CHAP. II.

King; they were no longer to be presented to the Pope for confirmation, nor receive their bulls and palliums from him. The last of these bulls obtained from Rome were those which Cranmer received on his consecration. (25 Henry VIII., c. 20.)

(4) All pecuniary contributions whatever, imposed by the Pope, were abolished; all lawful powers of licensing and dispensing were transferred from him to the Archbishop of Canterbury; his claims were called usurpations, and the realm declared to be "free from subjection to the laws of any foreign prince, potentate, or prelate ;" and the King was recognised as the only supreme head, under God, of the church and realm. (25 Henry VIII., 21.) A singular proviso was appended to this statute, which suspended its execution till midsummer, and enabled the King to repeal it on or before that day.

(5) By the next statute (25 Henry VIII., c. 22), provision was made for the succession, by pronouncing the King's marriage with Catherine void, and that with Anne valid; and, by a clause which, says Mackintosh, is "perhaps unmatched in the legislation of Tiberius,"* all who should, "by writing, print, deed, or act, do or cause to be procured or done, anything to the slander, prejudice, disturbance, or derogation" of the said lawful matrimony, "or as to the peril, slander, or disherison of any of the issue" of it, should be declared guilty of high treason, and suffer death accordingly. And the like penalty was enacted against all who should, in any way, question the royal supremacy, or refuse to take the oaths acknowledging it and the new order of succession.† Queen Catherine was solemnly degraded to her former rank of Princess of Wales.

Statute

all these

succession

II. ROYAL SUPREMACY.

51. Establishment of the Royal Supremacy. All these statutes were passed during the session between Christmas and confirming Easter, 1534, and in the next session (November, 1534), acts. they were sanctioned and established by a brief but comprehensive act, declaring "the King's majesty to be supreme head upon earth of the church of England," and granting him "full power to correct and amend any errors, heresies, and abuses, &c., which by any ecclesiastical jurisdiction might be reformed The oath of and redressed." The oath to the succession was also enacted. re-enacted, and its terms somewhat altered; the first fruits and tenths of all ecclesiastical benefices were given to the King, and commissioners appointed to value the benefices. The acquiescence, or rather, the active co-operation of the established clergy, forms a remarkable feature in these revolutionary proceedings. Among the chief supporters of them, besides the primate, were Heath, of York, Tunstal, of Durham, Gardiner, of Winchester, and Bonner, and the former two were the messengers chosen to convey to Catherine the tidings of her solemn degradation in parliament.. "Whether we ascribe," says Mackintosh,§ "this non-resistance to dread of the King's displeasure, or to a lukewarm zeal for the established religion, it affords a striking and instructive contrast to the stubborn resistance of the best and most honest of *History, II., 174; Froude attempts to justify this clause, on the ground of its necessity, II., 331. + Lingard, VI., 203-205; Hume III., 211. Ibid, 197. § Hist., II., 175

1533

them in the beginning, to the moderate reform of such odious grievances as pluralities and non-residence. They were now compelled to sacrifice more than it was fit so suddenly to require; and very considerably more than what, while the people were calm, would have satisfied their wishes." The recognition of the King's supremacy was acceptable to the nobility and gentry as the only effectual mode of cutting off the papal exactions; and to the citizens of large towns who had begun to acquire some taste for the Protestant doctrines. But the common people, who had suffered little by these impositions, and had been used to implicit reverence to the clergy, were not so easily influenced by these measures, and the main body of the clergy, especially the monastic orders, were opposed to them.*

The new

In

52. Execution of the Holy Maid of Kent and others. statutes were soon brought into action. There lived at this time in the convent of St. Sepulchre, in Canterbury, a nun professed named Elizabeth Barton, a native of Aldington, in Kent. She had been subject to fits, and the contortions of body which she suffered through them were so strange that the people considered her to be under the power of some preternatural agency. those ignorant times, idocy and epilepsy were considered as proofs of God's favour, and the best mediums of revelations; and the incoherent expressions which she uttered during the paroxysms of her disorder were regarded as prophecies—a delusion in which she herself at length believed. This was in 1526, when the monks were irritated at Wolsey's suppression of a few monasteries, and the question of Henry's divorce was causing some excitement. Richard Maister,† the rector of her parish, sent her to the nunnery, and Boching, a monk of Christ Church, Canterbury, who became her confessor, was her chief prompter. "Even the learned and wise, the honest bishop Fisher, and the amiable archbishop Fisher and Warham, countenanced her pretensions to some extent, believed in and even "the mighty intellect and conscious purity" of her. Sir Thomas More did not prevent him from yielding so far to the delusion as to expose him to the accusations of his enemies. Had the maid confined her revelations to less important matters, she might perhaps have eluded the King's suspicion; but she imprudently extended them to matters of state, impelled thereto, it seems, by Boching, Maister, and four others. Years had elapsed

More partly

since Henry first heard of her, and he had treated her with contempt and ridicule; but when in 1533 she predicted that, if he put away Catherine and married again, he would cease to be * Hallam's Const. Hist., I., 68. + "A designing fellow" says Hume, III., 209.

CHAP. II.

King, would die an infamous death in less than seven months after, and would be succeeded by Catherine's daughter Mary, he ordered her to be taken from her convent and examined. In November, 1533, she was brought, together with her associates, before Star Chamber, and they were all condemned to stand during the sermon at Paul's Cross, and confess their imposture. The date she had assigned for Henry's death had now gone by, and he was still living; this fact was sufficient to bring contempt upon her predictions, but the King was not content with this, and he caused a bill of attainder to be brought into the House of Lords, attainting the "Holy Maid of Kent," as she was called, and her associates, of treason, and others of misprision of treason, who had heard her revelations and not communicated them to the King. Though the Lords did the bidding of the King, and passed the bill without hearing the accused, their sense of justice impelled them to request that the prisoners should be tried in the Star Chamber, and be allowed to speak in their defence. But no defence was allowed, and on the 21st of April, 1534, the maid and her associates were executed at Tyburn. "She was executed,” says Mackintosh,* for misfortunes which ignorance and superstition regarded as crimes; for the incoherent language and dark visions of a disturbed if not alienated mind."t

53. Imprisonment of More and Fisher. Among those who were charged with misprision of treason were Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, and Sir Thomas More, late lord chancellor. The former was one of the most learned prelates of the age, and an intimate friend of Erasmus; he had been the friend of Henry from his youth, and was the last survivor of the counsellors of Henry VII. But his opposition to the divorce gradually effaced the recollection of his merit and services, and his attachment to the church, and aversion to Henry's revolutions, exposed him to Injustice of the King's resentment. The charge against him was brought utterly unjust; for, as he said in his defence, Barton had them. not spoken of any violence to be done to the King's person, but merely of a visitation of Providence, and she had been admitted to a private audience by the King, to whom she had communicated her revelations. He was, however, pronounced guilty by the Lords, and fined.

the charges

against

The name of Sir Thomas More was erased from the bill, although his innocence was not more clearly established than that of his friend Fisher. But it was not the intention of Henry or his counsellors to permit these men to escape, and in a fortnight * History, II., 177. † See Froude, II., 165-174.

1534

afterwards they were called upon to take the new oath of allegiance recently voted by parliament. More had now resigned his office of chancellor (1532), because, in the execution of his duty, he had found himself unavoidably engaged in matters which he could not reconcile with his conscience, and because the more he considered the grounds of the King's divorce, the greater was his conviction that they were weak and untenable. On the plea, therefore, that age and infirmity warned him to attend only to the concerns of his soul, he retired into private life, and devoted his whole time to study and to prayer.*

sion

succes

of them.

The oath of succession which these two men were called upon to make, not only excluded the Princess Mary, and con- The nature fined the succession to the King's children by Anne, but of the oath embraced certain doctrinal points to which they could not demanded conscientiously agree,-viz.: That the King's marriage with Catherine had been unlawful from the beginning, and that neither the Pope nor any other power on earth had authority to grant a dispensation. Cranmer would have allowed them to make the oath without the theological part, but Cromwell's advice that they should make an unconditional submission prevailed, and they were committed to the Tower (April 17th, 1534); and although the terms of the oath which they had refused to take, had not been prescribed by parliament, they were attainted for misprision of treason, and condemned to forfeiture and perpetual imprisonment. They were treated in prison with infamous severity. Fisher, in his seventieth year, was left in sickness and pain, without clothes to cover him, or proper food to eat; and More had no other resource for the support of life, than the charity of his friends, and the filial heroism of his favourite daughter, Margaret Roper. His "poore miserable wyfe and children" were at the same time deprived of everything by the despot's orders.

54. Executions under the Act of Supremacy. While these two conscientious men lay in the Tower, the oath was administered to the clergy and the clerical bodies, and to the monks and inmates of the several abbeys and convents; and formal decisions were obtained from both convocations, and from the two universities, against the papal authority. Yet in the midst of this active opposition to the church of Rome, Henry was burning people in Smithfield for differing from it; John Frith and Andrew John Frith Hewet being brought to the stake (July 22nd, 1534) for and Andrew denying the existence of purgatory, and holding "heretical" burnt.

* See Hume's remarks on his resignation, III., 190.

CHAP. II.

opinions upon transubstantiation, and fourteen Anabaptists from Holland being burnt in the following year.

clergy

In November, when parliament met, the oath of succession was altered, so as to include the acknowledgment of the King's supremacy; the word "Pope" was erased out of all books employed in public worship, all schoolmasters and clergymen were commanded to teach and to preach that the King was the true head of the church, and the Pope's authority a usurpation; and the sheriffs in each county were ordered to keep vigilant watch over them, to see that they obeyed the royal commands without coldness and indifference.* Several of the monks, however, refused either to take the oath, or to preach the new doctrine, and as Cromwell had no mercy for them, they were found guilty of high treason, Monks and and the horrible punishment of that crime was executed burnt. upon them with barbarous exactitude. Now and then a jury hesitated to convict men of treason on such illegal grounds, but Cromwell always bullied them into compliance, and sometimes threatened to hang them instead of the prisoners. During May and June (1535), nine monks and clergymen suffered in London alone.† 55. Execution of Fisher and More for refusing to acknowledge the Royal Supremacy. The next of Henry's deeds of blood has doomed his name to everlasting infamy. In order to make them commit themselves, Fisher and More were repeatedly and treacherously examined, with regard to their private opinions upon the King's supremacy. But they answered supremacy. with caution, and evaded the questions; their refusal to answer was considered as a proof of malice, and equivalent to a denial; and a special commission, consisting of the chancellor, Lord Audley, the Duke of Norfolk, the chief justice, and six judges, of whom Spelman and Fitzherbert were the most conspicuous, was appointed to try them on the charge of high treason.

More and Fisher examined as to their opinions about the

On the 7th of May, 1535, they were brought to trial, and these three searching and fatal questions put to them :—

(1) Would they repute and take the King for supreme head of the church? (2) Would they approve the marriage of the King with Queen Anne to be good

and lawful?

(3) Would they affirm the marriage with Catherine to have been unjust and

unlawful?

Both of them proposed their readiness to swear that they would support the succession to the crown as established by parliament; but to say absolutely yes or no to the questions, from that they begged to be excused. These replies sealed their doom. On the 17th of June Fisher was placed at the bar and charged with. * Lingard, VI., 216. † Ibid, 219; Froude, II., chap. ix.