AN. REG. 8, 1565-6.

ANNO REG. ELIZ. 8,

ANNO DOM. 1565, 1566.

Suit between 1.
Bishops
Horn and
Bonner.

THUS

HUS have we seen the public Liturgy confirmed in Parliament, with divers penalties on all those who either did reproach it, or neglect to use it, or wilfully withdrew their attendance from it; the doctrine of the Church declared in the Book of Articles, agreed upon in Convocation, and ratified in due form of law by the Queen's authority; external matters, in officiating God's public service and the apparel of the Clergy, regulated and reduced to their first condition, by the books of Orders and Advertisements. Nothing remaineth but that we settle the episcopal government, and then it will be time to conclude this History. And for the settling of this government by as good authority as could be given unto it by the laws of the land, we are beholden to the obstinacy of Dr Edward Bonner, the late great slaughter-man of London'. By a Statute made in the last Parliament, for keeping her Majesty's subjects in their due obedience, a power was given unto the Bishops to tender and receive the Oath of Supremacy of all manner of persons dwelling and residing in their several dioceses2. Bonner was then prisoner in the Clink or Marshalsea, which being in the Borough of Southwark, brought him within the jurisdiction of Horn, Bishop of Winchester, by whose Chancellor the oath was tendered to him. On the refusal of which oath he is indicted at the King's Bench upon the Statute; to which he appeared in some term of the year foregoing, and desires that counsel be assigned to plead his cause, according to the course of the court. The court assigns him no worse men than Christopher Wray, afterwards Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas ; that famous lawyer Edmond Ploydon3, whose learned Commentaries do sufficiently set forth his great abilities in that profession; and one Mr Lovelace, of whom we find nothing but the name.

3

1

Fuller, iv. 335-8. Strype, Ann. i. 378.

25 Eliz c. 1. Sup. p. 389.

Or Plowden. This learned lawyer was himself a Romanist.

1566.

2. By them and their advice the whole pleading chiefly is AN. REG.8, reduced to these two heads,-(to omit the niceties and punctilios of lesser moment);-the first whereof was this,―That Bonner was not at all named in the indictment by the style and title of Bishop of London, but only by the name Dr Edmond Bonner, clerk, Dr of the Laws, whereas at that time he was legally and actually Bishop of London, and therefore the writ to be abated, (as our lawyers phrase it) and the cause to be dismissed out of the court. But Ploydon found here that the case was altered, and that this plea could neither be allowed by Catiline, who was then Chief Justice, nor by any other of the bench, and therefore it is noted by Chief Justice Dyer, who reports the case, with a non allocatur1. The second principal plea was this,―That Horn, at the time when the oath was tendered, was not Bishop of Winchester, and therefore not empowered by the said Statute to make tender of it, by himself or his Chancellor. And for the proof of this, that he was no Bishop, it was alleged, that the form of Consecration of Archbishops and Bishops, which had been ratified by Parliament in the time of King Edward, had been repealed in the first year of Queen Mary, and so remained at Horn's pretended consecration. The cause, being put off from term to term, comes at the last to be debated amongst the Judges at Serjeants' Inn; by whom the cause was finally put upon the issue, and the trial of that issue ordered to be committed to a jury of the county of Surrey. But then withal it was advised, that the decision of the point should rather be referred to the following Parliament, for fear that such a weighty matter might miscarry by a coun174 try2 jury, of whose either partiality [or] insufficiency there had 346 been some proof made before, touching the grants made by King Edward's Bishops; of which a great many were made under this3 pretence, that the granters were not actually Bishops, nor legally possessed of their several Sees.

3. According to this sound advice, the business comes under consideration in the following Parliament, which began on the 30th of September; where, all particulars being fully and considerately discoursed upon, it was first declared, That their not restoring of that book to the former power in terms significant and express, was but Casus omissus; and secondly, 3 Edd. 1, 2, "his."

1 Dyer's Reports, 234; Bramhall, iii. 79.

2

Edd. 1, 2, "contrary."

1566.

AN. REG.8, That by the Statute 5th and 6th Edward Sixth1, it had been added to the Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments, as a member of it, or at least an appendant to it; and therefore by 1 Eliz. was restored again, together with the said Book of Common Prayer,-intentionally at the least, if not in terminis. But, being the words in the said Statute were not clear enough to remove all doubts, they did therefore revive it now; and did accordingly enact, that "all persons that had been, or should be, made, ordered, or consecrate Archbishops, Bishops, Priests, Ministers of God's Holy Word and Sacraments, or Deacons, after the form and order prescribed in the said book, be in very deed, and also by authority hereof, declared and enacted to be, and shall be, Archbishops, Bishops, Priests, Ministers and Deacons, rightly made, consecrate, and ordered, any statute, law, canon, or other2 thing to the contrary notwithstanding 3." Nothing else done in this Parliament which concerned the Church, nor anything at all in the Convocation, by which it was of course accompanied, more than the granting of a subsidy of six shillings in the pound out of all their benefices and promotions. And as for Bonner, who was the other party to the cause in question, it was determined that neither he nor any other person or persons should be impeached or molested in regard of any refusal of the said oath heretofore made, and hereafter to be made before the end of that Parliament. Which favour was indulged unto them of the laity, in hope of gaining them by fair means to a sense of their duty; to Bonner and the rest of the Bishops, as men that had sufficiently suffered upon that account, by the loss of their Bishopricks.

Rastell's counter-challenge to Jewel.

4. By this last Act the Church is strongly settled on her natural pillars of doctrine, government, and worship,-not otherwise to have been shaken, than by the blind zeal of all such furious Sampsons as were resolved to pull it on their own s 8 Eliz. c. 1.

1 Sup. i. 173.

2 Edd. Heyl. " any."

These words do not really apply to the refusal, but to the Bishop's certificate of it. "By occasion or mean of any certificate by any archbishop or bishop heretofore made, or before the last day of this present session of parliament to be made, by virtue of any act made in the first session of this present parliament, touching or concerning the refusal of the oath declared and set forth by act of parliament in the first year of the reign of our sovereign lady Queen Elizabeth." Gibson, 142.

Perhaps there is a reference to the puritan of this name. Sup. p. 404.

1566.

heads, rather than suffer it to stand in so much glory. And AN. REG. 8, here it will be time to conclude this history, having taken a brief view of the state of the Church, with all the aberrations from its first constitution, as it stood at this time, when the Puritan faction had began to disturb her order; and that it may be done with a greater certainty, I shall speak it in the words of one who lived and writ his knowledge of it at this time, I mean John Rastel, in his answer to the Bishop's Challenge. Who though he were a Papist, and a fugitive priest, yet I conceive that he hath faithfully delivered too1 many sad truths in these particulars. Three books he writ within the compass of three years now last past against Bishop Jewel, in one of which he makes this address unto him, viz.

"AND though you, Mr. Jewel, (as I have heard say), do take the bread into your hands when you celebrate solemnly, yet thousands there are of your inferior ministers whose death it is

1 Edd. 1, 2, "to."

2 The editor has been furnished, by the kindness of his friend the Rev. Charles Rew, Fellow of St John's College, Oxford, with a transcript of Rastell's Challenge, extracted from a pamphlet printed at Antwerp, 1565, (Bodleian Library)—“A copie of a Challenge, taken out of the Confutation of Mr Juell's sermon, made by John Rastell." The text has been corrected by this, in so far as the quotations are taken from the Challenge; and the references to the heads of it are inserted between brackets. The Challenge is in form a parody on Jewel's." If any learned man of all our adversaries, or if all the learned men that be alive, be able to bring any one sufficient sentence out of any old Catholic Doctor or Father, or out of any General Council, or out of the Holy Scriptures of God, or any one example of the primitive Church, whereby it may be clearly and plainly proved that....I promise that I will give over and subscribe unto him in that point." But it will be observed how different the topics are in character from those selected by the Bishop (sup. pp. 347-9). Some points apply as much to the Roman system as to that of the Reformed Church; some might be easily answered by the reference to antiquity which Rastell demands; some relate to small and indifferent matters of detail; some to defects and disorders existing in a Church, which, from the difficulties of the time, was as yet imperfectly settled-(and these were expressly contrary to the mind of the Church, and to the letter of its laws); some refer to private extravagances and scandals, in no way chargeable on the system, and very probably either invented or exaggerated by the malice of the writer and his party. As a reply to Jewel, the Counter-challenge is of no force; but it has now a historical value, and for this it was that Heylyn quoted it.

1566.

AN. REG.8, to be bound to any such external fashion; and your order of celebrating the Communion is so unadvisedly conceived, that every man is left unto his private rule or canon, whether he will take the bread into his hands, or let it stand at the end of the table, the bread and wine being laid upon the table, where it pleases the sexton or parish-clerk to set them, p. 28.

"In the primitive Church altars were allowed amongst Christians, upon which they offered the unbloody sacrifice of Christ's body; yet your company, to declare what followers they are of antiquity, do account it even among one of the kinds of idola- 175 try, if one keep an altar standing. And indeed you follow a 347 certain antiquity, not of the Catholics, but of desperate heretics-Optatus writing of the Donatists, that they did break, raze, and remove the altars of God upon which they offered, p. 34 and 1651.

"Where singing is used, what shall we say to the case of the people that kneel in the body of the Church? yea, let them hearken at the chancel-door itself, they shall not be much wiser. Besides, how will you provide for great parishes where a thousand people are, &c.? p. 50.

"Then to come to the Apostles-where did you ever read that in their external behaviour they did wear frocks or gowns, or four-cornered caps? or that a company of lay-men-servants did follow them, all in one livery? or that at their prayers they sate in sides, or lay on the ground, or fell prostrate, or sung Te Deum, or looked toward the South?? or did wear copes of tissue or velvet?" with a thousand more such questions, p. 446.

"Whereas the Church of God, so well ordered with excellent men of learning and godliness, is constrained to suffer cobblers, weavers, tinkers, tanners, cardmakers, tapsters, fiddlers, jailors, and other of like profession, not only to enter into disputing with her, but also to climb up into pulpits, and to keep the place of priests and ministers, &c., p. 2... [§ 4.] Or that any

1 The latter of these references is to § 40 of the Challenge,-" Or that they were not heretics which threw down altars erected unto Christ."

2 This is probably an allusion to the order of the Second and later Prayer-Books, that at the celebration of the holy Communion the priest should "stand at the north side of the Table," whereas the Book of 1549 directed that he should be standing humbly afore the midst of the Altar." Edw. VI.'s Liturgies, ed. Park. Soc. 77, 265.