act of proclamations, was manifested almost as strikingly in this act also. With the humility of a Roman senate towards a Roman emperor, the Parliament of England ordained that if the king wished their act to take effect earlier than they had fixed, or if he chose to annul the whole or part of it before it took effect, he might issue his letters patent in those behalfs.

84. The Act for the Submission of the Clergy and Restraint of Appeals

The submission of the clergy had been already extorted from convocation under the severe pressure of tyranny, and appeals to Rome had been already abrogated in order to deprive the dowager-princess of her last resource. To invest the one with the force of statute, to confirm the other by a new enactment, and join the two together in a single act of Parliament, was to raise a legislative monument which should eternally proclaim the causes and the nature of the English Reformation. .

This was the "act for the submission of the clergy, and restraint of appeals." It was ordained that the clergy, according to their submission, were neither to execute their old canons or constitutions nor make new ones, without the assent and license of the king, on pain of imprisonment and fine at the royal pleasure; that their convocations were only to be assembled by the authority of the king's writ; that the king should have power to nominate two and thirty persons, sixteen of the spirituality and sixteen of the temporalty, to revise the canons, ordinances, and constitutions provincial; and that in the meantime such of the canons which were not contrariant to the laws of the realm, nor prejudicial to the prerogative royal, should still be used and executed as heretofore.

The flame of controversy has raged round every letter of this celebrated act: how far it forbade or permitted the clergy to move, to treat, to debate, or to legislate in their assemblies; whether it respected one kind of convocation or more; and whether there were more than one kind of convocation which it could respect: these and other questions have been disputed with more than the usual acrimony of theological warfare, and with incredible closeness of research. But for the purposes of history it is enough to observe that the intention of the act was to discourage the clergy from debating, not less clearly than to forbid them to make new ecclesiastical laws without the king. They could never be certain

at what point of their proceedings the king's authority and license might be needful; how far they might go without it; what kind of matter might require it and what not. All was left undetermined; and if they attempted anything whatever, they might find themselves clapped into prison and heavily fined, as having fallen into a præmunire.

As for the plan of examining and revising the old canons and constitutions by a commission of thirty-two persons, this was never carried out. The king seems indeed to have nominated them; but he took no further notice of them or their work; and the ecclesiastical laws meantime remained in abeyance. It is true indeed that there was a provision added to the act, that those canons which were not contrariant to the laws of the realm and the prerogative of the king should be executed as heretofore, until the proposed revision should be made; but who was to determine which of the canons were meant? And who was to define a prerogative royal which was growing greater every day? The clergy might perhaps have shown that none of their canons were repugnant to the laws of the realm, if it had ever come to that; but they could never have been safe against the royal prerogative. We find the bishops, in their uncertainty after the passing of the act, taking out licenses for the execution of their functions as ordinaries of the Church. We shall find this commission of thirtytwo again and again promoted by act of Parliament in the course of the Reformation, and again and again brought to naught. What came of it eventually will be seen in due time. With regard to appeals, the act confirmed the measure of the year before in transferring them from Rome to Canterbury and the other archsees of England; but it gave a further and final appeal from the archbishops into the court of chancery. And it so happened that monasteries and other places exempt were here again excepted from the general tenor of the law. The appeals from all such places which were wont to be made to Rome were ordered not to be made to the archbishops, but immediately into chancery. Thus was the axe laid to the root of the monastic tree.

$5. The King Made Supreme Head of the Church

After an unusually short interval the houses of Parliament assembled again in the beginning of November. Their first act was to declare that the king ought to have the title and style of supreme head of the Church of England. The brief declaration

in which this was embodied was of little more than formal importance. It neither made, nor professed to make, any change in the constitution. The king was already supreme head of the Church of England, and the act began by saying that he was so already. The king had been already acknowledged by the clergy of the realm in their convocations to be the supreme head of the Church of England, and the act went on to rehearse that the clergy had acknowledged him already. But it seemed desirable "for increase of virtue in Christ's religion, and to repress and extirpe all errors, heresies, and other enormities and abuses," to authorize him to have the title and "all honors, dignities, preeminences, jurisdictions, privileges, authorities, immunities, profits, and commodities" belonging thereto.

The honors and dignities, it may be observed, he had already, because he was supreme head; the jurisdictions, privileges, authorities, and immunities which were usurped by foreign power had already been restored severally; and with them the profits and commodities which pertained to the same high office of right. But the houses of Parliament meant to augment very largely the profits and commodities, if they added nothing to the dignity of the head of the realm by a mere declaration of his title. The king, they added, was to have power and authority "to visit and reform errors, heresies, contempts, and offences." He had such power already as the supreme ordinary, and could have exercised it at any time through his spiritual officers; and in a constitutional point of view the clause which thus empowered him was merely declaratory, like the other parts of the act. But it was a declaration made with a terrible intention. He took the advantage it was meant to afford, and proceeded to ruin the monasteries, and half ruin the Church, for his own profits and commodities.

§ 6. Disposition of the Firstfruits

It has been seen that when the clergy, two years before, acknowledged the king for their supreme head, they represented the distress to which they were reduced by the papal exactions of annates, or firstfruits, and petitioned him for the abolition of these oppressive impositions. Now that the lords and commons in their turn acknowledged the king for their supreme head, they celebrated the occasion by annexing the firstfruits of all spiritual promotions to the crown. It might have seemed proper, since the pope was gone, that his exactions should go after him. But the

profits and commodities of the supreme head were to be augmented. . . .

The penalty for default of payment of the tenths was deprivation. The charge of collecting them was thrown upon the bishops. This seemed a ready mode of discharging the inestimable obligations which his Majesty's faithful subjects assembled owned so copiously. Some grains of mercy were added. No firstfruits were to be taken from a living of less than eight marks a year, unless the incumbent remained in it above three years from his presentation; but if he lived in it so long as that, firstfruits were to be levied. The fifth part of the enormous fine which the clergy had incurred under the præmunire two years before was remitted, in consideration of the yearly payments which they were henceforth required to make. To prevent the act from cutting both ways, another act was passed. There were many lands belonging to spiritual owners which were let, it might be, to temporal persons. Therefore, "for certain reasonable and urgent considerations moving the king's high court of Parliament," it was ordained that the farmers or lessees of such lands should not be liable to pay firstfruits or tenths on them; but that the payment should fall on the spiritual owners.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Pollard, Henry VIII, chap. vii on the "Origin of the Divorce," chap. viii on the "Pope's Dilemma," and the succeeding chapters on the work of the "Reformation Parliament." Gairdner, The Origin of the Divorce, in the English Historical Review, Vols. XI and XII. Lingard, History of England, Vol. V, chaps. i-iv, an old but useful work by a Catholic historian. Ranke, History of England Especially in the Seventeenth Century, Vol. I, pp. 91 ff. The Cambridge Modern History, Vol. I, chap. xiii on Henry VIII.

CHAPTER IV

THE MAINTENANCE OF THE NEW ESTABLISHMENT

THERE is, perhaps, no page in English history more tragical than that on which is recorded the trial and execution of Fisher and More and those who could not accept the new order established by the Reformation Parliament. Even the heroic efforts of Mr. Froude to justify the new policy on grounds of state, if regarded as successful, cannot obscure the real character of the men who helped to make those great historical events. The subsequent destruction of the monasteries and peculiar disposal of the lands wrested from the religious houses give us an insight into the spirit and methods employed by Henry VIII and his servants. A brief account of this period by a distinguished scholar is to be found in Gairdner, History of the English Church in the Sixteenth Century.

§ 1. The Execution of the Charterhouse Monks 1

1

On January 15, 1535, an order was made in council that the title "on earth supreme head of the Church of England" should be added to the king's style. It was a title that shocked deeply religious minds even Luther in Germany could not stomach it. But, as the king himself always declared, it conveyed no new powers and he was right. A temporal sovereign must always be supreme even over the Church within his kingdom. How far he may abuse his powers, is another question.

Thomas Cromwell, who for some months had been the king's chief secretary and master of the rolls, on January 21 received a commission for a general visitation of the churches, monasteries, and clergy throughout the kingdom. On the 30th commissions

1 Gairdner, A History of the Church of England in the Sixteenth Century, chap. ix. By permission of The Macmillan Company, Publishers.