11. =The House of Commons and the Clergy. 1529.=--No king ever felt the importance of popularity like Henry, and the compassion which had been freely given to Catharine by the crowd, on her appearance in the Legatine Court, made it necessary for him to find support elsewhere. It had been Wolsey's policy to summon Parliament as seldom as possible. It was to be Henry's policy to summon it as frequently as possible. He no longer feared the House of Lords, and either he or Wolsey's late servant, Thomas Cromwell, an able and unscrupulous man, who rose rapidly in Henry's favour, perceived the use which might be made of the House of Commons. By his influence the king could carry the elections as he pleased, and when Parliament met in =1529= it contained a packed House of Commons ready to do the king's bidding. The members were either lawyers or country gentlemen, the main supports of the Tudor monarchy, and Henry strengthened his hold upon them by letting them loose on the special abuses which had grown up in the ecclesiastical courts. Lawyers and country gentlemen were very much what they had been in the fifteenth century, without large political ideas or fine spiritual perceptions; but now that they were relieved of the oppression of the great nobles they turned upon the clergy, who claimed fees and dues which they disliked paying, and who used the powers of the ecclesiastical tribunals to exact heavy payments for moral and spiritual offences. 12. =The Universities Consulted. 1530.=--Henry had as yet no thought of breaking with the Pope. He wanted to put pressure on him to make him do what he had come to regard as right. In =1530= he sent to the universities of Europe to ask their opinion on the question whether a marriage with a brother's widow was contrary to the law of God. The whole inquiry was a farce. Wherever Henry or his allies could bribe or bully the learned doctors, an answer was usually given in the affirmative. Wherever the Emperor could bribe or bully, then the answer was usually given in the negative. That the experiment should have been tried, however, was a proof of the strength of the spirit of the Renascence. A question of morals which the Pope hesitated to decide was submitted to the learning of the learned. 13. =The Clergy under a Præmunire. 1530-1531.=--Towards the end of =1530= Henry charged the whole clergy of England with a breach of the Statute of Præmunire by their submission to Wolsey's legatine authority. A more monstrous charge was never brought, as when that authority was exercised not a priest in England dared to offend the king by resisting it. When the Convocation of Canterbury met in =1531=, it offered to buy the pardon of the clergy by a grant of 100,000_l._, to which was afterwards added 18,000_l._ by the Convocation of York. Henry refused to issue the pardon unless the clergy would acknowledge him to be supreme head of the Church of England.