Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 2.djvu/513

 forbidden. A more decided innovation was made in February, when by Proclamation the Council ordered the removal of all images, under the impression that this drastic measure would cause less disturbance than the widespread contentions as to whether the images were abused or not. Ashes and palms and candles on Candlemas Day had been forbidden in January; and soon afterwards a Proclamation was issued against the practice of creeping to the cross on Good Friday and the use of holy bread and holy water. These prohibitions had been contemplated under Henry VIII; they met with guarded approval from Gardiner; and they were comparatively slight concessions to the Reformers in a Proclamation, the main purpose of which was to check unauthorised innovations. The Council also sought to remove a fruitful cause of tumult -by forbidding the clergy to preach outside their own cures without a special licence. How far this bore hardly on the Catholics depends upon the proportion of Catholics to Reformers among the beneficed clergy; but it is fairly obvious that it was directed against the two extremes, the ejected monks on the one hand and the itinerant " hot-gospellers " on the other.

These measures were temporary expedients designed to preserve some sort of quiet, pending the production of the one " uniform and godly " order of service towards which the Church had been moving ever since the break with Rome. The assertion of the national character of the English Church necessarily involved an attempt at uniformity in its services. The legislation of 1547 seemed to imply unlimited religious liberty, and to leave the settlement of religious controversy to public discussion; but it was not possible to carry out a reformation solely by means of discussion. Local option, too, was alien to the centralising government of the Tudors and, unchecked, might well have precipitated a Thirty Years' War in England. Uniformity, however, was not the end which the government had in view, so much as the means to ensure peace and quietness. Somerset was less anxious to obliterate the liturgical variations between one parish and another, than to check the contention between Catholics and Reformers which made every parish the scene of disorder and strife; and the only way he perceived of effecting this object was to draw up one uniform order, a compromise and a standard which all might be persuaded or compelled to observe. Nor was the idea of uniformity a novel one. There were various Uses in medieval England, those of York, Hereford, Lincoln, and Sarum; but the divergence between these forms of service was slight, and before the Reformation the Sarum Use seems to have prevailed over the greater part of the kingdom.

As regards doctrine, the several formularies issued by Henry VIII accustomed men to the idea that the teaching of the Church of England should be uniform and something different from that of either Catholic or Reformed Churches on the Continent. Nor was it only in the eyes of antipapalists that some reformation of Church service books seemed