m raising this difficulty was
the transfer of judgment from the partial tribunal of Clement to a broader
court. The pope could not, of course, adjudicate on the extent of his own
powers; especially as he always declared himself to be ignorant of the law;
and the decision of so general a question rested either with a general
council, or must be determined by the consent of Christendom, obtained in
some other manner. If such general consent declared against the pope, the
cause was virtually terminated. If there was some approach to a consent
against him, or even if there was general uncertainty, Henry had a legal
pretext for declining his jurisdiction, and appealing to a council.

Thomas Cranmer, then a doctor of divinity at Cambridge,[251] is said to
have been the person who suggested this ingenious expedient, and to have
advised the king, as the simplest means of carrying it out, to consult in
detail the universities and learned men throughout Europe. His notorious
activity in collecting the opinions may have easily connected him with the
origination of the plan, which probably occurred to many other persons as
well as to him; but whoever was the first adviser, it was immediately acted
upon, and English agents were despatched into Germany, Italy, and France,
carrying with them all means of persuasion, intellectual, moral, and
material, which promised to be of most cogent potency with lawyers'
convictions.

This matter was in full activity when the Earl of Wiltshire, Anne Boleyn's
father, with Cranmer, the Bishop of London, and Edward Lee, afterwards
Archbishop of York, was despatched to Bologna to lay Henry's remonstrances
before the emperor, who was come at last in person to enjoy his miserable
triumph, and receive from the pope the imperial crown. Sir Nicholas Carew,
who had been sent forward a few weeks previously, described in piteous
language the state to which Italy had been reduced by him. Passing through
Pavia, the English emissary saw the children crying about the streets for
bread, and dying of hunger; the grapes in midwinter rotting on the vines,
because there was no one to gather them; and for fifty miles scarcely a
single creature, man or woman, in the fields. "They say," added Carew, "and
the pope also showed us the same, that the whole people of that country,
with divers other places in Italia, with war, famine, and pestilence, are
utterly dead and gone."[252] Such had been the combined work of the vanity