Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/189

1922 consent of the clergy explicitly claimed. In the parliament of 1390 the archbishops made a solemn protest on behalf of the clergy against the new statute of provisors and that of 1351, declaring that they dissented from them in so far as they restricted the power of the pope or impaired ecclesiastical liberty, as the clergy had always dissented from such measures in times past. Moreover, in 1397, when the commons gave the king permission to modify the statute of provisors, the archbishops, speaking in the name of all the lords spiritual, declared that they would oppose any arrangement which limited the pope's power or the liberty of the church. Now the statute of 1390, though a substantial joint, was a less formidable meal than the 'great statute of praemunire'. Yet we are asked to believe that the clergy swallowed the camel whole, though four years later they solemnly declared that they would refuse the smallest gnat. If, however, the statute merely forbade certain specific things, which the lords spiritual had just acknowledged to be prejudicial to the Crown, their assent to the act would follow as a matter of course.

When, furthermore, one examines the attitude of the Crown and of parliament towards the pope at the time when the statute was passed, it seems unlikely that even the laymen concerned would just then have enacted an anti-papal measure more comprehensive than any of its predecessors. The statute of 1390 against provisors had excited much alarm at Rome, where on 4 February 1391 Boniface solemnly annulled it, together with the 'statute' of Carlisle and the statute of 1351. Papal envoys had already been sent to press for the repeal of the new measure, and in June 1391 there arrived in England the abbot of Nonantola, who on behalf of the pope asked for the withdrawal of the statutes of provisors and other anti-papal measures, including the statutes,