ction and from the necessities of their position; they needed the
support of the Church to bolster up a weak title to the crown. The
civil wars followed; and Henry VII. was too much absorbed in securing
his throne to pursue any quarrels with Rome. But when his son began to
rule as well as to reign, it was inevitable that not merely questions
of Church property and of the relations with the Papacy should come up
for revision, but also those issues between Church and State which had
remained in abeyance during the fifteenth century. The divorce was the
spark which ignited the flame, but the combustible materials had been
long existent. If the divorce had been all, there would have been no
Reformation in England. After the death of Anne Boleyn, Henry (p. 233)
might have done some trifling penance at his subjects' expense, made
the Pope a present, or waged war on one of Clement's orthodox foes,
and that would have been the end. Much had happened since the days of
Hildebrand, and Popes were no longer able to exact heroic repentance.
The divorce, in fact, was the occasion, and not the cause, of the
Reformation.

* * * * *

That movement, so far as Henry VIII. was concerned, was not in essence
doctrinal; neither was it primarily a schism between the English and
Roman communions. It was rather an episode in the eternal dispute
between Church and State. Throughout the quarrel, Henry and Elizabeth
maintained that they were merely reasserting their ancient royal
prerogative over the Church, which the Pope of Rome had usurped.
English revolutions have always been based on specious conservative
pleas, and the only method of inducing Englishmen to change has been
by persuasions that the change is not a change at all, or is a change
to an older and better order. The Parliaments of the seventeenth
century regarded the Stuart pretensions, as Henry and Elizabeth did
those of the Pope, in the light of usurpations upon their own
imprescriptible rights; and more recently, movements to make the
Church Catholic have been based on the ground that it has never been
anything else. The Tudor contention that the State was always supreme
over the Church has been transformed into a theory that the Church was
always at least semi-independent of Rome. But it is not so clear that
the Church has always been anti-papal, as that the English laity have
always been anti-clerical.

The English people were certainly very