Page:Church and State under the Tudors.djvu/264

 that they were so it seems impossible to deny—both were persecuted by the State rather than by the Church, and for reasons of State rather than for entertaining wrong opinions. Romanism, as has been already said, was constantly associated with the idea of treason, Puritanism with that of sedition; and not unreasonably. Not only did fanatical Romanists actually attempt the Queen's life, but Roman statesmen plotted and Roman theologians defended these attempted assassinations. Nor were the Puritans much less obnoxious to the State than these when we remember what the State proposed to do and to be in the sixteenth century. They maintained the superiority of the clergy—i.e. of their elders and assemblies—over the civil power in ecclesiastical matters, to the extent of making the ministers the judges of what is law in all matters, and civil magistrates judges only of the facts, making the sovereign subject to the censures and excommunications of their elderships and assemblies, and establishing officers analogous to the Ephors at Sparta, with power to depose the sovereign if he seem to them to break the covenant, with many other similar extravagances. All these matters bore a vastly different appearance to the eye of a sovereign or a statesman in any State, in the sixteenth century, from that which they bear now; and in England we have to bear in mind that there was, as we have frequently had occasion to notice, a very special and close connection, almost an identification, of the Church with the State. The Sovereign had, as we have just seen stated in so many words by Dr. Bancroft, all the authority in