It is unnecessary to tell the story of the seven years of struggle
between 1560 and 1567. In the end, Mary was imprisoned in Lochleven
Castle, deposed, and her infant son, James VI., was placed on the
throne. Lord James Stewart, Earl of Moray, was made Regent. The Estates
or Parliament again voted the Confession of Faith, and engrossed it in
their Acts. The Regent, acting for the sovereign, signed the Acts. The
Confession thus became part of the law of the land, and the Reformed
Church was legally recognised in Scotland.
BOOK IV.
_THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND_
CHAPTER I.
THE CHURCH OF HENRY VIII.[364]
The Church and people of England broke away from the mediæval papal
ecclesiastical system in a manner so exceptional, that the rupture had
not very much in common with the contemporary movements in France and
Germany. Henry VIII. destroyed the papal supremacy, spiritual and
temporal, within the land which he governed; he cut the bands which
united the Church of England with the great Western Church ruled over by
the Bishop of Rome; he built up what may be called a kingly papacy on
the ruins of the jurisdiction of the Pope. His starting-point was a
quarrel with the Pope, who refused to divorce him from Catharine of
Aragon.
It would be a mistake, however, to think that Henry's eagerness to be
divorced from Catharine accounts for the English Reformation. No king,
however despotic, could have forced on such a revolution unless there
was much in the life of the people that reconciled them to the change,
and evidence of this is abundantly forthcoming.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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