Note (back) — Chapter IX

The English people were certainly very anti-sacerdotal from the very beginning of Henry VIII.'s reign. In 1512 James IV. complained to Henry that Englishmen seized Scots merchants, ill-treated them, and abused them as "the Pope's men".[659] At the end of the same year Parliament deprived of their benefit of clergy all clerks under the rank of sub-deacon who committed murder or felony.[660] This measure at once provoked a cry of "the Church in danger". The Abbot of Winchcombe preached that the act was contrary to the law of God and to the liberties of the Church, and that the lords, who consented thereto, had incurred a liability to spiritual censures. Standish, warden of the Mendicant Friars of London, defended the action of Parliament, while the temporal peers requested the bishops to make the Abbot of Winchcombe recant.[661] They refused, and, at the Convocation of 1515, Standish was summoned before it to explain his conduct. He appealed to the King; the judges pronounced that all who had taken part in the proceedings against Standish had incurred the penalties of præmunire. They also declared that the King could hold a Parliament without the spiritual lords, who only sat in virtue of their temporalties. This opinion seems to have nothing to do with the dispute, but it is remarkable that, in one list of the peers attending the Parliament of 1515, there is not a single abbot.[662]