Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 2.djvu/230

216 bill, though he could not be more innocent than Fisher, but not more than a fortnight passed before the bloodthirsty tyrant had contrived a more deadly snare for them both. He had them summoned, and commanded to take the new oath of allegiance. They were both of them ready to swear to the king's full temporal authority, and to the succession of his children, but they could not conscientiously take the oath which declared Henry the supreme head of the English Church, and the marriage with Anne Boleyn lawful. Cranmer, who on this occasion showed more mildness and liberality than he had shown honest principles in his elevation, would fain have admitted these illustrious men to take the oath so far as it applied to temporal, and to dispense with it as it regarded the spiritual matters. But he pleaded in vain, and they were both committed to the Tower.



Henry, having got the Acts of Parliament for the supremacy and the succession, was not of a temper to let them become a dead letter. Whether it were owing to the carelessness of Parliament or the carefulness of the crown, the oath of the succession had not been verbally defined, and Henry now availed himself of this omission to alter and add to it so as to please himself. From the clergy he took care to obtain an oath including the full recognition of his supremacy in the Church, omitting the qualifying clause in the former one; and an assertion that the Bishop of Rome had no more authority within the realm than any other bishop. He spent the summer in administering this oath to the monks, friars, and nuns, from all clergymen and clerical bodies whatever, and in obtaining decisions against the papal authority from the two convocations and the universities. The oath to the laity was administered to men and women alike. Remembering the mental reservation of Cranmer when he swore obedience to the Pope, he now demanded from every prelate an oath of renunciation of every protest previously or secretly made contrary to the oath of supremacy. He ordered that the very word Pope should be obliterated carefully out of all books used in public worship.

Every schoolmaster was commanded to teach diligently the new and daring doctrine to the children under his care; every clergyman, from the bishop to the curate, was bound to inculcate, every Sunday and every holiday, the principle that the king was head of the Church, and that the authority hitherto exercised by the Pope was a usurpation, permitted only by the negligence or