pe's
malediction, there were great numbers who would follow the Duke's advice
and make Popes of the King and Bishops, all to have the divorce case tried
in England.[85] The Queen was afraid of pressing her appeal, fearing that
if the Commons in Parliament heard that the King had been summoned to
Rome, measures injurious to her might easily be proposed and carried.[86]
Even the Duke of Norfolk was not satisfactory. He professed to be devoted
to the Emperor; he said he would willingly have lost a hand so that the
divorce question should never have been raised; but it was an affair of
theology and canon law, and he had not meddled with it. If the Emperor
had remained neutral, instead of interfering, it would have been sooner
settled.[87]

But, for the instant, the interests of the people of England were fixed on
a subject more immediately close to them. The sins of the clergy had at
last found them out. They pretended to be a supernatural order, to hold
the keys of heaven and hell, to be persons too sacred for ordinary
authority to touch. Their vices and their tyranny had made them and their
fantastic assumptions no longer bearable, and all Europe was in revolt
against the scandals of the Church and Churchmen. The ecclesiastical
courts, as the pretended guardians of morality, had the laity at their
mercy; and every offence, real or imaginary, was converted into an
occasion of extortion. The courts were themselves nests of corruption;
while the lives and habits of the order which they represented made
ridiculous their affectations of superiority to common men. Clement's
conduct of the divorce case was only a supreme instance of the methods in
which the clerical tribunals administered what they called justice. An
authority equally oblivious of the common principles of right and wrong
was extended over the private lives and language of every family in
Catholic Christendom. In England the cup was full and the day of reckoning
had arrived. I have related in the first volume of my history of the
period the meeting of the Parliament of 1529, and I have printed there the
Petition of the Commons to the Crown, with the Bishops' reply to it.[88] I
need not repeat what has been written already. A few more words are
needed, however, to explain the animosity which broke out against Wolsey.
The great Cardinal was the living embodiment of the detested
ecclesiastical domination, and a representation in his own person of the
worst abuses co