Note 500 — INDEX.

Footnote 500: Although the circumstances of the time called properly for an open declaration of this kind on the part of Cranmer, yet every one of his predecessors, from the time of Edward I., must have been inducted with a tacit understanding of the same kind. If a bishop had been prosecuted under the Statutes of Provisors, his oath to the Papacy would have been no more admitted as an excuse by the Plantagenet sovereigns, than the oath of a college Fellow to obey the statutes of the founder would have saved him from penalties under the House of Hanover had he said mass in his college chapel. Because Cranmer, foreseeing an immediate collision between two powers, which each asserted claims upon him, expressed in words a qualification which was implied in the nature of the case—it was, and is (I regret to be obliged to speak in the present tense), but a shallow sarcasm to taunt him with premeditated perjury.(Back to Main Text)