ther,
and subordinate both to the King. The Tudors, and especially Elizabeth,
vehemently denied to their Parliaments any share in their ecclesiastical
powers. Their supremacy over the Church was their own, and, as a
really effective control, it died with them. As the authority of the
Crown declined, its secular powers were seized by Parliament; (p. 330)
its ecclesiastical powers fell into abeyance between Parliament and
Convocation. Neither has been able to vindicate an exclusive claim to
the inheritance; and the result of this dual claim to control has been
a state of helplessness, similar in some respects to that from which
the Church was rescued by the violent methods of Henry VIII.[932]

[Footnote 932: A much neglected but very important
constitutional question is whether the King _qua_
Supreme Head of the Church was limited by the same
statute and common law restrictions as he was _qua_
temporal sovereign. Gardiner raised the question in
a most interesting letter to Protector Somerset in
1547 (Foxe, vi., 42). It had been provided, as Lord
Chancellor Audley told Gardiner, that no spiritual
law and no exercise of the royal supremacy should
abate the common law or Acts of Parliament; but
within the ecclesiastical sphere there were no
limits on the King's authority. The Popes had not
been fettered, _habent omnia jura in suo scrinio_;
and their jurisdiction in England had been
transferred whole and entire to the King. Henry was
in fact an absolute monarch in the Church, a
constitutional monarch in the State; he could
reform the Church by injunction when he could not
reform the State by proclamation. There was
naturally a tendency to confuse the two capacities
not merely in the King's mind but in his
opponents'; and some of the objections to the
Stuarts' dispensing practice, which was exercised
chiefly in the ecclesiastical sphere, seem due to
this confusion. Parliament in fact, as soon as the
Tudors were gone, began to apply commo