Elizabeth altered the form of words in which her father had expressed his ecclesiastical authority; but the substance was in both cases the same.  The sovereign was everything.  The Bishop of Rome was nothing.  There has never been in the Church of England since the divorce of Katharine any power to make a Bishop without the authority of the Crown, or to change a doctrine without the authority of Parliament, nor has any layman been legally subject to temporal punishment by the ecclesiastical courts.  Convocation cannot touch an article or a formulary.  King, Lords, and Commons can make new formularies or abolish the old.  The laity owe no allegiance to the Canons, and in every theological suit the final appeal is to the King in Council, now the Judicial Committee.  Since the accession of Elizabeth divine service has been performed in English, and the English Bible has been open to every one who can read.  Yet there are people who talk as if the Reformation meant nothing, was nothing, never occurred at all.  This theory, like the shallow sentimentalism which made an innocent saint and martyr of Mary Stuart, has never recovered from the crushing onslaught of Froude.

Mr. Swinburne in the Encyclopaedia Britannica reduces the latter theory to an absurdity, by demonstrating that if Mary was innocent she was a fool.  In his defence of Elizabeth Froude stops short of many admirers.  He was disgusted by her feminine weakness for masculine flattery; he dwells with almost tedious minuteness upon her smallest intrigues; he exposes her parsimonious ingratitude to her dauntless and unrivalled seamen.  Yet for all that he brings out the vital difference between her and Mary Tudor, between the Protestant and Catholic systems of government.  Elizabeth boasted, and boasted truly, that she did not persecute opinion.  If people were good citizens and loyal subjects, it was all the same to her whether they went to church or to mass.  Had it been possible to adopt and apply in the sixteenth century the modern doctrine of contemptuous indifference to sectarian quarrels, there was not one of her subjects more capable of appreciating and acting upon it than the great Queen herself.  But in that case she would have estranged her friends without conciliating her opponents.  She would have forfeited her throne and her life.  Pius V. had not merely excommunicated her, which was a barren and ineffective threat, a telum imbelle sine ictu; he had also purported to depose her as a heretic, and to release her subjects from the duty of allegiance.  Another Vicar of Christ, Gregory XIII., went farther.  He intimated, not obscurely, that whosoever removed such a monster from the world would be doing God’s service.  This at least was no idle menace.  Those great leaders of Protestantism in Europe, Coligny, Murray, William the Silent, were successively murdered within a few years.  That was, as Fra Paolo said when he saw the dagger (stilus) which had wounded him, the style (stylus) of the Roman Court.  It is all very well to say that Gregory was a blasphemous, murderous old bigot, and might have been left to the God of justice and mercy, who would deal with him in His own good time.  Before that time came, Elizabeth might have been in her grave, Mary Stuart might have been on the English throne, and the liberties of England might have been as the liberties of Spain.