Page:Church and State under the Tudors.djvu/84

 of God, we are king of England, and the kings of England in times past had never any superior but God only. Therefore know you well that we will maintain the right of our crown and of our temporal jurisdiction, as well in this as in all other points, in as ample manner as any of our progenitors have done before our time. And, as for your decrees, we are well assured that you of the spirituality go expressly against the words of divers of them, as hath been showed you by some of our council; and you interpret your decrees at your pleasure; but we will not agree to them more than our progenitors have done in former times.' In this particular instance Henry seems to have thought that he had sufficiently vindicated his authority by having the clerical delinquent brought to the bar, and the case was in the end withdrawn from the jury; but it required the utmost efforts of the Cardinal and the Archbishop of Canterbury to bring about this result, and the state of feeling which existed is plainly shown in a letter of the Bishop of London to Wolsey, in which he says: 'Assured I am that if my chancellor be tried by any twelve men in London, they be so maliciously set in favor em hæreticæ pravitatis, that they will cast and condemn any clerk though he were as innocent as Abel.'

It is quite conceivable that had the question of Henry's divorce not arisen, the Reformation in England might have been postponed for some years, for Henry VIII. was essentially an absolutist, and his first bias was, as is well known, in favour not only of Roman doctrine but also of Papal power, and he hated Luther and all his works. But it is not conceivable that if there had been no question of the divorce there would have been no Reformation in England at all. It was impossible but that the great movement which began in Germany and Switzerland and spread with