Page:Church and State under the Tudors.djvu/302

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CHURCH AXD STATE UXDER THE TUDORS

and then the anti-Roman Acts of Henry's, and re-established the Roman Church in greater power than it had enjoyed since Henry HI.; that she also, by setting up a violent persecution, gave occasion to a great and general reaction against that Church; and, further, she was unable to restore its wealth, which had been permanently taken from it by the abolition of the monastic system.

(10.) That Elizabeth, in the first year of her reign, restored the use of Edward's second Prayer-book with but two alterations, permitted the return of the Protestant divines who had gone into exile under Mary, and by means of the Act of Supremacy deprived all Mary's bishops with one only exception.

(11.) That the above Act, together with the Act of Uniformity, was passed by Elizabeth's first Parliament against the unanimous opposition of the Spiritual peers in the Upper House; and that Convocation took no part in the matter, except so far as the Lower House passed resolutions approving the whole of Mary's legislation.

(12.) That almost all the prominent Elizabethan bishops and divines were in doctrine Zwinglian or Calvinist, and were at much pains to declare themselves at one with the leading Swiss reformers, especially with Bullinger and Peter Martyr.

(13.) It was due to Elizabeth herself, and not to them, that the demands of the earlier Puritans were not complied with.

(14.) Bancroft in 1588, and Bilson some three years later, are the first writers who suggest any Divine right of bishops in the English Church, and of them the first accompanies his suggestion by a claim, in so many words, of the whole papal power for the Queen. It was plainly