These were called “Whitgift’s Articles,” as he was their principal author. Subscription to them was required, for many years, without the warrant of any statute, or even of any canon. On the archbishop’s primary metropolitan visitation, a hundred and twenty-four clergymen in Norfolk and Suffolk were suspended in consequence of the application of this test. {67b} Petitions again flowed in from Norwich and Norfolk, and from other counties. But Whitgift opposed every degree of relaxation, “lest the church should be thought to have maintained an error;” and a new commission was granted for the detection of nonconformity, against which even the privy council remonstrated, as a copy of the Spanish Inquisition. {67c} A conspicuous agent in this commission was Aylmer, bishop of London. At one visitation in Essex he suspended nearly forty ministers. Those who were brought before him, in his progress through the country, were loaded with invective. {68a} Others were summoned, from distant parts of the kingdom, to appear at St. Paul’s, or at Lambeth. {68b} The inconvenience and expense of travelling at that period rendered their case particularly grievous. They had to answer, upon oath, a string of interrogatories with which they were previously unacquainted, and which could not fail to convict the puritan clergyman on his own testimony. {68c} Too conscientious to conform in all points, he scorned to avert the sword of persecution by the aid of falsehood. If he would have sacrificed his convictions at the shrine of bigotry, and have signed his name where his reason refused assent, he might have revelled in the emoluments of ecclesiastical preferment, although he were “a sot, or dunce, Lascivious, headstrong, or all these at once.” But it was enough to extort from him an admission that he had, in any _one instance_, deviated in the slightest particular from the ceremonies; or that he had said or written, publicly or privately, aught against the Book of Common Prayer, or _any thing_ therein contained, as being unscriptural or _inconvenient_;—and although he had evinced the laborious zeal of Paul, displayed the eloquence of Apollos, and exemplified the holy benevolence of John, still—he was a nonconformist—he was cast out. * * * * * Among those who were suspended for nonconformity at Archbishop Whitgift’s first visitation, was WILLIAM FLEMING, rector of Beccles.