II. never attained to the stature of a gentleman,
but even Bishop Gardiner wrote that by Queen Catherine's death (p. 336)
"God had given sentence" in the divorce suit between her and the King.[944]

[Footnote 939: _L. and P._, vii., 83.]

[Footnote 940: _Ibid._, x., 28, 59, 60, 141.]

[Footnote 941: Dr. Norman Moore in _Athenaeum_,
1885, i., 152, 215, 281.]

[Footnote 942: _L. and P._, x., 51.]

[Footnote 943: _Ibid._ Hall only tells his readers
that Anne Boleyn wore yellow for the mourning
(_Chronicle_, p. 818).]

[Footnote 944: _L. and P._, x., 256.]

A week later, the Reformation Parliament met for its seventh and last
session. It sat from 4th February to 14th April, and in those ten
weeks succeeded in passing no fewer than sixty-two Acts. Some were
local and some were private, but the residue contained not a few of
public importance. The fact that the King obtained at last his Statute
of Uses[945] may indicate that Henry's skill and success had so
impressed Parliament, that it was more willing to acquiesce in his
demands than it had been in its earlier sessions. But, if the drafts
in the Record Office are to be taken as indicating the proposals of
Government, and the Acts themselves are those proposals as modified in
one or other House, Parliament must have been able to enforce views of
its own to a certain extent; for those drafts differ materially from
the Acts as finally passed.[946] Not a few of the bills were welcome,
if unusual, concessions to the clergy. They were relieved from paying
tenths in the year they paid their first-fruits. The payment of
tithes, possibly rendered doubtful in the wreck of canon law, was
enjoined by Act of Parliament. An attempt was made to deal with the
poor, and another, if not to check enclosures, at least to extract
some profit for the King from the process. It was made high treason to
counterfeit the King's sign-manual, privy signet, or privy seal; and
Henry was empowered by Parliament, as he had before been by (p. 337)
Convocation, to appoint a commission to reform the canon law. But the
chief acts of the session were for the dissolution of the lesser
monasteries and for the erection of a Court of Augmentations in order
to deal with the revenues which were thus to accrue to the King.