retained the celibacy of the clergy and restored the use of crucifixes in the churches.

The caution and hesitation with which she enforced on the clergy the oath required by the Act of Supremacy showed Elizabeth's wish to avoid the opening of a religious strife. The higher dignitaries, indeed, were unsparingly dealt with. The bishops, who with a single exception refused to take the oath, were imprisoned and deprived. The same measure was dealt out to most of the archdeacons and deans. But with the mass of the parish priests a very different course was taken. The commissioners appointed in May, 1559, were found to be too zealous in October, and several of the clerical members were replaced by cooler laymen. The great bulk of the clergy seem neither to have refused nor to have consented to the oath; but to have left the commissioners' summons unheeded and to have stayed quietly at home. Of the 9,400 beneficed clergy, only a tenth presented themselves before the commissioners. Of those who attended and refused the oath 189 were deprived; but many of the most prominent went unharmed. At Winchester, though the dean and canons of the cathedral, the warden and fellows of the college, and the master of St. Cross, refused the oath, only four of these appear in the list of deprivations. Even the few who suffered proved too many for the purpose of the queen. In spite of pressure from the Protestant prelates, who occupied the sees vacated by the deprived bishops, Elizabeth was firm in her policy of patience, and in December she ordered the commissioners in both provinces to suspend their proceedings.

In part, indeed, of her effort she was foiled by the bitterness of the Reformers. The London mob tore down the crosses in the streets. Her attempt to retain the crucifix, or to enforce the celibacy of the priesthood fell dead before the opposition of the Protestant clergy. But to the mass of the nation, the compromise of Elizabeth seems to have been fairly acceptable. They saw but little change. Their old vicar or rector in almost every case remained in his parsonage and ministered in his church. The new prayer-book was for the most part an English rendering of the old service. Even the more zealous adherents of Catholicism held as yet that in complying

with the order for attendance at public worship "there could be nothing positively unlawful." Where party feeling ran high, indeed, the matter was sometimes settled by a compromise. A priest would celebrate Mass at his parsonage for the more rigid Catholics, and administer the new communion in church to the more rigid Protestants. Sometimes both parties knelt together at the same altar-rails, the one to receive hosts consecrated by the priest at home after the old usage, the other wafers consecrated in church after the new. In many parishes of the north no change of service was made at all.

To modern eyes the church under Elizabeth would seem little better than a religious chaos. But England was fairly used to religious confusion, for the whole machinery of English religion had been thrown out of gear by the rapid and radical changes of the last two reigns. And to the queen's mind a religious chaos was a far less difficulty than the parting of the nation into two warring churches which would have been brought about by a more rigorous policy. She trusted to time to bring about greater order; and she found in Matthew Parker, whom Pole's death at the moment of her accession enabled her to raise to the see of Canterbury, an agent in the reorganization of the church whose patience and moderation were akin to her own. To the difficulties which Parker found, indeed, in the temper of the Reformers and their opponents new difficulties were sometimes added by the freaks of the queen herself. If she had no convictions, she had tastes; and her taste revolted from the bareness of Protestant ritual, and above all from the marriage of priests. "Leave that alone," she shouted to Dean Nowell from the royal closet as he denounced the use of images-"stick to your text, master dean, leave that alone!" When Parker was firm in resisting the introduction of the crucifix or of celibacy, Elizabeth showed her resentment by an insult to his wife. Married ladies were addressed at this time as "madam," unmarried ladies as "mistress ;" but the marriage of the clergy was still unsanctioned by law, for Elizabeth had refused to revive the statute of Edward by which it was allowed, and the position of a priest's wife was legally a very doubtful one. When Mrs. Parker, therefore, advanced at the close of a sumptuous

entertainment at Lambeth to take leave of the queen, Elizabeth feigned a momentary hesitation. "Madam," she said at last, "I may not call you, and mistress I am loath to call you; however, I thank you for your good cheer." But freaks of this sort had little real weight beside the steady support which the queen gave to the primate in his work of order. The vacant sees were filled with men from among the exiles, for the most part learned and able, though far more Protestant than the bulk of their flocks; the plunder of the church by the nobles was checked; and at the close of 1559, England seemed to settle quietly down in a religious peace.

But cautious as had been Elizabeth's movements, and skillfully as she had hidden the real drift of her measures from the bulk of the people, the religion of England was changed. The old service was gone. The old bishops were gone. The royal supremacy was again restored. All connection with Rome was again broken. The repudiation of the papacy and the restoration of the prayer-book in the teeth of the unanimous opposition of the priesthood had established the great principle of the Reformation, that the form of a nation's faith should be determined not by the clergy, but by the nation itself. Different, therefore, as was the temper of the government, the religious attitude of England was once more what it had been under the protectorate. At the most critical moment of the strife between the new religion and the old, England had ranged itself on the side of Protestantism. It was only the later history of Elizabeth's reign which was to reveal of what mighty import this Protestantism of England was to prove. Had England remained Catholic, the freedom of the Dutch Republic would have been impossible. No Henry the Fourth would have reigned in France to save French Protestantism by the edict of Nantes. No struggle over far-off seas would have broken the power of Spain, and baffled the hopes which the house of Austria cherished of winning a mastery over the western world.-J. R. GREEN.

THE PEOPLE'S SOVEREIGN.

Elizabeth, whose despotism was as peremptory as that of the Plantagenets, and whose ideas of the English constitution were limited in the highest degree, was, notwithstanding, more beloved by her subjects than any sovereign before or since. It was because, substantially, she was the people's sovereign; because it was given to her to conduct the outgrowth of the national life through its crisis of change, and the weight of her great mind and her great place were thrown on the people's side. She was able to paralyze the dying efforts with which, if a Stuart had been on the throne, the representatives of an effete system might have made the struggle a deadly one; and the history of England is not the history of France, because the resolution of one person held the Reformation firm till it had rooted itself in the heart of the nation, and could not be again overthrown. The Catholic faith was no longer able to furnish standing ground on which the English, or any other nation, could live a manly and a godly life. Feudalism, as a social organization, was not any more a system under which their energies could have scope to move. Thenceforward, not the Catholic Church, but any man to whom God had given a heart to feel and a voice to speak, was to be the teacher to whom men were to listen; and great actions were not to remain the privilege of the families of the Norman nobles, but were to be laid within the reach of the poorest plebeian who had the stuff in him to perform them.

Alone, of all the sovereigns of Europe, Elizabeth saw the change which had passed over the world. She saw it, and saw it in faith, and accepted it. The England of the Catholic Hierarchy and the Norman Baron, was to cast its shell and to become the England of free thought and commerce and manufacture, which was to plough the ocean with its navies, and sow its colonies over the globe; and the first appearance of these enormous forces and the light of the earliest achievements of the new era shines through the forty years of the reign of Elizabeth with a grandeur which, when once its history is written, will be seen to be among the most sublime

phenomena which the earth as yet has witnessed. The work was not of her creation; the heart of the whole English nation was stirred to its depths; and Elizabeth's place was to recognize, to love, to foster, and to guide. The Government originated nothing; at such a time it was neither necessary nor desirable that it should do so; but wherever expensive enterprises were on foot which promised ultimate good, and doubtful immediate profit, we never fail to find among the lists of contributors the Queen's Majesty, Burghley, Leicester, Walsingham. Never chary of her presence, for Elizabeth could afford to condescend, when ships were fitting in the river for distant voyages, the Queen would go down in her barge and inspect. Frobisner, who was but a poor sailor adventurer, sees her wave her handkerchief to him from the Greenwich Palace windows, and he brings her home a narwhal's horn for a present.

She honored her people, and her people loved her; and the result was that, with no cost to the government, she saw them scattering the fleets of the Spaniards, planting America with colonies, and exploring the most distant seas. Either for honor or for expectation of profit, or from that unconscious necessity by which a great people, like a great man, will do what is right, and must do it at the right time, whoever had the means to furnish a ship, and whoever had the talent to command one, laid their abilities together and went out to pioneer, and to conquer, and to take possession, in the name of the Queen of the Sea. There was no nation so remote but what some one or other was found ready to undertake an expedition there, in the hope of opening a trade; and, let them go where they would, they were sure of Elizabeth's countenance. We find letters written by her, for the benefit of nameless adventurers, to every potentate of whom she had ever heard—to the Emperors of China, Japan, and India, the Grand Duke of Russia, the Grand Turk, the Persian "Sofee," and other unheard-of Asiatic and African princes; whatever was to be done in England, or by Englishmen, Elizabeth assisted when she could, and admired when she could not.

-J. A. FROude.