Note 296 — Chapter IV

In the struggle made for popery at the queen's accession, the lower house of convocation sent up to the bishops five articles of faith, all strongly catholic. These had previously been transmitted to the two universities, and returned with the hands of the greater part of the doctors to the first four. The fifth they scrupled, as trenching too much on the queen's temporal power. Burnet, ii. 388, iii. 269.

Strype says, the universities were so addicted to popery that for some years few educated in them were ordained. Life of Grindal, p. 50. And Wood's Antiquities of the University of Oxford contain many proofs of its attachment to the old religion. In Exeter College, as late as 1578, there were not above four protestants out of eighty, "all the rest secret or open Roman affectionaries." These chiefly came from the west, "where popery greatly prevailed, and the gentry were bred up in that religion." Strype's Annals, ii. 539. But afterwards, Wood complains, "through the influence of Humphrey and Reynolds (the latter of whom became divinity lecturer on Secretary Walsingham's foundation in 1586), the disposition of the times, and the long continuance of the Earl of Leicester, the principal patron of the puritanical faction, in the place of Chancellor of Oxford, the face of the university was so much altered that there was little to be seen in it of the church of England, according to the principles and positions upon which it was first reformed." Hist. of Oxford, vol. ii. p. 228. Previously, however, to this change towards puritanism, the university had not been Anglican, but popish; which Wood liked much better than the first, and nearly as well as the second.

A letter from the University of Oxford to Elizabeth on her accession (Hearne's edition of Roper's Life of More, p. 173) shows the accommodating character of these academies. They extol Mary as an excellent queen, but are consoled by the thought of her excellent successor. One sentence is curious: "Cum patri, fratri, sorori, nihil fuerit republicâ carius, religione optatius, verâ gloriâ dulcius; cum in hâc familiâ hæ laudes floruerint, vehementer confidimus, etc., quæ ejusdem stirpis sis, easdem cupidissime prosecuturam." It was a singular strain of complaisance to praise Henry's, Edward's, and Mary's religious sentiments in the same breath; but the queen might at least learn this from it, that whether she fixed on one of their creeds, or devised a new one for herself, she was sure of the acquiescence of this ancient and learned body. A preceding letter to Cardinal Pole, in which the times of Henry and Edward are treated more cavalierly, seems by the style, which is very elegant, to have been the production of the same pen.