Of the successive High Commissions--which formed the great spiritual tribunals of the land--the majority of the Commissioners were laymen.[7] The Anglo-Catholics of Elizabeth's reign were obliged to accept this state of things, and sometimes to bow before their royal mistress, as if she had been possessed of an absolute super-episcopal rule.[8] Yet gradually they shewed a jealousy of parliamentary interference, and rose in the assertion of their authority and the exercise of their power. Whitgift availed himself of the lofty spiritual prerogatives of the Crown to check the Commons in what he deemed their intrusive meddlings with spiritual affairs.[9] He strove to lift the Parliamentary yoke from the neck of the Church, and to place all ecclesiastical matters in the hands of Convocation. He preferred canons to statutes, and asked for the royal confirmation of the first rather than the second. But, after Whitgift and under the Stuarts, Church power made considerable advances. Anglo-Catholics, under the first James and the first Charles, took higher ground than did their fathers. Their dislike of Parliaments went beyond what Whitgift had dared to manifest. The doctrine of the divine origin of Episcopacy, which was propounded by Bancroft, when Whitgift's chaplain, probably at Whitgift's suggestion, certainly with his concurrence--though it startled some English Protestants as a novelty, and roused the anger of a Puritan privy councillor jealous of the Queen's supremacy,[10] became a current belief of the Stuart Anglicans. At the same time the power of Convocation was widely stretched, as will be seen in the business of the famous canons of 1640. The encroachments of the High Commission upon the jurisdiction of the Civil Courts, and the liberties of the subject, produced complaints in everybody's mouth, and served, as much as anything, to bring on the great catastrophe. What is now indicated in a few words will receive proof and illustration hereafter.