[7] “There is,” continues our author, “a point much to be noted,” which is, “what men have commonly succeeded in the places of such as have been deposed?” The successors of five of our deposed monarchs have been all eminent princes; “John, Edward the Second, Richard the Second, Henry the Sixth, and Richard the Third, have been succeeded by the three Henries—the Third, Fourth, and Seventh; and two Edwards—Third and Fourth.”
[8] I have not seen this edition of “The Conference,” or “Speeches,” but it must assuredly have suffered some mutilations; for Parsons often puts down some marginal notes which were not suitable to the republicans of that day. Such, for instance, as these—“A Monarchy the best Government;” “Miseries of Popular Governments.” Mabbott, the licenser, must have rescinded such unqualified axioms.
[9] Cole’s MSS., xxx. 129. Cole adds, that Baker, in a manuscript note upon Pitt’s and Ribadeneira’s silence, observes, “That’s no argument—the book was a libel, and libels are not mentioned in catalogues by friends.”
[10] Winwood’s “Memorials,” vol. i., p. 51.
HOOKER.
The government of Elizabeth, in the settlement of an ecclesiastical establishment, had not only to pass through the convulsive transition of the “old” to the “new religion,” as it was called at the time; but subsequently it was thrown into a peculiar position, equally hateful to the zealots of two antagonist parties or factions.
The Romanists, who would have disputed the queen’s title to the crown, were securely circumscribed by their minority, or pressed down by the secular arm; they were silenced by penal statutes, or they vanished in a voluntary exile; and even their martyrs were only allowed to suffer as traitors. A more insidious adversary was lurking at home; itself the child of the Reformation, it had been nourished at the same breast, and had shared in the common adversity; and this youthful protestantism was lifting its arm against its elder sister.
A public event, when it becomes one of the great eras of a nation, has sometimes inspired one of those “monuments of the mind,” which take a fixed station in its literature, addressed to its own, but written for all times. And thus it happened with the party of the Mar-prelates; for these mean and scandalous satirists, and their abler chiefs, were the true origin of Hooker’s “Ecclesiastical Polity.” The scandalous pamphlets of the Mar-prelates met their fate, crushed by the sharper levity of more refined wits; the more solemn volumes of their learned chiefs encountered a master genius, such as had not yet risen in the nation.