withered his arm, and the feeble
lightnings flickered in harmless insignificance, they consented to withdraw
their watchfulness, and his supremacy was silently allowed as an innocent
superstition. It existed as some other institutions exist at the present
day, with a merely nominal authority; with a tacit understanding, that the
power which it was permitted to retain should be exerted only in conformity
with the national will.

Under these conditions the Tudor princes became loyal subjects to the Holy
See, and so they would have willingly remained, had not Clement, in an evil
hour for himself, forgotten the terms of the compact. He laid upon a legal
fiction a strain which his predecessors, in their palmiest days, would have
feared to attempt; and the nation, after grave remonstrance, which was only
received with insults, exorcised the chimaera with a few resolute words for
ever. The parliament, in asserting the freedom of England, carefully chose
their language. They did not pass a new law, but they passed an act
declaratory merely of the law which already existed, and which they were
vindicating against illegal encroachment. "Whereas," says the Statute of
Appeals, "by divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles, it is
manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is an empire,
and so hath been accepted in the world; governed by one supreme head and
king, having the dignity and royal estate of the imperial crown of the
same; unto whom a body politic compact of all sorts and degrees of people,
divided in terms by names of spiritualty and temporalty, be bound and ought
to bear, next to God, a natural and humble obedience: he being also
institute and furnished by the goodness and sufferance of Almighty God with
plenary, whole, and entire power, pre-eminence and authority, prerogative
and jurisdiction, to render and yield justice and final determination to
all manner of folk resident or subject within this his realm, without
restraint or provocation to any foreign prince or potentate of the world:
the body spiritual whereof having power when any cause of the law divine
happened to come in question, or of spiritual learning, [such cause being]
declared, interpret, and shewed by that part of the body politic called the
spiritualty, now usually called the English church; (which also hath been
reported and also found of that sort, that both for knowledge, integrity,
and sufficiency of numbers, it hath bee