Note 661 — Chapter VII
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Lord Bacon, in his advertisement respecting the Controversies of the Church of England, written under Elizabeth, speaks of this notion as newly broached. "Yea and some indiscreet persons have been bold in open preaching to use dishonourable and derogatory speech and censure of the churches abroad; and that so far, as some of our men ordained in foreign parts have been pronounced to be no lawful ministers."—Vol. i. p. 382. It is evident, by some passages in Strype, attentively considered, that natives regularly ordained abroad in the presbyterian churches were admitted to hold preferment in England; the first bishop who objected to them seems to have been Aylmer. Instances, however, of foreigners holding preferment without any re-ordination, may be found down to the civil wars. Annals of Reformation, ii. 522, and Appendix, 116; Life of Grindal, 271; Collier, ii. 594; Neal, i. 258.
The divine right of episcopacy is said to have been laid down by Bancroft, in his famous sermon at Paul's cross, in 1588. But I do not find anything in it to that effect. It is, however, pretty distinctly asserted, if I mistake not the sense, in the canons of 1606. Overall's Convocation Book, 179, etc. Yet Laud had been reproved by the university of Oxford in 1604, for maintaining, in his exercise for bachelor of divinity, that there could be no true church without bishops, which was thought to cast a bone of contention between the church of England and the reformed upon the Continent. Heylin's Life of Laud, 54.
Cranmer and some of the original founders of the Anglican church, so far from maintaining the divine and indispensable right of episcopal government, held bishops and priests to be the same order.