Gilbert William Child

“ If England had adopted the Roman law, or still better for purposes of illustration the Code Napoléon, would it be right to speak of it as a national system of law? Is it not rather the fact that English law differs from the law of other nations which makes it national? And, similarly, if the English nation accepted the Church with its then existing canon law, does it not tend to obscure rather than to illustrate the history of the Church in England to speak of it as the National Church? ”

“ The civilised world was still in all the ferment into which the revival of learning and the invention of printing had plunged it. Protestantism had sprung up into a formidable power, and the air was full of it: it followed the new learning and the newly awakened spirit of inquiry into every country of Europe, and under such circumstances it was impossible to separate a single country from the old unity of the Western Church without giving Protestantism a vast advantage in it. ”

“ To these sources of power and influence another has yet to be added. The power of the Papacy was the band which bound together the bundle of sticks, that is to say, which sufficed for a long time to outweigh all the jealousies between regulars and seculars, between monks and friars, between dignified and lower clergy, and to bind the whole sacerdotal order into one vast army, with the Pope for its emperor and generalissimo. ”

“ Moreover, if she had seen, and to some extent felt, the bitterness, cruelty, and relentless brutality of Mary's rule, not less had she also seen the selfish hypocrisy and unscrupulous greed of Edward's Protestant counsellors; and was in no danger of falling under the delusion that in the controversy of the times all the good was on one side and all the evil on the other.
Equally by nature and education Elizabeth was a woman of broad mind and clear understanding, but, like other people, her conduct was not always dictated by her understanding alone. ”

“ In studying the history of the Reformation in England, nothing is more necessary than to keep its different stages distinct from one another. We are too apt to think of the Reformation as if it had been all one process, or at least as if some person or persons had deliberately set it going, with a distinct perception of the results to which it was to lead, and had consciously adapted the means employed to the production of those results. ”

“ Her subjects, apparently, moved by that curious sympathy so constantly shown to monarchs, rejoiced to see her emerge from the clouds of undeserved misfortune which had surrounded her early life, and, themselves smarting under the selfish government of Edward's Council, indulged freely in all those vague and groundless hopes which so often usher in the beginning of a new regime. In those few years all was changed, and the rejoicings which proclaimed the accession of Elizabeth were more than half due to the relief felt at having escaped from Mary's tyranny. ”

“ To all these womanly graces she added brilliant health, wonderful physical strength and activity, and that light-hearted courage and natural contempt of danger which, in a man, makes a leader the idol of his soldiers, and which, when found in a woman, never fails to arouse the wildest enthusiasm and devotion. Such, then, with the whole power of France at her back, was Elizabeth's most formidable foe. ”

“ REIGN OF MARY
We have witnessed the worst excesses of the reforming party. We have seen how the Lords of the Council cared little enough for either religion or morality, or the prosperity of the State or the good of the people, or any other thing except power and honour and wealth for themselves and their friends. We are now to see how, the moment the pressure was taken off, the Catholic party ran into excesses even more extreme than those of their opponents ”

“ The only real ally whom she had throughout was Reginald Pole, a man as fanatical, as narrow, and, though from different causes, as politically ignorant, as herself, but without a tithe of her courage or her patience, who had been in exile for years, and was not even yet permitted to return to England, and whose knowledge of England was therefore obtained at second-hand and coloured by all the fancies of an enthusiast and a dreamer. ”

“ REIGN OF HENRY VIII
Nothing is more difficult, glibly as it is often talked and written of, than successfully to place ourselves in the circumstances of men living in another period of history, or even in another climate or under another government. ”

“ Let us endeavour now to sum up the results produced by the long and important reign of Elizabeth upon the relations between Church and State in England then and since her time. In so doing we must be careful to include in our record not only the effects produced, but also the means, and the power, and the authorities, by which they were brought about. No ruler of England has ever, since Elizabeth's day had opportunities similar to hers. At no time since has an equal amount of power rested in the hands of a single individual. ”

“ The statesmen of Henry VIII.'s reign were men of like passions with ourselves. Had they lived in other times they might have been like the statesmen that have followed them—like Walpole or Pulteney, Chatham or Bute, Pitt, Peel, or Palmerston; but it is surely not too much to say that these modern statesmen would have been very different from what they were, had they lived all their time with a halter round their necks, and worked under a master who, upon almost any displeasure conceived against them, instead of merely accepting their resignation would have ordered them at once to the block. ”

“ The one point in it which interests us here is the conduct of Cranmer. Cranmer had floated on the full tide of prosperity during Edward's reign. On the whole, his conduct had been good. He may have been somewhat inclined to harshness in his treatment of Gardiner and Bonner, but his chastisements had been but with whips as compared with the scorpions which they themselves dealt out to their opponents both before and after. ”

“ If any existing consideration could justify the breach of the unity, and the consequent revolt against the unique authority of the one universal Church, much more could similar considerations justify an assault upon some of those practical abuses which the best and noblest of her sons could not deny to exist within her, and which they had endured only because her own authority alone stood high enough to initiate a reform. The breach once made was as the let ting-out of water, and Henry it was who made it ”

“ So vastly do the circumstances of our daily and hourly lives, the atmosphere of the society which we meet, the tone of the books and newspapers which we read, mould every thought which we think and modify every view which we take of the occurrences which surround us, that it is all but an impossibility to judge how those best known to us, or how even we ourselves, would think or speak or act in a set of circumstances widely different from those in which our actual experience has been cast. ”

“ Mary's success had, indeed, been marvellous, and in the main it was all her own work. Her one idea, when she arrived at the throne, was to restore religion; that is to say, the sway of the Pope and the Roman Church. With that view she had brought about the Spanish marriage, against the opposition of Gardiner himself, the leader of the Catholic clergy, and with no support beyond that of Paget and a small knot of latitudinarian statesmen; and, with the additional influence derived from that marriage, had succeeded in bringing about the complete legislative revolution which we have just seen. ”

“ It is certain that papal supremacy was never popular in England, and it is also certain that in Henry VIII.'s time the priesthood was in no better odour with the people than the Pope, and that Henry carried popular opinion with him in his measures against both; and it seems unlikely that any very great feeling would have been aroused in favour of either, had Edward's counsellors moved on with any degree of mildness or moderation, or had they not shown, in their general government, an entire absence of regard for either religion, justice, or even common humanity. ”

“ It will, I think, appear that the old belief so much in fashion a generation ago that many persons even now can hardly hear it questioned without a shock, that the divorce was taken in hand merely to gratify Henry's caprice, and the scruples only put forward as a decent veil wherewith to cover it, must be abandoned by every one who makes the slightest pretence to impartial judgment or to any capacity for weighing evidence. ”

“ Nothing surely can prove much more distinctly than does the history of this Act, how completely Henry VIII. and Cromwell had, to adopt a favourite modern phrase, made the supreme headship a 'reality.' Here is a direct and emphatic and authoritative statement of doctrine which is introduced into Parliament as 'the King's will,' is hurried by Parliament into a bill, to which is appended—also because it is 'the King's will'—a penal clause, and the whole is passed by Parliament into an Act, and, as such, becomes the law of England, binding upon clergy no less than laity. ”

“ It was obvious that no discipline could be maintained at all if a man holding, as Travers did, the constituted authorities of his own Church in utter contempt, repudiating their discipline, and despising their orders, could go abroad on purpose to free himself from their authority, receive his commission there from the hands of a mere set of malcontents like himself, and then come back and claim that he held any office or cure in the Church of England which might fall to his lot, by as good a title as the best there. ”

“ Theoretically, no doubt, the power of the Crown was as great under James and Charles as under Elizabeth, but the Parliament in the one case was far less submissive, and in the other claimed and succeeded in establishing (for the moment) a power far greater than that of the Crown. And, again, the circumstances under which Elizabeth came to the throne were unusually favourable to a new departure. Mary's legislation had reduced the law and the constitution of England to a condition which practically gave her successor a liberty of action in ecclesiastical matters unexampled before or since. ”

“ In the tangled web of human affairs, no man but a complete fanatic, or an entirely selfish and unscrupulous person, can ever act from a single motive, and the man who professes to do so is mostly one so ignorant of his own nature, and so blind to his own faults, that he entirely overlooks the real springs of his actions. ”

“ It is difficult to study the actual facts of sixteenth-century history, putting apart preconceived ecclesiastical theories, without arriving at the conclusion that the English National Church was as completely the creation of Henry VIII., Edward's Council, and Elizabeth, as Saxon Protestantism was of Luther, or Swiss of Calvin or of Zwingle, Obviously no man who sets forth a distinctive form of Christianity can proclaim himself the founder of a new religion or a new Church as such. ”

“ Again, any one whose reading has not been confined to recent works on English Church history, can hardly help remarking that the change of view in the new, as compared with the older, books, is often so great that it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that, in the popular delineations of the subject, the lights and shadows seem almost to have changed places within the memory of living men. ”

“ They were powerful orders of men, bound by their own rules, subject to their own officers, settled, indeed, in every nation of Europe, and so far—and so far only—bound by the instinct of self-preservation to keep on good terms with the law of the several countries within whose dominions they lived, and by whose protection they enjoyed their possessions, but acknowledging no nationality but that of Christendom as a whole, and deriving their power, their grandeur, and their influence mainly from the very fact that they did acknowledge none. ”

“ Modern Englishmen, accustomed for more than two centuries to regard the whole island as one kingdom, the home of a single nation, though they know, as a fact, that in Elizabeth's reign the affairs of Scotland were as truly foreign affairs as those of France, find a difficulty in fully realising it. True it is, that for more than one generation kings and statesmen on both sides of the Border had begun to recognise the fact that it would be best for both nations could they be amalgamated into one ”