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ELIZABETH'S ARCHBISHOPS.

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establishment, peeps out in the details of Parker's consecration in Lambeth Chapel. Four lighted wax tapers were carried before him; of the bishops who consecrated, Barker of Chichester wore the rich silk cope of the Roman ordinal; Scory, elect of Hereford, and Hodskinne, suffragan of Bedford, had on linen surplices; "but Miles Coverdale wore nothing over his long cloth gown."

Elizabeth's second archbishop was Grindal, one of the Protestant exiles-a good man, but somewhat too entirely Protestant to suit his royal mistress's humour. He was of the Calvinistic party, and fell into the queen's displeasure by the favour which he showed to what was called "the exercise of prophecying." These were meetings amongst the clergy held once a-week, for the discussion of texts of Scripture, which the queen and the more "High Church" party had resolutely determined to suppress. Probably they served as occasions for display to some of these fanatical preachers who threatened the peace of Church and State; who prayed that the Church might be "swept clean," and in this exercise of prophecying “broke their enemies," as South has it, "upon the wheels of Ezekiel, cast them to the beasts in Daniel, and poured upon them all the vials of the Revelation." Grindal contended, and so far with truth, that for a clergy so utterly unlearned as he found his to be many of them having no acquaintance with Scripture beyond the Sunday lessons, which they could scarcely read-some such exercise was good and needful. He would not consent to suppress them; and Elizabeth, who brooked little opposition to her ecclesiastical headship, suspended him-nay, would have deprived him in favour of Whitgift, to whom she offered the succession to the primacy, but that he firmly declined to be thrust into a see which was not vacant, and begged her majesty to reconsider her determination. "Well, then," was the reply, “I made him an archbishop, and he shall die an archbishop." Grindal was pressed, however, to resign, and reluctantly consented; but before the act could be completed, he died, and Whitgift succeeded.

Whitgift had been master first of Pembroke and then of Trinity College, Cambridge. His reputation in the university had caused him to be brought to preach at court, when the queen was pleased to express her satisfaction by the remark, that this was a "White Gift" indeed. He was further recommended by his determined opposition to the fanatic Cartwright, an M.A. of his own college, who (excited, it was said, by jealousy at the honours conferred by the learned queen upon an opponent at an university disputation) had taken upon himself to declaim against ecclesiastical discipline and church government. So successful had been his violent denunciations of the surplice, that at evening chapel at Trinity all the academical congregation, except the chaplain and two others, threw off the "white rag" as an unclean thing. Whitgift stopped the disaffection by expelling Cartwright from the

college. Yet he was himself a staunch Protestant enough, as proved by the thesis which he chose for his doctor's degree-" Papa est ille Antichristus." And that he was respected by moderate men of all parties is clear from the fact, that when promoted to the bishopric of Worcester, the heads of colleges and a large body of members of the university escorted him for some distance out of Cambridge. He was a zealous and conscientious prelate, and repaired some disorders in the Church which had arisen from Grindal's laxity. The church of which he was overseer occupied his dying thoughts; his last audible words were"Pro ecclesia Dei! pro ecclesia Dei!" He retained Elizabeth's favour, with some trifling interruption, to the close of his life; once at least in every year he received her as his guest at one or other of his houses; and she was even pleased to call him, with the facetiousness allowed to royal and elderly maidenhood, her "black husband."

The reformed archbishops by no means allowed the state and dignity of the office to suffer in their keeping. Even Pole-cardinal and legate as he was scarcely maintained a more princely establishment. He had held a license from the Pope for a hundred servants; the number was probably very much exceeded in practice, otherwise his retinue would not have borne comparison with that of the Protestant Whitgift. When the latter made his first visitation of his province, he rode into Dover with a hundred mounted servants wearing his livery, forty of whom were "gentlemen in chains of gold." His personal train frequently numbered two hundred in all; and he was escorted from town to town by the gentry and clergy of the province in such numbers, that the whole cavalcade is said on some occasions to have amounted to a thousand horsemen. The French ambassador, who witnessed one of these triumphal entries into Canterbury, and was present at the full cathedral service on the following Sunday, declared that the enemies of the Reformation had spoken very untruly when they said that in England there was no longer church ritual or solemnity, and that the ministers preached in the woods and on the hill sides. He had never," he said, except in the Pope's own chapel, seen a more solemn sight, or heard a more heavenly sound;" and he should reverence the English archbishop as long as he lived. He remarked afterwards, that had the Reformed Churches in France retained the same ceremonial, there would have been many thousands more Protestants in that kingdom. Whitgift had also, at Lambeth House, a good armoury and "fair stable of great horses," and could muster fifty horse and a hundred foot, of his own retainers, armed and trained. In Essex's mad attempt at rebellion, the archbishop hurried to Lambeth, called out his men, and sent them under a proper officer to occupy Essex House-a service for which he was personally thanked by the queen. The armoury was kept up at Lambeth until its plunder during the Great Rebellion, when the

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HOSPITALITIES OF LAMBETH.

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quantity of arms found there was urged against Laud, as evidence of treasonable intent; they were never afterwards replaced.

The archbishop's establishment continued to be on a royal scale of state and magnificence, after the Reformation as before. Archbishop Warham's inauguration feast at Lambeth-when "the cheer at dinner was as great as for money it might be made," when the Duke of Buckingham, as high steward, rode into the magnificent hall before the banquet, bareheaded and carrying his white staff of office, and he and the archbishop presided each at his own table over a few select guests, while three lower tables were set, the first for noblemen and knights, the second for doctors of divinity, the third for the country gentlemen —was at least rivalled by the splendour with which Parker entertained Elizabeth and her court for seven days at Croydon Palace, a manor which had belonged to the see since the time of Lanfranc, and had been the occasional residence of his successors; or even by the daily magnificence of Cranmer's household, where none beneath the rank of peers were admitted to sit down with the archbishop himself, even suffragan bishops having places assigned them at a second table, and ordinary guests at a third. A more interesting feature in the hospitalities of Lambeth is the provision that was made for charity. At the great gate, in the days of Archbishop Winchelsea, as many as five thousand poor had been relieved daily in a time of dearth, and in ordinary seasons not less than four thousand, involving an expenditure of £500 per annum; a very large sum, if the value of money in those days is considered. Such charity, it must be remembered, was all that the infirm and the distressed had to depend upon before the operation of the poor-law; nor were common beggars its only objects. It is very pleasant to read that Winchelsea, especially, wont to take the greatest compassion on those that by any misfortune were decayed, and had fallen from wealth to poor estate;" and we look charitably on the popular gratitude which made the good archbishop's tomb such an object of resort for its sanctity, that, like the brazen serpent of Moses, it became a sort of Nehushtan, and had to be taken down. The archbishops under the reformed discipline maintained the charitable fame of the house, though the increasing industry and prosperity of the country under Elizabeth left fewer claimants for the dole. The household of Parker and Whitgift was also a college of religious and secular learning. Parker especially loved to surround himself with young students of promising abilities, and he not only employed his chaplains and others in collating and publishing our early English historians, but Lambeth House, during his occupation, resembled one of the old monasteries in its establishment of illuminators, engravers, and printers.

was

Elizabeth and her archbishops passed away, and the troublous times of the Stuarts threw their shadow upon Canterbury. Abbot, the second

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