LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
THE RIDSDALE JUDGMENT: NEW EVIDENCE.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE " SFEcTAToB.'1
Sta,—I am not quite sure whether I may count on your candour and liberality for admitting another reply from me. But your article of last Saturday seems to invite a rejoinder, and I am glad to promise that this shall be my last. You pronounce my mind to be " prepossessed," and my knowledge of the history in question to be " extremely superficial and fragmentary." It is natural, we know, for an editor to have all knowledge at his fingers' ends, and to see everything in the dry light of perfect impartiality. But I fail to see why Mr. MacColl, for so many years the eager advocate of the Ritualists, should also be sup- posed to stand at the punclum indifferens, and to be wholly free from prepossession. However, as your courtesy gives me a hearing, it will be for our readers to judge on which side any misleading prepossession is to be found.
The Vestiarian controversy, I admit, is not one in which I feel at home. But your assertion that new and remarkable evidence had been brought to light since the Ridsdale judgment, such as you believed would alter Lord Selborne's opinion, seemed to me, vexato toties by unceasing denunciations of the judgment in your columns, to give an opportunity for a limited discussion. The evidence you adduced was not new, except in one insignificant particular, though it may have some claim to be considered remarkable. We are at issue on the question whether, new or old, it has any weight.
A Church inventory has been " brought to light," dating ten years after Queen Elizabeth's Advertisements, in which there is a mention of some vestments which the Ridsdale Court hell to have been forbidden by these Advertisements. " That fact,' you say, " in Mr. Davies's opinion, does not prove that they were used. We reply that the onus probandi of that assertion dies on Mr. Davies." That is, I am bound to prove that the mention of vestments in a Church inventory does not prove that they were used in divine service. The writer of your article does not seem to be aware of the difference between a proof and a presumption. I am willing to allow that the pos- session of certain goods by a church affords some prima facie presumption that they were in use. But the pre- sumption may be rebutted, as, for example, by evidence showing that churchwardens were directed to take care of the costly vestments which were no longer to be used in divine ser- vice. You challenge me to produce any such direction. Here is one, from a letter of Archbishop Parker to the Warden of All Souls' College, Oxford, March 5th, 1566-67 :—" By these my letters, I do require you' to make a perfect inventory, con- taining the form and fashion of the said plate, and also the number and fashion of their vestments and tunics which serve not to use at these days." (" Miscellanies," Rev. Scott F. Surtees, p. 22.) On Mr. Surtees' next page there is a letter of Archbishop Parker complaining of the alienation of such goods at Canterbury :—" There was not left in the church at my coming the tenth penny of the plate and ornaments which were left there at Dr. Wotton's coming thither." There is abundant evidence of churchwardens being called strictly to account for the safe keeping of Church goods and vestments, until they should be disposed of " in such order and sort as may be most to God's glory and our [the Sovereign's] honour." The Bodmin receipt, which you quote, goes further in support of your view than the Derby inventory. The Bodmin churchwardens make themselves responsible for certain goods and ornaments, " to be used and occupied to the honour of God in the said church," and the catalogue includes chasubles and copes. This re- ceipt was known and discussed before the Ridsdale trial, and it has been pointed out that the catalogue also in- cludes " three Jesus cotes, three tormentors' cotes, and two devil's cotes." Were these garments to be used in the Church under the authority of Elizabeth's Act P It seems probable that the form of receipt was a common one, so that the expres- sion quoted would not be conclusive evidence of ritual use, with re- gard to every item of the catalogue. No indisputable evidence has been found of any ritual use of the chasuble since the Advertise- ments, although such evidence abounds with regard to the cope. But let me put at your service a stronger presumption in favour of the occasional use of the chasuble than is supplied by these inventories. It is difficult to understand why Archbishops and Bishops should have continued to denounce and prohibit the use of chasubles as contrary to the law, if they were never used. "After 1566, vestments, albs, and tunicles (copes also, in parish and non-collegiate churches), are mentioned in the official acts of the Bishops and others, performed in the public exercise of their legal jurisdiction, only as things associated with supersti- tion, and to be defaced and destroyed. They were so treated by a Royal Commission sent to Oxford by Queen Elizabeth in 1573, and by the Visitation Articles of Archbishops Grindal and Sandys (York, 1571 and 1578), and Abbot and Laud (1611 and 1637); of Bishops Aylmer, Bancroft, and King (London, 1577, 1601, and 1612), and others."—(Ridsdale Judgment.) I think it might be fairly argued from these exercises of legal jurisdiction that the use of the chasuble was not altogether unknown, or why should the Bishops have been so earnest in enforcing the law against it ?
You say, " Mr. Davies assumes that all the evidence pub- lished by Mr. MacColl must have been before the Court in the Ridsdale case, because Mr. MacColl's book was published before that trial." I did not say " before the Court." What I said was that all that evidence must have been "per- fectly well known to Mr. Ridsdale's counsel." And so I say again. It is certain that those who instructed Sir James Stephen and his colleagues were well acquainted with all that had been discovered by Mr. MacColl's researches. The argu- ments were duly catalogued in Mr. MacColl's inventory, [what inventory is referred to ?] but, nevertheless, they were not used. The reason why they were not brought before the Court may be guessed without difficulty. Certainly, it is impossible to imagine Sir James Stephen gravely pleading that it was illegal for the Queen to do what she was expressly authorised by an Act of Parliament to do, whatever any Bishop Horn may have thought about it. Suppose you and Mr. MacColl to be right in saying that Bishop Horn "believed that the law of the Ornaments Rubric could not be modified except by a fresh Act of Parlia- ment," it would only be so much the worse for Bishop Horn and his belief. But your article plainly misinterprets Bishop Horn's letter. The letter is a difficult one to understand, either from Mr. MacColl's point of view, or from that of the Ridsdale judgment. You say that the Advertisements had just been drawn up, with Bishop Horn's assistance (which is not likely) [we should
say, with deference to Mr. Davies, all but certain. Parker ex- pressly says they were drawn up with the co-operation of the per- sons whose names are attached, and Bishop Horn's name is at- tached], to enforce the use of cope and surplice ; and yet he is here doubting whether it is lawful to wear a square cap and sur- plice, to avoid being turned out of the clerical office. According to Bishop Horn, by some Act of Parliament, which appears to be Elizabeth's Act of Uniformity, " though the rest of the rubbish
was taken away, the wearing of square caps and surplices was
continued to the clergy, though without any superstitious con- ceit, which was expressly guarded against by the terms of the Act. This Act cannot be repealed, unless by the agreement and consent of all the Estates of the Realm, by whose concurrence it was enacted." This last is a perfectly safe assertion, which does not necessarily imply (though I admit that conceivably it might) that the Queen could not take other order in accordance with the terms of the Act.* But how are we to understand that the
a Compare whet Grindal says : —" Tim authority of Parliament is so great, that the laws male therein cannot by any m ans be dissolved, except by the sanction of the same Yet the law itself allowed the Queen's Majesty. with the advice of some of the Bishops, to alter some things." (" Grindal s Works," p. 339, Parker Society.) Archbishop Parker, who drew up the Adver- tisements, speaks expressly, in a letter to) Cecil (January 8t5, 1570), of the power of the Queen to take action by the advice of bar Commissioners, or Metropolitan, under the proviso. He is refer ing t one of the Q1013[1.6 Injunctions :—" They that like not the Injunctions, force much the Statute in the book. I tell them that they do evil to make o lienstcomparison between Statute and Injunction, and yet I say and hold that the Injunction bath authority by proviso et the Statute." rest of the rubbish (reliqua fcez)—chasuble, &c.—was taken away (sublata) by the Act ? Mr. lifacColl's device and yours is to assume that Horn is speaking of what had been practically enforced. "What he says is that under the authority of the Act as it stood, the surplice and square cap were enforced, and had been enforced ever since Elizabeth's accession, though the other requirements of the Act were left in abeyance." Pardon me, but he says nothing of the kind. The Act took away the rubbish, says Bishop Horn ; that means, in your version, the Act imposed the rubbish, but the authorities forbore to enforce the use of it. The Act prescribed caps and surplices, guarding (disertis verbis*) against any superstitious notion about them ; that means, the authorities enforced cap and surplice only, though the Act required more. I confess that I do not know how to explain what Bishop Horn says about the Act. But it is patent that the Bishop does not say what you make him say. A method which allows so much misreading may be an effectual one for disposing of difficulties. But, whether prepossession has had anything to do with its adoption or not, it is not the judicial method which it claims to be. Lord Selborne is not very likely to change his mind, I should imagine, in deference to arguments and evidence which Mr. Ridsdale's counsel were so well advised in declining to offer to the consideration of the [Mr. Davies's assumption that all the evidence in existence before the Ridsdale judgment was given, whether placed be- fore the Court or not, must, in the first place, have been deliberately rejected by the counsel for Mr. Ridsdale as worth- less ; and secondly must, therefore, be treated as actually worth- less, and not deserving the name of new evidence, can hardly be serious. For instance, he sedulously refuses to deal with one principal item of evidence which was not before the Court in the Ridsdale judgment, and on which we ourselves lay great stress,—the abolition by the Puritan Parliament of 1644 of the "superstitious vestments," as well as of the surplice and cope, although, according to Mr. Davies's contention, those vestments needed no abolition. Mr. Davies insists that the "rubbish which was taken away " referred to by Bishop Horn must mean the vestments. But that is pure assumption, and, as we think, a most unreasonable assumption. It referred, doubtless, to the service of the Mass which was abolished by the Act. For the rest, if we should find anything needing fuller comment in his letter, which we received very late in the week, we will criticise it shortly in our next issue.—En. Spectator.
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