had been
the main object of Henry's efforts during the closing years of his
reign, and the imperial idea was a dominant note in Henry's mind. No
king was more fond of protesting that he wore an imperial crown and
ruled an imperial realm. When, in 1536, Convocation declared England
to be "an imperial See of itself," it only clothed in decent and
formal language Henry's own boast that he was not merely King, but
Pope and Emperor, in his own domains. The rest of Western Europe was
under the temporal sway of Caesar, as it was under the spiritual sway
of the Pope; but neither to one nor to the other did Henry owe any
allegiance.[1012]

[Footnote 1011: Odet de Selve, _Corresp. Pol._, p.
268.]

[Footnote 1012: This was part of the revived
influence of the Roman Civil Law in England which
Professor Maitland has sketched in his _English
Law and the Renaissance_, 1901. But the influence
of these ideas extended into every sphere, and not
least of all into the ecclesiastical. Englishmen,
said Chapuys, were fond of tracing the King's
imperial authority back to a grant from the Emperor
Constantine--giving it thus an antiquity as great
and an origin as authoritative as that claimed for
the Pope by the false _Donation of Constantine_
(_L. and P._, v., 45; vii., 232). This is the
meaning of Henry's assertion that the Pope's
authority in England was "usurped," not that it was
usurped at the expense of the English national
Church, but at the expense of his prerogative. So,
too, we find instructive complaints from a
different sort of reformers that the reformation as
effected by Henry VIII. was merely a _translatio
imperii_ (_ibid._, XIV., ii., 141). Henry VIII.'s
encouragement of the civil law was the natural
counterpart of the prohibition of its study by Pope
Honorius in 1219 and Innocent IV. in 1254 (Pollock
and Maitland, i., 102, 103).]

For the word "imperial" itself he had shown a marked (p. 363)
predilection from his earliest day