princes, absolving subjects from their allegiance, or selling
dispensations for offences against the law of the land. Appeals are no
longer carried from the national courts to the court of the Rota. The
papal treasury is no longer supplied by the plunder of the national
clergy, collected by resident papal officials. Bishops and convocations
have ceased to legislate above and independent of the secular authority,
and clerks who commit crimes bear the same penalties as the profane. The
high quality of the Reformation statutes is guaranteed by their endurance;
and it is hard to suppose that the politicians who conceived and carried
them out were men of base conditions. The question is not of the character
of the King. If nothing was at issue but the merits or demerits of a
single sovereign, he might be left where he lies. The question is of the
characters of the reforming leaders, who, jointly with the King, were the
authors of this tremendous and beneficent revolution. Henry in all that he
did acted with these men and through them. Is it possible to believe that
qualities so opposite as the popular theory requires existed in the same
persons? Is it possible, for instance, that Cranmer, who composed or
translated the prayers in the English Liturgy, was the miserable wretch
which Macaulay or Lingard describes? The era of Elizabeth was the
outspring of the movement which Henry VIII. commenced, and it was the
grandest period in English history. Is it credible that so invigorating a
stream flowed from a polluted fountain?

Before accepting a conclusion so disgraceful--before consigning the men
who achieved so great a victory, and risked and lost their lives in the
battle, to final execration--it is at least permissible to pause. The
difficulty can only be made light of by impatience, by prejudice, or by
want of thought. To me at any rate, who wished to discover what the real
history of the Reformation had been, it seemed so considerable, that,
dismissing the polemical invectives of later writers, I turned to the
accounts of their conduct, which had been left behind by the authors of it
themselves. Among the fortunate anomalies of the situation, Henry departed
from previous custom in holding annual parliaments. At every step which
he took, either in the rearrangement of the realm or in his own domestic
confusions, he took the Lords and Commons into his council, and ventured
nothing without their consent. The preambles of the prin