Tudors as the ancient race coming to their own again :

"All hail, ye genuine kings, Britannia's issue, hail!”

God had indeed a work for them to do, worthy of Gladys and of Linus; and whether they willed it or not, he made them instruments of the greatest blessings to our race, overruling their very crimes for the good of his Church and for mankind.

32. THE EPOCH OF WOLSEY.

Where Wiclif left the spiritual work we find the whole Anglican Church ready to take it up and complete it in Queen Elizabeth's day. The first prayer-book of Edward VI. would better attest where he stood. Not till then was the Church of England reformed theologically. What happened under Henry VIII. was merely the reassertion of those temporal rights and liberties of which Rome had divested our forefathers. Certain modifications of existing practices and doctrines were indeed attempted, but they amounted to little more than Rome herself has had to tolerate ever since the Council of Trent. Henry himself never ceased to burn those whom Rome accounted heretics. His laws would have sent to the stake every Anglican bishop, priest, and deacon who accepts the Anglican prayer-book. Whatever he was, he was bred in Rome's school; his life was fashioned after that of princes most in her favour; and if he was not a better man than he should be, which of the Popes, his contemporaries, set him a better

example? His character I abhor; for it reflected all that Rome had been doing for the corruption of princes for centuries. All that we have to do with him is to note that his quarrel with the Pope reversed the policy of the kings of England, who, since the Plantagenets, had favoured the Paparchy. Not one of them had possessed a strictly legitimate claim to the crown, and they needed the support of Rome to prop up their thrones. Now came one who, whatever his faults, was the most resolute and courageous prince in Christendom. It is of no consequence to our case whether he was right or wrong in his personal quarrel. A conflict arose which, after years of patient waiting, enabled his people and the Church in her convocations to call upon him to "reassume" what the Plantagenets had so often asserted, what even under "the Roses" and the first Tudor the Church had not suffered to be forgotten, and what Henry now enforced by an appeal to the actual law in the old statutes of Provisors and Præmunire. By these, the legatine position of Wolsey and others was shown to have been illegal and void from the beginning; and, basely as Henry may have treated the Cardinal, whom he tempted into his false position, the crisis had come when the Church had to speak out or perish. Cruel as were the circumstances, her voice came in terrible earnest, — the old refrain, Nolumus leges Angliæ mutari, - We will not let our laws be changed.

1 See supra, page 228, and Note X".

33. RESTORED RIGHTS.

Pugin

As for Wolsey, how beautifully Shakespeare has summed up his good and bad, putting it into the mouth of such a "chronicler as Griffith"! Let us hear what a modern Roman Catholic thinks of him. Mr. Pugin says that he was "a greater instrument in producing the English schism than the archheretic Cranmer himself. . . . By his vexatious exercise of his legatine power, he caused the spiritual authority of the Roman pontiff to become an odious and intolerable burden; by dissolving religious houses, he paved the way for the destruction of every great religious establishment.” might have added, that, by persecuting the married clergy, while he himself was raising illegitimate children, he faithfully represented the contemporary Popes, and so made even Henry look respectable. But let us note what that Bluebeard really permitted the Church to do. It is often stupidly said that Henry made himself "Head of the Church," refusing to give that dignity any longer to the Pope. The facts are, that he did nothing of the kind. He asserted the old temporal headship which Adrian had recognized in Charlemagne and the Nicene Fathers in Constantine; nothing but what Gregory the Great had recognized in the miserable Phocas; nothing but what the Popes long afterwards allowed the Gallicans to recognize in Louis XIV.; nothing but what, though just then eclipsed by legatine assumptions, had been steadily kept up and maintained down to these very times by the law of the land. Again, this head

ship, or supremacy," was never the Pope's, for his supremacy had never been recognized in any way, theologically or legally. It was still maintained that Christ was the only Supreme Head of the Church, and nothing but temporalities admitted of any earthly supremacy. Accordingly, the headship of Henry was limited when the whole convocation voted as follows (nemine contradicente): "Of the English Church and clergy, we recognize his Majesty as the singular protector and only supreme governor, and so far as the law of Christ permits, even the supreme head." How far was that? No further than had been conceded to Constantine as episcopus ab extra. The unreformed Henry and his daughter Mary used this form; but when we come to Elizabeth and to the theological restoration, she herself objected to its ambiguity. It then received its true interpretation in the only form that has been lawful for three centuries: the English sovereign is simply styled "supreme governor over all persons and in all causes, ecclesiastical as well as civil." And this was precisely what, during the entire Paparchy, the English kings had always legally claimed and been able to defend against Rome by laws of Church and State.

34. WHO DID THIS?

And here let us recall the fact, that all this was done by the unreformed Church of England. Henry was himself as much a Papist as the late Victor Emmanuel. But he and many divines had

fallen back on the old idea of a papal primacy, under the ancient canons, and were determined to restrict the Pope to what he had been before the days of Nicholas. So utterly undefined, indeed, had the chimera been through all the Middle Ages, that there was now room for all manner of theories as to what the Pope should be. They who restored the King's rights to govern his own kingdom without foreign meddling differed widely as to the position to which the Papacy was now replaced; but Gardyner and Bonner themselves voted for this measure. The Paparchy was at an end, but nobody yet dreamed of detachment from the Papacy. And all this was done under Archbishop Warham, who died in full communion with Rome. To quote a recent writer, himself of that communion:

"It was done in a solemn convocation, a reverend array of bishops, abbots, and dignitaries, in orphreyed copes and jewelled mitres. Every great cathedral, every diocese, every abbey, was duly represented in that important synod. ... One venerable prelate (Fisher) protests; his remonstrance is unsupported by his colleagues, and he is speedily brought to trial and execution. Ignorantly do we charge this on the Protestant system, which was not even broached at this time. His accusers, judges, jury, his executioner all Catholics; the bells are ringing for mass as he ascends the scaffold."

This is all true. I venerate old Bishop Fisher, and Sir Thomas More no less.1 They would have abhorred the late Vatican Council: they believed in a theoretical papacy, and they were never "Roman Catholics."

1 See Note A"".