Note (back) — Chapter X

This anti-ecclesiastical bias on the part of the laity was the dominant factor in the Reformation under Henry VIII. But the word in its modern sense is scarcely applicable to the ecclesiastical policy of that King. Its common acceptation implies a purification of doctrine, but it is doubtful whether any idea of interfering with dogma ever crossed the minds of the monarchs, who, for more than a generation, had been proclaiming the need for a reformation. Their proposal was to reform the practice of the clergy; and the method they favoured most was the abolition of clerical privileges and the appropriation of ecclesiastical property. The Reformation in England, so far as it was carried by Henry VIII., was, indeed, neither more nor less than a violent self-assertion of the laity against the immunities which the Church had herself enjoyed, and the restraints which she imposed upon others. It was not primarily a breach between the Church of England and the Roman communion, a repudiation on the part of English ecclesiastics of a harassing papal yoke; for it is fairly obvious that under Henry VIII. the Church took no measures against Rome that were not forced on it by the State. It was not till the reigns of Edward VI. and Elizabeth that the Church accorded a consent, based on conviction, to a settlement originally extorted by force. The Reformation was rather a final assertion by the State of its authority over the Church in England. The breach with the Roman Church, the repudiation of papal influence in English ecclesiastical affairs, was not a spontaneous clerical movement; it was the effect of the subjection of the Church to the national temporal power. The Church in England had hitherto been a semi-independent part of the political community. It was semi-national, semi-universal; it owed one sort of fealty to the universal Pope, and another to the national King. The rising spirit of nationality could brook no divided allegiance; and the universal gave way to the national idea. There was to be no imperium in imperio, but "one body politic,"[741] with one Supreme Head. Henry VIII. is reported by Chapuys as saying that he was King, Emperor and Pope, all in one, so far as England was concerned.[742] The Church was to be nationalised; it was to compromise its universal character, and to become the Church of England, rather than a branch of the Church universal in England.