ful one, and on its personal side need not concern us here further than as it illustrates the private character of Henry. Into the public bearing of it I must enter at some length, in order to explain the interest with which the nation threw itself into the question, and to remove the scandal with which, had nothing been at stake beyond the inclinations of a profligate monarch, weary of his queen, the complaisance on such a subject of the lords and commons of England would have colored the entire complexion of the Reformation.

85. The Divorce and State Policy

The succession to the throne, although determined in theory by the ordinary law of primogeniture, was nevertheless subject to repeated arbitrary changes. The uncertainty of the rule was acknowledged and deplored by the Parliament, and there was no order of which the nation, with any unity of sentiment, compelled the observance. An opinion prevailed - not I believe traceable to statute, but admitted by custom, and having the force of statute in the prejudices of the nation - that no stranger born out of the realm could inherit. Although the descent in the female line was not formally denied, no female sovereign had ever, in fact, sat upon the throne. Even Henry VII refused to strengthen his title by advancing the claims of his wife; and the uncertainty of the laws of marriage, and the innumerable refinements of the Romish canon law, which affected the legitimacy of children, furnished, in connection with the further ambiguities of clerical dispensations, perpetual pretexts, whenever pretexts were needed, for a breach of allegiance. So long, indeed, as the character of the nation remained essentially military, it could as little tolerate an incapable king as an army in a dangerous campaign can bear with an inefficient commander; and whatever might be the theory of the title, when the sceptre was held by the infirm hand of an Edward II, a Richard II, or a Henry VI, the difficulty resolved itself by force, and it was wrenched by a stronger arm from a grasp too feeble to retain it. The consent of the nation was avowed, even in the authoritative language of a statute, as essential to the legitimacy of a sovereign's title; and Sir Thomas More, on examination by the solicitor-general, declared as his opinion that Parliament had power to depose kings if it so pleased.

So many uncertainties on a point so vital had occasioned fearful episodes in English history; the most fearful of them, which had traced its character in blood in the private records of every Eng

lish family, having been the long struggle of the preceding century from which the nation was still suffering and had but recovered sufficiently to be conscious of what it had endured. It had decimated itself for a question which involved no principle and led to no result, and perhaps the history of the world may be searched in vain for any parallel to a quarrel at once so desperate and so unmeaning.

No effort of imagination can reproduce to us the state of this country in the fatal years which intervened between the first rising of the Duke of York and the battle of Bosworth, and experience too truly convinced Henry VII that the war had ceased only from general exhaustion, and not because there was no will to continue it. The first Tudor breathed an atmosphere of suspended insurrection, and only when we remember the probable effect upon his mind of the constant dread of an explosion can we excuse or understand, in a prince not generally cruel, the execution of the Earl of Warwick. The danger of a bloody revolution may present an act of arbitrary or cowardly tyranny in the light of a public duty. Fifty years of settled government, however, had not been without their effects. The country had collected itself; the feuds of the great families had been chastened, if they had not been subdued; while the increase of wealth and material prosperity had brought out into obvious prominence those advantages of peace which a hot-spirited people, antecedent to experience, had not anticipated, and had not been able to appreciate. They were better fed, better cared for, more justly governed, than they had ever been before; and though abundance of unruly tempers remained, yet the wiser portion of the nation, looking back from their new vantage-ground, were able to recognize the past in its true hatefulness. Thenceforward a war of succession was the predominating terror with English statesmen, and the safe establishment of the reigning family bore a degree of importance which it is possible that their fears exaggerated, yet which in fact was the determining principle of their action.

XXXV.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Gairdner, A History of the English Church in the Sixteenth Century, chaps. i, ii, iv, and v. Brewer, The Reign of Henry VIII, Vol. II, chap. Gasquet, Henry VIII and the English Monasteries, chap. i; Eve of the Reformation, chap. iii on the "Two Jurisdictions," and chap. iv on "England and the Pope." The Cambridge Modern History, Vol. I, chaps. xviii and xix, for the Church and Europe on the eve of the Reformation Creighton, History of the Papacy during the Period of the Reformation.

CHAPTER III

PARLIAMENT AND THE BREACH WITH ROME

AFTER unsatisfactory negotiations with the pope for a decree of separation from Queen Catherine, Henry VIII in 1529 determined to bring still greater pressure to bear in the interest of his case. In that year he called the famous "Reformation Parliament," which was destined to last seven years and pass measure after measure until the dispute culminated in declaring Henry the supreme head of the English Church. The question as to whether this Parliament fairly represented the will of the nation constitutes a very important problem. If it did, there must have been a strong anti-papal sentiment on the eve of the ecclesiastical revolution. The fact, however, that many if not all of the great measures were prepared by royal favorites and promptly passed by Parliament has led some writers to regard it as no way representative of the nation, but a packed body constituting a servile tool of the king. Such is the view of Mr. Brewer in his History of Henry VIII to the Fall of Wolsey. On the other hand, Mr. Pollard in the tenth chapter of his volume on Henry VIII controverts this conclusion and maintains that the Reformation Parliament was fairly representative of the national will. It must be admitted, however, that it will take a far more detailed analysis of the history of that Parliament than has ever been made to settle finally this very complicated problem. Even Mr. Pollard admits that the Parliament would probably have been dissolved after a few weeks if Clement had granted the separation. But the pope would not or could not yield, and Parliament finally passed the last great acts which repudiated papal authority. A temperate and scholarly account of the work of this Parliament is to be found in Dixon's History of the Church of England.

§ 1. The Act Relating to Annates, Bulls, and Election of Bishops1

The houses met January 15, 1534. Scarce a third of the spiritual lords were present. Out of twenty-six abbots fourteen were away; and of the bishops none other appeared but Canterbury, London, Winchester, Lincoln, Bath and Wells, Llandaff, and Carlisle. During the session the preachers at Paul's Cross preached every Sunday against the authority of the pope in England, by order of the council.

Of the three great acts of the session which were directed against Rome, the first which passed bore the title of an act "for the restraint of annates," or "for the non-payment of firstfruits to the Bishop of Rome," but it was also called, when it first appeared, a "bill concerning the consecration of bishops." In this, as in the other enactments regarding Rome, a less deferential style marked the growing alienation of the kingdom. The "pope's holiness" of former statutes was constantly henceforth "the Bishop of Rome, otherwise called the pope."

Whereas the

The body of the act may be briefly described. act about annates which was made two years before, reserved certain payments for bulls procured from the See of Rome on the election of every bishop, this Act extinguished all such payments without reserve; it forbade bulls, breves, or any other thing to be procured from Rome, and confined the elections of bishops entirely within the kingdom. As to the form and manner of their election, it was least of all to be expected that the Church of England should have recovered now her long-lost liberty in this important particular; but the nominal freedom which she had enjoyed of old was not disturbed unnecessarily. From remote antiquity the theory had been that the prelates of churches and monasteries should be freely elected by chapters and convents, the election being afterwards confirmed by the consent of the king and the council of the realm. But this theory was rarely real, the kings in various ways generally contriving to overrule the elections, whether by nominating, investing, or signifying the candidate whom they preferred. The last formal settlement of the matter had been in the time of King John, who in one of his charters conceded that the election of all bishops and abbots should be free and canonical, the king's license to elect, or congé d'élire, being first procured.

1 Dixon, History of the Church of England, Vol. I, pp. 180 ff. By permission of the Delegates of the Clarendon Press, Oxford.

But the charter of John was of no avail in protecting the liberty of the churches; and the last of the royal inventions had been to accompany the license to elect with a letter missive to signify to the chapter the person whom the king desired to be elected.

In the act which now passed, the old process of the license to elect, or congé d'élire, and the old abuse of royal nomination, in the shape of the letter missive, were both continued; but the latter was made part of the statute law of England for the first time. If the chapter failed to elect in a certain number of days, they were placed under a præmunire, and the king proceeded to fill the vacancy by simple nomination, without further regard to them. The bishop elect was to make his corporal oath to the king, and to none other.

§ 2. The Act Concerning Papal Revenues from England

This act was completed by another, "The act concerning Peter-pence and dispensations," called also "for the exoneration from exactions paid to the See of Rome," but which seems at first to have borne the franker title of "a bill for the abrogation of the usurped authority of the Roman pontiff." .

This was the statute which the lawyers describe as discharging the subject from all dependence on the See of Rome. It bore the form of a petition or supplication to the king, to whom it set forth the intolerable exactions which the Bishop of Rome, otherwise called the pope, and his chambers, which he called apostolic, took out of the realm, of usurpation and sufferance. There were "pensions, censes, Peter-pence, procurations, fruits, suits for provisions, and expeditions of bulls for archbishoprics and bishoprics, and for delegacies and rescripts in causes of contentions and appeals, jurisdictions legatine; and also for dispensations, licenses, faculties, grants, relaxations, writs called perinde valere, rehabilitations, abolitions, and other infinite sorts of bulls, breves, and instruments of sundry natures, names, and kinds, in great number," of which the catalogue seemed swollen by the zeal of recitation. It was, however, no doubt true that the pope got much money out of England, more perhaps than from any other country; and that the English nation had been treated formerly by the popes with far less consideration than they deserved by their piety. The remonstrances of the English nation against the intolerable and incessant exactions of the pope had been heard even in the highest day of papal domination; all orders of men in the kingdom had

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