from the clergy, for ecclesiastical enactments which, in former times, would have proceeded from the clergy themselves as a matter of course, it was glad enough to do so, but when it could not, it very simply, as we have seen, did without it. We have also seen that those early measures of Elizabeth, on which the permanent establishment of the Reformation hangs, were carried out in the teeth of the unanimous opposition of the clergy both in the House of Lords and in the Convocation—the only Convocation of the age which is above suspicion of having yielded to governmental pressure.
In the foregoing pages it has been my endeavour to confine myself as much as possible to facts, to what was actually done, said, or written by the actors in the great ecclesiastical revolution of the sixteenth century, and to what appear to be the necessary deductions from those facts. Except, perhaps, in the description of what their acts appear to me to show of the characters of some of the most important actors in the drama, I have as much as possible avoided both opinions and theories. How far the facts and the deductions hang together, and whether they accord best with the view of the whole transaction which was taken by contemporaries, and which remained general amongst Englishmen until our own days, or with those of that special party which arose in the seventeenth century, and all but expired with the non-jurors early in the eighteenth, but whose ideas have been revived and exaggerated within the last fifty years, it will be for my readers to determine for themselves. The earliest forms of those opinions we have seen arose about the year 1588 or '90. They were totally unknown before, and remained almost entirely inoperative for many years after—in fact, during
