Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 5.djvu/508

ENGLAND follows: "By a process well known to Ecclesiastical Law, the King wished to institute his suit in the Appeal Court for this purpose given original jurisdiction. With this object, instead of, as originally intended, suing in an English Consistory or Arches Court, from which appeal lay to Rome, then menaced or actually occupied by the armies of Charles V, a commission from Pope Clement, dated June 9, and confirmed by a pollicitatio dated July 13, 1528, was obtained constituting the two cardinals a Legatine Papal Court of both original supreme and ultimate jurisdiction and to proceed judicially. The Court opened May 21, 1529; there followed citation, articles, examination, and publication, and on Friday, July 23, 1529, the cause was ripe for judgment. At that day Campejus [Campeggio] adjourned till October, on the ground that the Roman Vacation, which he was bound to observe, had already begun. But in September the advocation of the cause to Rome, and inhibition of the Legatine Court, given by Clement contrary to his written promise on the word of a Pope, had arrived in England, and the Court never sat again. Henry waited for more than three years, negotiating to have the suit brought to judgment, till at last, in November, 1532, he married Anne Boleyn, and in the following year, May, 1533, Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, gave sentence of nullity. At Rome the cause dragged on, there is a gap at this epoch in the reports of the Rota, and it does not appear if there was any argument either by the advocates of the `orator' or `oratrix', or by the defensor, till at last, on March 25, 1534, the Pope, in a Consistory of Cardinals, of whom a minority voted against the marriage, pronounced the marriage with Katherine valid, and ordered restitution of conjugal rights."

The Statute of 1535 (26 Hen. VIII, c. 1) above quoted—it is commonly called the Act of Supremacy—which transferred to the king the authority over the Church in England hitherto exercised by the pope, may be regarded as Henry's answer to the papal sentence of 1534. But, as Professor Brewer remarks, "to this result the King was brought by slow and silent steps". The Act of Supremacy was in truth simply the last of a series of enactments whereby, during the whole progress of the matrimonial cause, the king sought to intimidate the pontiff and to obtain a decision favorable to himself. Seven statutes in particular may be noted as preparing the way for, and leading up to, the Act of Supremacy. The 21 Hen. VIII, c. 13, prohibited, under pecuniary penalties, the obtaining from the Holy See of licences for pluralities or non-residence. The 23 Hen. VIII, c. 9, forbade the citation of a person out of the diocese wherein he or she dwelt, except in certain specified cases. The 23 Hen. VIII, c. 20, which is entitled "Concerning the restraint of payment of annates to the See of Rome", was not only an attempt to intimidate, but also to bribe the pope. It forbade, under penalties, the payment of first fruits to Rome, provided that, if the Bulls for a bishop's consecration were in consequence denied, he might be consecrated without them, and authorized the king to disregard any consequent ecclesiastical censure of "our Holy Father the Pope" and to cause Divine service to be continued in spite of the same; and further empowered the King by letters patent to give or withhold his assent to the Act, and at his pleasure to suspend, modify, annul and enforce it. The Act was in fact what Dr. Lingard has called it, "a political experiment to try the resolution of the Pontiff". The experiment failed, and in the next year the royal assent was given to the Act by letters patent. In this year also was passed the Statute, 24 Hen. VIII, c. 12, prohibiting appeals to Rome in testamentary, matrimonial, and certain other causes, and requiring the clergy to continue their ministrations in spite of ecclesiastical censures from Rome. The next year witnessed the passing of the Act (25 Hen. VIII, c. 19) "for the submission of the clergy to the King's Majesty", which prohibited all appeals to Rome. The Act following this in the Statute Book abolished annates, forbade, under the penalties of praemunire, the presentation of bishops and archbishops to "the Bishop of Rome, otherwise called the Pope", and the procuring from him of Bulls for their consecration, and established the method still existing in the Anglican Church (of which more will be said later on) of electing, confirming, and consecrating bishops. It was immediately followed by an Act forbidding, under the same penalties, the king's subjects to sue to the pope, or the Roman See, for "licenses, dispensations, compensations, faculties, grants, rescripts, delegacies or other instruments or writings", to go abroad for any visitations, congregations, or assembly for religion, or to maintain, allow, admit, or obey any process from Rome. The net effect of these enactments was to take away from the pope the headship of the Church of England. That headship the Act of Supremacy conferred on the king.

This sudden falling away of a whole nation from Catholic unity, is an event so strange and so terrible as to require some further explanation than Macaulay's, who refers it to the "brutal passion" and "selfish policy" of Henry VIII. In fact the struggle between that monarch and the pope was the last phase of a contest between the papal and the regal power which had been waged, with longer or briefer truces, from the days of the Norman Conquest. The Second Henry was no less desirous than the Eighth to emancipate himself from the jurisdiction of the supreme pontiff, and the destruction and pillage of the shrine of St. Thomas a Becket was not merely a manifestation of uncontrollable fury and unscrupulous greed; it was also Henry VIII's way of redressing a quarrel of nearly four hundred years' standing. The reason why Henry VIII succeeded where Henry II, a greater man, had failed must be sought in the political and religious conditions of the times. Von Ranke has pointed out that the state of the world in the sixteenth century was "directly hostile to the Papal domination... The civil power would no longer acknowledge any higher authority" (Die römischen Papste, I, 39). In England the monarch was virtually a tyrant. The Wars of the Roses had destroyed the old nobility, formerly an effective check upon regal despotism. "The prerogative", Brewer writes, "was absolute both in theory and practice. Government was identified with the will of the Sovereign; his word was law for the conscience as well as the conduct of his subjects. He was the only representative of the nation. Parliament was little more than an institution for granting subsidies" (Letters and State Papers, II, Part I, p. cxciii, Introd.). The lax lives led by too many of the clergy, the abuses of pluralities, the scandals of the Consistorial Courts, had tended to weaken the influence of the priesthood; "the papal authority", to quote again Brewer, "had ceased to be more than a mere form, a decorum to be observed." The influence of the ecclesiastical order as a check upon arbitrary power was extinct at the death of Wolsey. "Thus it was that the royal supremacy was now to triumph after years of effort, apparently fruitless and often purposeless. That which had been present to the English mind was now to come forth in a distinct consciousness, armed with the power that nothing could resist. Yet that it should come forth in such a form is marvellous. All events had prepared the way for the King's temporal supremacy: opposition to Papal authority was familiar to men; but a spiritual supremacy, an ecclesiastical headship as it separated Henry VIII from all his predecessors by an immeasurable interval, so was it without precedent and at variance with all tradition" (Brewer, Letters and State Paters, I, cvii, Introd.).

Henry VIII made full proof of his ecclesiastical