reigning idea
that nothing limits the power of the State.

Exactly the reverse of this distinguishes the movement which took
place at the same time in England, proceeding from the government
before the wave of Reformation struck the shores. Here there were
local reminiscences of Lollardry, and a tradition, as old as the
Conquest, of resistance to the medieval claims of Rome; but the first
impulse did not arise on the domain of religion. From the beginning
there was a body of opinion hostile to the king's marriage. The
practice was new, it was discountenanced by earlier authorities, and
it belonged to the same series of innovations as the recent system of
indulgences which roused the resistance of Germany. Precedents were
hard to find. Alexander VI had granted the same dispensation to
Emmanuel of Portugal, but with misgivings; and had refused it until
the king undertook to make war in person against the Moors of Africa.
Julius II, coming immediately after, had exacted no such condition
from Henry VII, so that he had done what was never done before him.
Sixtus V afterwards declared that Clement had deserved the calamities
that befell him, because he had not dissolved so unholy a union.
Others thought so at the time. No protest could well be heard before
1523, when Adrian censured his predecessors for exceeding their
powers. After that it could be no offence to say that Julius was one
of those whose conduct was condemned by his next successor but one.
But it was still a dangerous point to raise, because any action taken
upon it implied a breach with the queen's nephew Charles V, and the
loss of the old alliance with the House of Burgundy.

After the triumph of Pavia, the captivity of Francis I, and his
defiance of the treaty by which he obtained his deliverance, Wolsey
accepted a pension of 10,000 ducats from France, England renounced
friendship with the Habsburgs, and the breach was already
accomplished. The position of Catharine became intolerable, and she
led the opposition to Wolsey, the author of the change. Therefore,
from 1526, both the religious and the political motive for silence
ceased to operate, and there were, just then, evident motives for
speech. There was no hope that Catharine would have a son, and the
secret that a queen may reign by her own right, that the nation may be
ruled by the distaff, had not been divulged in England. In foreign
policy and in home policy alike, there were interests w