nd limited under the law of
the land, except what could not be taken from them--their special
privilege of administering the sacraments. Double loyalty to the Crown and
to the Papacy was thenceforward impossible. The Pope had attempted to
depose the King. The Act of Supremacy was England's answer.

But to enact a law was not enough. With Ireland in insurrection, with half
the nobles and more than half the clergy, regular and secular, in England
inviting a Spanish invasion, the King and Commons, who were in earnest in
carrying through the reforms which they had begun, were obliged to take
larger measures to distinguish their friends from their enemies. If the
Catholics had the immense majority to which they pretended, the
Constitution gave them the power of legitimate opposition. If they were
professing with their lips and sustaining with their votes a course of
policy which they were plotting secretly to overthrow, it was fair and
right to compel them to show their true colours. Therefore the Parliament
further enacted that to deny the royal supremacy--in other words, to
maintain the right of the Pope to declare the King deprived--should be
high treason, and the Act was so interpreted that persons who were open to
suspicion might be interrogated, and that a refusal to answer should be
accepted as an acknowledgment of guilt. In quiet times such a measure
would be unnecessary, and therefore tyrannical. _Facta arguantur dicta
impune sint._ In the face of Chapuys's correspondence it will hardly be
maintained that the reforming Government of Henry VIII. was in no danger.
The Statute of Supremacy must be judged by the reality of the peril which
it was designed to meet. If the Reformation was a crime, the laws by which
it defended itself were criminal along with it. If the Reformation was the
dawning of a new and brilliant era for Imperial England, if it was the
opening of a fountain from which the English genius has flowed out over
the wide surface of the entire globe, the men who watched over its early
trials and enabled the movement to advance, undishonoured and undisfigured
by civil war, deserve rather to be respected for their resolution than
reviled as arbitrary despots. To try the actions of statesmen in a time of
high national peril by the canons of an age of tranquillity is the highest
form of historical injustice.

The naked truth--and nakedness is not always indecent--was something of
this kind. A marriage with a br