or ever.

[Sidenote: April 4. Dissolution of the parliament, and summary of its
labours.]

So closed the first great parliament of the Reformation, which was now
dissolved. The Lower House is known to us only as an abstraction. The
debates are lost; and the details of its proceedings are visible only in
faint transient gleams. We have an epitome of two sessions in the Lords'
Journals; but even this partial assistance fails us with the Commons;
and the Lords in this matter were a body of secondary moment. The Lords
had ceased to be the leaders of the English people; they existed as an
ornament rather than a power; and under the direction of the council
they followed as the stream drew them, when individually, if they had so
dared, they would have chosen a far other course. The work was done by
the Commons; by them the first move was made; by them and the king the
campaign was carried through to victory. And this one body of men, dim
as they now seem to us, who assembled on the wreck of the administration
of Wolsey, had commenced and had concluded a revolution which had
reversed the foundations of the State. They found England in dependency
upon a foreign power; they left it a free nation. They found it under
the despotism of a church establishment saturated with disease; and they
had bound the hands of that establishment; they had laid it down under
the knife, and carved away its putrid members; and stripping off its
Nessus robe of splendour and power, they had awakened in it some forced
remembrance of its higher calling. The elements of a far deeper change
were seething; a change, not in the disposition of outward authority,
but in the beliefs and convictions which touched the life of the soul.
This was yet to come; and the work so far was but the initial step or
prelude leading up to the more solemn struggle. Yet where the enemy who
is to be conquered is strong, not in vital force, but in the prestige of
authority, and in the enchanted defences of superstition, those truly
win the battle who strike the first blow, who deprive the idol of its
terrors by daring to defy it.

NOTES:

[480] The English archbishops were embarrassed by the statutes of
provisors in applying for plenary powers to Rome. If they accepted
commissions they accepted them at their peril, and were compelled to
caution in their manner of proceeding.

[481] 27 Hen. VIII. cap. 28. The statute says that many visitations had
been made in the two hu