mal aggre civil and vested in a mere of state; its dogmas and liturgy royal au the merit of completeness. Upon the abnormal aggregation an abnorof civil powers which the growth of the conciliar system had gation of already concentrated in the hands of the crown the absolute ecclesiasticontrol of the entire ecclesiastical system was superimposed. cal powers From its high place as an estate of the realm the church was the crown; reduced to a mere department of state; its wealth was laid at the church the feet of the king, while its ministers, from the highest to department the lowest, were made to feel that their right to exercise their spiritual functions depended alone upon the royal authority, an authority which claimed the supreme right not only to fixed by prescribe the forms of worship, but also to define through thority; the agency of parliament and convocation principles of belief, and in that way to fix the difficult line which then divided heresy from orthodoxy. During the seven years of Henry's reign that remained after Cromwell's fall, it was not found necessary to add anything to the system he had founded; it was administered to the end in substantially the same form in which he had left it by the king, whose one desire seems to have been simply to conserve and rest upon the results their joint efforts had accomplished. After Cromwell was rivalry of gone, the task of upholding the new ecclesiastical system was gious facnot lightened by the necessity that existed of forcing upon Cromwell's the two rival religious factions an unqualified acceptance of fall; a theology which demanded at once an admission of the mass and of the royal supremacy. After the return of Norfolk to Norfolk's power, which followed the king's marriage with his niece, power after Catherine Howard, in the summer of 1540, it seemed for Henry's time as if, under the influence of the older nobles at whose with Cathhead he stood, and of the more conservative churchmen under ard in 1540; the lead of Gardiner, there was a gradual drift back to catholicism. Norfolk's hostility to the new religious movement was his hostility undisguised; and as he looked forward hopefully to a general religious council as the prelude to a reunion of England with the main movement body of the Catholic Church, he turned away from Francis and guised; the Lutheran princes in favor of an alliance with the emperor, through whose influence alone such a council could be brought about. And even after the decline of Norfolk's power, by reason of the execution of Catherine Howard in February, 1542, and the king's subsequent marriage with Catherine Parr in July, 1543, Henry still clung to the general line of foreign the reli tions after return to marriage erine How to the new undis ried Cath erine Parr, Henry mar- policy which the duke had advocated. Not until after the hostile action towards the Lutheran movement which was July, 1543; taken in the council opened at Trent, in December, 1545, and the subsequent effort of the emperor in the following year to break up the League of Schmalkald, did Henry finally realize the fact that the breach which the Reformation had made breach with between the papacy and the Teutonic nations was final and the papacy was final; irrevocable.2 when he realized that the and parts of books into English; In spite, however, of his hopes of a reunited Christendom, and of his devotion to the dogmas of the ancient faith as embodied in the Six Articles, the king found it impossible, as his reign drew to a close, to resist the demands of the protestant party for certain changes in the devotional system of the church suggested by the continental Reformation. As a part translation of the Lutheran movement. Tyndale's translation of the Bible, of the Bible made at Cologne in 1525, had come over into England, and the service that was followed by Coverdale's translation, also published abroad in 1535. The translation last named is probably that referred to in the royal license given for placing the first complete edition of the English Bible in churches for the general reading of lay people, in 1536. In the next year a similar license was issued, permitting another edition to be used without hindrance by every one in private. To prevent the difficulties which at once arose out of the publication of a great number of unofficial translations by private persons, there was the "Great issued in 1539 the authorized version known as the "Great Bible" of Bible," reprinted in the next year, with a preface by Archbishop Cranmer. The same general impulse which thus prompted 1539; pp. 281, 282. But they had no faith in 4 Wilkins, Conc., vol. iii. p. 815. "The Great Bible' of 1539 (well known to us still by our Prayer Book Psalms) continued to be the authorized version of the Church of England until 1568, when it was superseded by that made under the direction of Arch Litany; the translation of the Bible into English at the same time brought about changes of a similar character in the devotional system of the church: "This process went slowly on in the issuing of two primers in 1535 and 1539, the rendering into English of the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Ten Commandments, the publication of an English Litany for outdoor an English processions in 1544,1 and the adding to this of a collection of English prayers in 1545."2 In the last month of that year it was that Henry, worn out by the hopeless task of hushing a strife which day by day increased in bitterness, made his last exhortation to parliament, an exhortation in which he appealed to the warring religious factions about him to be tolerant with Henry's appeal for each other, so that "you, by verity, conscience, and charity religious between yourselves, may in this point, as you be in divers toleration; others, accounted among the rest of the world as blessed men." All such vain hopes were, however, destined soon to be blighted, as Henry's steadily failing health now surely admonished him that the religious truce, which rested alone upon his personal authority, was soon to be broken by his death. How to provide for the permanency of his work, how to secure his final the stability of his throne during the bitter strife that was ments; sure to follow the transfer of the vast powers which he had concentrated in his own strong hands to those of his infant successor, were the perplexing problems that vexed the king's life as it drew to a close. The nearest male relatives of Jane the SeySeymour's son, now nine years old, were her two brothers, the the nobles eldest of whom, Edward Seymour, had been raised to the earl- of the "new dom of Hertford, and had been intrusted with the chief command in the war against Scotland. The part which Hertford was sure to play in the coming reign, coupled with his wellknown inclination to the new doctrine, naturally made him the leader of the court faction known as the "new men," a term of reproach applied by their adversaries to the new nobility who, without historical connections with the past, had been bishop Parker: which was to be superseded in its turn, after forty years, by that since used for two centuries and a half."- Blount, Reform. of the Church of Eng., vol. i. p. 521. 1 See as to the Litany, which after receiving the final sanction of convocation in March, 1543-44, was promul gated by the crown on June 11, 1544, 2 Green, Hist. of the Eng. People, 8 An account of the speech is given by Hall, and by Mason in a letter to Paget, in MS., in the State Paper Office. See Froude, vol. iv. pp. 196–199. arrange mours and blood;" built up from the court by royal favor, and enriched by the crown out of the monastic estates of which the church had been plundered. To these nobles of the "new blood," such as the Seymours, the Russells, the Wriothesleys, the Cavendishes, the Fitzwilliams, and the Herberts, who were thus raised up as the great temporal lords were stricken down, and who by irrevocably the very method of their creation and enrichment were bound irrevocably to the cause of the Reformation, the small yet of the Re- resolute party of change were looking for guidance in the movement to be made after Henry's death for the breaking of the yoke of the Six Articles, and for the drawing of the English Church into closer communion with the reformed churches of the continent. bound to the cause formation. Edward's title to the crown: 8. As to the validity of Edward's title to the crown there could be no possible difficulty. Since the kingship had ceased summary of to be purely elective the two principles which regulated the principles succession were "that, no act of the legislature intervening, the succes- the crown and the royal dignity ought to descend from ances regulating sion elective kingship blended theory of "2 tor to heir in a certain established course of descent; but that this course of descent is subject to the controul of the legislature." These principles were the natural outcome of the process through which the ancient elective kingship gradually became blended with the new feudal theory of hereditary right. with feudal The several stages of that process, as heretofore explained, hereditary may be summarized as follows: (1) The Old-English kingright, ship, although elective, was associated from the beginning with the hereditary principle by virtue of the rule which limited the election to the members of a single royal house. Subject to that limitation, the right of election was freely exercised by the witan, whose action conferred the inchoate right to become civil always king, a right which was perfected, after the taking of the usual ecclesiasti- oaths, by the ceremony of unction and coronation, wherein cal election, the clergy and assembled people repeated the election in the followed by died with quest immediate change in tive system, from per ritorial kingship, sanctuary, as a spiritual ratification of the choice which the state had made.1 The new reign was then dated from the coronation, and during the interval the king's peace was sus- king's peace pended. After the king came to be regarded as the source him, of all peace and law, both were supposed to die with him and to rise again with his successor.2 (2) The coming of William the Conand the consequent substitution of a new royal stock worked worked no no immediate change in the outward form of the primitive system. The change which followed that event resulted the primifrom the quickening of the feudalizing process, already under way, through which the archaic idea of personal or tribal was transition gradually transformed into that of territorial kingship, a pro- sonal to tercess wherein the king of the English was ultimately developed into the king of England. Thus under the influence of feudal ideas the theory gained ground that the royal office was an royal office estate that belonged to the king as feudal lord, descendible a descendfrom ancestor to heir, according to the strict rules of hereditary ible estate, right which had begun to regulate the descent of land. This doctrine had so far advanced by the time of the accession of Edward I. that the old rule of dating the new reign from the coronation was abandoned. At the funeral of Henry III., which occurred four days after his death, the baronage swore fealty to the absent Edward, and three days thereafter the council declared the new peace in the name of the first English king who had so far reigned before his coronation. This new rule, Edward which was emphasized by the accession of Edward II. the day fore his after his father's death, never ripened, however, until the reign coronation, of Edward IV., into the maxim that the king never dies, from 6 regarded as reigns be |