'She only followed the example of the primitive church': Le Mesurier's Bampton Lectures on the rights and liberties of the ecclesia Anglicana

In the fourth of his 1807 Bampton Lectures, On the Nature and Guilt of Schism, Le Mesurier reaffirms the Old High conviction that the Reformation in England was a legitimate restoration of the rights and liberties of a national church, rooted in patristic experience. 

Such a confident, positive assertion  by the Old High tradition of the Reformation of the ecclesia Anglicana contrasts with the (at best) unease about the Reformation increasingly evident in Tractarianism and, also, later progressive Anglican distaste for the Royal Supremacy, failing to recognise its vital historic significance in offering the alternative to papal supremacy:

At the reformation, therefore, the church of England did only reassert that independence which belonged to her in the beginning, and which, neither to her nor to any national church can be denied. Again, in recognizing the king of this realm for her head, as supreme in ecclesiastical as well as temporal causes, she only followed the example of the primitive church, which, from the moment that it pleased God to give her Christian emperors, submitted herself to their authority, and owned them for her sovereigns. And this lasted for several centuries, without any pretence to the contrary advanced by any one pope,

There will appear no doubt of this, if we take ever so cursory a survey of what was the practice of the first ages, in which we shall find the absolute independency of bishops established in the first instance, and afterwards only limited by their being made subject to the superintendence of patriarchs or metropolitans within their several provinces, and to the emperor as the head of all. Their independency was so absolute at the beginning, that it extended to all matters whatever, relating to the internal economy of the church, to rites and ceremonies, to the form of prayer which was used, nay, to the particular terms of the creeds, with all that was necessary in order to enforce and to preserve

uniformity. 

According to the practice then pursued and approved by all the orthodox, every Christian was bound to join in communion with the particular church within whose limits he was resident, and to conform to all her ordinances, under the penalty of being considered as a schismatic. Such was the state of every church within herself, and such her constitution with respect to individual members. As far as this goes; therefore, it is clear that the church of England was fully authorized in the claims which she made for herself at the reformation, and in the manner in which she established and gave effect to those claims.

We might note that Le Mesurier's robust, confident understanding that the Reformation rejection of the papal supremacy, and the restoration of the rights and liberties of a national church under the Royal Supremacy, was a return to an earlier patristic vision of the Church catholic, finds contemporary expression in the view of the late John Hughes:

The rediscovery of the dignity of the laity at the Reformation and the suspicion of the clericalism which had developed in the medieval West from the Hildebrandine reforms of the eleventh century onwards, meant a return in the Church of England to the more non-dualist, integralist ecclesiology of the first millennium, combined with a more Byzantine  or Carolinian view of the priestly nature of 'secular' authority, which was recovered in the Reformation.

In other words, the Old High view expressed by Le Mesurier, rather than being the stance of a redundant pre-1833 Anglicanism , no longer relevant to contemporary Anglicans, turns out to have enduring significance, a version of what Hughes termed "the integral humanism that shaped the whole of Christendom".