ry had
already suffered in this way, and would yet suffer.[113]

The tendency of men's minds in this direction showed itself also in
the understanding come to on the chief question of all.

Parliament renewed its complaints of the abuses in the ecclesiastical
legislation, and learned men brought out clearly the want of any
divine authority to justify it; at last the bishops virtually
renounced their right of special legislation, and pledged themselves
for the future not to issue any kind of Ordinance or Constitution
without the King's knowledge and consent. A revision of the existing
canons by a mixed commission, under the presidentship of their common
head, the King, was to restore the unity of legislation.

The clause was then necessarily omitted by which the recognition of
the Crown's supremacy over the clergy had been hitherto limited. The
defenders of the secular power put forth the largest claims. They
said, the King has also the charge of his subjects' souls, the
Parliament is divinely empowered to make ordinances concerning them
also.[114]

So a consolidation of public authority grew up in England, unlike
anything which had yet been seen in the West. One of the great
statutes that followed begins with the preamble that England is a
realm to which the Almighty has given all fulness of power, under one
supreme head, the King, to whom the body politic has to pay natural
obedience, next after God; that this body consists of clergy and
laity; to the first belongs the decision in questions of the divine
law and things spiritual, while temporal affairs devolve on the laity;
that one jurisdiction aids the other for the due administration of
justice, no foreign intervention is needed. This is the Act by which,
for these very reasons, legal appeals to Rome were abolished. It was
now possible to carry out what in previous centuries had been
attempted in vain. All encroachments on the prerogative of the
'Imperial Crown' were to be abolished, the supreme jurisdiction of the
Roman Curia was to be valid no longer; appeals to Rome were not only
forbidden but subjected to penalties.

The several powers of the realm united to throw off the foreign
authority which had hitherto influenced them, and which limited the
national independence, as being itself a higher power.

As the oaths taken by the bishops were altered to suit these statutes,
the King set himself to modify his coronation oath also in the same
sense. He would