d the Pope's authority to be guilty of _praemunire_,
imposing an oath of renunciation on all lay and clerical officers, and
making the refusal of that oath high treason. Thus the hopes of a
reaction built on the fall of those "apostles of the new sect," Anne
Boleyn and her relatives, were promptly and roughly destroyed.

[Footnote 975: Parliament prefered to risk the
results of Henry's nomination to the risk of civil
war, which would inevitably have broken out had
Henry died in 1536. Hobbes, it may be noted, made
this power of nomination an indispensable attribute
of the sovereign, and if the sovereign be
interpreted as the "King in Parliament" the theory
is sound constitutionalism and was put in practice
in 1701 as well as in 1536. But the limitations on
Henry's power of bequeathing the crown have
generally been forgotten; he never had power to
leave the crown away from Edward VI., that is, away
from the only heir whose legitimacy was undisputed.
The later acts went further, and entailed the
succession upon Mary and Elizabeth unless Henry
wished otherwise--which he did not. The preference
of the Suffolk to the Stuart line may have been due
to (1) the common law forbidding aliens to inherit
English land (_cf. L. and P._, vii., 337); (2) the
national dislike of the Scots; (3) a desire to
intimate to the Scots that if they would not unite
the two realms by the marriage of Edward and Mary,
they should not obtain the English crown by
inheritance.]

Henry's position had been immensely strengthened alike by the death of
Catherine of Aragon and by the fall of Anne Boleyn; and on both
occasions he had expressed his appreciation of the fact in the most
indecent and heartless manner. He was now free to marry whom he liked,
and no objection based on canon or on any other law could be raised to
the legitimacy of his future issue; whether the Pope could dispense or
not, it made no difference to Edward VI.'s claim to the throne. The
fall of Anne Boleyn, in spite of some few rumours tha