It may please your Grace, I am sorry to trouble you so often as I do, bur I am more troubled myself, not only with many private petitions of sundry ministers, recommended from persons of credit for peacable persons in their ministry, and yet by complaints to your Grace and other your colleagues in commission greatly troubled; but also I am now daily charged by councillors and public persons to neglect my duty in not staying these your Grace's proceedings so vehement and so general against ministers and preachers, as the Papists are thereby generally encouraged, all ill-disposed subjects animated, and thereby the Queen's Majesty's safety endangered . . . But now, my good Lord, by chance I am come to the sight of an intrument of twenty-four articles¹ of great length and curiosity, found in a Romish style, to examine all manner of ministers in this time, without distinction of persons. Which articles are entitled, Apud Lamhith, May 1584, to be executed ex officio mero, &c. . . . Which I have read, and find so curiously penned, so full of branches and circumstances, as I think the inquisitors of Spain use not so many questions to comprehend and to trap their preys. I know your canonists can defend these with all their perticels, but surely, under your Grace's correction, this judicial and canonical sifting of poor ministers is not to edify or reform. And, in charity, I think they ought not to answer to all these nice points, except they were very notorious offenders in papistry or heresy. Now my good Lord, forbear with my scribbling. I write with a testimony of a good conscience. I desire the peace of the Church. I desire concord and unity in the exercise of our religion. I favour no sensual and wilful recusants. But I conclude that, according to my simple judgment, this kind of proceeding is too much savouring of the Romish inquisition, and is rather a device to seek for offenders than to reform any. This is not the charitable instruction that I thought was intended ... It may be, as I said, the canonists may maintain this proceeding by rules of their laws, but though omnia licent yet omnia non expediunt. . .
      Primo Julii, 1584. Your Grace's at commandment, W. Cecill.


1 Printed in the Appendix to Strype's Whitgift, III. p. 81 (Book III, No. IV); cf. id. I p. 268. These articles, dated May, 1584, obliged the examinee to declare, among other things, that the Book of Common Prayer contained nothing repugnant to scripture, and to state whether he had refused to wear the surplice or to use the sign of the cross in baptism, the ring in marriage, and the form of words prescribed in burial, whether he had adhered strictly in all respects to the form of service prescribed in the Prayer-Book, whether he had subscribed to the three articles demanded of all ministers (see above, Whitgift's Articles, VI.), &c.

Other Local Resources:

• Archbishop Whitgift
  
• William Cecil, Lord Burleigh
  
• Whitgift's Articles Touching Preachers, 1583
  

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