Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/272

 would have agreed with him in the dissolution of the monasteries; the convocation had petitioned for a translation of the Bible; the worship of the saints and the excessive devotions at their shrines had long been a burden to the souls of men, not merely men like Erasmus, but of far more unimpeachable orthodoxy. The supremacy of the chair of S. Peter was by no means as yet an article of unquestioning faith; even the marriage of the clergy was a point not beyond discussion. But there were things which, quite irrespective of the pope and his claims, could not be touched without the taint of heresy. And of these Henry, with all his inconsistencies, was a constant defender. He might tolerate a certain evangelical obliquity in Boleyn's eyes; he might choose to be blind to Cromwell's sympathies with foreign protestantism; he might tolerate Mrs. Cranmer, as he had not looked too curiously into the semi-matrimonial connexions of the great cardinal; he might even go the length of marrying a lady like Anne of Cleves, in whom, through the phlegmatic impenetrability of the Flanders mare, some instincts of unorthodox skittishness might be detected. But Henry was royally orthodox. If, for any purpose of the moment, he relaxed the stringency of the courts, he kept the law very strong against heresy. This acted in a curious way. The king's idea that he was supreme in Church and State, whilst in some regions it led him to maintain the administrative machinery of the two severely separate, in others led him to some mixture of his functions. In his first act of heresy he repealed the statute of Henry IV 'de hereticis comburendis' which seemed to give too much power to the bishops, but re-enacted those of Richard II and Henry V which tended to make heresy an offence at common law. A similar intention is clear in the Act of Six Articles of 1539, and with this light upon it, in the several modifications of the Six Articles which were proposed in the later parliaments. I shall not speculate on the possibility that, if he had lived longer, he might have developed more in the direction of protestant doctrine; I think however that it is unlikely; doctrinally, although quite able to maintain his own line, he clearly symbolised