Note (back) — Chapter XV

The King had more to do with the Necessary Doctrine, commonly called the "King's Book" to distinguish it from the Bishops' Book of 1537, for which Henry had declined all responsibility. Henry, indeed, had urged on its revision, he had fully discussed with Cranmer the amendments he thought the book needed, and he had brought the bishops to an agreement, which they had vainly sought for three years by themselves. It was the King who now "set forth a true and perfect doctrine for all his people".[1149] So it was fondly styled by his Council. A modern high-churchman[1150] asserts that the King's Book taught higher doctrine than the book which the bishops had drafted six years before, but that "it was far more liberal and better composed". Whether its excellences amounted to "a true and perfect doctrine" or not, it failed of its purpose. The efforts of the old and the new parties were perpetually driving the Church from the Via Media, which Henry marked out. On the one hand, we have an act limiting the use of the Bible to gentlemen and their families, and plots to catch Cranmer in the meshes of the Six Articles.[1151] On the other, there were schemes on the part of some of the Council to entrap Gardiner, and we have Cranmer's assertion[1152] that, in the last months of his reign, the King commanded him to pen a form for the alteration of the Mass into a Communion, a design obviously to be connected with the fact that, in his irritation at Charles's desertion in 1544, and fear that his neutrality might become active hostility, Henry had once more entered into communication with the Lutheran princes of Germany.[1153]