Note (back) — Chapter XII

In England the change from a dual to a sole control at once made that control effective, and reform became possible. But it was a reform imposed on the Church from without and by means of the exceptional powers bestowed on the Supreme Head. Hence the burden of modern clerical criticism of the Reformation. Objection is raised not so much to the things that were done, as to the means by which they were brought to pass, to the fact that the Church was forcibly reformed by the State, and not freed from the trammels of Rome, and then left to work out its own salvation. But such a solution occurred to few at that time; the best and the worst of Henry's opponents opposed him on the ground that he was divorcing the Church in England from the Church universal. Their objection was to what was done more than to the way in which it was done; and Sir Thomas More would have fought the Reformation quite as strenuously had it been effected by the Convocations of Canterbury and York. On the other side there was equally little thought of a Reformation by clerical hands. Henry and Cromwell carried on and developed the tradition of the Emperor Frederick II. and Peter de Vinea,[929] of Philippe le Bel and Pierre Dubois, of Lewis the Bavarian and Marsiglio of Padua[930] who maintained the supremacy of the temporal over the spiritual power and asserted that the clergy wielded no jurisdiction and only bore the keys of heaven in the capacity of turnkeys.[931] It was a question of the national State against the universal Church. The idea of a National Church was a later development, the result and not the cause of the Reformation.