It has already been seen that the liberties of the people were much
favored by the frequent interruptions in the succession to the crown.
Whenever one branch of the Plantagenet family displaced another, the
new king, feeling himself weak, endeavored to strengthen his title by
procuring a parliamentary enactment in support of it. It thus became
established as a regular principle in the English government, that the
people who were represented in parliament had something to say in the
appointment of their king. A considerable change, however, had taken
place since the accession of Henry VII. The great power acquired by
that king, through his worldly wisdom and the destruction of the
nobility during the civil wars, had been handed down through four
successive princes, who inherited the crown by birthright, and did not
require to cringe to the people for a confirmation of their title. The
parliaments, therefore, were now a great deal more under the control
of the sovereign than they had formerly been. From an early period of
his reign, Henry VIII never permitted his parliament to oppose his
will in the least. To the various changes of religion under successive
sovereigns, the parliaments presented no obstacle. An idea was now
beginning to arise, very much through the supremacy which the
sovereigns had acquired over the church, that the right of the crown
was one derived from God, and that the people had nothing to do with
it, except to obey what it dictated to them. Of this notion, no one
took so much advantage, or was at so much pains to impress it, as
Elizabeth. No doubt her arbitrary measures were generally of a popular
nature, yet this does not excuse them in principle; and their ultimate
mischief is seen in the attempts of future sovereigns to pursue worse
ends upon the same means. Elizabeth’s government consisted entirely of
herself and her ministers, who were, from the beginning to the end of
her reign, the very spirit and essence of the enlightened men of
England. Her prime minister was the celebrated Lord Burleigh, by far
the most sagacious man who ever acted as a minister in Britain; and
all her emissaries to foreign courts were of one complexion――circumspect
and penetrating men, ardently devoted to their country, their mistress,
and to the Protestant religion.
On the accession of Elizabeth, the two celebrated acts of Supremacy
and Conformity were passed, for the purpose of crushing the political
influence of the Popish religion; an end which they sufficiently
accomplished. By the act of supremacy, all beneficed clergymen, and
all holding offices under the crown, were compelled to take an oath
adjuring the temporal and spiritual jurisdiction of any foreign prince
or prelate, on pain of forfeiting their offices, while any one
maintaining such supremacy was liable to heavy penalties. The other
statute prohibited any one from following any clergyman who was not of
the established religion, under pain of forfeiting his goods and
chattels for the first offense, of a year’s imprisonment for the
second, and of imprisonment during life for the third; while it
imposed a fine of a shilling on any one absenting himself from the
established church on Sundays and holidays. By means of a court of
ecclesiastical commission, which the queen erected, these laws, and
others of a more trifling and vexatious nature, were enforced with
great severity. It may afford some idea of the barbarity of the age,
and of the terror in which the church of Rome was now held, that,
during the reign of Elizabeth, one hundred and eighty persons suffered
death by the laws affecting Catholic priests and converts.