Page:Church and State under the Tudors.djvu/208

 this time, however, as is well known, Elizabeth herself retained some taste for crosses and other ecclesiastical ornaments.

It will be well to give a somewhat full and detailed account of the ecclesiastical proceedings of the earliest years of Elizabeth's reign, because, as no further Parliament or Convocation was held until the fifth year, it is clear that, whatever transactions took place before that time, depended solely for their legality upon the Acts of the Parliament just narrated, since Convocation, as we have seen, had no part nor lot in them.

Some time in March, and while Parliament was still in session, one of those formal disputations, of which so many took place in the previous reigns, was held in Westminster Abbey between some bishops and other divines of the Roman Church on the one hand, and an equal number of the champions of the Reformation on the other, with the usual result that, while no one was really convinced on either side, the henchmen of the ruling party were credited with the victory, though in fact it was but a barren display.

One of the earliest of Elizabeth's measures after the dissolution of Parliament was the issue of a Commission to value the bishops' lands, with a view to carrying out the provisions of 1 Eliz. c. 19, which seems to have pleased the Protestants who were likely to become bishops as little as it did their predecessors.

In the course of the summer Commissioners were appointed under the recent Act to administer the Oath of Supremacy to the bishops and other clergy. Strype tells us, on the authority of a MS. of Sir Henry Sidney, that Elizabeth had an interview with the bishops previously to the Oath being offered to them, and on their