thority, and the basis upon which he built his own
supremacy over the Church.

[Footnote 740: _Cf. ibid._, iv., App. 1.]

This anti-ecclesiastical bias on the part of the laity was the
dominant factor in the Reformation under Henry VIII. But the word in
its modern sense is scarcely applicable to the ecclesiastical policy
of that King. Its common acceptation implies a purification of
doctrine, but it is doubtful whether any idea of interfering with
dogma ever crossed the minds of the monarchs, who, for more than a
generation, had been proclaiming the need for a reformation. Their
proposal was to reform the practice of the clergy; and the method they
favoured most was the abolition of clerical privileges and the
appropriation of ecclesiastical property. The Reformation in England,
so far as it was carried by Henry VIII., was, indeed, neither more nor
less than a violent self-assertion of the laity against the immunities
which the Church had herself enjoyed, and the restraints which she
imposed upon others. It was not primarily a breach between the Church
of England and the Roman communion, a repudiation on the part of
English ecclesiastics of a harassing papal yoke; for it is fairly
obvious that under Henry VIII. the Church took no measures against
Rome that were not forced on it by the State. It was not till the
reigns of Edward VI. and Elizabeth that the Church accorded a consent,
based on conviction, to a settlement originally extorted by force. The
Reformation was rather a final assertion by the State of its authority
over the Church in England. The breach with the Roman Church, the
repudiation of papal influence in English ecclesiastical affairs, was
not a spontaneous clerical movement; it was the effect of the (p. 268)
subjection of the Church to the national temporal power. The Church in
England had hitherto been a semi-independent part of the political
community. It was semi-national, semi-universal; it owed one sort of
fealty to the universal Pope, and another to the national King. The
rising spirit of nationality could brook no divided allegiance; and
the universal gave way to the national idea. There was to be no
_imperium in imperio_, but "one body politic,"[741] with one Supreme
Head. Henry VIII. is reported by Chapuys as saying that he was King,
Emperor and Pope, all in one, so far as England was concerned.[742]
The Church was to be nationalised; it was to compromise its universal
c