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 8. STUBBS: THE CANON LAW 281 and justifiable protests of the Puritans ; and I mention them with respect here, because this opposition to unconstitutional tyranny is the only point in which I have any sympathy with them; their tenets I hold to be untenable, and their methods of promoting them by calumny, detraction, and coarse ribaldry I think entirely detestable; but I do think they were right in denouncing the Court of High Commis- sion and all its works. Even conservative churchmen like Hooker, in their defence of the ecclesiastical system, are hampered by the consciousness that much of what existed was indefensible. The bishops saw their position as bishops ignored, and the Puritans saw the power which they thought should be exercised by their own ministers exercised through a royal commission : the bishops however had the power and endured the ignominy, the Puritans suffered and waited for their turn to persecute. The lawyers were not all of one mind; Coke the great lawyer was himself of two minds ; he liked the crown better than the episcopate, but he loved the common law better than the crown ; and his inconsistency produces some curious results on his teaching. This leads us to two or three facts. From 1587 to 1591 the famous Cawdrey's case drew its grievous length along. The High Commission had deprived Cawdrey for nonconformity ; the question arose, had the Commission under the terms of the Act of the queen's first year exceeded its authority.? The resolution finally adopted by all the judges, and recorded and approved by Coke, affirmed that the ecclesiastical prerogative of the crown was such that the powers of a commission issued by it were not limited by that statute, but covered the whole range of eccle- siastical jurisdiction; and therefore the sentence was good. The judgment in Cawdrey's case, full of bad law and worse history, is often referred to even now by lawyers with a respect which it does not merit ; here it is useful as showing to what lengths the common lawyers under Elizabeth would go in support of the authority of the crown over things ecclesiastical. It stimulated the Puritans in and out of the Church to bitterer action, and disabled the hands of the bishops who, like Andrewes, would rather have taken the