who will contrast, for instance, the language of the Admonition to Parliament with that of the correspondence of Bullinger or Peter Martyr, and with that of Elizabeth's bishops, will scarcely fail to be struck with the difference of tone between them, and will be ready to admit the difficulty of working with the Puritan leaders. Other motives, no doubt, combined with taste in directing Elizabeth's action against the Puritans. She had scarcely the materials for arriving at James I.'s subsequent formula, 'no bishop, no king'; but a Tudor had ever a keen scent for disobedience, and the general revolt against authority which was implied in Puritanism, would of itself have been sufficient to secure it her disfavour, while its direct tendency to split up the Protestant body was a manifest disadvantage in the struggle against the old Church. Elizabeth liked no authority but her own, and as she found herself often compelled to yield in matters of State, she became all the more arbitrary in her government of the Church. It should further be considered that during nearly the whole of Elizabeth's reign, as also in the latter part of Edward's, there had been and was no doubt as to the essentially Protestant character of the Church of England. The whole of the lives and writings of the Elizabethan divines, with the single and perhaps doubtful exception of Bishop Cheney, of Gloucester, agreed in doctrine with the Churches of Zurich and Geneva, and would almost certainly have followed them in practice also, but for the personal predilections of the Queen.[1] The passage already quoted from Jewell is sufficient to show
- ↑ See, for example, Norton's letter to Whitgift in Strype, Whitgift, vol. i. pp. 58-9. See also Archbishop Hutton's letter to Lord Cranborn at the beginning of the next reign; Strype, Whitgift, vol. iii. p. 420. Also extract from Archbishop Sandy's will in Strype, Whitgift, vol. i. p. 548. Also An7ials, vol. iii. pt. ii. pp. 67-8.
