Page:A School History of England (1911).djvu/137

 The nation had hardly dared to whisper its desire to curb the Pope and the Church; here was a king who shouted it aloud!

Do not think that I praise Henry VIII. It was a selfish and wicked motive that started the idea in his mind. What I say is that, once the idea was started, he would have all the kings of Europe against him, and no friend but his own people; and so King and people now became one as they had never been before.

Very few Englishmen were as yet prepared to accept any new sort of Church; most of them hated the idea of ‘heresy’. Henry hated it also, and continued to the end of his life to burn a few extreme heretics. King and people wished no more than to abolish the power of the Pope in England, to strip the Church of its enormous wealth, and yet to remain ‘good Catholics’. Was this possible? History was to prove that it was not; once the Pope was pulled down in England a ‘Reformation’ of all the Church in England must follow, in spite of any effort to prevent it. Henry just managed to stave off this reformation while he lived.

The Parliament of 1529 sat for seven years, and when it rose a new England had begun. How the new laws against the Church were forced through the House of Lords no one knows; one fears it was by terror and threats, for nearly all the bishops and certainly all the abbots would be against them; and of the forty-five lay peers, a strong minority must have hated serious changes. But the House of Commons, almost to a man, welcomed these changes; and that House then represented the sober country gentlemen and the sober merchants of England.

One by one all the powers of the Pope were shorn