Note (back) — Chapter X

In this, as in other respects, the King and his Parliament were in the fullest agreement. Henry had already given proof of his anti-clerical bias by substituting laymen for churchmen in those great offices of State which churchmen had usually held. From time immemorial the Lord Chancellor had been a Bishop,[752] but in 1529 Wolsey was succeeded by More, and, later on, More by Audley. Similarly, the privy seal had been held in Henry's reign by three bishops successively, Fox, Ruthal and Tunstall: now it was entrusted to the hands of Anne Boleyn's father, the Earl of Wiltshire. Gardiner remained secretary for the time, but Du Bellay thought his power would have increased had he abandoned his clerical vows,[753] and he, too, was soon superseded by Cromwell. Even the clerkship of Parliament was now given up to a layman. During the first half of Henry's reign clerical influence had been supreme in Henry's councils; during the second it was almost entirely excluded. Like his Parliament, he was now impugning the jurisdiction of the clergy in the matter of heresy; they were doctors, he said, of the soul, and had nothing to do with the body.[754] He was even inclining to the very modern theory that marriage is a civil contract, and that matrimonial suits should therefore be removed from clerical cognisance.[755] As early as 1529 he ordered Wolsey to release the Prior of Reading, who had been imprisoned for Lutheranism, "unless the matter is very heinous".[756] In 1530 he was praising Latimer's sermons;[757] and in the same year the Bishop of Norwich complained of a general report in his diocese that Henry favoured heretical books.[758] "They say that, wherever they go, they hear that the King's pleasure is that the New Testament in English shall go forth." There seems little reason to doubt Hall's statement that Henry now commanded the bishops, who, however, did nothing, to prepare an English translation of the Bible to counteract the errors of Tyndale's version.[759] He wrote to the German princes extolling their efforts towards the reformation of the Church;[760] and many advisers were urging him to begin a similar movement in England. Anne Boleyn and her father were, said Chapuys, more Lutheran than Luther himself; they were the true apostles of the new sect in England.[761]