fits, and commodities to the said dignity belonging, with
full power to visit, repress, redress, reform, and amend all such errors,
heresies, abuses, contempts, and enormities, which by any manner of
spiritual authority or jurisdiction might or may lawfully be reformed."

[Sidenote: The Vicar-General]

The full import of the Act of Supremacy was only seen in the following
year. At the opening of 1535 Henry formally took the title of "on earth
Supreme Head of the Church of England," and some months later Cromwell was
raised to the post of Vicar-General or Vicegerent of the king in all
matters ecclesiastical. His title, like his office, recalled the system of
Wolsey. It was not only as Legate but in later years as Vicar-General of
the Pope that Wolsey had brought all spiritual causes in England to an
English court. The supreme ecclesiastical jurisdiction in the realm passed
into the hands of a minister who as Chancellor already exercised its
supreme civil jurisdiction. The Papal power had therefore long seemed
transferred to the Crown before the legislative measures which followed
the divorce actually transferred it. It was in fact the system of
Catholicism itself that trained men to look without surprise on the
concentration of all spiritual and secular authority in Cromwell.
Successor to Wolsey as Keeper of the Great Seal, it seemed natural enough
that Cromwell should succeed him also as Vicar-General of the Church and
that the union of the two powers should be restored in the hands of a
minister of the king. But the mere fact that these powers were united in
the hands not of a priest but of a layman showed the new drift of the
royal policy. The Church was no longer to be brought indirectly under the
royal power; in the policy of Cromwell it was to be openly laid prostrate
at the foot of the throne.

[Sidenote: Subjection of the Bishops]

And this policy his position enabled him to carry out with a terrible
thoroughness. One great step towards its realization had already been
taken in the statute which annihilated the free legislative powers of the
convocations of the Clergy. Another followed in an act which under the
pretext of restoring the free election of bishops turned every prelate
into a nominee of the king. The election of bishops by the chapters of
their cathedral churches had long become formal, and their appointment had
since the time of the Edwards been practically made by the Papacy on the
nomination