ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY 



afFection was considered treason. The success of these seminary priests 

 and of their converts was regarded as a political danger, whatever their 

 professions or even intentions may have been, and the government, in self- 

 defence, made the obligatory duties of their religion acts of treason. 



But the zeal which led men to face boldly the stake as heretics, or 

 the gallows with its worse accompaniments of the hangman's knife, as 

 traitors, had been no more conspicuously common in Surrey than else- 

 where in England during the earlier revolutions of the Reformation era. 

 As a criterion of the rehgious opinions of the county we should in the 

 first instance have been naturally disposed to examine the action of the 

 clergy. The opinions of a parish priest and of his parishioners need not 

 be the same, but they are more likely to be similar than not. The parish 

 clergy were often the nominees of gentlemen in the county ; they lived 

 in the society of the farmers and tradesmen of their parish. They must 

 often have been related to them. A professional feeling might to some 

 extent actuate them in a direction opposed to lay opinion ; but the usual 

 difference in religion between clergy and laity is that the former hold 

 the same religious opinions as the latter, only more strongly, with less 

 reserve and latitude. If therefore the recorded instances of religious 

 opinion, among the clergy, strong enough to make them defy the law, or 

 to give up their livings for conscience sake, are but few, we must con- 

 clude that the religious indifference of the laity was very strongly marked 

 indeed. The number of clergy who found it impossible to accept the 

 successive changes of the Tudors in ecclesiastical matters was not large 

 in Surrey as it was not large elsewhere. 



No attempt has ever been made to compile a complete list of clergy 

 who were deprived or resigned owing to their inability to accept the 

 various changes from Henry the Eighth's Royal Supremacy Act down 

 to 1559. But there is no evidence to show that in Surrey these changes 

 were at all considerable. Institutions after deprivation or resignation are 

 not more numerous than in ordinary times, and though men may have 

 been deprived or have resigned for nonconformity, the reason does not 

 generally appear. In 1559 and in the next few years under Elizabeth a 

 few changes were made. Nicholas Sanders, the famous recusant and 

 Romanist controversialist, author of Dt" Visibili Monarchia Ecclesice and De 

 Origine et Progressu Schismatis Anglicani, attempted a list of beneficed clergy 

 who refused to accept Elizabeth's religious settlement. It is avowedly 

 imperfect on the side of omission, and has been shown also to contain a few 

 names which should not be included, men ordained abroad after 1559, 

 and men who conformed at first, but who for some reason were induced 

 to change their minds after some years, and a few who never changed 

 their minds or their benefices at all. Subsequent lists seem to have been 

 based upon that of Sanders.' Now it is pertinent to our inquiry to re- 

 member that Nicholas Sanders belonged to a Surrey family, that of Sanders, 



* The whole question of Sanders' trustworthiness has been exhaustively treated so far as available 

 evidence allows in The Elizabethan Clergy, 1558-64, by the Rev. Henry Gee, Oxford, Clarendon 

 Press, 1898. 



21 



