first step towards such an end was the freeing the monarchy from its
spiritual obedience to Rome. What the first of the Tudors had done for the
political independence of the kingdom, the second was to do for its
ecclesiastical independence. Henry the Seventh had freed England from the
interference of France or the House of Burgundy; and in the question of
the divorce Cromwell saw the means of bringing Henry the Eighth to free it
from the interference of the Papacy. In such an effort resistance could be
looked for only from the clergy. But their resistance was what Cromwell
desired. The last check on royal absolutism which had survived the Wars of
the Roses lay in the wealth, the independent synods and jurisdiction, and
the religious claims of the church; and for the success of the new policy
it was necessary to reduce the great ecclesiastical body to a mere
department of the State in which all authority should flow from the
sovereign alone, his will be the only law, his decision the only test of
truth. Such a change however was hardly to be wrought without a struggle;
and the question of national independence in all ecclesiastical matters
furnished ground on which the crown could conduct this struggle to the
best advantage. The secretary's first blow showed how unscrupulously the
struggle was to be waged. A year had passed since Wolsey had been
convicted of a breach of the Statute of Praemunire. The pedantry of the
judges declared the whole nation to have been formally involved in the
same charge by its acceptance of his authority. The legal absurdity was
now redressed by a general pardon, but from this pardon the clergy found
themselves omitted. In the spring of 1531 Convocation was assembled to be
told that forgiveness could be bought at no less a price than the payment
of a fine amounting to a million of our present money, and the
acknowledgement of the king as "the chief protector, the only and supreme
lord, and Head of the Church and Clergy of England." Unjust as was the
first demand, they at once submitted to it; against the second they
struggled hard. But their appeals to Henry and Cromwell met only with
demands for instant obedience. A compromise was at last arrived at by the
insertion of a qualifying phrase "So far as the law of Christ will allow";
and with this addition the words were again submitted by Warham to the
Convocation. There was a general silence. "Whoever is silent seems to
consent," said the Archbis