That movement, so far as Henry VIII. was concerned, was not in essence doctrinal; neither was it primarily a schism between the English and Roman communions. It was rather an episode in the eternal dispute between Church and State. Throughout the quarrel, Henry and Elizabeth maintained that they were merely reasserting their ancient royal prerogative over the Church, which the Pope of Rome had usurped. English revolutions have always been based on specious conservative pleas, and the only method of inducing Englishmen to change has been by persuasions that the change is not a change at all, or is a change to an older and better order. The Parliaments of the seventeenth century regarded the Stuart pretensions, as Henry and Elizabeth did those of the Pope, in the light of usurpations upon their own imprescriptible rights; and more recently, movements to make the Church Catholic have been based on the ground that it has never been anything else. The Tudor contention that the State was always supreme over the Church has been transformed into a theory that the Church was always at least semi-independent of Rome. But it is not so clear that the Church has always been anti-papal, as that the English laity have always been anti-clerical. The English people were certainly very anti-sacerdotal from the (p. 234) the very beginning of Henry VIII.'s reign. In 1512 James IV. complained to Henry that Englishmen seized Scots merchants, ill-treated them, and abused them as "the Pope's men".[659] At the end of the same year Parliament deprived of their benefit of clergy all clerks under the rank of sub-deacon who committed murder or felony.[660] This measure at once provoked a cry of "the Church in danger". The Abbot of Winchcombe preached that the act was contrary to the law of God and to the liberties of the Church, and that the lords, who consented thereto, had incurred a liability to spiritual censures. Standish, warden of the Mendicant Friars of London, defended the action of Parliament, while the temporal peers requested the bishops to make the Abbot of Winchcombe recant.[661] They refused, and, at the Convocation of 1515, Standish was summoned before it to explain his conduct. He appealed to the King; the judges pronounced that all who had taken part in the proceedings against Standish had incurred the penalties of _praemunire_. They also declared that the King could hold a Parliament without the spiritual lords, who only sat in virtue of their temporalties. This opinion seems to have nothing to do with (p. 235) the dispute, but it is remarkable that, in one list of the peers attending the Parliament of 1515, there is not a single abbot.[662] [Footnote 659: _L. and P._, i., 3320. In 1516 one Humphrey Bonner preached a sermon ridiculing the Holy See (_ibid._, ii., 2692).]