rgy. If they
had waived their right to deal with these matters during the old age of
Elizabeth, they asserted it now. "Let your Majesty be pleased to receive
public information from your Commons in Parliament, as well of the
abuses in the Church as in the civil state and government." Words yet
bolder, and which sound like a prelude to the Petition of Right, met the
claim of absolutism which was so frequently on the new king's lips.
"Your majesty would be misinformed," said the address, "if any man
should deliver that the kings of England have any absolute power in
themselves, either to alter religion or make any laws concerning the
same, otherwise than as in temporal causes, by consent of Parliament."

[Sidenote: The Canons of 1604.]

The address was met by a petulant scolding, and as the Commons met
coldly the king's request for a subsidy the Houses were adjourned. James
at once assumed the title to which Parliament had deferred its assent,
of King of Great Britain; while the support of the Crown emboldened the
bishops to a fresh defiance of the Puritan pressure. The act of
Elizabeth which gave parliamentary sanction to the Thirty-nine Articles
compelled ministers to subscribe only to those which concerned the faith
and the sacraments, and thus implicitly refused to compel their
signatures to the articles which related to points of discipline and
Church government. The compromise had been observed from 1571 till now;
but the Convocation of 1604 by its canons required the subscription of
the clergy to the articles touching rites and ceremonies. The king
showed his approval of this step by raising its prime mover, Bancroft,
to the vacant See of Canterbury; and Bancroft added to the demand of
subscription a requirement of rigid conformity with the rubrics on the
part of all beneficed clergymen. In the spring of 1605 three hundred of
the Puritan clergy were driven from their livings for a refusal to
comply with these demands.

[Sidenote: Fresh breach with the Catholics.]

If James had come to his new throne with dreams of conciliation and of a
greater unity among his subjects, his dream was to be speedily
dispelled. At the moment when the persecution of Bancroft announced a
final breach between the Crown and the Puritans, a revival of the old
rigour made a fresh breach between the Crown and the Catholics. In
remitting the fines for recusancy James had never purposed to suffer any
revival of Catholicism; and in the open