ad hardly risen into life when it became the organ of the national
jealousy, whether of any papal jurisdiction without the realm or of the
separate life and separate jurisdiction of the clergy within it. The
movement was long arrested by religious reaction and civil war. But the
fresh sense of national greatness which sprang from the policy of Henry
VIII, the fresh sense of national unity as the monarchy gathered all
power into its single hand, would have itself revived the contest even
without the spur of the divorce.

What the question of the divorce really did was to stimulate the
movement by bringing into clearer view the wreck of the great Christian
commonwealth of which England had till now formed a part, and the
impossibility of any real exercise of a spiritual sovereignty over it by
the weakened papacy, as well as by outraging the national pride through
the summons of the King to a foreign bar and the submission of English
interests to the will of a foreign emperor.

With such a spur as this the movement, which More dreaded, moved forward
as quickly as Cromwell desired. The time had come when England was to
claim for herself the fulness of power, ecclesiastical as well as
temporal, within her bounds; and, in the concentration of all authority
within the hands of the sovereign which was the political characteristic
of the time, to claim this power for the nation was to claim it for the
king. The import of that headship of the Church which Henry had assumed
in the preceding year was brought fully out in one of the propositions
laid before the convocation of 1532.

"The King's majesty," runs this memorable clause, "hath as well the care
of the souls of his subjects as their bodies; and may by the law of God
by his parliament make laws touching and concerning as well the one as
the other." The principle embodied in these words was carried out in a
series of decisive measures. Under strong pressure the convocation was
brought to pray that the power of independent legislation till now
exercised by the church should come to an end, and to promise "that from
henceforth we shall forbear to enact, promulge, or put into execution
any such constitutions and ordinances so by us to be made in time
coming, unless your highness by your royal assent shall license us to
make, promulge, and execute them, and the same so made be approved by
your highness' authority."

Rome was dealt with in the same unsparing fashion. The parlia