Seldom, indeed, has an episcopal career offered fewer attractions than during the sixteenth century. The possession of place without power is purgatory to all but ignoble minds, and lack of power was only one of the hardships which fell to the lot of Henry’s bishops; others were provided by the prison and the stake. But men of spirit could face fetters and flames with greater dignity than they could sit on a throne, erstwhile that of Augustine, but now the footstool of him who wielded the sceptre of England. The Church had fallen from her high estate; the mighty institution which had humbled emperors in the dust was become the handmaid of princes. The successor of him, who had stood as a suppliant three days in the snow at Canossa, had with impunity sacked the Holy City and held the Vicar of Christ as his prisoner; and the Archbishop of Canterbury had sunk into the position of a minister of a spiritual jurisdiction which belonged to the King.

This revolution was already effected before Cranmer was elected to the Metropolitan See; it only needed some legal formalities to give it complete recognition. No one can really be satisfied with the theory that this peripeteia was solely due to the violence, avarice, and lust of a single man. The phenomenon was not peculiar to one, but common to almost all the nations of Europe; priests were not more hated in England than they were in Germany, and the secularisation of church property proceeded apace even in Catholic countries. The Church of England was painfully servile to Henry VIII., but it never licensed bigamy, as Clement VII. proposed to do at Rome, and as Luther and Melanchthon did in Germany. The subordination of Church to State was in the sixteenth century a common characteristic rather than a distinguishing feature, and it is therefore idle to seek its explanation in purely local circumstances like the temper of Henry VIII.

There had for many hundreds of years been an unceasing struggle in every country between the civil and the ecclesiastical power. In England the Church reached the zenith of its influence during the thirteenth century; and from the legislation of Edward I. it had gradually declined until the Wycliffite movement, with its appeal to the State to purify a corrupt Church, seemed likely to anticipate some of the most striking effects of the Reformation. But the alliance between the Lancastrian monarchs and the Church, the emancipation of the Popes from their Babylonish captivity at Avignon, and their victory over the Conciliar movement delayed the decisive hour; and then the Wars of the Roses interposed another obstacle in the path of reform. The main result of that struggle was an enormous increase of royal power. Feudal aristocracy committed political suicide, and even the House of Commons maimed itself for generations. Henry VII. completed the process. His most effective method of strengthening his position was the elimination of all alternative governments, and pretenders were removed by force or by fraud, while the remaining feudal lords were converted into Tudor officials or relegated to obscurity.

But his astute policy would have been vain without the co-operation of powerful secular tendencies. The amazing geographical discoveries extending throughout the fifteenth century, and the consequent impetus given to commerce diverted men’s minds from the pursuit of political ends to the prosecution of personal gain, and a community bent on trade is more interested in strong government than in self-government. The simultaneous revival of learning, and particularly the study of Roman civil law, added fresh dignity to the name of Prince; common law and feudal custom, both of them checks on royal despotism, became barbarous in the eyes of men who were fascinated with the symmetry of the Code and its scientific maxims of despotism. To promote the study of the Roman civil law was an object dear to all the Tudors; their officials were mostly civilians, and the Roman law, which was adopted far and wide on the Continent, and even in Scotland, was almost received into England.¹ It was a weapon which kings could use against canon and common law, against papal and popular claims. To Roman emperors divine honours were paid after death, and to Tudor sovereigns honours too near the divine were rendered while they lived. No poet before the age of the Tudors would have thought of the “divinity” which “doth hedge a king,” and a great French historian has described the sixteenth-century sovereign as a kind of new Messiah.¹ He was the embodiment of the fresh national aspirations which had ousted the universal and cosmopolitan ideals of the Middle Ages, and intense loyalty to the King left little room for the old allegiance to the Church.

The last reinforcement the King received was from the Reformation itself. The voice of the Church, which exalted the Pope but slighted the King, gave way to the Scriptures, which knew nothing of Popes or Archbishops, but were emphatic about the claims of secular princes. In the Old Testament kings rather than priests were the Lord’s Anointed. In the New, resistance to authority was pronounced a heinous offence, and the powers that be were derived from divine ordination. Cranmer’s political theory resembled that of St. Paul. Luther long regarded Charles V. as the lineal successor of the Caesar whose authority Christ had recognised; and when he gave up his faith in Charles he transferred it to his territorial sovereign, the Elector of Saxony, and preached an unlimited passive obedience. The divine right of kings was a Reformation theory.

Parallel with this extraordinary growth of the royal prestige and power there went a corresponding decline in clerical influence. Externally the Church stood erect, robed in its old magnificence; papal pretensions were never louder nor clerical privileges more exorbitant than at the dawn of the sixteenth century; and it was a novel extension of ecclesiastical abuses which precipitated the conflict at Wittenberg. But it was then with the Church as it was with the French monarchy on the eve of the Revolution; both had monopolised power only to be crushed by its weight; and while the imposing edifice seemed to grow in height, its foundations in the hearts and understandings of men were slowly rotting away. The debasement of clerical morals, the corruption of papal courts, the immunity of clerical criminals, the wealth of the clergy, their exactions from the laity, and the oppressiveness of their jurisdiction had made the Church more unpopular than it had been before or has been since.¹ One of the first uses to which the printing-press was put was to satirise and denounce the clergy; and whether the accusations contained in this popular literature were substantially true or not, they prove that the Church had lost its hold upon the affections of men. These grievances found their first and freest utterance in Germany. They were equally felt in England, but in England there was a strong central government, which, for the moment, was guided by clerical hands.

During the first few years of Henry VIII.’s reign his chief advisers were Bishops Fox and Ruthal, and Archbishop Warham; presently they were eclipsed by Wolsey’s rising star, which ruled the ascendant for fifteen years. By keeping Parliament at a distance and by playing upon the vain young King’s Continental ambitions, Wolsey staved off the attack on the Church. But his power was built on a vanishing base. The Treaty of Cambrai in 1529 closed the avenues to England’s influence abroad, and made Henry’s gaze introspective. It was as great a blow to Wolsey as his failure to obtain a divorce for his master,¹ and he was too great a statesman not to perceive what would be the effect. His failure in foreign policy would mean his fall, and his fall, as he repeatedly told Campeggio, Du Bellay, and Clement VII., would mean the irretrievable ruin of the Church in England.² It was owing, wrote Campeggio, to Wolsey’s vigilance and solicitude that the Holy See retained its authority³; and Du Bellay declared on the eve of Wolsey’s fall that the intention was, as soon as he was gone, to attack the Church and to confiscate its riches; he wrote the information in cipher, but said that such a precaution was really superfluous, because the policy was openly proclaimed. He thought no ecclesiastic would again be made Chancellor, and predicted “terrible alarms” for the Church in the coming Parliament.⁴

It is, therefore, perfectly obvious that the anti-ecclesiastical legislation of the Reformation Parliament was no mere whim on the part of Henry VIII., or chance suggestion on the part of any adviser¹; it was so far dictated by circumstances that intelligent observers could predict its general tenor before that Parliament met. Wolsey fell, as he himself and others had foretold, and with him clerical influence was eliminated from the Government. The Chancellorship, which from time immemorial had been held by prelates,² was, as Du Bellay anticipated, entrusted to a layman, Sir Thomas More. The keepership of the Privy Seal, which had been occupied in Henry VIII.’s reign by three successive bishops, was now transferred to Anne Boleyn’s father; the clerkship of Parliament, hitherto considered as peculiarly a clerical office, was given to Sir Edward North; and, though Gardiner remained Secretary, Du Bellay thought that his influence would have been much enhanced had he abandoned his spiritual calling.¹ The Government thus assumed an unwonted lay complexion; at the same time it was brought into harmony with the spirit which animated the House of Commons, while the simultaneous creation of half a dozen peers tended to equalise the temporal and spiritual vote in the House of Lords.²

Parliament began its work in November, 1529, with bills to limit clerical fees for probate, to check the abuse of pluralities and non-residence, and to forbid the acquisition of breweries and tanneries by the clergy. These modest proposals at once provoked the cry of “The Church in danger!”, as it had been provoked in 1512 by a proposal to exempt spiritual persons below the rank of subdeacon from the “benefit of clergy” if they had committed murder or felony.³ “My Lords,” cried Bishop Fisher, “you see daily what bills come hither from the Commons’ House, and all is to the destruction of the Church. For God’s sake, see what a realm the kingdom of Bohemia was; and when the Church went down, then fell the glory of that kingdom. Now with the Commons is nothing but ‘Down with the Church!’ And all this, meseemeth, is for lack of faith only.”⁴ The bills were rejected by means of the spiritual votes in the House of Lords; and as a way out of the deadlock between the two Houses, Henry suggested a conference, in which the temporal peers, united with the Commons, outvoted the bishops and abbots and passed the bills.¹ In 1531, Convocation was compelled, under the threat of Præinunire, to pay a large fine to the King and to give him the title “Supreme Head of the Church.” Even in those degenerate days the proposal excited resistance, and the papal nuncio went down to stiffen the backs of the clergy. But it was all of no avail; Archbishop Warham declared that ira principis mors est,² and Convocation had to content itself with the qualifying clause, “as far as the law of Christ allows.” It was, thought Chapuys, the Imperial ambassador, an empty phrase, for no one would venture to dispute with the King the question where his supremacy ended and that of Christ began.³

In 1532 the Act forbidding the payment of Annates to Rome was passed, and the famous petition of the Commons against the clergy was presented.⁴ On the assumption that there were no real abuses in the Church at that time, and that all the evidence of their existence is necessarily a false and malicious libel, this petition has been represented as a Court concoction prepared to facilitate the evil designs of the King; and the Commons are supposed to have been hypnotised into the belief that they suffered from grievances which were entirely fictitious. However that may be, two sets of demands were laid before Convocation; one came from the King, the other was the petition of the Commons. Henry wished the Church to abdicate its right of independent legislation, to consent to a reform of ecclesiastical laws, and to recognise the necessity of the King’s approval of existing canons. On the other hand the Commons complained of the citation of laymen out of their dioceses, the delays in obtaining probate and in the institution of parsons, the conferment of benefices on minors, the devotion of the clergy to worldly affairs, the exaction of heavy fees, and the harsh procedure of the spiritual courts in cases of heresy. These reforms were granted by Convocation; most of them passed the House of Commons; but in the House of Lords, the bishops and abbots, aided by Sir Thomas More, rejected the demands of the King, while accepting those of the Commons. Before the end of the year Audley succeeded More as Chancellor, Cromwell stepped into Gardiner’s shoes as Henry’s chief adviser, and the lay element had become supreme in the Government, in both Houses of Parliament, and in the country at large. The Church in England had been forced into that dependence on the State from which she has never since been able or willing to shake herself free.

Such were the conditions under which Cranmer accepted the archiepiscopal See, and they must be taken into careful consideration in judging his action and in estimating his character. Apart from his adoption of the principles of the Reformation, which can only be a defect in the eyes of Roman Catholics, the worst suspicion under which he labours is that of having been in some sort a traitor to his order, of having handed over to secular hands the keys of ecclesiastical independence. The surrender of a position to the enemy is always an unpopular act, but it may in certain circumstances be necessary and patriotic. If the city is beleaguered without hope of succour, if the refusal to yield only means that it will be stormed and left to the uncovenanted mercies of the foe, the commander who takes upon himself the responsibility of capitulation is braver than he who declines. There can be no doubt that the Church in England, however distasteful the process may have been, was consulting both its own interests and those of the nation at large in seeking to come to terms with the secular power, and in endeavouring, by the surrender of its least tenable rights and privileges, to retain as much as might be of its catholicity and its connection with the past. It may be asserted that, had Warham been a Becket, had the whole Church been animated with a spirit of firm resistance, it might have withstood the assault. But it is far more probable that its ruin would have been more irretrievable, its break with the past more complete. The course of the Reformation in England might then have followed more closely its course in Germany or even in Switzerland; and so far from seeking only to remove abuses, men might have set themselves to raise a new edifice upon other foundations. The result would have probably been to kindle the flames of civil wars of religion.

Further, it must be observed that it was not Cranmer who handed over the keys at all, but the prelate whom Roman Catholic writers describe as the “saintly and venerable Warham.”¹ It was he who persuaded Convocation to acknowledge the royal supremacy, and he did so with less justification than Cranmer might have urged. For Warham believed the royal supremacy to be an evil; Cranmer thought it a good. Just before his death the aged Archbishop drew up a protest against the recent infractions of ecclesiastical immunities²; he recalled the case of Henry II. and hinted that Henry VIII. might go the way of other kings who had violated the liberties of the Church. Cranmer’s view was different; he was profoundly impressed with the abuses in the Church, which for years he had ascribed to the papal jurisdiction. The only means of reform was the royal supremacy. He thought, as the vast majority of English churchmen have thought after him, that the Church gained more than it lost through its connection with the State, and he was not so foolish as to quarrel with the conditions upon which alone that connection was possible. These conditions had been laid down by others, and for them he was not responsible. He entered upon his archiepiscopal career knowing perfectly well that his mission was to be, as Henry expressed it, “the principal minister of our spiritual jurisdiction.”¹ With that condition, he would, even if he disliked it, be forced to comply; the King who had broken Wolsey without an effort, and afterwards sent a Cardinal to the block, would not be deterred by Cranmer.

For the present, however, the abolition of the papal jurisdiction added dignity to the Archbishopric of Canterbury. When, in 1544, the Archbishop of York died, Cranmer assumed a function hitherto exercised by Popes, and sent his successor a pall.² This was a solitary instance of the adoption by an English Archbishop of an expedient employed by the Popes to enhance their authority and fill their coffers³; but primates of England retained for a longer period the right of issuing dispensations and licences which previously belonged to the Roman pontiff; they were found useful in releasing Henry VIII. from inconvenient matrimonial bonds. For a year, too, the Archbishop’s court remained the supreme tribunal in England for ecclesiastical causes, but its authority was soon limited by the legalisation of appeals from it to Chancery, and by the transference to secular courts of matters which had before been regarded as subject to ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Henry VIII. even meditated placing the marriage laws under the cognisance of civil tribunals,¹ but many generations passed away before this very modern idea was put into execution.

Meanwhile the King’s presumption in cutting the Gordian knot of the divorce question by having it decided in England roused Clement VII. to action; and on 11 July, 1533, the sentence of excommunication was drawn up at Rome,² though its publication was deferred. Henry thereupon withdrew his ambassadors from the papal court, confirmed the Act of Annates, and prepared an appeal from the Pope to a General Council. Clement, at last, was alarmed; he began to fear that he really would lose his spiritual jurisdiction in England; and he probably derived little comfort from the assurances of his Imperialist friends that, after all, England was but “an unprofitable island,” and that its loss would be more than compensated by the increased devotion of Spain and of the other dominions of the Emperor.³ The appeal to a General Council was served on the Pope by Bonner⁴ on 7 November, while Clement was visiting Francis I. at Marseilles⁵; and Cranmer was advised to intimate a similar appeal in case the Pope should “make some manner of prejudicial process against me and my Church.”⁶ He accordingly wrote to Bonner to ask him to do this service: but as the letter was not dated till 27 November, Cranmer’s appeal was too late.¹ His apprehensions were well founded, for he was doubtless one of the bishops whom the Pope “cursed” in the summer for their share in the divorce,² and in September a brief was drawn up for his deprivation and excommunication.³

Henry’s action in appealing to a General Council dashed the hopes which Francis I. entertained of effecting an accommodation between his old ally, England, and his new friend, the Pope.⁴ He made, however, another effort by sending Du Bellay, Bishop of Paris, to London in the winter to induce Henry to resume negotiations with the papal court. Henry would only promise that if Clement would declare his first marriage null and his second valid, he would refrain from further measures against the Pope’s authority. With these assurances the Bishop set out for Rome, and Burnet has a story,⁵ told on the authority of Du Bellay’s brother, of how a reconciliation between England and Rome was only frustrated by the precipitation of the Imperialist cardinals, who refused to wait a few extra days for the return of a courier. Burnet discerns the hand of Providence in this narrow escape from peace with Rome; but in reality the promise of peace was quite illusory, and Parliament was at the moment engaged in severing the last of the bonds between the English Church and the Roman See. Henry had, in fact, thrown off all disguise as soon as his specious appearance of conciliation had done its work, and his confirmation of the Act forbidding the payment of Annates to Rome¹ was ratified by a fresh Act, passed in the session of Parliament which lasted from January to March, 1534. This second Act of Annates defined the method henceforth to be observed for the appointment of English bishops. Chapters were to elect the candidate named in the King’s letters missive, and if they failed to do so within twelve days the King might appoint by letters patent.² A second Act of Appeals, besides repeating and confirming the abolition of appeals to Rome, embodied those concessions to the King which had been made by Convocation in 1532, but rejected in the House of Lords. Convocation was not to meet or legislate without the King’s assent; a commission, nominated by the King, might reform the Canon Law; there was to be an appeal from the Arch-bishop’s court to Chancery; and religious houses which were exempt from episcopal authority were subjected to that of the King. Another Act forbade the payment of Peter’s pence; and a check upon prosecutions for heresy was provided by an Act which required the evidence of two lay witnesses for every charge.¹

The final Act of that session was a constitutional innovation of great importance. The succession to the crown, which had hitherto been regulated by vague right, was now determined by a definite law to be vested in Henry’s heirs by Anne Boleyn. This Act was to be enforced by an oath which might be tendered to any one, and at the head of the commission appointed to administer it was the Archbishop of Canterbury.² Among the first who were required to take the oath were Fisher and More; both had been implicated in the previous year in the extraordinary affair of Elizabeth Barton,³ the Nun of Kent, in whose alleged visions it is impossible to distinguish the imposture from the genuine delusions. Some eight years before, she had earned a reputation for sanctity by denouncing the sensual lives of the clergy, and this reputation was afterwards used to put obstacles in the way of Henry’s divorce. She drew, it is stated in the Confutation of Unwritten Verities doubtfully attributed to Cranmer, “into her confederacy, both of heresy and treason, holy monks of the Charter House, obstinate (they would be called Observant) friars of Greenwich, nice nuns of Sion, black monks (both of cowls and conditions) of Christ Church and St. Austin’s of Canterbury, knights, squires, learned men, priests, and many other.”¹ She predicted that Henry would lose his kingdom within seven months if he married Anne Boleyn, and declared that in her visions she had seen the very place in hell that was prepared for him.² This kind of prophesying would nowadays be safely left to confute itself, but in that superstitious age it was a source of public danger. The nun could scarcely be treated as innocuous when men like Warham and Fisher fell under her influence. Warham is said, in a contemporary account, to have been diverted by her warnings from an intention to pronounce sentence in favour of Henry’s divorce. Many others disaffected to the Government had held communications with her, including Queen Catherine’s chaplains. More sought an interview with her, but was not deceived, and his name was struck out of the bill passed against her and her adherents. But Fisher believed in her holiness, and there is some point in Cromwell’s remonstrance to him that he would have made a more careful inquiry before accepting her visions if she had approved instead of denouncing the King’s proceedings.³ It was Cranmer who took the first steps to expose the imposture; he saw the Nun of Kent in the summer of 1533,⁴ and induced her to confess. In accordance with his invariable practice of making Parliament his accomplice in all acts of severity, Henry had her condemned by Act of Attainder, and she was executed in April, 1534. Cranmer, however, interceded earnestly and successfully on behalf of the monks of Christ Church, who had been among her dupes or accomplices.¹

Their connection with the Nun of Kent naturally suggested the administration to Fisher and More of the oath imposed by the Act of Succession; a further reason may possibly be found in the sentence pronounced by the Pope on 23 March, 1534, in favour of the validity of Henry’s marriage with Catherine of Aragon. The oath would serve as a useful touchstone of allegiance to the verdict of the Pope or to that of the English Church. So, on 13 April, Fisher and More were called before Cranmer and his colleagues at Lambeth.² The form of the oath had not been prescribed by Parliament, but drawn up by the commissioners; and More, while willing to swear to the succession itself on the ground that that was a matter within the competence of Parliament, objected to the oath³ and to the preamble of the Act because it contained a denial of Papal authority, which he maintained was incompatible with his conscience. Fisher also refused, and Cranmer, who was generally on the side of mercy, urged the King to accept the oath in the form in which they were willing to take it.¹ He thought this would be a sufficient recognition of Henry’s authority, but the King discovered an implied assertion of that of the Pope. Cranmer’s mediation proved vain, and Fisher and More were condemned to loss of goods and imprisonment for life. With their subsequent execution on the charge of maliciously trying to deprive the King of his title of Supreme Head of the Church Cranmer had, fortunately for his reputation, nothing to do.²

In the meantime Convocation, universities, and monasteries were occupied in debating the question whether the Bishop of Rome had any more authority in England than any other foreign bishop. In the previous year preachers had been required to proclaim the superiority of General Councils to Popes, and it had been ordered that the Pope should be officially styled plain Bishop of Rome. His authority in England was now repudiated with something like unanimity. Fear, no doubt, had something to do with it, but the decision would hardly have become permanent had it been based on nothing but fear. In November, 1534, Parliament met once more to give legal effect to this repudiation of the Papal authority and to the recognition of Henry’s ecclesiastical supremacy, conceded three years before by Convocation. It went farther than Convocation had gone, and omitted the clause qualifying the supremacy. It professed only to corroborate and confirm a pre-existing right. The King’s Majesty, it declared, “justly and rightfully is and ought to be the Supreme Head of the Church of England,” and it proceeded to annex and unite to the Imperial Crown “all honours, dignities, pre-eminences, jurisdictions, privileges, authorities, immunities, profits, and commodities to the said Dignity of Supreme Head of the same Church belonging and appertaining.”¹ The title was incorporated with the King’s style by an order in council dated 15 January, 1535.²

This Act of Supremacy is one of the shortest in the statute-book; it remained in force for less than twenty years, and Henry VIII. was the only monarch who personally exercised for any length of time the powers it conferred.³ He was also better qualified than any other English sovereign for the position. His morals, it is true, left much to be desired, but they were not worse than those of some Popes. His mind and conscience had been nourished on mediaeval scholastic philosophy and on mediaeval canon law, and throughout his reign his theological views were in general harmony with those of the majority of his clergy. He always believed in rites and ceremonies; he might dally with Lutheranism, or rather permit his ministers to dally with it for political purposes, but he always remained a Catholic at heart. His convictions were not due to ignorance, for few men were so well read in heretical theology; he kept a private cabinet full of Lutheran books and read them with eagerness and intelligence. He loved nothing better than a theological argument with his bishops, and most of them regarded his supremacy not without reason as the most effectual bulwark against the storms of heresy which had sub-merged the Church in Germany.

Nor did his extensive powers trench quite so much upon the Church’s prerogative as has sometimes been supposed. The King’s authority was only a potestas jurisdictionis and not at all a potestas ordinis.¹ The title “Supreme Head” was an offensive phrase, which implied to most men more than even Henry thought of claiming. It seemed to indicate a pretension to spiritual powers which were entirely outside the lay province. But Henry himself declared that the title conferred on him no new powers; he never asserted² that he could ordain a sub-deacon, baptise, marry, impose penance, pronounce absolution, let alone say mass. The whole sacramental system was left in the hands of the Church. The King was empowered in certain circumstances to nominate bishops, but it was never assumed that such nomination conferred any spiritual powers; they were the result of confirmation and consecration at the hands of the Church. Henry claimed to control the machine, but he did not pretend to supply the motive power; he might select the channels through which spiritual privileges flowed, but he was not the channel through which, nor the fountain from which, they flowed. He was willing, to use his own words, to leave the clergy control of men’s souls, provided the State had control of their bodies.¹

Again, it is necessary to guard against the idea that Henry forced a Church that was previously free under a galling Erastian yoke. Such a view errs as much in one direction as the view that Henry freed the Church does in the other. The freedom of the Church had long before shrunk to a shadow. Bishops and Abbots, who had once been freely elected by their chapters, had for centuries been joint nominees of Pope and King. A prelate depended exclusively upon the King for his temporalities and upon the Pope for his spiritualities.² The representative idea embodied in elections had gone out of them and left them a meaningless form; while the supposed right of the English provinces to legislate independently of King and of Pope has been conclusively proved to be mainly a myth.¹ Had the jurisdiction of the Pope been only abolished, the English Church would undoubtedly have acquired that right; but before the Papal jurisdiction was abolished Henry took care that Convocation should transfer to himself those legislative powers which the Pope had exercised. The Church in England was not freed from the yoke of an extraneous jurisdiction or from the burden of first-fruits and tenths; they were merely transferred from the Pope to the King. Henry, in fact, neither liberated nor enslaved the Church; he simply substituted a sole for a dual control. The change was no doubt acceptable to most, and it might appear like a liberation, because the despotism was a native and not an alien one. But it became at once more effective and more severe. Dual controls are usually inefficient, and between Kings and Popes the Church had lapsed into impotent anarchy. The rigour of the new supremacy may best be justified on the plea that not otherwise could the Church have been reformed.

It was, however, an expedient repugnant to modern ideas. In the latter years of Henry’s reign “the King’s doctrine” became the usual phrase for orthodoxy. Such a condition could not be permanent, for it was opposed to the foundations of Protestantism as well as to those of Catholicism, and occasioned the simultaneous execution of martyrs to both faiths, the one class on the scaffold as traitors, the other at the stake as heretics.¹ It was only possible in days when a powerful sovereign could stand between the two opposing forces, balancing one against the other, and when regard for the State as represented in the King’s person outweighed every other consideration. Henry’s supremacy was personal, not parliamentary; he and his daughter Elizabeth denied to their Parliaments any share in their ecclesiastical prerogative. Parliament and Convocation were co-ordinate legislative bodies, independent of one another, but subject to the sovereign. Such was the Tudor system, but it barely outlived the Tudor dynasty. No other monarch has been able to wield their double sceptre; and as the power of the Crown declined, its secular authority was seized by Parliament, which also attempted to grasp its ecclesiastical supremacy. Convocation disputed the claim, but was unable to vindicate its own, and the royal supremacy as exercised by Henry VIII. has died a natural death, leaving as yet no recognised successor, and a state of affairs not far removed from ecclesiastical anarchy.