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472 prerogative as supreme head of the Church; but Strickland replied, "The salvation of their souls was concerned, to which all the kingdoms of the earth were nothing in comparison." Enraged at this bold conduct, the queen sent for Strickland to appear before her in Council, and ordered him to appear no more in the House of Commons. But the House was of another temper to that which it had shown in her father's time. It called Strickland to its bar, and demanded what was the reason that he absented himself from his duties. Strickland stated the cause, nothing loth; and the House then declared that its privileges had been invaded in his person; that such proceedings could not be submitted to without a betrayal of its trust to the people; that the queen could neither make nor break the laws; and that the House, which had the authority to determine the right to the crown itself, was certainly competent to treat of all matters concerning the Church, its discipline, and ceremonies.

The Speaker, after a consultation with some of the ministers, proposed to suspend the debate; but the next morning Strickland appeared in his place, and was greeted by the acclamations of the House. Elizabeth took the hint, and suffered the matter to pass; but she did not forget it. On dismissing Parliament at the end of the Session, she ordered the Lord Keeper Bacon to inform the members that their conduct had been strange, undutiful, and unbecoming; that as they had forgotten themselves, they should be otherwise remembered; and that the queen's highness did utterly disallow and condemn their folly in meddling with things not appertaining to them, nor within the capacity of their understandings.

But the example of independence had been shown, and it was not lost. This stern resistance to the will of the monarch in Parliament, in fact, constituted a new era. To the spirit of the Puritans we owe the establishment of the supremacy of Parliament, and its defence against the encroachments of the sovereign, however powerful; for the battle that commenced was continued with various but advancing success, till it terminated in the expulsion of the Stuarts, and the passing of the Bill of Rights. Not the less, however, did Elizabeth rage against it; and if she found Parliament invulnerable, she attacked the liberties of the subject in detail, by her Court of High Commission—a mere variation of the High Court of Star Chamber. This court consisted of a number of commissioners, with Parker, the primate, at their head, who were empowered to inquire, on the oath of the person accused, and on the oaths of witnesses, into all heretical, erroneous, and dangerous opinions; into absence from the public worship and the frequenting of conventicles; into the possession of seditious books, libels against the queen, her magistrates, and ministers; into adulteries, and all offences against decency and morals; and to punish the offender by spiritual censures, by fine, imprisonment, and deprivation. As there was no jury, it was clearly a breach of Magna Charta, and wholly unconstitutional, and was a species of inquisition liable to great abuses, and to become an instrument to the grossest injustice. Its powers were first turned against the Papists, but the sturdy character and acts of the Puritans very soon brought them under its notice, and they became ere long the first objects of its oppressive rigour. This rigour only tended to drive so high-spirited a class of subjects into open schism, and to the conventicles which sprang up fast and far. These Parker attacked with fury. At a meeting at Plumber's Hall more than a hundred persons were seized and brought into the High Commission Court, and of these twenty-four men and seven women, who refused to confess themselves guilty of any offence, were punished with twelve months' imprisonment. This course was now pursued towards the Dissenters everywhere. They were driven out of their meetings, and subjected to insult and imprisonment, some of them for life. Parker, with his bench of bishops and delegates, grew more and more ferocious. He declared that the Puritans were cowards, and that they would soon succumb to a strong hand; but, like many another persecutor, whilst he thought he was destroying, he was only disseminating the obnoxious principles; and the cowards, as he called them, in two more reigns, laid the monarch in his blood, and the throne in the dust. Had the primate been a man of any deep insight into human nature, the hardy answer of Mr. Wentworth, one of the most eloquent debaters of the House of Commons, would have caused him to reflect. He called him before him to interrogate him regarding certain omissions in the Thirty-nine Articles, which the Commons had taken upon themselves to make. "He asked me," said Wentworth, "why we did put out of the book the articles for the homilies, consecration of bishops, and such like. 'Surely, sir,' said I, 'because wo were so occupied in other matters that we had no time to examine them how they agree with the word of God.' 'What!' said he 'surely you mistake the matter: you will refer yourselves wholly to us therein.' 'No, by the faith I bear to God,' said I, 'we will pass nothing before we understand what it is; for that were put to make you Popes. Make you Popes who list,' said I, 'for we will make you none.'"

In the January of 1571 the queen went in great state to dine with Sir Thomas Gresham in the City, who had invited her to open the new Exchange which he had built at his own expense on Cornhill. After the ceremony, she dined with the great merchant at his house in Bishopsgate Street, where she was accompanied by La Mothe Fenelon, the French ambassador. After dinner she indulged herself in her favourite topic in private—that of marrying—though she hated nothing more than to have this subject broached to her in public by her Parliament. "Among other things," Fenelon says, "she told me that she was determined to marry, not from any wish of her own, but for the satisfaction of her subjects, and also to put an end, by the authority of a husband or by the birth of offspring, if it pleased God to give them to her, to the enterprises which she felt would be perpetually made against her person and realm if she became so old a woman that there was no longer any pretence for taking a husband, or hope that she might have children. She added that, 'in truth, she greatly feared not being loved by him whom she might espouse, which would be a greater misfortune than the first, for it would be worse to her than death, and she could not bear to reflect on such a possibility.'"

The ambassador, of course, flattered, and recommended to her one of the French princes—the Duke of Anjou. Elizabeth was fain to listen to this proposal, because she