KING EDWARD THE SIXTH
12. Such were the Orders and Injunctions wherewith the King’s
Commissioners were furnished for their Visitation—most of them such as had been formerly given out by Cromwell, or otherwise published and pursued, (but not without some intermissions), by the King deceased, and therefore to be put in execution with greater safety. For though the young King, by reason of his tender age, could not but want a great proportion of his father’s spirit for carrying on a work of such weight and moment, yet he wanted nothing of that power in church-concernment, which either naturally was inherent in the crown imperial, or had been legally vested in it by acts of parliament. Neither could his being in minority, nor the writings in his name by the Lord Protector and the rest of the council, make any such difference in the case, as to invalidate the proceedings, or any of the rest which followed in the Reformation. For, if they did, the objection would be altogether as strong against the reformation made in the minority of King Josias, as against this, in the minority of the present King: that of Josias being made, (as Josephus FB313 telleth us), by the advice of the elders; as this of King Edward the Sixth by the advice of the council. And yet it cannot be denied, but that the reformation made under King Josias, by advice of his council, was no less pleasing unto God, nor less valid in the eyes of all his subjects, than those of Jehoshaphat and Hezekiah, in their riper years; who perhaps acted singly on the strength of their own judgments only, without any advice. Now of Josias we are told by the said historian, that, “when he grew to be twelve years old, he gave manifest approbation of his piety and justice. For he drew the people to a
comfortable course of life, and to the detestation and abolishing of idols, that were no gods, and to the service of the only true God of their
forefathers. And, considering the actions of his predecessors, he began to rectify them in that wherein they were deficient, with no less
circumspection than if he had been an old man; and that which he found to be correspondent, and advisedly done by them, that did he both maintain and imitate. All which things he did, both by reason of his innated wisdom, as also by the admonishment and counsel of his elders, in following orderly the laws, not only in matters of religion, but also of civil polity.” Which puts the parallel betwixt the two young Kings, in the case before us, above all exception; and the proceedings of King Edward, or his council rather, beyond all dispute.
13. Now, whereas question hath been made, FB314 whether the twenty- fourth Injunction, for laboring on the holy-day in time of harvest, extends
as well to the Lord’s day, as the annual’ festivals;—the matter seems, to any well-discerning eye, to be out of question. For in the third chapter of the statute made in the fifth and sixth years of King Edward the Sixth, (when the Reformation was much more advanced than it was at the present), the names and number of such holy-days as were to be observed in this Church, are thus laid down: “That is to say, all Sundays in the year, the feasts of the Circumcision of our Lord Jesus Christ, of the Epiphany, etc.” with all the rest, still kept, and there named particularly. And then it followeth in the act, “That it shall, and may, be lawful for every
husbandman, laborer, fisherman, and to all and every other person or persons, of what estate, degree, or condition he or they be, upon the holy- days aforesaid, in harvest, or at any other time in the year, when necessity shall so require, to labor, ride, fish, or work any kind of work, at their free will and pleasure, any thing in this act to the contrary, notwithstanding.”
FB315
The law being such, there is no question to be made in point of practice, nor consequently of the meaning of the King’s Injunction. For further opening of which truth we find, that not the country only, but the court were indulged the liberty of attending business on that day; it being ordered by the King, amongst other things, “That the Lords of the Council should upon Sundays attend the public affairs of this realm, dispatch answers to letters for good order of state, and make full dispatches of all things concluded the week before: provided always, that they be present at Common Prayer, and that on every Sunday night the King’s Secretary should deliver him a memorial of such things as are to be debated by the Privy Council in the week ensuing.” Which order, being compared with the words of the statute, may serve sufficiently to satisfy all doubts and
scruples touching the true intent and meaning of the said Injunction. FB316 14. But, as this question was not started till the later times, when the Lord’s day began to be advanced into the reputation of the Jewish sabbath;
so was there nothing in the rest of the said Injunctions, which required a commentary—some words and passages therein, which seem absurd to us of this present age, being then dearly understood by all and every one whom they did concern: published and given in charge by the
Commissioners in their several circuits, with great zeal and cheerfullness;
and no less readily obeyed in most parts of the realms, both by priests and people, who observed nothing in them either new or strange, to which they had not been prepared in the reign of the King deceased. None forwarder in this compliance than some learned men in and about the city of London,
who not long since had shewed themselves of a contrary judgment:—some of them running before authority, and others keeping even pace with it, but few so confident of themselves as to lag behind. It was ordered in the twenty-first—“That, at the time of high mass, the Epistle and Gospel should be read in the English tongue:” and, “That both at the Matins, and Even-song, a chapter out of the New Testament FB317 should be also read.”
And, for example to the rest of the land, the compline, being a part of the Evening Service, was sung in the King’s chapel on Monday in the Easter- week, (then falling on the eleventh of April), in the English tongue. FB318 Doctor Smith, Master of Whittington College in London, and Reader in Divinity at the King’s College at Oxford, (afterwards better known by the name of Christchurch), had before published two books:—one of them written in defense of the mass, the other endeavoring to prove, that unwritten verities ought to be believed under pain of damnation. But, finding that these doctrines did not now beat according to the pulse of the times, he did voluntarily retract the said opinions; declaring in a sermon at St. Paul’s Cross, on Sunday the fifteenth of May, that his said former books and teachings were not only erroneous, but heretical. FB319 The like was done in the month next following by Doctor Pern, afterwards Master of Peter-House in Cambridge; who, having on St. George’s day delivered, in the parish-church of Saint Andrew Undershaft, for sound catholic doctrine, “That the pictures of Christ, and of the saints were to be adored,”
upon the seventeenth day of June declared himself, in the said church, to have been deceived in that, what he before had taught them, and to be sorry for delivering such doctrine to them. FB320 But these men might pretend some warrant from the King’s Injunctions, which they might conceive it neither fit nor safe to oppose: and therefore, that it was the wisest way to strike sail betimes, upon the shooting of the first warning- piece to bring them in. But no man was so much beforehand with authority as one Doctor Glasier; who, as soon as the fast of Lent was over,—(and it was well he had the patience to stay so long),—affirmed publicly in a sermon at St. Paul’s Cross, that “the Lent was not ordained of God to be fasted, neither the eating of flesh to be forborne; but that the same was a politic ordinance of men, and might therefore be broken by men at their pleasure.” FB321 For which doctrine as the preacher was never
questioned,—the temper of the times giving encouragement enough to such extravagancies,—so did it open such a gap to carnal liberty, that the King found it necessary to shut it up again by a proclamation on the
sixteenth of January, commanding abstinence from all flesh, for the Lent then following. FB322
15. But there was something more than the authority of a minor King,