Page:Church and State under the Tudors.djvu/25

 INTRODUCTION

is proposed in the present essay to investigate the relations of Church and State in England during the reign of the Tudor sovereigns, with the object of throwing some light upon the respective shares of each in what is commonly known as the 'Reformation settlement.' In order to do this intelligibly it is, however, necessary to give a short account of the state of these relations in far earlier times, and also a slightly fuller one of the position which they occupied during the reign of the Plantagenet and subsequent kings, since in historical as in other investigations into the actual course of facts, however violent may be the contrast which any given state of things may present to that which preceded it, there are constant relations of cause and effect to be discovered between the two. The best, perhaps the only practicable, mode of treating history may be to divide it into periods; but we must ever remember that no given period could have presented the actual phenomena which we see in it had that which preceded it been other than it was.