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1532.] which he had yielded: but in the other prelates there was little seriousness of conviction; and the constitution of the bench had been affected also by the preferment of Gardiner and Edward Lee to two of the sees made vacant by the death of Wolsey. Both these men had been active agents in the prosecution of the divorce; and Gardiner, followed at a distance by the other, had shaped out, as the Pope grew more intractable, the famous notion that the English Church could and should subsist as a separate communion, independent of foreign control, self governed, self organized, and at the same time adhering without variation to Catholic doctrine. This principle (if we may so abuse the word) shot rapidly into popularity: a party formed about it strong in Parliament, strong in Convocation, strong out of doors among the country gentlemen and the higher clergy—a respectable, wealthy, powerful body, trading upon a solecism, but not the less, therefore, devoted to its maintenance, and, in their artificial horror of being identified with heresy, the most relentless persecutors of the Protestants. This party, unreal as they were, and influential perhaps in virtue of their unreality, became for the moment the arbiters of the Church of England; and the bishops belonging to it, and each rising ecclesiastic who hoped to be a bishop, welcomed the resistance of the annates as an opportunity for a demonstration of their strength. On this question, with a fair show of justice, they could at once relieve themselves of a burden which pressed upon their purses, and, as they supposed, gratify the King. The conservatives were