ABSTRACT
An age which insisted on degree could not think in radical terms or welcome the break-up of any established thing. The words of Shakespeare's Ulysses, often quoted, may yet be cited once again:
Without degree, with the natural order of things disturbed, the moral order itself would dissolve. Sanctionless, right would fall before might. The statesmen of the age held this view with cold passion, and every means of propaganda was employed to preach order, obedience, and humble acquiescence in one's station. Cranmer's Homily on Obedience (I547)-an official sermon read in all churches-justified the existing political order as part of that universal order "yhich the 'Chain of Being' exemplified. That the political order of 1547 was a very different thing from that of 1527 there was no need to admit: the Henrician revolutionaries always pretended to be preservers of the proper order. Afterwards,
however, the new order was to be really preserved unaltered. The political common-place book of the Elizabethan period, the Mirror for Magistrates (first published in 1559 and frequently reprinted), a collection of tales about kings and others who came to a sticky end through offending against the universal order, preached both the supremacy of degree and the duty of obedience. Even evil rulers are for God to deal with, and not for man. Rebellion is the great political sin because it disturbs degree which is man's only right condition.
