SIR J. MAYNARD.
There may be something in this. Yet your lordship, I think, does not carry the matter quite far enough; and, with your leave, I will presume to give another, and perhaps the truer, answer to Mr. Somers’s difficulty. The subject is a little nice, but I have not those scruples which may reasonably be conceived to restrain your lordship from enlarging upon it.
I reply then directly, and without softening matters, that this irregular translation of the supremacy is no proof that there was not then a FREE CONSTITUTION, with a legitimate power in it, to which the supremacy belonged. And my reason, without offence to my lord of Salisbury, is this. When the papal authority was abolished, and the question came into parliament, “who now became the head of the church;” the search after him was not carried, where it should have been, into the constitution of the kingdom; but, as it was a matter of religion, they mistook that, which was only an affair of church discipline, to be a doctrine of theology; and so searched, for a solution of the question, in the New Testament, and Ecclesiastical History. In the New Testament, obedience is pressed to the person of Cæsar, because an absolute monarchy was the only government in being: and, for the same reason, when afterwards the empire became Christian, the supremacy, as we know from ecclesiastical story, was assumed by the emperor: just as it would have been by the consul and senate, had the republic existed. Hence our Reformers, going altogether by spiritual and ecclesiastical example, and hoping thereby to preserve their credit against the reproaches of Rome, which, as your lordship knows, was perpetually charging them with novelties and innovations in both respects, recurred to early antiquity for that rule.
This attention to ecclesiastical example was, I suppose, a consideration of convenience with the wise fathers of our church: the other appeal to the Gospel, might be a matter of conscience with them. And thus by force of one text, ill-understood, render unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar’s, they put the spiritual sword into the king’s hands; just as by another, he beareth not the sword in vain (for I know of no better authority), the temporal sword had also been committed to his care.
MR. SOMERS.
This last intimation, I am apprehensive, would bear a further debate[31]. But I acquiesce in your answer to my particular question; I mean, unless the bishop of Salisbury warns me against submitting to so heretical a doctor.
BP. BURNET.
My Lord Commissioner chuses to let slip no opportunity of exposing what he takes to be an error in ecclesiastical management. Either way, however, I am not displeased to find that his main thesis keeps its ground; and that, even according to his own account of the matter, the nation, when it gave up the supremacy to the king, was in possession of a free and legal constitution.
On the whole, you give me leave then to presume that the considerations, now offered to you, afford a reasonable account of that despotic form under which the English government has appeared, from the union of the two roses down to the subversion of the constitution in Charles the First’s time.
Other causes concurred; but the Reformation was the chief prop and pillar of the imperial dignity, while the constitution itself remained the same, or rather was continually gaining strength even by the necessary operation of those principles on which the Reformation was founded. Religious liberty made way for the entertainment of civil, in all its branches. It could not be otherwise. It disposed the minds of men to throw off that sluggishness, in which they had slumbered for many ages. A spirit of inquiry prevailed. Inveterate errors were seen through; and prejudices of all sorts fell off, in proportion to the growth of letters, and the progress of reason.