Whitgift succeeded Grindal as Archbishop of Canterbury in the year 1583, the twenty-fifth of Elizabeth, and his primacy lasted during the remainder of her reign. It was a period of very great importance to the Church of England. The series of Acts just enumerated made Nonconformity almost as penal as Popery, and without the same provocation which could be alleged in excuse for severity in the latter case. Nonconformists, in Tudor times at least, always professed to l^e and probably were loyal subjects; their quarrel, according to their own account, was not with the Queen but with the bishops. Yet it is sufficiently evident that the bishops were but the tools of the State, and that to quarrel with them was to quarrel with the State, and, further, that in this particular department even more than in any other, Elizabeth herself was the State. To arrive at any sound conclusion on this matter it is necessary to look at the reign as a whole and then to see wherein the latter half of it differed from the earlier. We shall find on so doing that Elizabeth herself retained the same disposition, the same tastes and inclinations throughout, but that as times changed and opinions progressed, so the action of this constant force became modified, and the results which it produced modified still more. The opinions and wishes of most of Elizabeth's earlier bishops, Grindal, Jewell, and others, differed, as we have seen, little or nothing from those of the earlier Puritans, and there can be no reasonable doubt that but for the personal distaste of Elizabeth herself, very great modifications in the ceremonies and ecclesiastical habits in use in the English Church would have been introduced.[1] Certain it is that in the Convocation of 1562 the pro-
- ↑ Burnet, vol. iii. p. 513, and Strype as there referred to.
