ing down the last constitutional force
which could hold the Monarchy in check. What he really did was to give
life and energy to new forces which were bound from their very nature to
battle with the Monarchy for even more than the old English freedom.
When Cromwell seized on the Church he held himself to be seizing for the
Crown the mastery which the Church had wielded till now over the
consciences and reverence of men. But the very humiliation of the great
religious body broke the spell beneath which Englishmen had bowed. In
form nothing had been changed. The outer constitution of the Church
remained utterly unaltered. The English bishop, freed from the papal
control, freed from the check of monastic independence, seemed greater
and more imposing than ever. The priest still clung to rectory and
church. If images were taken out of churches, if here and there a
rood-loft was pulled down or a saint's shrine demolished, no change was
made in form of ritual or mode of worship. The mass was untouched. Every
hymn, every prayer, was still in Latin; confession, penance, fastings
and feastings, extreme unction, went on as before. There was little to
show that any change had taken place; and yet every ploughman felt that
all was changed. The bishop, gorgeous as he might be in mitre and cope,
was a mere tool of the king. The priest was trembling before heretics he
used to burn. Farmer or shopkeeper might enter their church any Sunday
morning to find mass or service utterly transformed. The spell of
tradition, of unbroken continuance, was over; and with it the power
which the Church had wielded over the souls of men was in great part
done away.

It was not that the new Protestantism was as yet formidable, for,
violent and daring as they were, the adherents of Luther were few in
number, and drawn mostly from the poorer classes among whom Wyclifite
heresy had lingered or from the class of scholars whose theological
studies drew their sympathy to the movement over sea. It was that the
lump was now ready to be leavened by this petty leaven, that men's hold
on the firm ground of custom was broken and their minds set drifting and
questioning, that little as was the actual religious change, the thought
of religious change had become familiar to the people as a whole. And
with religious change was certain to come religious revolt. The human
conscience was hardly likely to move everywhere in strict time to the
slow advance of Henry's reform