Page:Church and State under the Tudors.djvu/93

 lady to be separated from the King, the King would never have pretended to claim sovereignty over the Church. &hellip; 'There is none who do not blame this usurpation except those who have promoted it.' &hellip; Again: 'The Nuncio has been with the King to-day.' &hellip; 'The Nuncio then entered upon the subject of this new papacy made here,' &c. And again on March 8 he writes: 'The clergy are more conscious every day of the great error they committed in acknowledging the King as sovereign over the Church,' Once more, on June 6 of the same year, he gives his master an account of a visit of some of Henry's counsellors to Queen Katherine, and he quotes her as saying that 'the King is sovereign in his realm as far as regards temporal jurisdiction, but as to the spiritual it was not pleasing to God either that the King should so intend, or that she should consent, for the Pope was the only true sovereign and vicar of God, who had power to judge of spiritual matters, of which marriage was one.'

Such extracts, if they do not prove that Henry's ecclesiastical legislation was in truth a new departure, are at least conclusive of the fact that those nearest his throne and most immediately affected by it believed it to be so.

Bishop Stubbs gives quite a different account of the relations of Church and State in England during the middle ages, and it is one which, while far more consonant than that of Dr. Hook with the actual facts, is also totally irreconcilable with it. He says that the clergy 'recognise the King as supreme in matters temporal, and the Pope in matters spiritual. But then,' he adds, 'there are questions as to the exact limits between the spiritual and the temporal, and more im-