Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/211

 1922 THE GREAT STATUTE OF PRAEMUNIRE 203 expressly interpreted in the sense I have advocated is of small significance ; for if my reading of the act is correct, little use was likely to be made of it until a wider construction had been put upon it. Again, assuming that I have understood it aright, one would even expect its original purpose to be forgotten when, after being lost to sight for more than a generation, it was rediscovered. The courts of law had seldom if ever had occasion to interpret it ; few of those who had taken part in its enactment were alive ; and unless the circumstances in which it was passed were clearly remembered, it would seem most improbable that a long statute, prescribing very drastic penalties for its infringe- ment, should be exclusively concerned with the punishment of churchmen for executing sentences of the king's courts and the translation of bishops without the consent of themselves or the king, two things with no apparent connexion and moreover unknown in the days of Henry VI. The interval between the enactment and the reappearance of the statute had been a stormy and chequered one for both church and state, and a revolutionary change of dynasty, the conciliar movement, the vicissitudes of the French war, to mention nothing else, might well have blotted out the memory of Boniface IX and his ambitions. Cardinal Beaufort was perhaps as likely as any man to remember the events which had occasioned the passing of the act ; but, already under suspicion of preferring the interests of the pope to those of the Crown, he would hardly give a new handle to his enemies by attempting to explain away an anti-papal statute which was probably never actually used to his hurt. The English clergy, while they protested when the statute was turned against their liberties, would only have prejudiced their case if they had put forward the pope as a fellow victim of the abuse of the measure. There was, in short, hardly any one in England whose interest it was to scrutinize the act on behalf of the pope, and as it seems to have been some time before it was employed against him, the wider interpretation of the statute probably became established before the court of Rome realized its dangerous character. Further, while the statute may have been honestly misunderstood, it is evident that anti-papal statutes were in demand during Gloucester's long quarrel with Beaufort, and it appears from the complaints of the clergy that an anti-clerical spirit had invaded the judicial bench, which a generation earlier had been well disposed towards the courts Christian. In a word, conditions were extraordinarily favourable for the misinterpretation of the statute. It was not the only anti-papal measure that owed its importance to a mistake, for the ' statute of Carlisle ', cited at length in the first statute of provisors and solemnly denounced by Boniface IX, was no statute at all, but only a fruitless petition