1533-1534 explain received doctrines, and thus to transform them without knowing what they were doing. Hugh Latimer, for instance, a favorite chaplain of the king, was, indeed, a preacher of righteousness, testing all things rather by their moral worth than by their conformity to an intellectual standard. The received doctrines about Purgatory, the worship of the saints, and pilgrimages to their images seemed to him to be immoral; but as yet he wished to purify opinion, not to change it altogether, and in this he had the support of the king, who, in 1535, made him Bishop of Worcester. Before 1533 was over Henry appealed from the Pope to a General Council. Clement not only paid no heed to his appeal, but gave sentence in favor of Catharine. When Parliament met in 1534, therefore, Henry was obliged to strengthen his position of hostility to the Pope. He procured from it three Acts. The first of these was a second Act of Annates, which conferred on him absolutely not only the first-fruits of bishoprics which had been the subject of the conditional Act of Annates in 1532, but also the firstfruits of all the beneficed clergy, as well as a tenth of each year's income of both bishops and beneficed clergy, all of which payments had hitherto been made to the Pope. Incidentally this Act also regulated the appointment of bishops, by ordering that the king should issue a congé d'élire to the chapter of the vacant see, together with a letter missive compelling the choice of his nominee. The second was an Act concerning Peter's pence, abolishing all minor payments to the Pope, and cutting away all interference of the Pope by transferring his right to issue licenses and dispensations to the Archbishop of Canterbury. The third confirmed the submission of the clergy and enacted that appeals from the courts of the archbishops should be heard by commissioners appointed by the king, and known as the delegates of Appeals. It was by these Acts that the separation between the Churches of England and Rome was finally effected. They merely completed the work which had been done by the great Act of Appeals in 1533. The Church of England had indeed always been a national Church with its own ecclesiastical assemblies, and with ties to the Crown which were stretched more tightly or more loosely at various times. It had, however, maintained its connection with the continental churches by its subordination to the Pope, and this subordination had been made real by the subjection of its courts to appeals to Rome, and by the necessity of recurring to Rome for permission to do certain 1533-1534 things prohibited by English ecclesiastical law. All this was now at an end. The old supremacy of the king was sharpened and defined. The jurisdiction of the Pope was abolished. Nominally the English ecclesiastical authorities became more independent; more capable of doing what seemed to them to be best for the Church of the nation. Such at least was the state of the law. In practice the English ecclesiastical authorities were entirely at Henry's bidding. In theory and in sentiment the Church of England was still a branch of the Catholic Church, one in doctrine and discipline with the Continental Churches. Practically it was now, in a far more unqualified sense than before, a national Church, ready to drift from its moorings and to accept new counsels whenever the tide of opinion should break strongly upon it. IN Chapter XXVI THE ROYAL SUPREMACY. 1534-1547 LEADING DATES REIGN OF HENRY VIII., A.D. 1509-1547-THE ACTS OF SUCCESSION N September, 1533, Anne had given birth to a daughter, who was afterwards Queen Elizabeth. In 1534 Parliament passed an Act of Succession. Not only did it declare Anne's marriage to be lawful and Catharine's to be unlawful, and consequently Elizabeth and not Mary to be heir to the crown, but it required all subjects to take an oath acknowledging their approval of the contents of the Act. More and Fisher professed themselves ready to swear to any succession which might be authorized by act of Parliament; but they would not swear to the illegitimacy of Catharine's marriage. It was on this point that Henry was most sensitive, as he knew public opinion to be against him, and he threw both More and Fisher into the Tower. In the year before the language held in the pulpit on the subject of Henry's marriage with Anne in his wife's lifetime had been so strong that Cranmer had forbidden all preaching on the subject of the king's laws or the succession to the throne. Of the clergy, the friars were still the most resolute. Henry now sent commissioners to visit the friaries, and those in which the oath was refused were summarily suppressed. In 1534 Parliament also passed a new Act of Treasons which made it high treason to wish or practice harm to the king, the queen, and their heirs, to use words denying their titles, or to call the king a "heretic, schismatic, tyrant, infidel, or usurper of the crown." Later in the same year, but in a fresh session, Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy, which confirmed the title of Supreme Head of the Church of England, a title very similar to that to which the 1535-1536 king had obtained the qualified consent of the clergy in 1531. From that time anyone who denied the king to be the Supreme Head of the Church of England was liable to a traitor's death. It can hardly be doubted that Henry's chief adviser in these tyrannical measures was the able and unscrupulous Cromwell. It was Cromwell's plan to exalt the royal authority into a despotism by means of a subservient Parliament. He was already Henry's secretary; and in 1535 was appointed the king's Vicar-General in ecclesiastical matters. His first object was to get rid of the Friars Observant, who had shown themselves more hostile to what they called in plainness of speech the king's adultery. All their houses were suppressed, and some of the inmates put to death. Then Cromwell fell on the London Charterhouse,1 the inmates of which had been imprisoned in the year before simply for a refusal to take the oath of the Act of Succession, though they had not uttered a word against the king's proceedings. They could now be put to death under the new Treason Act, for denying the king's supremacy, and many of them were accordingly executed after the usual barbarous fashion, while others perished of starvation or of diseases. contracted in the filthy prisons in which they were confined. Fisher and More were the next to suffer on the same charge, though their sentences were commuted to death by beheading. More preserved his wit to the last. "I pray you," he said as he mounted the scaffold, "see me safe up, and for my coming down I will shift for myself." Money never came amiss to Henry, and Cromwell now rooted himself firmly in his master's favor by pointing out to him fresh booty. The English monasteries were rich and weak, and it was easy to trump up or exaggerate charges against them. Cromwell sent commissioners to inquire into their moral state (1535), and the commissioners, who were as unscrupulous as himself, rushed around the monasteries in such a hurry that they had no time to make any real inquiry, but nevertheless returned with a number of scandalous tales. These tales referred to some of the larger monasteries as well as the smaller, but, when Parliament met in 1536, Henry contented himself with asking that monasteries having property worth less than 200l. a year should be dissolved, and their estates given to himself, on the ground that while the smaller ones were dens of vice the larger ones were examples of virtue. Parliament granted 1 The Charterhouse here means the house of the Carthusians. 1535-1536 his request, and the work of spoliation began. There can be no doubt that vice did exist in the monasteries, though there was not so much of it as the commissioners asserted. On the other hand, the monks were easy landlords, were hospitable to the stranger and kindly to the poor, while neither the king himself nor those to whom he gave or sold the lands which he acquired cared for more than to make money. The real weakness of the monks lay in their failure to conciliate the more active minds of the age, or to meet its moral needs. The attack upon the vast edifice of Henry's despotism in Church and State could only be carried on successfully by the combined effort of men like the scholars of the Renaissance, whose thoughts were unfettered, and of those who, like the Protestants, were full of aggressive vigor, and who substituted for the duty of obedience the duty of following their own convictions. Before the end of 1536 there was a new queen. Henry became tired of Anne, as he had tired of Catharine, and on a series of monstrous charges he had her tried and executed. Her unpardonable crime was probably that her only living child was a daughter and not a son. Ten days after Anne's death Henry married a third wife, Jane Seymour. As Catharine was now dead, there could be no doubt of the legitimacy of Jane's offspring, but to make assurance doubly sure, a new Parliament passed an Act settling the succession on Jane's children, and declaring both Mary and Elizabeth illegitimate. It is probable that when Henry took the title of Supreme Head he intended to maintain the doctrines and practices of the Church exactly as he found them. In 1536 the clergy were crying out not merely against attacks on their faith, but against the ribaldry with which these attacks were often conducted. One assailant, for instance, declared the oil used in extreme unction to be no more than the Bishop of Rome's grease or butter, and another that it was of no more use to invoke a saint than it was to whirl a stone against the wind. Many of the clergy would have been well pleased with mere repression. Henry, however, and the bishops whom he most trusted, wished repression to be accompanied with reasonable explanations of the doctrines and practices enforced. The result was seen in the Ten Articles which were drawn up by Convocation, and sent abroad with the authority of the king. There was to be uniformity, to be obtained by the circulation of a written document, in which the old doctrines were stripped of much that had given |