Page:Church and State under the Tudors.djvu/125

 them out. The abuses existing in the Church were great and oppressive; the clergy, both regular and secular, were unpopular. The nobility were too weak to offer effectual opposition to the King. From this state of things it followed that the clergy, who alone stood in a position to do so, had many enemies, and no ally except the Pope. But the Pope (Clement VII.) was worse than no ally at all. He was a man totally destitute of any high ideal—he was, if I may so say, a Medici first and only Pope afterwards; that is to say, he was essentially a petty upstart Italian princeling, who cared far more for his own family ascendency in Florence than for all the interests of Christianity over the civilised world, and was ready at any moment to employ, and even to endanger, the authority which the Papacy gave him amongst the clergy of all Europe, for the sake of some beggarly family intrigue or dynastic interest. Nevertheless, low as the Papacy had sunk at the beginning of the sixteenth century, it still retained an immense prestige. The Pope was still supreme over the clergy in every State, though his right may have suffered in some degree in each, and still drew a large revenue from them, both in England and elsewhere. Hence, as soon as Henry quarrelled with the Pope on the matter of the divorce, his plain policy was to attack the clergy at home, since by this means he carried out at once his secondary object of punishing the Pope, and his primary object of making himself absolute. By the help of his Parliament he coerced the clergy into joining him in repudiating the Pope, and he punished the Pope not only by annulling his authority, but by depriving him of his revenue; and then he proceeded to transfer both authority and revenue to his own person, while all the time he maintained the Church