of ecclesiastical jurisdiction in the
English Church before the Reformation is an assertion of the
gravest import, which ought not to have been thus taken for
granted.... The fact really is this:--A modern opinion, which, by
force of modern circumstances, has of late gained great favour in
the Church of Rome, is here dated back and fastened upon ages to
whose fixed principles it was unknown and alien; and the case of
the Church of England is truly hard when the Papal authority of
the Middle Ages is exaggerated far beyond its real and historical
scope, with the effect only of fastening that visionary
exaggeration, through the medium of another fictitious notion of
wholesale transfer of the Papal privileges to the Crown, upon us,
as the true and legal measure of the Royal Supremacy.

It appears to me that he who alleges in the gross that the Papal
prerogatives were carried over to the Crown at the Reformation,
greatly belies the laws and the people of that era. Their
unvarying doctrine was, that they were restoring the ancient regal
jurisdiction, and abolishing one that had been usurped. But there
is no evidence to show that these were identical in themselves, or
co-extensive in their range. In some respects the Crown obtained
at that period more than the Pope had ever had; for I am not aware
that the Convocation required his license to deliberate upon
canons, or his assent to their promulgation. In other respects the
Crown acquired less; for not the Crown, but the Archbishop of
Canterbury was appointed to exercise the power of dispensation in
things lawful, and to confirm Episcopal elections. Neither the
Crown nor the Archbishop succeeded to such Papal prerogatives as
were contrary to the law of the land; for neither the 26th of
Henry VIII. nor the 2nd of Elizabeth annexed to the Crown all the
powers of correction and reformation which had been actually
claimed by the Pope, but only such as "hath heretofore been or may
lawfully be exercised or used." ... The "ancient jurisdiction,"
and not the then recently claimed or exercised powers, was the
measure and the substance of what the Crown received from the
Legislature; and, with those ancient rights for his rule, no
impartial man would say that the Crown was the source of
ecclesiastical jurisdiction according to the statutes of th