The substitution of the lords of the council for the autocratic rule of
the cardinal-minister, the break-up of the great mass of powers which
had been gathered into a single hand, the summons of a parliament, the
ecclesiastical reforms which it at once sanctioned, were measures which
promised a more legal and constitutional system of government. The
question of the divorce presented to More no serious difficulty.
Untenable as Henry's claim seemed to the new Chancellor, his faith in
the omnipotence of parliament would have enabled him to submit to any
statute which named a new spouse as queen and her children as heirs to
the crown. But as Cromwell's policy unfolded itself he saw that more
than this was impending.

The Catholic instinct of his mind, the dread of a rent Christendom and
of the wars and bigotry that must come of its rending, united with
More's theological convictions to resist any spiritual severance of
England from the papacy. His love for freedom, his revolt against the
growing autocracy of the Crown, the very height and grandeur of his own
spiritual convictions, all bent him to withstand a system which would
concentrate in the king the whole power of church as of state, would
leave him without the one check that remained on his despotism, and
make him arbiter of the religious faith of his subjects. The later
revolt of the Puritans against the king-worship which Cromwell
established proved the justice of the provision which forced More in the
spring of 1532 to resign the post of chancellor.

But the revolution from which he shrank was an inevitable one. Till now
every Englishman had practically owned a double life and a double
allegiance. As citizen of a temporal state his life was bounded by
English shores, and his loyalty due exclusively to his English King. But
as citizen of the state spiritual, he belonged not to England, but to
Christendom. The law which governed him was not a national law, but a
law that embraced every European nation, and the ordinary course of
judicial appeals in ecclesiastical cases proved to him that the
sovereignty in all matters of conscience or religion lay, not at
Westminster, but at Rome.

Such a distinction could scarcely fail to bring embarrassment with it as
the sense of national life and national pride waxed stronger; and from
the reign of the Edwards the problem of reconciling the spiritual and
temporal relations of the realm grew daily more difficult. Parliament
h