lli. Machiavelli
hoped to find in Caesar Borgia or in the later Lorenzo de' Medici a
tyrant who, after crushing all rival tyrannies, might unite and
regenerate Italy; and, terrible and ruthless as his policy was, the
final aim of Cromwell seems to have been that of Machiavelli, an aim of
securing enlightenment and order for England by the concentration of all
authority in the Crown.

The first step toward such an end was the freeing the monarchy from its
spiritual obedience to Rome. What the first of the Tudors had done for
the political independence of the kingdom, the second was to do for its
ecclesiastical independence. Henry VII had freed England from the
interference of France or the house of Burgundy; and in the question of
the divorce Cromwell saw the means of bringing Henry VIII to free it
from the interference of the papacy. In such an effort resistance could
be looked for only from the clergy. But their resistance was what
Cromwell desired. The last check on royal absolutism which had survived
the Wars of the Roses lay in the wealth, the independent synods and
jurisdiction, and the religious claims of the Church; and for the
success of the new policy it was necessary to reduce the great
ecclesiastical body to a mere department of the state in which all
authority should flow from the sovereign alone, his will be the only
law, his decision the only test of truth.

Such a change, however, was hardly to be wrought without a struggle;
and the question of national independence in all ecclesiastical matters
furnished ground on which the Crown could conduct this struggle to the
best advantage. The secretary's first blow showed how unscrupulously the
struggle was to be waged. A year had passed since Wolsey had been
convicted of a breach of the Statute of Provisors. The pedantry of the
judges declared the whole nation to have been formally involved in the
same charge by its acceptance of his authority. The legal absurdity was
now redressed by a general pardon, but from this pardon the clergy found
themselves omitted. In the spring of 1531 a convocation was assembled to
be told that forgiveness could be bought at no less a price than the
payment of a fine amounting to a million of our present money, and the
acknowledgment of the King as "the chief protector, the only and supreme
lord, and head of the Church and clergy of England."

Unjust as was the first demand, they at once submitted to it; against
the second they s