Реферат: Henry Viii 2 Essay Research Paper Henry

making every other kind of concession he might be able to maintain the

position he had assumed upon the more vital question of the divorce

conceded Bulls and pallium. But to benefit by them it was necessary that

Cranmer should take certain prescribed oaths of obedience to the Holy

See. He took the oaths, but committed to writing a solemn protest that he

considered the oaths in no way binding in conscience, a procedure which

even so prejudiced a historian as Mr. H.A. Fisher cannot refrain from

describing as a “signal dishonesty.” “If”, asks Dr. Lingard, “it be simony to

purchase spiritual office by money, what is it to purchase the same by

perjury?” The father of the new Church of England, and future compiler

of its liturgy, was not entering upon his functions under very propitious

auspices.

But the Church which was soon to be brought into being probably owes

even more to Thomas Cromwell than to its first archbishop. It is

Cromwell who seems to have suggested to Henry as a deliberate policy

that he should abolish the imperium in imperio, throw off the papal

supremacy, and make himself the supreme head of his own religion. This

was in fact the course which from the latter part of 1529 Henry

undeviatingly followed, though he did not at first go to lengths from which

there was no retreat. The first blow was struck at the clergy by involving

them in Wolsey’s praemunire. Some anti-clerical disaffection there had

always been, partly, no doubt, the remnants of Lollardy, as was instanced

in the case of Richard Hunne, 1515. This, of late years, had been a good

deal aggravated by the importation into England of Tyndale’s annotated

New Testament and other books of heretical tendency, which, though

prohibited and burnt by authority, still made their way among the people.

Henry and his ministers had, therefore, some popular support upon which

they could fall back, if necessary, in their campaign to reduce the clergy

to abject submission. At the beginning of 1531 the Convocation of