Parliament met in November 1529 and passed many acts against clerical
exactions, mortuaries, probate dues and pluralities, which evoked a
passionate protest from Bishop Fisher: "Now, with the Commons," he cried
in the House of Lords, "is nothing but 'Down with the Church.'" During
1530 Henry's agents were busy abroad making that appeal on the divorce
to the universities which Cranmer had suggested. In 1531 the clergy in
convocation, terrified by the charge of _praemunire_ brought against
them for recognizing Wolsey's legatine authority, paid Henry a hundred
and eighteen thousand pounds and recognized him as supreme head of the
church so far as the law of Christ would allow. The details of this
surrender were worked out by king and Commons in 1532; but Gardiner and
More secured the rejection by the Lords of the bill in which they were
embodied, and it was not till 1533, when More had ceased to be
chancellor and Gardiner to be secretary, that a parliamentary statute
annihilated the independent legislative authority of the church. An act
was, however, passed in 1532 empowering the king, if he thought fit, to
stop the payment of annates to Rome. Henry suspended his consent in
order to induce the pope to grant Cranmer his bulls as archbishop of
Canterbury where he succeeded Warham late in 1532. The stratagem was
successful, and Henry cast off all disguise. The act of annates was
confirmed; another prohibiting appeals to Rome and providing for the
appointment of bishops without recourse to the papacy was passed; and
Cranmer declared Henry's marriage with Catherine null and void and that
with Anne Boleyn, which had taken place about January 25, 1533, valid.
Anne was crowned in June, and on the 7th of September the future Queen
Elizabeth was born. At length in 1534 Clement VII. concluded the case at
Rome, pronouncing in favour of Catherine's marriage, and drawing up a
bull of excommunication against Henry and his abettors. But he did not
venture to publish it; public opinion in England, while hostile to the
divorce, was not in favour of the clergy or the pope, and the rivalry
between Charles V. and Francis I. was too bitter to permit of joint, or
even isolated, action against Henry. Charles was only too anxious to
avoid the duty of carrying out the pope's commands, and a year later he
was once more involved in war with France. Henry was able to deal
roughly with such manifestations as Elizabeth Barton's visions, and in
the autumn of 1534 to obtain from parliament the Act of Supremacy which
transferred to him the juridical, though not the spiritual, powers of
the pope. No penalties were attached to this act, but another passed in
the same session made it treason to attempt to deprive the king of any
of his titles, of which supreme head of the church was one, being
incorporated in the royal style by letters patent of January 1535.
Fisher and More were executed on this charge; they had been imprisoned
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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