Page:Church and State under the Tudors.djvu/272

 Further still, as the quarrel between the Puritans and the bishops is becoming exacerbated, we find each party in turn charging the other with being disloyal to the supremacy. Thus, one of the commonest charges against the former party is that 'they attribute in effect no more to her Majesty and all other civil magistrates in these causes than the Papists do, which is potestatem facti non juris; and, on the other hand, we find Sir Francis Knollys—who is holding a brief, as his manner was, for the Puritans—writing to Lord Burleigh in complaint of the assumption of the bishops, 'Her Majesty is not supreme governor over the clergy if so be that our bishops be not under-governors to her Majesty, but superior governors by a higher claim than directly from her Majesty.' We see here how, during the latter part of the reign, each party was charged with putting forth claims which were felt to be incompatible with the old idea of the extent and character of the royal supremacy which, nevertheless, both parties represented as the undoubtedly orthodox and constitutional view. The explanation is probably to be found in the fact that thought upon every subject grows and ripens like a herb of the field, and, like that, its growth is favoured, checked, or altered, by the circumstances around it; and thus the ideas of these two parties developed by natural growth and were cramped and distorted by the different conditions in which they grew, by their opposition to one another and the different favour which they found with the Queen or with the people, until both of them arrived, sooner or later, by mere spontaneous development at the conclusion that, however much it might be the theory of the Tudor sovereignty that the will of the monarch for the time being was the standard of ortho-