Page:Church and State under the Tudors.djvu/154

 If now, in conclusion, we come to sum up the difference in the position of the Church at the end of this reign from what it was at the beginning, we shall find it greater in some respects, less in others, than seems to be generally believed. The reign of Edward VI. seems to be generally looked upon as the time when the great revolution took place in the Church of England—as pre-eminently the era of the Reformation; but if we examine the statute book we find no Acts in this reign which affect the fundamental relations of Church and State in any way at all comparable to the Act of Supremacy and the Act for the Submission of the Clergy in the previous reign. There are several Acts already noticed above, such as the two Acts of Uniformity and others, of great importance to the Church; but they are all of a quite different class from the great Acts just mentioned, and, in fact, grew out of them. They are Acts dealing with the constitution and management of the Church, and are the legitimate and natural results of that transfer of the government of the Church from the Pope and the clergy to the sovereign, which those two great Acts had effected. In fact, the Parliament of Edward VI. was far more remarkable for what it refused to do than for what it did. In 1552 it (and in this case 'it' means the House of Commons) rejected a Heresy Bill, it rejected the attainder of Bishop Tunstall, and it completely remodelled a Treason Bill. These were all Northumberland's measures, and he consequently dissolved the Parliament (April 15). But early in the following year he was compelled to summon another, and this, though carefully and unscrupulously packed, refused to pass a bill against ecclesiastical impropriation, and another which would have renewed the system of monopolies abolished in the twelfth year of Henry VII.