Yet Elizabeth never overcame her repugnance to the marriage of the clergy, nor is it, perhaps, to be wondered at when we consider the contempt in which she held the church of which she was the head,[1269] and her general aversion to sanctioning in others the matrimony which she was herself always toying with and never contracting. When she made her favorites of both sexes suffer for any legalized indiscretions of the kind, it is scarcely surprising that she always looked with disfavor on those of the clergy who availed themselves of the privilege which circumstances had extorted from her, and which she would fain have withheld. When Archbishop Parker ventured to remonstrate with her on her popish tendencies, she sharply told him that “she repented of having made any married bishops.” This was a cutting rejoinder, but even more pointed was the insolence from which his life-long services could not protect his wife. The first time the queen visited the archiepiscopal palace, on her departure she turned to thank Mrs. Parker:—“And you—madam I may not call you, mistress I am ashamed to call you, so I know not what to call you—but, howsoever, I thank you.”[1270] So in Ipswich, in August, 1561, she found great fault with the marriage of the clergy, and especially with the number of wives and children in cathedrals and colleges—a feeling possibly justified by occasional disorders not unlikely to occur. In 1563 we find Sir John Bourne complaining to the Privy Council that the Dean and Chapter of Worcester had broken up the large organ, the pride of the cathedral, which had cost £200; the metal pipes whereof were melted into dishes and divided among the wives of the prebendaries and the case used to make bedsteads for them; the copes and ornaments, he added, would likewise have been distributed had not some of the unmarried men prevented it, “and as by their Habit and Apparel you might know the Priests wives, and by their Gate in the Market and the Streets from an hundred other Women: so in the Congregation and Cathedral Church they were easy to be known by placing themselves above all other of the most ancient and honest Calling of the said City.”[1271] There was no lack of persons to pour such stories into the queen’s ear, and, with her well-known tendencies, it is no wonder that her counsellors found it difficult to restrain her to the simple order which she issued from Ipswich, declaring “that no manner of person, being either the head or member of any college or cathedral church within this realm, shall, from the time of the notification hereof in the same college, have, or be permitted to have, within the precinct of any such college, his wife, or other woman, to abide and dwell in the same, or to frequent and haunt any lodging within the same college, upon pain that whosoever shall do to the contrary shall forfeit all ecclesiastical promotions in any cathedral or collegiate church within this realm.” Burghley, in sending this royal mandate to Parker, remarks, “Her Majesty continueth very evil affected to the state of matrimony in the clergy. And if [I] were not therein very stiff, her Majesty would openly and utterly condemn and forbid it. In the end, for her satisfaction, this injunction now sent to your Grace is devised. The good order thereof shall do no harm. I have devised to send it in this sort to your Grace for your province; and to the Archbishop of York for his; so as it shall not be promulged to be popular.”[1272] It is doubtless to this occurrence that we may attribute the last relic of clerical celibacy enforced among Protestants, that of the Fellows of the English Universities.

This injunction of Queen Elizabeth caused no little excitement. Though Burghley had prudently endeavored to prevent its becoming “popular,” yet Cox, Bishop of Ely, in remonstrating against its cruelty to those whom it affected in his cathedral seat, shows that it was speedily known to all men, and that it gave exceeding comfort to the reactionaries—“What rejoicing and jeering the adversaries make! How the godly ministers are discouraged, I will pass over.”[1273] In the Universities, where crowds of young men were collected, there might be some colorable excuse for the regulation, but in the splendid and spacious buildings connected with the cathedrals some milder remedy might easily have been found, and the mandate was particularly unpalatable to married bishops. Parker himself, who was individually interested in the matter, made a personal appeal to the queen, the result of which was to wound him deeply, as well as to show him how extreme were her prejudices on the subject. He pours forth his feelings in a letter to Burghley describing the interview—“I was in an horror to hear such words to come from her mild nature and Christianly learned conscience, as she spake of God’s holy ordinance and institution of matrimony. I marvel that our states in that behalf cannot please her Highness, which we doubt nothing at all to please God’s sacred Majesty.” He deplores the effect which it must produce on the people—“We alone of our time openly brought in hatred, shamed and traduced before the malicious and ignorant people, as beasts without knowledge to Godward, in using this liberty of his word, as men of effrenate intemperency, without discretion or any godly disposition worthy to serve in our state. Insomuch that the queen’s Highness expressed to me a repentance that we were thus appointed in office, wishing it had been otherwise.” The interview had evidently been stormy, and Parker had been made to feel the full force of Elizabeth’s perverseness—“I have neither joy of house, land, or name, so abased by my natural sovereign good lady; for whose service and honor I would not think it cost to spend my life”—and he even goes so far as to threaten resistance—“I would be sorry that the clergy should have cause to show disobedience, with oportet Deo obedire magis quam hominibus. And what instillers soever there be, there be enough of this contemned flock, which will not shrink to offer their blood to the defence of Christ’s verity, if it be either openly impugned or secretly suggilled.”[1274] Evidently, before Parker could have been driven to such scarcely covered threats, there must have been an intimation by the angry queen that she would recall the permission to marry, which, in the existing state of the law, she could readily have done.

The same spirit which rendered the marriage of a pastor dependent on the approbation of the neighboring squires caused the retention of ancient rules, which prove the profound distrust still entertained as to the discretion and morality of the clergy, and the difficulty with which the Anglican church threw off the traditions of Catholicism. Thus, even in 1571, Grindal, Archbishop of York, promulgates a modification of the canon of Nicæa, forbidding the residence with unmarried ministers of women under the age of sixty, except relatives closely connected by blood.[1275] Indeed, in some remote corners of the kingdom the old license was kept up. Archbishop Parker, about the year 1565, in speaking of the diocese of Bangor, states—“I hear that diocese to be much out of order, both having no preaching there and pensionary concubinary openly continued, notwithstanding liberty of marriage granted.”[1276] It evidently required time to accustom the clergy to the substitution of the new privileges for the old.

Although sacerdotal marriage was now fully sanctioned by the organic canon law of the church, yet it was still exposed to serious impediments of a worldly character. When thus frowned upon by her who was in reality, if not in name, Supreme Head of the church; when the wife of the primate himself could be exposed to such indelible impertinence; when the marriage of every unfortunate parson was subjected to degrading conditions, and when it was assumed that his bride must be a woman at service, the influences affecting the matrimonial alliances of the clergy must have been of the worst description. The higher classes of society would naturally model their opinions on those of the sovereign, while the lower orders had not as yet shaken off the prejudices in favor of celibacy, implanted in them by the custom of centuries. Making due allowance for polemical bitterness, there is therefore no doubt much truth in the sarcastic account which Sanders gives of the wives of the Elizabethan clergy. Taking advantage of the refusal of Parliament to formally legalize such marriages—a refusal which could not but greatly affect the minds of the people—he assumes that the wives were concubines and the children illegitimate in the eyes of the law; consequently decent women refused to undergo the obloquy attached to a union with a minister of the church, who was therefore forced to take as his spouse any one who would consent to accept him. The wives of prelates were ostracized; not received at court, and sharing in no way the dignities of their husbands, they were kept closely at home for the mere gratification of animal passion. The members of universities had been wholly unsuccessful in their efforts to obtain the same license, which was only granted to the heads of colleges, under condition that their wives should reside elsewhere, and should rarely pollute with their presence the learned precincts.[1277]

The accuracy of this sarcastic description is confirmed by a statement made by Percival Wiburn for the benefit of his friends in Zurich, subsequent to the adoption of the Thirty-nine Articles. He asserts that “The marriage of priests was counted unlawful in the times of queen Mary, and was also forbidden by a public statute of the realm, which is also in force at this day; although by permission of queen Elizabeth clergymen may have their wives, provided only they marry by the advice and assent of the bishop and two justices of the peace, as they call them. The lords bishops are forbidden to have their wives with them in their palaces; as are also the deans, canons, presbyters, and other ministers of the church, within colleges, or the precincts of cathedral churches.”[1278] It is not a little curious, indeed, to observe that in spite of the formal declaration in the Thirty-nine Articles, the absence of a special act of Parliament long caused the question to remain a doubtful one in the public mind. As late as July, 1566, Lawrence Humphrey and Thomas Sampson, two zealous Protestants, in denouncing “some straws and chips of the popish religion” which still defaced the Anglican church, state that “the marriage of the clergy is not allowed and sanctioned by the public laws of the kingdom, but their children are by some persons regarded as illegitimate;” in answer to which, Bishops Grindal and Horn rejoined that “the wives of the clergy are not separated from their husbands, and their marriage is esteemed honorable by all, the papists always excepted.”[1279] The matter evidently was still regarded as a subject of controversy, not yet decided beyond appeal; and the experience of the previous quarter of a century had accustomed men to too many vicissitudes for them to feel safe with so slender a guarantee as the Articles afforded. The Catholics still constituted a very large proportion of the population, and they scarcely concealed their feelings towards the innovation. When Sir John Bourne quarrelled with Dr. Sandys, Bishop of Worcester, among the formal articles of accusation which he presented to the Privy Council was the assertion that the Bishop in a sermon had ridiculed celibacy and had decried the virtue of unmarried priests.[1280] The knight apparently believed that this would be damaging to the bishop, and the latter seems likewise to have thought so, for in his answer he emphatically denied it, retorting that his adversary was a papist who had mass celebrated in his house and who was in the habit of applying the most opprobrious epithets to the wives of priests.[1281] So when in 1569 the Catholics of the North rose in insurrection under the Earls of Westmoreland and Northumberland, one of the grievances of which they complained was the marriage of the ministers of Christ.[1282] During the whole of this transition period the question was evidently one which occupied largely the public mind, and in the diversity of opinion it was not easy to see what the ultimate decision might be. When an irrevocable step such as marriage was legal only during the pleasure of a capricious woman, whose assent was known to have been extorted from her, it is no wonder that it should be looked upon with disfavor by all prudent relatives of women inclined to venture on it.

Such a state of feeling could not but react most injuriously on the character of the great body of the clergy. It deprived them of the respect due to their sacred calling, and consequently reduced them to the level of such scant respect as was accorded to them. How long this lasted, and how materially it degraded the ministers of Christ as a body, cannot be questioned by any one who recalls the description of the rural clergy in the brilliant third chapter of Macaulay’s History of England. In 1686 an author complains that the rector is an object of contempt and ridicule for all above the rank of the neighboring peasants; that gentle blood would be held polluted by any connection with the church, and that girls of good family were taught with equal earnestness not to marry clergymen, nor to sacrifice their reputation by amourous indiscretions—two misfortunes which were commonly regarded as equal.[1283]

Thus eagerly accepted and grudgingly bestowed, the privilege of marriage established itself in the Church of England by connivance rather than as a right; and the evil influences of the prejudices thus fostered were not extinguished for generations.

[XXVII.]
CALVINISM.

When John Calvin formulated the system of theology which bears his name, sacerdotal marriage had already become recognized as one of the necessary incidents of the revolt against Rome. That the French Huguenots should accept it accordingly was therefore a matter of course. Calvin himself manifested his contempt for all the ancient prejudices by marrying, in 1539, Idelette de Bure, the widow of the Anabaptist Jean Stordeur, whom he had converted.[1284] The Huguenot Confession of Faith was drawn up by him, and was adopted by the first national synod, held at Paris in 1559. Of course the Genevan views of justification swept away all the accumulated observances of sacerdotalism, and ascetic celibacy shared the fate of the rest.[1285] The discipline of the Calvinist church with regard to the morality of its ministers was necessarily severe. The peculiar purity expected of a pastor’s household was shown by the rule which enjoined any church officer whose wife was convicted of adultery to dismiss her absolutely, under pain of deposition, while laymen, under such circumstances, were exhorted to be reconciled to their guilty partners.[1286] Any lapse from virtue on the part of a minister was visited with peremptory deposition;[1287] nor was this a mere idle threat such as were too many of the innumerable decrees of the Catholic councils quoted above, for the proceedings of various synods show that it was carried sternly into execution. A list of such vagrant and deposed ministers was even kept and published to the churches, with personal descriptions of the individuals, that they might not be able to impose on the unwary. Indeed, the national synod of Lyons, in 1563, went so far as to punish those ministers who brought contempt upon the church by unfitting marriages;[1288] and, though this was omitted from the final code of discipline, it shows the exceeding strictness with which the internal economy of the ecclesiastical establishment of the Huguenots was regulated.