of cardinals belonging to each
nationality to arrive at a fairly accurate indication of the peoples
who rejected papal pretensions. The nations most inadequately represented
in the college of cardinals broke away from Rome; those which remained
faithful were the nations which controlled in the present, or might
hope to control in the future, the supreme ecclesiastical power. Spain
and France had little temptation to abolish an authority which they
themselves wielded in turn; for if the Pope was a Spaniard to-day, he
might well be a Frenchman to-morrow. There was no absurdity in
Frenchmen or Spaniards ruling over the papal States; for France and
Spain already held under their sway more Italian territory than
Italian natives themselves. It was the subjection of the Pope to
French and Spanish domination that prejudiced his claims in English
eyes. His authority was tolerable so long as the old ideal of the
unity of Christendom under a single monarch retained its force, or
even so long as the Pope was Italian pure and simple. But when Italy
was either Spanish or French, and the Pope the chaplain of one or the
other monarch, the growing spirit of nationality could bear it no
longer; it responded at once to Henry's appeals against the claims of
a foreign jurisdiction.

It was a mere accident that the breach with Rome grew out of Spanish
control of the Pope. The separation was nearly effected more than (p. 232)
a century earlier, as a result of the Pope's Babylonish captivity in
France; and the wonder is, not that the breach took place when it did,
but that it was deferred for so long. At the beginning of the fifteenth
century all the elements were present but one for the ecclesiastical
revolution which was reserved for Henry VIII. to effect. The Papacy
had been discredited in English eyes by subservience to France, just
as it had in 1529 by subservience to Charles. Lollardy was more
powerful in England in the reign of Henry IV. than heresy was in the
middle of that of Henry VIII. There was as strong a demand for the
secularisation of Church property on the part of the lay peers and
gentry; and Wycliffe himself had anticipated the cardinal point of the
later movement by appealing to the State to reform the Church. But
great revolutions depend on a number of causes working together, and
often fail for the lack of one. The element lacking in the reign of
Henry IV. was the King himself. The Lancastrians were orthodox from
convi