HENRY VIII

XII.

"THE PREVAILING OF THE GATES OF HELL."

That victorious issue of the Tudor struggle with the power, against which Popes proclaimed that the gates of hell should not prevail, was distant enough in 1533. Then the Tudor monarch seemed rushing headlong to irretrievable ruin. Sure of himself and his people, and feeling no longer the need of Clement's favour, Henry threw off the mask of friendship, and, on the 9th of July, confirmed, by letters patent, the Act of Annates. Cranmer's proceedings at Dunstable, Henry's marriage, and Anne's coronation, constituted a still more flagrant defiance of Catholic Europe. The Pope's authority was challenged with every parade of contempt. He could do no less than gather round him the relics of his dignity and prepare to launch against Henry the final ban of the Church. So, on the 11th of July, the sentence of the greater excommunication was drawn up. Clement did not yet, nor did he ever, venture to assert his claims to temporal supremacy in Christendom, by depriving the English King of his kingdom; he thought it prudent to rely on his own undisputed prerogative. His spiritual powers seemed ample; and he applied to himself the words addressed to the Prophet Jeremiah, "Behold, I have set thee above nations and kingdoms that thou mayest root up and destroy, build and plant, a lord over all kings of the whole earth and over all peoples bearing rule". In virtue of this prerogative Henry was cut off from the Church while he lived, removed from the pale of Christian society, and deprived of the solace of the rites of religion; when he died, he must lie without burial, and in hell suffer torment for ever.

What would be the effect of this terrific anathema? The omens looked ill for the English King. If he had flouted the Holy See, he had also offended the temporal head of Christendom. The Emperor's aunt had been divorced, his cousin's legitimacy had been impugned, and the despatches of his envoy, Chapuys, were filled with indignant lamentations over the treatment meted out to Catherine and to her daughter. Both proud and stubborn women, they resolutely refused to admit in any way the validity of Henry's acts and recent legislation. Catherine would rather starve as Queen, than be sumptuously clothed and fed as Princess Dowager. Henry would give her anything she asked, if she would acknowledge that she was not the Queen, nor her daughter the Princess; but her bold resistance to his commands and wishes brought out all the worst features of his character. His anger was not the worst the Queen and her daughter had to fear; he still preserved a feeling of respect for Catherine and of affection for Mary. "The King himself," writes Chapuys, "is not ill-natured; it is this Anne who has put him in this perverse and wicked temper, and alienates him from his former humanity." The new Queen's jealous malignity passed all bounds. She caused her aunt to be made governess to Mary, and urged her to box her charge's ears; and she used every effort to force the Princess to serve as a maid upon her little half-sister, Elizabeth.

This humiliation was deeply resented by the people, who, says Chapuys, though forbidden, on pain of their lives, to call Catherine Queen, shouted it at the top of their voices. "You cannot imagine," he writes a few weeks later to Charles, "the great desire of all this people that your Majesty should send men. Every day I have been applied to about it by Englishmen of rank, wit and learning, who give me to understand that the last King Richard was never so much hated by his people as this King." The Emperor, he went on, had a better chance of success than Henry VII., and Ortiz at Rome was cherishing the belief that England would rise against the King for his contumacy and schismatic disobedience. Fisher was urgent that Charles should prepare an invasion of England; the young Marquis of Exeter, a possible claimant to the throne, was giving the same advice. Abergavenny, Darcy and other peers brooded in sullen discontent. They were all listening to the hysterical ravings of Elizabeth Barton, the Nun of Kent, who prophesied that Henry had not a year to live. Charles's emissaries were busy in Ireland, where Kildare was about to revolt. James V. of Scotland was hinting at his claims to the English crown, should Henry be deprived by the Pope; and Chapuys was divided in mind whether it would be better to make James the executor of the papal sentence, or marry Mary to some great English noble, and raise an internal rebellion. At Catherine's suggestion he recommended to the Emperor Reginald Pole, a grandson of George, Duke of Clarence, as a suitor for Mary's hand; and he urged, on his own account, Pole's claims to the English throne. Catherine's scruples, not about deposing her husband, or passing over the claims of Henry's sisters, but on the score of Edward IV.'s grandson, the Marquis of Exeter, might, thought Chapuys, be removed by appealing to the notorious sentence of Bishop Stillington, who, on the demand of Richard III, had pronounced Edward IV's marriage void and his children illegitimate. Those who had been the King's firm supporters when the divorce first came up were some of them wavering, and others turning back. Archbishop Lee, Bishops Tunstall and Gardiner, and Bennet, were now all in secret or open opposition, and even Longland was expressing to Chapuys regrets that he had ever been Henry's confessor; like other half-hearted revolutionists, they would never have started at all, had they known how far they would have to go, and now they were setting their sails for an adverse breeze. It was the King, and the King alone, who kept England on the course which he had mapped out. Pope and Emperor were defied; Europe was shocked; Francis himself disapproved of the breach with the Church; Ireland was in revolt; Scotland, as ever, was hostile; legislation had been thrust down the throats of a recalcitrant Church, and, we are asked to believe, of a no less unwilling House of Commons, while the people at large were seething with indignation at the insults heaped upon the injured Queen and her daughter. By all the laws of nature, of morals, and of politics, it would seem, Henry was doomed to the fate of the monarch in the Book of Daniel the Prophet, who did according to his will and exalted and magnified himself above every god; who divided the land for gain, and had power over the treasures of gold and silver; who was troubled by tidings from the east and from the north; who went forth with great fury to destroy and utterly make away many, and yet came to his end, and none helped him.

All these circumstances, real and alleged, would be quite convincing as reasons for Henry's failure; but they are singularly inconclusive as explanations of his success, of the facts that his people did not rise and depose him, that no Spanish Armada disgorged its host on English shores, and that, for all the papal thunderbolts, Henry died quietly in his bed fourteen years later, and was buried with a pomp and respect to which Popes themselves were little accustomed. He may have stood alone in his confidence of success, and in his penetration through these appearances into the real truth of the situation behind. That, from a purely political or non-moral point of view, is his chief title to greatness. He knew from the beginning what he could do; he had counted the cost and calculated the risks; and, writes Russell in August, 1533, "I never saw the King merrier than he is now". As early as March, 1531, he told Chapuys that if the Pope issued 10,000 excommunications he would not care a straw for them. When the papal nuncio first hinted at excommunication and a papal appeal to the secular arm, Henry declared that he cared nothing for either. He would open the eyes of princes, he said, and show them how small was really the power of the Pope; and "when the Pope had done what he liked on his side, Henry would do what he liked here". That threat, at least, he fulfilled with a vengeance. He did not fear the Spaniards; they might come, he said (as they did in 1588), but perhaps they might not return. England, he told his subjects, was not conquerable, so long as she remained united; and the patriotic outburst with which Shakespeare closes "King John" is but an echo and an expansion of the words of Henry VIII.

This England never did, nor never shall,
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror,
But when it first did help to wound itself....
Come the three corners of the world in arms,
And we shall shock them. Nought shall make us rue,
If England to itself do rest but true.

The great fear of Englishmen was lest Charles should ruin them by prohibiting the trade with Flanders. "Their only comfort," wrote Chapuys, "is that the King persuades the people that it is not in your Majesty's power to do so." Henry had put the matter to a practical test, in the autumn of 1533, by closing the Staple at Calais. It is possible that the dispute between him and the merchants, alleged as the cause for this step, was real; but the King could have provided his subjects with no more forcible object-lesson. Distress was felt at once in Flanders; complaints grew so clamorous that the Regent sent an embassy post-haste to Henry to remonstrate, and to represent the closing of the Staple as an infraction of commercial treaties. Henry coldly replied that he had broken no treaties at all; it was merely a private dispute between his merchants and himself, in which foreign powers had no ground for intervention. The envoys had to return, convinced against their will. The Staple at Calais was soon reopened, but the English King was able to demonstrate to his people that the Flemings "could not do without England's trade, considering the outcry they made when the Staple of Calais was closed for only three months".

Henry, indeed, might almost be credited with second-sight into the Emperor's mind. On 31st May, 1533, Charles's council discussed the situation. After considering Henry's enormities, the councillors proceeded to deliberate on the possible remedies. There were three: justice, force and a combination of both. The objections to relying on methods of justice, that is, on the papal sentence, were, firstly, that Henry would not obey, and secondly, that the Pope was not to be trusted. The objections to the employment of force were, that war would imperil the whole of Europe, and especially the Emperor's dominions, and that Henry had neither used violence towards Catherine nor given Charles any excuse for breaking the Treaty of Cambrai. Eventually, it was decided to leave the matter to Clement. He was to be urged to give sentence against Henry, but on no account to lay England under an interdict, as that "would disturb her intercourse with Spain and Flanders. If, therefore, an interdict be resorted to, it should be limited to one diocese, or to the place where Henry dwells." Such an interdict might put a premium on assassination, but otherwise neither Henry nor his people were likely to care much about it. The Pope should, however, be exhorted to depose the English King; that might pave the way for Mary's accession and for the predominance in England of the Emperor's influence; but the execution of the sentence must not be entrusted to Charles. It would be excellent if James V or the Irish would undertake to beard the lion in his den, but the Emperor did not see his way clear to accepting the risk himself.

Charles was, indeed, afraid, not merely of Henry, but of Francis, who was meditating fresh Italian schemes; and various expedients were suggested to divert his attention in other directions. He might be assisted in an attack upon Calais. "Calais," was Charles's cautious comment, "is better as it is, for the security of Flanders." The Pope hinted that the grant of Milan would win over Francis. It probably would; but Charles would have abandoned half a dozen aunts rather than see Milan in French possession. His real concern in the matter was not the injustice to Catherine, but the destruction of the prospect of Mary's succession. That was a tangible political interest, and Charles was much less anxious to have Henry censured than to have Mary's legitimate claim to the throne established. He was a great politician, absolutely impervious to personal wrong when its remedy conflicted with political interests. "Though the Emperor," he said, "is bound to the Queen, this is a private matter, and public considerations must be taken into account." And public considerations, as he admitted a year later, "compelled him to conciliate Henry". So he refused Chapuys' request to be recalled lest his presence in England should lead people to believe that Charles had condoned Henry's marriage with Anne Boleyn, and dissuaded Catherine from leaving England. The least hint to Francis of any hostile intent towards Henry would, thought Charles, be at once revealed to the English King, and the two would join in making war on himself. War he was determined to avoid, for, apart from the ruin of Flanders, which it would involve, Henry and Francis had long been intriguing with the Lutherans in Germany. A breach might easily precipitate civil strife in the Empire; and, indeed, in June, 1534, Würtemberg was wrested from the Habsburgs by Philip of Hesse with the connivance of France. Francis, too, was always believed to have a working agreement with the Turk; Barbarossa was giving no little cause for alarm in the Mediterranean; while Henry on his part had established close relations with Lübeck and Hamburg, and was fomenting dissensions in Denmark, the crown of which he was offered but cautiously declined.[882]

This incurable jealousy between Francis and Charles made the French King loth to weaken his friendship with Henry. The English King was careful to impress upon the French ambassador that he could, in the last resort, make his peace with Charles by taking back Catherine and by restoring Mary to her place in the line of succession. Francis had too poignant a recollection of the results of the union between Henry and Charles from 1521 to 1525 ever to risk its renewal. The age of the crusades and chivalry was gone; commercial and national rivalries were as potent in the sixteenth century as they are to-day. Then, as in subsequent times, mutual suspicions made impossible an effective concert of Europe against the Turk. The fall of Rhodes and the death of one of Charles's brothers-in-law at Mohacz and the expulsion of another from the throne of Denmark had never been avenged, and, in 1534, the Emperor was compelled to evacuate Coron. If Europe could not combine against the common enemy of the Faith, was it likely to combine against one who, in spite of all his enormities, was still an orthodox Christian? And, without a combination of princes to execute them, papal censures, excommunications, interdicts, and all the spiritual paraphernalia, served only to probe the hollowness of papal pretensions, and to demonstrate the deafness of Europe to the calls of religious enthusiasm. In Spain, at least, it might have been thought (p. 313) that every sword would leap from its scabbard at a summons from Charles on behalf of the Spanish Queen. "Henry," wrote Chapuys, "has always fortified himself by the consent of Parliament." It would be well, he thought, if Charles would follow suit, and induce the Cortes of Aragon and Castile, "or at least the grandees," to offer their persons and goods in Catherine's cause. Such an offer, if published in England, "will be of inestimable service". But here comes the proof of Charles's pitiful impotence; in order to obtain this public offer, the Emperor was "to give them privately an exemption from such offer and promise of persons and goods". It was to be one more pretence like the others, and unfortunately for the Pope and for the Emperor, Henry had an inconvenient habit of piercing disguises.

The strength of Henry's position at home was due to a similar lack of unity among his domestic enemies. If the English people had wished to depose him, they could have effected their object without much difficulty. In estimating the chances of a possible invasion, it was pointed out how entirely dependent Henry was upon his people: he had only one castle in London, and only a hundred yeomen of the guard to defend him. He would, in fact, have been powerless against a united people or even against a partial revolt, if well organised and really popular. There was chronic discontent throughout the Tudor period, but it was sectional. The remnants of the old nobility always hated Tudor methods of government, and the poorer commons were sullen at their ill-treatment by the lords of the land; but there was no concerted basis of action between the two. The dominant class was commercial, and it had no grievance against Henry, while it feared alike the lords and the lower orders. In the spoliation of the Church temporal lords and commercial men, both of whom could profit thereby, were agreed; and nowhere was there much sympathy with the Church as an institution apart from its doctrine. Chapuys himself admits that the act, depriving the clergy of their profits from leases, was passed "to please the people"; and another conservative declared that, if the Church were deprived of all its temporal goods, many would be glad and few would bemoan. Sympathy with Catherine and hatred of Anne were general, but people thought, like Charles, that these were private griefs, and that public considerations must be taken into account. Englishmen are at all times reluctant to turn out one Government until they see at least the possibility of another to take its place, and the only alternative to Henry VIII. was anarchy. The opposition could not agree on a policy, and they could not agree on a leader. There were various grandchildren of Edward IV. and of Clarence, who might put forward distant claims to the throne; and there were other candidates in whose multitude lay Henry's safety. It was quite certain that the pushing of any one of these claimants would throw the rest on Henry's side. James V., whom at one time Chapuys favoured, knew that a Scots invasion would unite the whole of England against him; and Charles was probably wise in rebuking his ambassador's zeal, and in thinking that any attempt on his own part would be more disastrous to himself than to Henry. For all this, the English King was, as Chapuys remarks, keeping a very watchful eye on the countenance of his people, seeing how far he could go and where he must stop, and neglecting no precaution for the peace and security of himself and his kingdom. Acts were passed to strengthen the navy, improvements in arms and armament were being continually tested, and the fortifications at Calais, on the Scots Borders and elsewhere were strengthened. Wales was reduced to law and order, and, through the intermediation of Francis, a satisfactory peace was made with Scotland.

Convinced of his security from attack at home and abroad, Henry proceeded to accomplish what remained for the subjugation of the Church in England and the final breach with Rome. Clement had no sooner excommunicated Henry than he began to repent; he was much more alarmed than the English King at the probable effects of his sentence. Henry at once recalled his ambassadors from Rome, and drew up an appeal to a General Council. The Pope feared he would lose England for ever. Even the Imperialists proved but Job's comforters, and told him that, after all, it was only "an unprofitable island," the loss of which was not to be compared with the renewed devotion of Spain and the Emperor's other dominions; possibly they assured him that there would never again be a sack of Rome. Clement delayed for a time the publication of the sentence against Henry, and in November he went to his interview with Francis I. at Marseilles. While he was there, Bonner intimated to him Henry's appeal to a General Council. Clement angrily rejected the appeal as frivolous, and Francis regarded this defiance of the Pope as an affront to himself in the person of his guest, and as the ruin of his attempts to reconcile the two parties. "Ye have clearly marred all," he said to Gardiner; "as fast as I study to win the Pope, you study to lose him," and he declared that, had he known of the intimation beforehand, it should never have been made. Henry, however, had no desire that the Pope should be won. He was, he told the French ambassador, determined to separate from Rome; "he will not, in consequence of this, be less Christian, but more so, for in everything and in every place he desires to cause Jesus Christ to be recognised, who alone is the patron of Christians; and he will cause the Word to be preached, and not the canons and decrees of the Pope."

Parliament was to meet to effect this purpose in January, 1534, and during the previous autumn there are the first indications, traceable to Cromwell's hand, of an attempt to pack it. He drew up a memorandum of such seats as were vacant from death or from other causes; most of the new members appear to have been freely elected, but four vacancies were filled by "the King's pleasure." More extensive and less doubtful was the royal interference in the election of abbots. Many abbeys fell vacant in 1533, and in every case commissioners were sent down to secure the election of the King's nominee; in many others, abbots were induced to resign, and fresh ones put in their place. It is not clear that the main object was to pack the clerical representation in the House of Lords, because only a few of these abbots had seats there, the abbots gave much less trouble than the bishops in Parliament, and Convocation, where they largely outnumbered the bishops, was much more amenable than the House of Peers, where the bishops' votes preponderated. It is more probable that the end in view was already the dissolution of the monasteries by means of surrender. Cromwell, who was now said to "rule everything," was boasting that he would make his King the richest monarch in Christendom, and his methods may be guessed from his praise of the Sultan as a model to other princes for the authority he wielded over his subjects. Henry, however, was fortunate in 1533, even in the matter of episcopal representation. He had, since the fall of Wolsey, had occasion to fill up the Sees of York, Winchester, London, Durham and Canterbury; and in this year five more became vacant: Bangor, Ely, Coventry and Lichfield by death, and Salisbury and Worcester through the deprivation by Act of Parliament of their foreign and absentee pastors, Campeggio and Ghinucci. Of the other bishops, Clerk of Bath and Wells, and Longland of Lincoln, had been active in the divorce, which, indeed, Longland, the King's confessor, was said to have originally suggested about the year 1523; the Bishops of Norwich and of Chichester were both over ninety years of age. Llandaff was Catherine's confessor, a Spaniard who could not speak a word of English. On the whole bench there was no one but Fisher of Rochester who had the will or the courage to make any effective stand on behalf of the Church's liberty.

Before Parliament met Francis sent Du Bellay, Bishop of Paris, to London to make one last effort to keep the peace between England and Rome. Du Bellay could get no concessions of any value from Henry. All the King would promise was that, if Clement would before Easter declare his marriage with Catherine null and that with Anne valid, he would not complete the extirpation of the papal authority. Little enough of that remained, and Henry himself had probably no expectation and no wish that his terms should be accepted. Long before Du Bellay had reached Rome, Parliament was discussing measures designed to effect the final severance. Opposition was of the feeblest character alike in Convocation and in both Houses of Parliament. Chapuys himself gloomily prophesied that there would be no difficulty in getting the principal measures, abolishing the Pope's authority and arranging for the election of bishops, through the House of Lords. The second Act of Appeals embodied the concessions made by Convocation in 1532 and rejected that year in the House of Lords. Convocation was neither to meet nor to legislate without the King's assent; Henry might appoint a royal commission to reform the canon law; appeals were to be permitted to Chancery from the Archbishop's Court; abbeys and other religious houses, which had been exempt from episcopal authority, were placed immediately under the jurisdiction of Chancery. A fresh Act of Annates defined more precisely the new method of electing bishops, and provided that, if the Chapter did not elect the royal nominee within twelve days, the King might appoint him by letters patent. A third act forbade the payment of Peter-pence and other impositions to the Court of Rome, and handed over the business of dispensations and licences to the Archbishop of Canterbury; at the same time it declared that neither King nor realm meant to vary from the articles of the Catholic Faith of Christendom.

Another act provided that charges of heresy must be supported by two lay witnesses, and that indictments for that offence could only be made by lay authorities. This, like the rest of Henry's anti-ecclesiastical legislation, was based on popular clamour. On the 5th of March the whole House of Commons, with the Speaker at their head, had waited on the King at York Place and expatiated for three hours on the oppressiveness of clerical jurisdiction. At length it was agreed that eight temporal peers, eight representatives of the Lower House and sixteen bishops "should discuss the matter and the King be umpire"—a repetition of the plan of 1529 and a very exact reflection of Henry's methods and of the Church-and-State situation during the Reformation Parliament.

The final act of the session, which ended on 30th March, was a constitutional innovation of the utmost importance. From the earliest ages the succession to the crown had in theory been determined, first by election, and then by hereditary right. In practice it had often been decided by the barbarous arbitrament of war. For right is vague, it may be disputed, and there was endless variety of opinion as to the proper claimant to the throne if Henry should die. So vague right was to be replaced by definite law, which could not be disputed, but which, unlike right, could easily be changed. The succession was no longer to be regulated by an unalterable principle, but by the popular (or royal) will expressed in Acts of Parliament. The first of a long series of Acts of Succession was now passed to vest the succession to the crown in the heirs of the King by Anne Boleyn; clauses were added declaring that persons who impugned that marriage by writing, printing, or other deed were guilty of treason, and those who impugned it by words, of misprision. The Government proposal that both classes of offenders should be held guilty of treason was modified by the House of Commons.

On 23rd March, a week before the prorogation of Parliament, and seven years after the divorce case had first begun, Clement gave sentence at Rome pronouncing valid the marriage between Catherine and Henry. The decision produced not a ripple on the surface of English affairs; Henry, writes Chapuys, took no account of it and was making as good cheer as ever. There was no reason why he should not. While the imperialist mob at Rome after its kind paraded the streets in crowds, shouting "Imperio et Espagne," and firing feux-de-joie over the news, the imperialist agent was writing to Charles that the judgment would not be of much profit, except for the Emperor's honour and the Queen's justification, and was congratulating his master that he was not bound to execute the sentence. Flemings were tearing down the papal censures from the doors of their churches, and Charles was as convinced as ever of the necessity of Henry's friendship. He proposed to the Pope that some one should be sent from Rome to join Chapuys in "trying to move the King from his error"; and Clement could only reply that "he thought the embassy would have no effect on the King, but that nothing would be lost by it, and it would be a good compliment!" Henry, however was less likely to be influenced by compliments, good or bad, than by the circumstance that neither Pope nor Emperor was in a position to employ any ruder persuasive. There was none so poor as to reverence a Pope, and, when Clement died six months later, the Roman populace broke into the chamber where he lay and stabbed his corpse; they were with difficulty prevented from dragging it in degradation through the streets. Such was the respect paid to the Supreme Pontiff in the Holy City, and deference to his sentence was not to be expected in more distant parts.

Henry's political education was now complete; the events of the last five years had proved to him the truth of the assertion, with which he had started, that the Pope might do what he liked at Rome, but that he also could do what he liked in England, so long as he avoided the active hostility of the majority of his lay subjects. The Church had, by its actions, shown him that it was powerless; the Pope had proved the impotence of his spiritual weapons; and the Emperor had admitted that he was both unable and unwilling to interfere. Henry had realised the extent of his power, and the opening of his eyes had an evil effect upon his character. Nothing makes men or Governments so careless or so arbitrary as the knowledge that there will be no effective opposition to their desires. Henry, at least, never grew careless; his watchful eye was always wide open. His ear was always strained to catch the faintest rumbling of a coming storm, and his subtle intellect was ever on the alert to take advantage of every turn in the diplomatic game. He was always efficient, and he took good care that his ministers should be so as well. But he grew very arbitrary; the knowledge that he could do so much became with him an irresistible reason for doing it. Despotic power is twice cursed; it debases the ruler and degrades the subject; and Henry's progress to despotism may be connected with the rise of Thomas Cromwell, who looked to the Great Turk as a model for Christian princes. Cromwell became secretary in May, 1534; in that month Henry's security was enhanced by the definitive peace with Scotland, and he set to work to enforce his authority with the weapons which Parliament had placed in his hands. Elizabeth Barton, and her accomplices, two Friars Observants, two monks, and one secular priest, all attainted of treason by Act of Parliament, were sent to the block. Commissioners were sent round, as Parliament had ordained, to enforce the oath of succession throughout the land. A general refusal would have stopped Henry's career, but the general consent left Henry free to deal as he liked with the exceptions. Fisher and More were sent to the Tower. They were willing to swear to the succession, regarding that as a matter within the competence of Parliament, but they refused to take the oath required by the commissioners; it contained, they alleged, a repudiation of the Pope not justified by the terms of the statute. Two cartloads of friars followed them to the Tower in June, and the Order of Observants, in whose church at Greenwich Henry had been baptised and married, and of whom in his earlier years he had written in terms of warm admiration, was suppressed altogether.

In November Parliament reinforced the Act of Succession by laying down the precise terms of the oath, and providing that a certificate of refusal signed by two commissioners was as effective as the indictment of twelve jurors. Other acts empowered the King to repeal by royal proclamation certain statutes regulating imports and exports. The first-fruits and tenths, of which the Pope had been already deprived, were now conferred on the King as a fitting ecclesiastical endowment for the Supreme Head of the Church. That title, granted him four years before by both Convocations, was confirmed by Act of Parliament; its object was to enable the King as Supreme Head to effect the "increase of virtue in Christ's Religion within this Realm of England, and to repress and extirp all Errors, Heresies and other Enormities, and Abuses heretofore used in the same". The Defender of the Faith was to be armed with more than a delegate power; he was to be supreme in himself, the champion not of the Faith of any one else, but of his own; and the qualifying clause, "as far as the law of Christ allows," was omitted. His orthodoxy must be above suspicion, or at least beyond the reach of open cavil in England. So new treasons were enacted, and any one who called the King a heretic, schismatic, tyrant, infidel, or usurper, was rendered liable to the heaviest penalty which the law could inflict. As an earnest of the royal and parliamentary desire for an increase of virtue in religion, an act was concurrently passed providing for the creation of a number of suffragan bishops.

Henry was now Pope in England with powers no Pope had possessed. The Reformation is variously regarded as the liberation of the English Church from the Roman yoke it had long impatiently borne, as its subjection to an Erastian yoke which it was henceforth, with more or less patience, long to bear, or as a comparatively unimportant assertion of a supremacy which Kings of England had always enjoyed. The Church is the same Church, we are told, before and after the change; if anything, it was Protestant before the Reformation, and Catholic after. It is, of course, the same Church. A man may be described as the same man before and after death, and the business of a coroner's jury is to establish the identity; but it does not ignore the vital difference. Even Saul and Paul were the same man. And the identity of the Church before and after the legislation of Henry VIII. covers a considerable number of not unimportant changes. It does not, however, seem strictly accurate to say that Henry either liberated or enslaved the Church. Rather, he substituted one form of despotism for another, a sole for a dual control; the change, complained a reformer, was merely a translatio imperii. The democratic movement within the Church had died away, like the democratic movements in national and municipal politics, before the end of the fifteenth century. It was never merry with the Church, complained a Catholic in 1533, since the time when bishops were wont to be chosen by the Holy Ghost and by their Chapters.

Since then the Church had been governed by a partnership between King and Pope, without much regard for the votes of the shareholders. It was not Henry who first deprived them of influence; neither did he restore it. What he did was to eject his foreign partner, appropriate his share of the profits, and put his part of the business into the hands of a manager. First-fruits and tenths were described as an intolerable burden; but they were not abolished; they were merely transferred from the Pope to the King. Bishops became royal nominees, pure and simple, instead of the joint nominees of King and Pope. The supreme appellate jurisdiction in ecclesiastical causes was taken away from Rome, but it was not granted the English Church to which in truth it had never belonged. Chancery, and not the Archbishop's Court, was made the final resort for ecclesiastical appeals. The authority, divided erstwhile between two, was concentrated in the hands of one; and that one was thus placed in a far different position from that which either had held before.

The change was analogous to that in Republican Rome from two consuls to one dictator. In both cases the dictatorship was due to exceptional circumstances. There had long been a demand for reform in the Church in England as well as elsewhere, but the Church was powerless to reform itself. The dual control was in effect, as dual controls often are, a practical anarchy. The condition of the Church before the Reformation may be compared with that of France before the Revolution. In purely spiritual matters the Pope was supreme: the conciliar movement of the fifteenth century had failed. The Pope had gathered all powers to himself, in much the same way as the French monarch in the eighteenth century had done; and the result was the same, a formal despotism and a real anarchy. Pope and Monarch were crushed by the weight of their own authority; they could not reform, even when they wanted to. From 1500 to 1530 almost every scheme, peaceful or bellicose, started in Europe was based on the plea that its ultimate aim was the reform of the Church; and so it would have continued, vox et præterea nihil, had not the Church been galvanised into action by the loss of half its inheritance.

In England the change from a dual to a sole control at once made that control effective, and reform became possible. But it was a reform imposed on the Church from without and by means of the exceptional powers bestowed on the Supreme Head. Hence the burden of modern clerical criticism of the Reformation. Objection is raised not so much to the things that were done, as to the means by which they were brought to pass, to the fact that the Church was forcibly reformed by the State, and not freed from the trammels of Rome, and then left to work out its own salvation. But such a solution occurred to few at that time; the best and the worst of Henry's opponents opposed him on the ground that he was divorcing the Church in England from the Church universal. Their objection was to what was done more than to the way in which it was done; and Sir Thomas More would have fought the Reformation quite as strenuously had it been effected by the Convocations of Canterbury and York. On the other side there was equally little thought of a Reformation by clerical hands. Henry and Cromwell carried on and developed the tradition of the Emperor Frederick II and Peter de Vinea, of Philippe le Bel and Pierre Dubois, of Lewis the Bavarian and Marsiglio of Padua who maintained the supremacy of the temporal over the spiritual power and asserted that the clergy wielded no jurisdiction and only bore the keys of heaven in the capacity of turnkeys. It was a question of the national State against the universal Church. The idea of a National Church was a later development, the result and not the cause of the Reformation.

Henry's dictatorship was also temporary in character. His supremacy over the Church was royal, and not parliamentary. It was he, and not Parliament, who had been invested with a semi-ecclesiastical nature. In one capacity he was head of the State, in another, head of the Church. Parliament and Convocation were co-ordinate one with another, and subordinate both to the King. The Tudors, and especially Elizabeth, vehemently denied to their Parliaments any share in their ecclesiastical powers. Their supremacy over the Church was their own, and, as a really effective control, it died with them. As the authority of the Crown declined, its secular powers were seized by Parliament; its ecclesiastical powers fell into abeyance between Parliament and Convocation. Neither has been able to vindicate an exclusive claim to the inheritance; and the result of this dual claim to control has been a state of helplessness, similar in some respects to that from which the Church was rescued by the violent methods of Henry VIII.