ancery, and not the Archbishop's Court,
was made the final resort for ecclesiastical appeals. The authority,
divided erstwhile between two, was concentrated in the hands of one;
and that one was thus placed in a far different position from that
which either had held before.

[Footnote 928: For one year, indeed, Cranmer
remained _legatus natus_, and by a strange anomaly
exercised a jurisdiction the source of which had
been cut off. Stokesley objected to Cranmer's use
of that style in order to escape a visitation of
his see, and Gardiner thought it an infringement of
the royal prerogative. It was abolished in the
following year.]

The change was analogous to that in Republican Rome from two consuls
to one dictator. In both cases the dictatorship was due to exceptional
circumstances. There had long been a demand for reform in the Church
in England as well as elsewhere, but the Church was powerless to
reform itself. The dual control was in effect, as dual controls often
are, a practical anarchy. The condition of the Church before the
Reformation may be compared with that of France before the Revolution.
In purely spiritual matters the Pope was supreme: the conciliar
movement of the fifteenth century had failed. The Pope had (p. 328)
gathered all powers to himself, in much the same way as the French
monarch in the eighteenth century had done; and the result was the
same, a formal despotism and a real anarchy. Pope and Monarch were
crushed by the weight of their own authority; they could not reform,
even when they wanted to. From 1500 to 1530 almost every scheme,
peaceful or bellicose, started in Europe was based on the plea that
its ultimate aim was the reform of the Church; and so it would have
continued, _vox et praeterea nihil_, had not the Church been galvanised
into action by the loss of half its inheritance.

In England the change from a dual to a sole control at once made that
control effective, and reform became possible. But it was a reform
imposed on the Church from without and by means of the exceptional
powers bestowed on the Supreme Head. Hence the burden of modern
clerical criticism of the Reformation. Objection is raised not so much
to the things that were done, as to the means by which they were
brought to pass, to the fact that the Church was forci