Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 17.djvu/233

 evasive reply given to the address of 1597, to deal with the question by statute. Cecil and Bacon in behalf of the queen strongly deprecated this course, but after four days' hot debate Elizabeth sent down a message announcing her intention to revoke all grants of monopolies' that should be found injurious by fair trial at law'. This prudent step satisfied the commons, and a collision between them and their sovereign was averted. Having got through a prodigious amount of business of a very miscellaneous character, the commons were sent for on 19 Dec. 1601 to the upper house, and there 'her majesty, under a rich cloth of state,' after receiving their obeisance, dissolved her last parliament, which had dealt more liberally with her than any that had gone before.

The harsh and cruel treatment which the seminary priests and all who favoured them received at the hands of Elizabeth has been already dwelt on. Between 24 July and 29 Nov. 1588 (four months!) twenty-two priests and eleven lay folk, one a woman, were put to death with revolting cruelties under the statute of 27 Eliz. (, Dodd, iii. 163). Though no such wholesale slaughter was perpetrated after this, yet not a year passed without some unhappy creatures being executed, even to within five weeks of the queen's death, when William Richardson, a seminary priest, was 'hanged, bowelled, and quartered' at Tyburn for being found in England contrary to the statute. But in the Armada year the puritans and sectaries begun to find out that they too might presume too much upon the toleration which, such as it was, had been hitherto accorded to them. It is one of the many anomalies which we meet with in the history of Elizabeth's reign that, while ample freedom of worship was granted to foreigners, and churches were actually delivered over to them for their use (, Walloon Church of Norwich, vol. i. pt. ii. chap, iii.), nonconformity with the ritual prescribed by law, was punished as a crime when Englishmen were convicted of it. At first the only people who suffered inconvenience for conscience sake among the precisians were the clergy who objected to surplices and square caps, and the cross at baptism, and the ring at the marriage ceremony, with other matters equally trivial. These clergy were deprived of their livings, or suspended, or refused a license to preach in the churches; it is certain, however, that they were not otherwise worried. This only must be understood, that in the church the queen would tolerate no departure from the ritual established by law. Here and there it would happen that the friends of a popular preacher would gather together in private and so a 'conventicle' would be the result, but as no great harm was likely to come of such gatherings the authorities were not very ready to interfere. Separation from church communion had hardly been thought of as yet in England.

It was in 1567 that the first serious interference with a puritan conventicle was heard of. A large number of people had assembled at Plumbers' Hall in London, and while they were engaged in their religious exercises the myrmidons of the law burst in upon them and carried off a dozen or so of the boldest and threw them into prison (, Parker, i. 480). This was not a solitary instance, for a year or two after this it appears that there were then many languishing in the London prisons, and that some had actually died in gaol (, Preface, p. xlv, Cal. Dom. Add., 1566-79). As time went on the queen became less and less tolerant of any departure from the prescribed formularies; the puritans began to discover that the statute of 23 Eliz. c.2 was a double-edged weapon, which might be used against themselves. It was on the charge of publishing seditious libels against the queen's government, which this statute had made a capital offence, that Penry, Udal, Barrow, and Greenwood suffered, though the first two were representatives of those who desired what they considered necessary ecclesiastical reforms; the others protested that the church of England as by law established was essentially corrupt in its constitution, and nothing short of separation from communion with it was imperative upon all true and faithful christians.

In dealing with the two classes of non-conformists, the Romanists and the puritans, the queen's method of procedure was marked by a notable difference. The Romanists refused to take the oath of supremacy, and refused to conform to the ritual by law established, on the ground that in spiritual matters they owed allegiance to the pope of Rome, at whose dictation they withdrew from all communion with the schismatical church of England and its excommunicated 'supreme head;' that is, they set up the authority of a foreign power as antagonistic to the power of the queen of England. This position, in the view which Elizabeth and her council thought proper to take of it, compelled the government to treat the non-conformity of the Romanists as a political offence, and as such it was dealt with by the civil power (see a remarkable speech of the queen reported in Cal. Dom. 1601-3, p. 168).

The puritans, on the other hand, railed