(abusus tollit usumexcepted). They are significant on two counts. First,
in questions material to the faith, the prince had a legitimate concern;
but in matters of adiaphora, all coercion, by definition, was prohibited.
Thus he happily presented his case before Edward VI against the oath
contained in the ordinal, the king then striking out the offending article
with his own hand. The offending article, the last part of the oath to the
king’s supremacy, contained in the service for the Ordering of Deacons,
required of all that
in case any othe bee made, or hath been made by me, to any person
or persones, in mayntenaunce, defence, or fauoure of the Bisshoppe
of Rome, or hys aucthoritie, iurisdiction, or power, I repute the
same, as vayne and adnichilate: so help me God, all Saints and the
holy Evangelist.^40The king’s action in this regard concerned something material, not
indifferent, and as such was a legitimate sphere for royal activity. Thus
Hooper’s stance was consistent with his essentially conservative position
on the power and authority of the civil government. His short treatise on
Romans 13 embraced only passive resistance, even to the point of
bowing the neck to tyranny.^41 Yet in his notes before the council, he
questioned the council’s right to interfere in his dispute with Ridley. He
is ready to bow to the will of the council, but Hooper wanted the
controversy settled in the ecclesiastical realm. For Hooper, questions of
adiaphora were beyond the pale of the civil government for a simple
reason: once the government – civil or ecclesiastical – imposed itself on
the will of the individual in matters indifferent, its manifest tyranny had
obliterated the indifferent thing, rendering it an offense.^42
This particular form of argument appears in Hooper’s compeer, the
Polish emigré John à Lasco.^43 In his 1552 tract ‘The Abolition of
Vestments’,^44 à Lasco revisited Flaccius Illyricus’s diatribe against
Melanchthon: the identification of certain vestments with Aaronic and
A PRELATE PUBLIC AND PRIVATE 167
(^40) The First and Second Prayer Books of Edward VI(London, 1910), p. 300. Also in
The Two liturgies of Edward VI, p. 169.
(^41) ‘Annotations on Romans XIII’ in John Hooper, Later Works, Vol II of Works, Parker
Society Edition (Cambridge, 18, 1852), esp. pp. 95–112.
(^42) Hooper’s notes, trans. by Edward P.C. Greene, appear in Iain H. Murray, ed. The
Reformation of the Church: A collection of Reformed and Puritan documents on Church
issues(Edinburgh, 1965), pp. 55–62. For the original Latin C. Hopf, ‘Bishop Hooper’s
“Notes” to the King’s Council’, Journal of Theological Studies, XLIV (January–April,
1943), pp. 194–99.
(^43) Horton G. Davies, Worship and Theology, Vol. I, p. 350.
(^44) This short treatise was never published till later printed by the Puritans in the
Elizabethan Vesterian controversy of 1566. Murray, Reformation of the Church, pp.
61–62.