Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire; built by Elizabeth, Countess of Shrewsbury, about 1597.
11. Furniture.—The furniture within the houses underwent a change as great as the houses themselves. When Elizabeth came to the throne people of the middle class were content to lie on a straw pallet, with a log of wood, or at the best a bag of chaff, under their heads. It was a common saying that pillows were fit only for sick women. Before many years had passed comfortable bedding had been introduced. Pewter platters and tin spoons replaced wooden ones. Along with these improvements was noticed a universal chase after wealth, and farmers complained that landlords not only exacted higher rents, but themselves engaged in the sale of the produce of their lands.
12. Growing Strength of the House of Commons.—This increase of general prosperity could not but strengthen the House of Commons. It was mainly composed of country gentlemen, and it had been the policy of the Tudors to rely upon that class as a counterpoise to the old nobility. Many of the country gentlemen were employed as Justices of the Peace, and Elizabeth had gladly increased their powers. When, therefore, they came to fulfil their duties as members of Parliament, they were not mere talkers unacquainted with business, but practical men, who had been used to deal with their own local affairs before being called on to discuss the affairs of the country. Various causes made their opinions more important as the reign went on. In the first place, the national uprising against Spain drew with it a rapid increase of Protestantism in the younger generation, and, for this reason, the House of Commons, which, at the beginning of the reign, represented only a Protestant minority in the nation itself (see p. [428]), at the end of the reign represented a Protestant majority, and gained strength in consequence. In the second place, Puritanism tended to develop independence of character, whilst the queen was not only unable to overawe the Puritan members of the House, but, unlike her father, had no means of keeping the more worldly-minded in submission by the distribution of abbey lands.
E-shaped house, Beaudesert, Staffordshire; built by Thomas, Lord Paget, about 1601.
13. Archbishop Whitgift and the Court of High Commission. 1583.—The Jesuit attack in 1580 and 1581 strengthened the queen's resolution to put an end to the divisions which weakened the English Church, as she was still afraid lest Puritanism, if unchecked, might give offence to her more moderately-minded subjects and drive them into the arms of the Papacy. In 1583, on Grindal's death, she appointed to the Archbishopric of Canterbury Whitgift, who had taken a leading part in opposing Cartwright (see p. [446]). Whitgift held that as questions about vestments and ceremonies were unimportant, the queen's pleasure in such matters ought to be the rule of the Church. He was, however, a strict disciplinarian, and he was as anxious as the queen to force into conformity those clergy who broke the unity of the Church for the sake of what he regarded as mere crotchets of their own, especially as some of them were violent assailants of the established order. In virtue of a clause in the Act of Supremacy, passed in 1559, the queen had in that year erected a Court of High Commission. Though many laymen were members of this court, they seldom attended its sittings, and it was practically managed by bishops and ecclesiastical lawyers. Its business was to enforce conformity on the clergy, and now under Whitgift it acted most energetically, sitting permanently, and driving from their livings and committing to prison clergymen who refused to conform.