Narrative and Critical History of America, Vol. 3 (of 8): English Explorations and Settlements in North America 1497-1689
History
Narrative and Critical History of America, Vol. 3 (of 8): English Explorations and Settlements in North America 1497-1689
America -- Discovery and exploration; America -- History; United States -- History
The consumptive boy-king, Edward VI., dying when sixteen years of age,
through his advisers, advanced the Reformation in some of its details
beyond the stage at which it was left by his father, and put the work
in the direction of further progress. But “Bloody Mary,” with her
spectral Spanish consort, Philip II., overset what had by no means
become a Protestant realm, and made it over to cardinal and pope.
Nearly three hundred martyrs, including an archbishop and four bishops,
perished at the stake, besides the uncounted victims in the dungeons.
No one had suffered to the death for religion in the preceding reign.
After her accession, Elizabeth stiffly held back from accepting even
that stage of reform reached by Edward. In the Convocation of 1562,
only a single vote, on a division, withstood the proposal to clear the
ritual of nearly every ceremony objectionable to the Puritans. The two
statutes of supremacy and uniformity, passed in the first year of the
reign of Elizabeth, brought the English Church under that subjection to
the temporal or civil jurisdiction which has continued to this day. The
firmness, not to say the obstinacy, with which the Queen stood for her
prerogative in this matter has been entailed upon Parliament; and the
ecclesiastical Convocation has in vain struggled to assert independency
of it. Elizabeth exhibited about an equal measure of zeal against
Catholics and Puritans. She frankly gave out her resolution that if
she should marry a Catholic prince, she should not allow him a private
chapel in her palace. About two hundred Catholics suffered death in her
reign.
An important episode in the development of Puritanism and Separatism
in the English Church brings to our notice the share which different
parties came to have in both those forms of dissent during a period of
temporary exile on the Continent in the reigns of Henry VIII. and Mary,
and afterward of Elizabeth. The results reached by the two classes
of those exiles were manifested respectively in the colonization,
first by Separatists, at Plymouth, and next by Nonconformists in the
Massachusetts Bay, and by other New England colonists.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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