DIALOGUE

VI.

Thus decreed that great school-master of the whole land (to give his majesty no harder a title than he was pleased to give himself); and it is difficult to say whence his supremacy extracted this golden rule of free monarchies, if not from the pope's own code of imperial

canons.

Thus it appears what misconceptions arose, and what strange conclusions were drawn, from the king's supremacy in spirituals. One might proceed further in contemplation of this subject; but I have wearied you too much already. You will see from these several particulars how it came to pass that the REFORMATION, which was founded on the principles of liberty and supported by them, was yet for some time the cause of strengthening the power of the crown. For though the exercise of private judgment, which was essential to Protestantism, could not but tend to produce right notions of civil liberty, as well as of religious faith and discipline, and so in the end was fated to bring

is taken from the same discourse, p. 204. His words are these" The people of a borough cannot displace their provost-yea, even the poor school-master cannot be displaced by his scholars-How much less it is lawful upon any pretext to control or displace the great provost "and GREAT SCHOOL-MASTER OF THE WHOLE LAND."

VI.

about a just form of free government (as after DIALOGUE some struggles and commotions, we see, it has happened), yet the translation of supremacy from the pope to the civil magistrate brought with it a mighty accession of authority, which had very sensible effects for several reigns afterwards. The mysterious sacredness and almost divinity which had lodged in the pope's person, was now inshrined in the king's; and it is not wonderful that the people should find their imaginations strongly affected by this notion. And with this general preparation, it followed very naturally, that, in the several ways here recounted, the crown should be disposed and enabled to extend its prerogative, till another change in the government was required to limit and circumscribe it, almost as great as that of the Reformation.

MR. SOMERS.

I have listened with much pleasure to this deduction which your lordship has made from that important circumstance of the crown's supremacy in spirituals. I think it throws great light on the subject under consideration, and accounts in a clear manner for that appearance of despotism which the English government

VI.

DIALOGUE has worn from the times of reformation. I have only one difficulty remaining with me: but it is such an one as seems to bear hard on the great hypothesis itself, so learnedly maintained by my Lord Commissioner in our late conversation, of the original free constitution of the English government. For, allowing all you say to be true, does not the very translation of the pope's supremacy to the king, considered in itself, demonstrate that we had then, at least, no free constitution at all, to be invaded by the high claims of that prerogative? If we admit the existence of any such, the supremacy of the church should, naturally, I think, have devolved upon the supreme civil power; which with us, according to the present supposition, is in the three estates of the legislature. But this devolution, it seems, was on the king alone; a public acknowledgment, as I take it, that the constitution of the government was at that time conceived to be, in the highest sense of the word, absolutely MONAR

CHICAL.

BP. BURNET.

I was not, I confess, aware of this objection to our theory, which is very specious. Yet it may be sufficient, as I suppose, to reply to it,

that the work of reformation was carried on DIALOGUE VI. and established by the whole legislature; and that the supremacy, in particular, though it of right belonged to the three estates, was by free consent surrendered and given up into the hands of the king. It is certain this power, though talked of as the ancient right of the crown, was solemnly invested in it by act of parliament.

SIR J. MAYNARD.

There may be something in this. Yet your lordship, I think, does not carry the matter quite far enough; and, with your leave, I will presume to give another, and perhaps the truer, answer to Mr. SOMERS's difficulty. The subject is a little nice, but I have not those scruples which may reasonably be conceived to restrain your lordship from enlarging upon it.

I reply then directly, and without softening matters, that this irregular translation of the supremacy is no proof that there was not then a FREE CONSTITUTION, with a legitimate power in it, to which the supremacy belonged. And my reason, without offence to my lord of Salisbury, is this. When the papal authority was abolished, and the question came into parlia

VI.

DIALOGUE ment, "who now became the head of the "church;" the search after him was not carried, where it should have been, into the constitution of the kingdom; but, as it was a matter of religion, they mistook that, which was only an affair of church discipline, to be a doctrine of theology; and so searched, for a solution of the question, in the New Testament, and Ecclesiastical History. In the New Testament, obedience is pressed to the person of Cæsar, because an absolute monarchy was the only government in being: and, for the same reason, when afterwards the empire became Christian, the supremacy, as we know from ecclesiastical story, was assumed by the emperor just as it would have been by the consul and senate, had the republic existed. Hence our Reformers, going altogether by spiritual and ecclesiastical example, and hoping thereby to preserve their credit against the reproaches of Rome, which, as your lordship knows, was perpetually charging them with novelties and innovations in both respects, recurred to early antiquity for that rule.

I

This attention to ecclesiastical example was, suppose, a consideration of convenience with the wise fathers of our church: the other appeal to the Gospel, might be a matter of con