Church England Quotes
England had, under Henry VIII, left the Roman Catholic Church where the King replaced the Pope as head of the English Church. Henry’s successors then had to organize and manage the national Christian church. James was discussing the hierarchy of the Church of England and there was a suggestion that Bishops be eliminated and have every priest directly responsible to the crown. Bishops would be powerful figures who might form a power center. (They did later). However, King James I observed that the King is God’s choice and rules by divine right. So there had to be bishops to crown kings. The bishoprics were retained.
1st Earl of Beaconsfield
1st Viscount Bolingbroke. This is the argument that was and still is given by most theocracies and nations opposed to pluralism. It was also a quotation which with the American founders were familiar and were targeting this view when they demanded the 1st Amendment.
Toynbee was very active in attempting to reform the Church of England.
1st Duke of Wellington. The prohibitions against Catholic participation dated from the time when the Pope and the Vatican tried to support Catholic insurrections in England to return it as a Catholic country which it had been until King Henry VIII had a dispute with the Pope. However, the Catholic attempt to take over England and crush the Protestant Church of England had occurred so long before that there was no practical danger to the then established Church of England. Wellington, an Irish Protestant himself, realized that the law presented no significant protection and caused not only great resentment of English and Irish Catholics, but denied the nation the benefit of their great talents in politics. England took a great step forward and passed the bill.
The major targets of this law were the Puritans who would not attend the normal Church of England services but had their own, usually in a private home.
Although a Protestant Minister himself he called for major reform of the church. He made little headway except to inform public opinion. He died in prison where he was incarcerated for “libel and sedition” major crimes in England at that time which had no freedom of speech or of the press guaranteed by a Bill of Rights.
Barrow tried to argue that attacking the Bishops was not an attack on the Queen (Elizabeth I) who was head of the church. His argument failed and he was hanged. Even in modern times there are some who see an attack on a cabinet member as an attack on the President or Prime Minister, since the former serve at the suffrage of the latter.
This is a particularly interesting historical quotation because it succinctly gives a history of the various horrors of religious strife in British history—a history that was very well known to the American Founding Fathers and the general American Colonial population. This history was the major driver behind the public insistence for the Bill of Rights and the 1st Amendment which erected a wall of separation between church and state with government never favoring or abetting any particular religion.
This proposal was considered so dangerous to the established Anglican Church that Holyoake was charged with Blasphemy, tried, convicted and sentenced to 6 months in prison.
It is this proclamation and others like it that caused many of the American Founding Fathers to include the doctrine of separation of church and state. In this case, and many others, the government actually proscribed and controlled the prayers and the liturgy. See {617532} where the government proscribes the proportion of revenues that must be spent on the poor.
Many Protestant Englishmen were shocked to hear this, having little familiarity with the details of the functioning of the Church of England—the Established Church of Great Britain—in Ireland and the contribution of the Church to the discrimination against Irish Catholics and the poverty of Ireland.
