Note 342 — Chapter IV

See a declaration to this effect, at which no one could cavil, in Strype's Annals, iv. 85. The puritans, or at least some of their friends, retaliated this charge of denying the queen's supremacy on their adversaries. Sir Francis Knollys strongly opposed the claims of episcopacy, as a divine institution, which had been covertly insinuated by Bancroft, on the ground of its incompatibility with the prerogative, and urged Lord Burleigh to make the bishops acknowledge they had no superiority over the clergy, except by statute, as the only means to save her majesty from the extreme danger into which she was brought by the machinations of the pope and King of Spain. Life of Whitgift, p. 350, 361, 389. He wrote afterwards to Lord Burleigh in 1591, that if he might not speak his mind freely against the power of the bishops, and prove it unlawful, by the laws of this realm, and not by the canon law, he hoped to be allowed to become a private man. This bold letter he desires to have shown to the queen. Lansdowne Catalogue, vol. lxviii. 84.