Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 59.djvu/388

 a brief had been sent by the pope to forbid universities, as such, giving any further opinions on the divorce question. In September the English ambassadors at Rome were soliciting a decretal commission to three bishops in England to judge the cause, or failing that, to the archbishop and clergy of Canterbury. But although their efforts were seconded (very insincerely) by the bishop of Tarbes in order to make it appear that France would join England in enmity to the Holy See if the pope did not yield, they led to no result.

On 25 Nov. 1530 Warham made his will. He felt, doubtless, that a time of still more acute trial was at hand. Wolsey had already been sent for from the north, and, but for his death, would no doubt have been committed to the Tower. Warham knew that he himself would be required still further to be an instrument of the king's designs. Sampson, dean of the chapel, presented him about this time with eight documents in favour of the divorce obtained from French and Italian universities, which More, as chancellor, had to lay before parliament on 30 March following. Warham's subservience was so far relied on that the pope was continually urged to commit the cause to him; but Clement very naturally replied that he was no fit judge, having actually made himself a party by signing the letter from the lords to urge him to give judgment according to the king's wishes. In December Warham went a step further to satisfy the king by calling before him Bishop Fisher and urging him to retract what he had written in the queen's favour; but though his exhortations were seconded by those of Stokesley, Lee, and Edward Foxe, they were unavailing. Indeed Warham's subservience caused him now to be censured in placards affixed to the door of St. Paul's, which, as they reflected on the king and his privy council as well, were immediately taken down and destroyed.

At the end of 1530 the whole clergy of England was subject to a præmunire in the king's bench for having acknowledged Wolsey's legatine authority. The convocation of Canterbury met at Westminster Abbey on 21 Jan. 1531, and endeavoured to buy off the royal displeasure by a heavy subsidy payable in five years. But on 7 Feb. a body of judges and privy councillors informed them that their grant would not be accepted without certain emendations in the preamble recognising the king's supremacy over the church. The claim was ambiguous and was resisted for three days, when the king intimated through Lord Rochford that he would be content if the words ‘post Deum’ were inserted after ‘supremum Caput.’ But even this did not give satisfaction, and Warham proposed an amendment recognising the king as protector and supreme lord of the church ‘et quantum per Christi legem licet, etiam supremum Caput.’ This no one either seconded or opposed, and the archbishop remarked ‘Qui tacet consentire videtur.’ ‘Then we are all silent,’ some one exclaimed, and the new title was voted in this form. On 22 March accordingly Warham notified to the king the grant of 100,000l. passed by convocation to purchase the pardon of the clergy. On 10 July the king instructed Benet at Rome once more to propose to the pope (on the plea that he was afraid of the emperor) that Warham should determine his divorce cause, speaking highly of his impartiality as one who was once of the queen's counsel, above eighty years of age, and who owed nothing to the king; for the king, in fact, had taken from him the chancellorship and in the last session of parliament the probate of testaments. Of course the policy was to magnify the archbishop's independence at Rome while securing the very contrary at home. But Warham's conscience at length rebelled at proceedings which had been systematically planned to destroy the independence of the clergy. On 24 Feb. 1532 he made a formal protest against all the acts of the parliament (now in its third session) which had begun in November 1529 that were derogatory to the pope's authority or to the ecclesiastical prerogatives of the province of Canterbury. But both he and the clergy were made to feel themselves quite at the king's mercy. The House of Commons was not only encouraged but prompted by the court to pass a bill complaining of innumerable abuses in ecclesiastical jurisdiction and the ‘uncharitable’ way in which prosecutions were conducted; also that the clergy in convocation made laws without the king's knowledge, inconsistent with the laws of the realm, and so forth. This petition was presented by the speaker to the king on 18 March 1532, with a request at the same time that his majesty would now release his faithful subjects from their long and costly attendance in parliament by a dissolution, and let them return home to the country. But the king very naturally replied that if they expected any result from their petition, they must wait for it. The petition was delivered to the archbishop on 12 April, when convocation resumed after the Easter holidays, and, after being referred to the lower house, an elaborate categorical answer was drawn up partly in the name of Warham himself, who