prisoned, and sometimes, as in the case of John Penry, even executed. And the means used by the bishops were as unscrupulous and unfair as their acts were harsh and arbitrary.[1] In particular, what was called the 'oath ex officio' was a method of investigation worthy only of the Spanish Inquisition. Under it a man could be called before the Bishop or the Court of High Commission without a charge and without an accuser, and there have an oath administered to him to reveal whatsoever he knew, whether of himself or anyone else; and if he refused the oath he was sent to prison at once. What will strike any modern reader as at once the most remarkable, and from a moral point of view the most lamentable, feature in this bitter and important controversy, is that the points in dispute not only were really unimportant, but were admitted on both sides to be so. If we examine[2] Anthony Gilby's 'One Hundred Points of Poperie yet remaining which deform the English Reformation' (he enumerates in fact 151), omitting those concerning the administration of justice in the Bishop's Courts, which were only indirectly a religious question, we shall find that no one of the real doctrines of the Anglican Church is in question, but trifling matters of vestments or ceremonies, to which, as we have seen, the Anglican divines of that age attached no importance, and many of which they would willingly and even gladly have given up.[3] Yet neither party would yield an inch. The malcontents would not yield, for they had, as we have just seen,
- ↑ Arber's Introductory Sketch, p. 73.
- ↑ Ibid. p. 28.
- ↑ Mr. Mullinger (University of Cambridge from the Royal Injunctions of 1535 to the Accession of Charles I., p. 263), quotes Travers himself as saying in his Eccles. Discip. Explicatio, ' The Universities are set on fire by causes most trivial in themselves,' and, as we have already seen, Travers professed himself entirely satisfied with the Thirty-nine Articles.
