XXVI. THE ANGLICAN CHURCH. (continued 2)

This injunction of Queen Elizabeth caused no little excitement. Though Burghley had prudently endeavored to prevent its becoming “popular,” yet Cox, Bishop of Ely, in remonstrating against its cruelty to those whom it affected in his cathedral seat, shows that it was speedily known to all men, and that it gave exceeding comfort to the reactionaries—“What rejoicing and jeering the adversaries make! How the godly ministers are discouraged, I will pass over.”1273 In the Universities, where crowds of young men were collected, there might be some colorable excuse for the regulation, but in the splendid and spacious buildings connected with the cathedrals some milder remedy might easily have been found, and the mandate was particularly unpalatable to married bishops. Parker himself, who was individually interested in the matter, made a personal appeal to the queen, the result of which was to wound him deeply, as well as to show him how extreme were her prejudices on the subject. He pours forth his feelings in a letter to Burghley describing the interview—“I was in an horror to hear such words to come from her mild nature and Christianly learned conscience, as she spake of God’s holy ordinance and institution of matrimony. I marvel that our states in that behalf cannot please her Highness, which we doubt nothing at all to please God’s sacred Majesty.” He deplores the effect which it must produce on the people—“We alone of our time openly brought in hatred, shamed and traduced before the malicious and ignorant people, as beasts without knowledge to Godward, in using this liberty of his word, as men of effrenate intemperency, without discretion or any godly disposition worthy to serve in our state. Insomuch that the queen’s Highness expressed to me a repentance that we were thus appointed in office, wishing it had been otherwise.” The interview had evidently been stormy, and Parker had been made to feel the full force of Elizabeth’s perverseness—“I have neither joy of house, land, or name, so abased by my natural sovereign good lady; for whose service and honor I would not think it cost to spend my life”—and he even goes so far as to threaten resistance—“I would be sorry that the clergy should have cause to show disobedience, with oportet Deo obedire magis quam hominibus. And what instillers soever there be, there be enough of this contemned flock, which will not shrink to offer their blood to the defence of Christ’s verity, if it be either openly impugned or secretly suggilled.”1274 Evidently, before Parker could have been driven to such scarcely covered threats, there must have been an intimation by the angry queen that she would recall the permission to marry, which, in the existing state of the law, she could readily have done.

The same spirit which rendered the marriage of a pastor dependent on the approbation of the neighboring squires caused the retention of ancient rules, which prove the profound distrust still entertained as to the discretion and morality of the clergy, and the difficulty with which the Anglican church threw off the traditions of Catholicism. Thus, even in 1571, Grindal, Archbishop of York, promulgates a modification of the canon of Nicæa, forbidding the residence with unmarried ministers of women under the age of sixty, except relatives closely connected by blood.1275 Indeed, in some remote corners of the kingdom the old license was kept up. Archbishop Parker, about the year 1565, in speaking of the diocese of Bangor, states—“I hear that diocese to be much out of order, both having no preaching there and pensionary concubinary openly continued, notwithstanding liberty of marriage granted.”1276 It evidently required time to accustom the clergy to the substitution of the new privileges for the old.

Although sacerdotal marriage was now fully sanctioned by the organic canon law of the church, yet it was still exposed to serious impediments of a worldly character. When thus frowned upon by her who was in reality, if not in name, Supreme Head of the church; when the wife of the primate himself could be exposed to such indelible impertinence; when the marriage of every unfortunate parson was subjected to degrading conditions, and when it was assumed that his bride must be a woman at service, the influences affecting the matrimonial alliances of the clergy must have been of the worst description. The higher classes of society would naturally model their opinions on those of the sovereign, while the lower orders had not as yet shaken off the prejudices in favor of celibacy, implanted in them by the custom of centuries. Making due allowance for polemical bitterness, there is therefore no doubt much truth in the sarcastic account which Sanders gives of the wives of the Elizabethan clergy. Taking advantage of the refusal of Parliament to formally legalize such marriages—a refusal which could not but greatly affect the minds of the people—he assumes that the wives were concubines and the children illegitimate in the eyes of the law; consequently decent women refused to undergo the obloquy attached to a union with a minister of the church, who was therefore forced to take as his spouse any one who would consent to accept him. The wives of prelates were ostracized; not received at court, and sharing in no way the dignities of their husbands, they were kept closely at home for the mere gratification of animal passion. The members of universities had been wholly unsuccessful in their efforts to obtain the same license, which was only granted to the heads of colleges, under condition that their wives should reside elsewhere, and should rarely pollute with their presence the learned precincts.1277

The accuracy of this sarcastic description is confirmed by a statement made by Percival Wiburn for the benefit of his friends in Zurich, subsequent to the adoption of the Thirty-nine Articles. He asserts that “The marriage of priests was counted unlawful in the times of queen Mary, and was also forbidden by a public statute of the realm, which is also in force at this day; although by permission of queen Elizabeth clergymen may have their wives, provided only they marry by the advice and assent of the bishop and two justices of the peace, as they call them. The lords bishops are forbidden to have their wives with them in their palaces; as are also the deans, canons, presbyters, and other ministers of the church, within colleges, or the precincts of cathedral churches.”1278 It is not a little curious, indeed, to observe that in spite of the formal declaration in the Thirty-nine Articles, the absence of a special act of Parliament long caused the question to remain a doubtful one in the public mind. As late as July, 1566, Lawrence Humphrey and Thomas Sampson, two zealous Protestants, in denouncing “some straws and chips of the popish religion” which still defaced the Anglican church, state that “the marriage of the clergy is not allowed and sanctioned by the public laws of the kingdom, but their children are by some persons regarded as illegitimate;” in answer to which, Bishops Grindal and Horn rejoined that “the wives of the clergy are not separated from their husbands, and their marriage is esteemed honorable by all, the papists always excepted.”1279 The matter evidently was still regarded as a subject of controversy, not yet decided beyond appeal; and the experience of the previous quarter of a century had accustomed men to too many vicissitudes for them to feel safe with so slender a guarantee as the Articles afforded. The Catholics still constituted a very large proportion of the population, and they scarcely concealed their feelings towards the innovation. When Sir John Bourne quarrelled with Dr. Sandys, Bishop of Worcester, among the formal articles of accusation which he presented to the Privy Council was the assertion that the Bishop in a sermon had ridiculed celibacy and had decried the virtue of unmarried priests.1280 The knight apparently believed that this would be damaging to the bishop, and the latter seems likewise to have thought so, for in his answer he emphatically denied it, retorting that his adversary was a papist who had mass celebrated in his house and who was in the habit of applying the most opprobrious epithets to the wives of priests.1281 So when in 1569 the Catholics of the North rose in insurrection under the Earls of Westmoreland and Northumberland, one of the grievances of which they complained was the marriage of the ministers of Christ.1282 During the whole of this transition period the question was evidently one which occupied largely the public mind, and in the diversity of opinion it was not easy to see what the ultimate decision might be. When an irrevocable step such as marriage was legal only during the pleasure of a capricious woman, whose assent was known to have been extorted from her, it is no wonder that it should be looked upon with disfavor by all prudent relatives of women inclined to venture on it.

Such a state of feeling could not but react most injuriously on the character of the great body of the clergy. It deprived them of the respect due to their sacred calling, and consequently reduced them to the level of such scant respect as was accorded to them. How long this lasted, and how materially it degraded the ministers of Christ as a body, cannot be questioned by any one who recalls the description of the rural clergy in the brilliant third chapter of Macaulay’s History of England. In 1686 an author complains that the rector is an object of contempt and ridicule for all above the rank of the neighboring peasants; that gentle blood would be held polluted by any connection with the church, and that girls of good family were taught with equal earnestness not to marry clergymen, nor to sacrifice their reputation by amourous indiscretions—two misfortunes which were commonly regarded as equal.1283

Thus eagerly accepted and grudgingly bestowed, the privilege of marriage established itself in the Church of England by connivance rather than as a right; and the evil influences of the prejudices thus fostered were not extinguished for generations.