provincial synods, presbyteries, and kirk sessions. In 1597 the Parliament admitted certain representatives of the clergy to seats in it, to which the General Assembly assented at its next meeting; and thus was completed the system of Church government in Scotland at that time.