sons who for the moment were competent to hold them. The
jealousy of ecclesiastical encroachments, which had shown itself so
bitterly under the Plantagenets, had been superseded from the accession of
Henry VII. by a policy of studied conciliation, and the position of Wolsey
had but symbolised the position of his order. But Wolsey was now gone, and
the ecclesiastics who had shared his greatness while they envied it, were
compelled to participate also in his change of fortune.

This great minister, after the failure of a discreditable effort to fasten
upon him a charge of high treason,--a charge which, vindictively pressed
through the House of Lords, was wisely rejected by the Commons,--had been
prosecuted with greater justice for a breach of the law, in having
exercised the authority of papal legate within the realm of England. His
policy had broken down: he had united against him in a common exasperation
all orders in the state, secular and spiritual; and the possible
consequences of his adventurous transgression had fallen upon him. The
parliaments of Edward I., Edward III., Richard II., and Henry IV. had by a
series of statutes pronounced illegal all presentations by the pope to any
office or dignity in the Anglican church, under penalty of a premunire; the
provisions of these acts extending not only to the persons themselves who
accepted office under such conditions, but comprehending equally whoever
acknowledged their authority, "their executors, procurators, fautors,
maintainers, and receivers."[287] The importance attached to these laws was
to be seen readily in the frequent re-enactment of them, with language of
increasing vehemence; and although the primary object was to neutralise the
supposed right of the pope to present to English benefices, and although
the office of papal legate is not especially named in any one of the
prohibitory clauses, yet so acute a canonist as Wolsey could not have been
ignorant that it was comprehended under the general denunciation. The 5th
of the 16th of Richard II. was in fact explicitly universal in its
language, and dwelt especially on the importance of prohibiting the
exercise of any species of jurisdiction which could encroach on the royal
authority. He had therefore consciously violated a law on his own
responsibility, which he knew to exist, but which he perhaps trusted had
fallen into desuetude, and would not again be revived. It cannot be denied
that in doing so, being at t