d
ceremonies, was deferred to the reign of Edward VI.[1147] The greatest
of all these compositions, the Litany, was, however, sanctioned in
1545.[1148]

[Footnote 1144: _L. and P._, xvi., 819; Burnet,
iv., 509.]

[Footnote 1145: _L. and P._, xvi., 978, 1022,
1027.]

[Footnote 1146: _Ibid._, xvi., 1262; xvii., 176.]

[Footnote 1147: See the present writer's _Cranmer_,
pp. 166-72.]

[Footnote 1148: _Ibid._, pp. 172-75.]

The King had more to do with the _Necessary Doctrine_, commonly called
the "King's Book" to distinguish it from the Bishops' Book of 1537,
for which Henry had declined all responsibility. Henry, indeed, had
urged on its revision, he had fully discussed with Cranmer the
amendments he thought the book needed, and he had brought the bishops
to an agreement, which they had vainly sought for three years by
themselves. It was the King who now "set forth a true and perfect
doctrine for all his people".[1149] So it was fondly styled by (p. 418)
his Council. A modern high-churchman[1150] asserts that the King's
Book taught higher doctrine than the book which the bishops had
drafted six years before, but that "it was far more liberal and better
composed". Whether its excellences amounted to "a true and perfect
doctrine" or not, it failed of its purpose. The efforts of the old and
the new parties were perpetually driving the Church from the _Via
Media_, which Henry marked out. On the one hand, we have an act
limiting the use of the Bible to gentlemen and their families, and
plots to catch Cranmer in the meshes of the Six Articles.[1151] On the
other, there were schemes on the part of some of the Council to entrap
Gardiner, and we have Cranmer's assertion[1152] that, in the last
months of his reign, the King commanded him to pen a form for the
alteration of the Mass into a Communion, a design obviously to be
connected with the fact that, in his irritation at Charles's desertion
in 1544, and fear that his neutrality might become active hostility,
Henry had once more entered into communication with the Lutheran
princes of Germany.[1153]

[Footnote 1149: _L. and P._, XVIII., i., 534.]

[Footnote 1150: Canon Dixon.]

[Footnote 1151: See the present writer's _Cranmer_,
pp. 144-60.]