npopular. So
violent was the indignation against Anne Boleyn that she hardly dared to
stir abroad. But popular feeling ran almost as bitterly against the
Papacy. The sight of an English king and an English queen pleading before
a foreign tribunal revived the old resentment against the subjection of
Englishmen to Papal courts. The helplessness of Clement in the grasp of
the Emperor recalled the helplessness of the Popes at Avignon in the grasp
of the kings of France. That Henry should sue for justice to Rome was
galling enough, but the hottest adherent of the Papacy was outraged when
the suit of his king was granted or refused at the will of Charles. It was
against this degradation of the Crown that the Statutes of Provisors and
Praemunire had been long since aimed. The need of Papal support to their
disputed title which had been felt by the Houses of Lancaster and York had
held these statutes in suspense, and the Legatine Court of Wolsey had
openly defied them. They were still however legally in force; they were
part of the Parliamentary tradition; and it was certain that Parliament
would be as ready as ever to enforce the independent jurisdiction of the
Crown.

[Sidenote: Hopes of the New Learning]

Not less significant was the attitude of the New Learning. On Wolsey's
fall the seals had been offered to Warham, and it was probably at his
counsel that they were finally given to Sir Thomas More. The chancellor's
dream, if we may judge it from the acts of his brief ministry, seems to
have been that of carrying out the religious reformation which had been
demanded by Colet and Erasmus while checking the spirit of revolt against
the unity of the Church. His severities against the Protestants,
exaggerated as they have been by polemic rancour, remain the one stain on
a memory that knows no other. But it was only by a rigid severance of the
cause of reform from what seemed to him the cause of revolution that More
could hope for a successful issue to the projects of reform which the
council laid before Parliament. The Petition of the Commons sounded like
an echo of Colet's famous address to the Convocation. It attributed the
growth of heresy not more to "frantic and seditious books published in the
English tongue contrary to the very true Catholic and Christian faith"
than to "the extreme and uncharitable behaviour of divers ordinaries." It
remonstrated against the legislation of the clergy in Convocation without
the king's