could and should
subsist as a separate communion, independent of foreign control, self
governed, self organised, and at the same time adhering without variation
to Catholic doctrine. This principle (if we may so abuse the word) shot
rapidly into popularity: a party formed about it strong in parliament,
strong in convocation, strong out of doors among the country gentlemen and
the higher clergy--a respectable, wealthy, powerful body, trading upon a
solecism, but not the less, therefore, devoted to its maintenance, and in
their artificial horror of being identified with heresy, the most
relentless persecutors of the Protestants. This party, unreal as they were,
and influential perhaps in virtue of their unreality, became for the moment
the arbiters of the Church of England; and the bishops belonging to it, and
each rising ecclesiastic who hoped to be a bishop, welcomed the resistance
of the annates as an opportunity for a demonstration of their strength. On
this question, with a fair show of justice, they could at once relieve
themselves of a burden which pressed upon their purses, and as they
supposed, gratify the king. The conservatives were still numerically the
strongest, and for a time remained in their allegiance to the Papacy,[352]
but their convictions were too feeble to resist the influence brought to
bear upon them, and when Parliament re-assembled after the Easter recess,
the two Houses of Convocation presented an address to the crown for the
abolition of the impost, and with it of all other exactions, direct and
indirect,--the indulgences, dispensations, delegacies, and the thousand
similar forms and processes by which the privileges of the Church of
England were abridged for the benefit of the Church of Rome, and weighty
injury of purse inflicted both on the clergy and the laity.[353]

That they contemplated a conclusive revolt from Rome as a consequence of
the refusal to pay annates, appears positively in the close of their
address: "May it please your Grace," they concluded, after detailing their
occasions for complaint,--"may it please your Grace to cause the said
unjust exactions to cease, and to be foredone for ever by act of your high
Court of Parliament; and in case the pope will make process against this
realm for the attaining those annates, or else will retain bishops' bulls
till the annates be paid; forasmuch as the exaction of the said annates is
against the law of God and the pope's own laws, forbi