court in the diocese of Winchester, he availed himself of the information which he was thus enabled to collect to lay before the privy council, in the following Michaelmas, the famous Articles of Abuses (‘Articuli Cleri’), in which he protested, in the name of the collective clergy of the realm, against the ‘prohibitions’ which the civil judges were in the practice of issuing against the proceedings of the ecclesiastical courts. This interference was repudiated by the majority of the clergy, who maintained that those courts were amenable for their proceedings to the crown alone. Bancroft, although supported by King James, found himself confronted by Coke and the rest of the common-law judges, and the whole dispute (see Gardiner, History of England, ii. 35–42) affords a striking illustration of the struggle which the interpreters of the law, in accord with the national feeling, now found it necessary to carry on against the combined influence of the crown and the church. It is difficult indeed to doubt the justice of Hallam's observation when he asserts (Const. Hist. c. vi.) that Bancroft, while magnifying the royal authority over the ecclesiastical courts, was really aiming at rendering those courts independent of the law.
The scheme of a new translation of the Bible, which he had opposed when it had emanated from a puritan quarter, found in him a ready supporter when enforced by the royal sanction; and it is due to Bancroft to recognise the fact that much of the success which ultimately attended that great undertaking was due to his zealous co-operation.
In the excess of indignation directed against the Roman catholics in consequence of the discovery of the Gunpowder plot, Bancroft seems to have striven to mitigate the violence of popular feeling; but that he himself inclined to catholicism is an allegation which rests on no adequate evidence. In January 1605–6 he brought forward a motion in the House of Lords for the appointment of a committee to inquire into the laws in force for the preservation of religion, the protection of the king, and the maintenance of the commonwealth; and his efforts resulted in the enactment of two additional measures directed against popish recusants.
With reference to the puritan party his conduct was far less defensible. Soon after his confirmation as archbishop he devised the ‘ex animo’ form of subscription, as a further test of unreserved compliance on the part of the clergy with the doctrines of the prayer-book. Many who had before been ready to yield a general conformity to Whitgift's three articles could not be brought to subscribe to a declaration that they did so with full approval and unreserved assent. Bancroft extended to them no indulgence, and some two or three hundred were consequently dispossessed of their benefices and driven from the church. Of the feelings which he thus evoked against himself we have a notable example in the language addressed to him by the eminent Scotch divine, Andrew Melville, when cited before the privy council in November 1606. On that occasion Melville, to quote the description given by his own nephew, ‘burdeinit him with all thais corruptiounes and vanities, and superstitiounes, with profanatioune of the Sabbath day, silenceing, imprissouning, and beiring doun of the true and faithfull preicheres of the Word of God, of setting and holding upe of antichristiane hierarchie and popische ceremonies; and taking him by the quhyt sleives of his rochet, and schalking them, in his manner, frielie and roundlie, callit them “Romishe ragis, and a pairt of the Beastes mark!”’ (Diary of James Melville (Wodrow Soc.), p. 679).
In 1608 Bancroft was elected chancellor of the university of Oxford, and was incorporated D.D. of the university. In the parliament of 1610 he brought forward an elaborate scheme (which he failed to carry) for bettering the condition of the clergy, whereby, among other provisions, all prædial tithes were to be made payable in kind, while those collected in cities and large towns were to be estimated according to the rents of houses.
Another project, attributed to him by Wilson, was that of founding a college of controversial divinity at Chelsea, wherein ‘the ablest scholars and most pregnant wits in matters of controversies were to be associated under a provost,’ for the express purpose of ‘answering all popish books … or the errors of those that struck at hierarchy’ (Complete History of England, ii. 685). According, however, to another writer (see Biog. Brit.), the author of the scheme was Sutcliffe, dean of Exeter, who was afterwards first provost of the college. But that Bancroft warmly sympathised with the design is shown by the fact that when, at his death, he bequeathed his valuable library to his successors in the see of Canterbury, it was on the condition that they should successively give security for the due preservation of the collection in its entirety, and, failing such security, the books were to go to Chelsea College, then in process of erection. The college proved a failure; and when, at the puritan revolution, the episcopal office was abolished, Bancroft's library was, by order of parliament, transferred to the university of Cambridge, which he had himself designated
