before the English people in this translation: the chief objection to the admission of Papal prerogatives was the "lordship" which he claimed over and above the spiritual powers he exercised as successor of St. Peter. On this point we find preachers and writers of the period insisting most clearly and definitely. Some, of course, attack the spiritual jurisdiction directly, but most commonly such attacks are flavoured and served up for general consumption by a supply of abuse of the temporal assumptions and the worldly show of the Popes. This appealed to the popular mind, and to the growing sense of national aims and objects, and the real issue of the spiritual head

(1) Ordination of priests without cure of souls, not learned, of lower order in life, and too young and of doubtful morals: They suggest that each diocese should have a magistrum to see that candidates are properly instructed-none to be ordained except by their own bishop.

(2) Benefices, and in particular, episcopal sees, are given to people with interest, and not because their elevation would be good for the church. They suggest that the best man should be chosen, and residence should be insisted on, and consequently “non Italo conferendum est beneficium in Hispania aut in Britannia aut ex contra."

(3) Pensions reserved from Benefices. Though the Pope, "who is the universal dispenser of the goods of the church," may reserve a part for a pious use, e.g., for the poor, &c., still not to reserve sufficient for the proper purpose of the beneficiary, and still more to give a pension out of a benefice to one rich enough without, is wrong.

(4) Change of benefices for the sake of gain, and handing on benefices by arrangement or always assigning episcopal sees to coadjutors, is the cause of outcry against the clergy, and is in reality making private property out of what is public.

(5) Permission to clergy to hold more than one benefice.

(6) Cardinals being allowed to hold sees. They ought to be counsellors to the Pope in Rome, and when holding sees they are more or less dependent on the will of the kings, and so cannot give independent advice and speak their minds.

(7) Absence of bishops from their sees.

(8) Such religious houses as needed correction should be forbidden to profess members, and when they die out, their places should be taken by fervent religious. Confessors for convents must be approved by the ordinaries of the place.

ship was obscured by the plea of national sentiment and safeguards.

To take one more example: Bishop Tunstall, on Palm Sunday, 1539, preached before the king and court. His object was to defend the rejection of the Papal supremacy and jurisdiction. He declaimed against the notion that the Popes were to be considered as free from subjection to worldly powers, maintaining that in this they were like all other men. "The Popes," he says, "exalt their seat above the stars of God, and ascend above the clouds, and will be like to God Almighty. The Bishop of Rome offers his feet to be kissed, shod with his shoes on. This I saw myself, being present thirty-four years ago,

(9) The use of the keys ought never, under any pretext, to be granted for money.

(10) Questors of the Holy Spirit, St. Anthony, &c., who foster superstition among the poor people, should be prohibited.

(11) Confessional privileges and use of portable altars to be very rarely allowed.

(12) No indulgences to be granted except once a year, and in the great cities only.

Finally they say of Rome: "Hæc Romana civitas et ecclesia mater est et magistra aliarum ecclesiarum," and hence it should be a model to all. Foreigners, however, who come to St. Peter's find that priests "sordidi, ignari, induti paramentis et vestibus quibus nec in sordidis ædibus honeste uti possent, missas celebrant."

Cardinal Sadolet, on receiving a copy of Sturmius's letter, replied in kindly terms. He had, he declared, a high opinion of Sturmius, Melanchthon, and Bucer, looking on them as most learned men, kindly disposed, and cordially friendly to him. He looked upon it as the peculiar characteristic of Luther to try and overwhelm all his opponents with shouts and attacks." He speaks of the great piety of Pope Clement from personal knowledge. His wars were, he said, rather the work of his adversaries than his own (De consilio, ed. J. G. Schelhorn, 1748, p. 91).

He also, in 1539, penned the De Christiana Ecclesia (in Specilegium Romanum, ii., p. 101 seqq.), sending it to Cardinal Salicati, and asking him to pass it on to Cardinal Contarini. It was the outcome of conversations about the troubles of the Church, and the result of the movement was the Council of Trent, to restore, as Sadolet says, ecclesiastical disci pline "quæ nunc tota pæne nobis e manibus elapsa est."

when Julius, the Bishop of Rome, stood on his feet and one of his chamberlains held up his skirt because it stood not, as he thought, with his dignity that he should do it himself, that his shoes might appear, whilst a nobleman of great age prostrated himself upon the ground and kissed his shoes."

To us, to-day, much that was written and spoken at this time will appear, like many of the above passages, foolish and exaggerated; but the language served its purpose, and contributed more than anything else to lower the Popes in the eyes of the people, and to justify in their minds the overthrow of the ecclesiastical system which had postulated the Pope as the Universal Father of the Christian Church. Each Sunday, in every parish church throughout the country, they had been invited in the bidding prayer, as their fathers had been for generations, to remember their duty of praying for their common Father, the Pope. When the Pope's authority was finally rejected by the English king and his advisers, it was necessary to justify this serious breach with the past religious practice, and the works of the period prove beyond doubt that this was done in the popular mind by turning men's thoughts to the temporal aspect of the Papacy, and making them think that it was for the national profit and honour that this foreign yoke should be cast off. Whilst this is clear, it is also equally clear in the works of the time that the purely religious aspect of the question was as far as possible relegated to a secondary place in the discussions. This was perhaps not unnatural, as the duty of defending the rejection of the Papal supremacy can hardly have been very tasteful to those who were forced by the strong arm of the State to justify it before the people. As late as 1540 we are told by a contemporary writer that the spirituality under the

1 Sermon on Palm Sunday, Berthelet, 1539.

bishops "favour as much as they dare the Bishop of Rome's laws and his ways.”1

Even the actual meaning attached to the formal acknowledgment of the king's Headship by the clergy was suf ficiently ambiguous to be understood, by some at least, as aimed merely at the temporal jurisdiction of the Roman curia. It is true it is usually understood that Convocation, by its act acknowledging Henry as sole supreme Head of the Church of England, gave him absolute spiritual jurisdiction. Whatever may have been the intention of the king in requiring the acknowledgment from the clergy, it seems absolutely certain that the ruling powers in the Church considered that by their grant there was no derogation of the Pope's spiritual jurisdiction.

A comparison of the clauses required by Henry with those actually granted by Convocation makes it evident that any admission that the crown had any cure of souls, that is, spiritual jurisdiction, was specifically guarded against. In place of the clause containing the words, "cure of souls committed to his Majesty," proposed in the king's name to his clergy, they adopted the form, "the nation committed to his Majesty." The other royal demands were modified in the same manner, and it is consequently obvious that all the insertions proposed by the crown were weighed with the greatest care by skilled ecclesiastical jurists in some two and thirty sessions, and the changes introduced by them with the proposals made on behalf of the king throw considerable light upon the meaning which Convocation intended to give to the Supremum Caput clause. In one sense, perhaps not the obvious one, but one that had de facto been recognised during Catholic ages, the sovereign was the Protectorthe advocatus-of the Church in his country, and to him the clergy would look to protect his people from the intro

'Lancelot Ridley, Commentary in Englyshe on Sayncte Paule's Epystle to the Ephesians, L. 4.

duction of heresy and for maintenance in their temporalities. So that whilst, on the one hand, the king and Thomas Crumwell may well have desired the admission of Henry's authority over "the English Church, whose Protector and supreme Head he alone is," to cover even spiritual jurisdiction, on the other hand, Warham and the English Bishops evidently did intend it to cover only an admission that the king had taken all jurisdiction in temporals, hitherto exercised by the Pope in England, into his own hands.

Moreover, looking at what was demanded and at what was granted by the clergy, there is little room for doubt that they at first deliberately eliminated any acknowledgment of the Royal jurisdiction. This deduction is turned into a certainty by the subsequent action of Archbishop Warham. He first protested that the admission was not to be twisted "in derogation of the Roman Pontiff or the Apostolic See," and the very last act of his life was the drafting of an elaborate exposition, to be delivered in the House of Lords, of the impossibility of the king's having spiritual jurisdiction, from the very nature of the constitution of the Christian Church. Such jurisdiction, he claimed, belonged of right to the Roman See.1

That the admission wrung from the clergy in fact formed the thin end of the wedge which finally severed the English Church from the spiritual jurisdiction of the Holy See is obvious. But the "thin end" was, there can be hardly any doubt, the temporal aspect of the authority of the Roman See; and that its insertion at all was possible may be said in greater measure to be due to the fact that the exercise of jurisdiction in temporals by a foreign. authority had long been a matter which many Englishmen had strongly resented.

'This important paper was printed for the first time in the Dublin Review, April, 1894, pp. 390-420.