Note 1194 — XXVI. THE ANGLICAN CHURCH.

Wilkins III. 778.—Strype, in his “Memorials of Cranmer,” Bk. I. Chap. 18, gives this proclamation as dated Nov. 16, in the 30th year of Henry VIII. which would place it in 1538, and Bishop Wilkins also prints (III. 696) from Harmer’s “Specimen of Errors” the same with unimportant variations, as “given this 16th day of November, in the 13th year of our reign,” which would place it in 1521. It is impossible, however, at a time when even the Lutherans of Saxony had scarcely ventured on the innovation, that in England priestly marriage could already have become as common as the proclamation shows it to be. The bull of Leo X., thanking Henry for his refutation of Luther, was dated Nov. 4th, 1521, and we may be sure that the king’s zeal for the faith would at such a moment have prompted him to much more stringent measures of repression, if he had ventured, at that epoch, to invade the sacred precincts of ecclesiastical jurisdiction—a thing he would have been by no means likely to do. The date of 1521 is therefore evidently an error.

For the same reasons I have been forced to reject a discussion in convocation of the same year (Wilkins III. 697), in which the question of sacerdotal marriage was decided triumphantly in the affirmative. The proceedings are evidently those of Dec. 1547, in the first year of Edward VI.