ious grounds.

Tunstall, coming up to attend Parliament, suffered himself to be
stopped by a letter from the king, dispensing with his presence.
Fisher alone offered opposition. He caused the royal supremacy to be
accepted with the proviso, "so far as the divine law permits." And as
this proved only a stepping-stone to the unconditional headship of the
Church, he regarded it as his own fault. He refused submission, and
put himself in communication with the Imperialists with a view to
effective intervention. Sir Thomas More, the most modern and original
mind among the men of his time, showed greater caution. He admitted
the right of Parliament to determine the succession, and made no
struggle for Mary Tudor, as he had made none for her mother. He did
not openly contest the royal supremacy until after sentence. Besides
these two, a large number of monks were executed during Cromwell's
ministry.

Having given up the Pope, the government had no ground for keeping the
religious orders. They did not belong to the primitive Church, and
some of them, Grey Friars and Black Friars, were an essential part of
the medieval system which was rejected with the papal authority. When
Rome was taken in 1527, and Clement a prisoner, Wolsey, with some
other cardinals, proposed that he should act as his vicar during
captivity, so that the Church should not be receiving orders from the
Emperor through the Pope. This proposal is a first glimpse of what
was now introduced. The idea of a middle course, between Rome and
Wittemberg, occurred easily to every constant reader of Erasmus; and
many divines of the fifteenth century suggested something similar.
What then prevailed was not a theological view, but a political view.
The sovereignty of the Modern State, uncontrolled by the opinions of
men, commanded the minds both of Cromwell and of Gardiner, rivals
though they were. Cromwell is the first public man known to have been
a student of Machiavelli's writings; and the first to denounce them
was his enemy, Reginald Pole. It is the advent of a new polity.
Gardiner believed in it, thinking that nothing else could save
Catholicism after the mismanagement of the Church in Germany. And it
is the dominant note of the following years, whichever party was
prevailing.

That is the broad distinction between the continental Reformation and
the contemporary event in England. The one was the strongest
religious movement in the history of Chri