l
reformation, but he could have gone no farther than the Pope, who gave
him his authority, permitted. Had the Church in England transgressed
that limit, it would have become dead in schism, and Wolsey's
jurisdiction would have _ipso facto_ ceased. Hence the fundamental (p. 270)
impossibility of Wolsey's scheme; hence the ultimate resort to the
only alternative, a reformation by the temporal sovereign, which
Wycliffe had advocated and which the Anglicans of the sixteenth
century justified by deriving the royal supremacy from the authority
conceded by the early Fathers to the Roman Emperor--an authority prior
to the Pope's.

[Footnote 743: _Cf._ Maitland, _Roman Canon Law_;
Pollock and Maitland, _History of English Law_, i.,
90 (Bracton regards the Pope as the Englishman's
"Ordinary"); and Leadam, _Select Cases from the
Star Chamber_, Introd., pp. lxxxvi.-viii.]

[Footnote 744: _L. and P._, v., 1247. A curious
point about this document, unnoticed by the editor,
is that the Bishop of St. Asaph had been
consecrated as far back as 1518, and that he was
the Standish who had played so conspicuous a part
in the early Church and State disputes of Henry's
reign. This is an echo of the "Investiture"
controversy (Luchaire, _Manuel_, pp. 509, 510).]

Hence, too, the agency employed was Parliament and not
Convocation.[745] The representatives of the clergy met of course as
frequently as those of the laity, but their activity was purely
defensive. They suggested no changes themselves, and endeavoured
without much success to resist the innovations forced upon them by
King and by Parliament. They had every reason to fear both Henry and
the Commons. They were conscious that the Church had lost its hold
upon the nation. Its impotence was due in part to its own corruption,
in part to the fact that thriving commercial and industrial classes,
like those which elected Tudor Parliaments, are as a rule impatient of
religious or at least sacerdotal dictation. God and Mammon, in spite
of all efforts at compromise, do not really agree. In 1529, before the
meeting of Parliament, Campeggio had appealed to Henry to prevent the
ruin of the Church; he felt that without State protection the Church
could ha