[Footnote 917: "The Lord Cromwell," says Bishop Gardiner, "had once put in the King our late sovereign lord's head, to take upon him to have his will and pleasure regarded for a law; for that, he said, was to be a very King," and he quoted the _quod principi placuit_ of Roman civil law. Gardiner replied to the King that "to make the laws his will was more sure and quiet" and "agreeable with the nature of your people". Henry preferred Gardiner's advice (Foxe, ed. Townsend, vi., 46).] [Footnote 918: _L. and P._, vii., 483, 647.] [Footnote 919: _Ibid._, vii., 522.] [Footnote 920: _Ibid._, vii., 665.] [Footnote 921: _Ibid._, vii., 499.] [Footnote 922: _Ibid._, vii., 841, 856. The order had been particularly active in opposition to the divorce (_ibid._, iv., 6156; v., 266.)] In November Parliament[923] reinforced the Act of Succession by laying down the precise terms of the oath, and providing that a certificate of refusal signed by two commissioners was as effective as the indictment of twelve jurors. Other acts empowered the King to repeal by royal proclamation certain statutes regulating imports and exports. The first-fruits and tenths, of which the Pope had been already (p. 325) deprived, were now conferred on the King as a fitting ecclesiastical endowment for the Supreme Head of the Church. That title, granted him four years before by both Convocations, was confirmed by Act of Parliament; its object was to enable the King as Supreme Head to effect the "increase of virtue in Christ's Religion within this Realm of England, and to repress and extirp all Errors, Heresies and other Enormities, and Abuses heretofore used in the same". The Defender of the Faith was to be armed with more than a delegate power; he was to be supreme in himself, the champion not of the Faith of any one else, but of his own; and the qualifying clause, "as far as the law of Christ allows," was omitted. His orthodoxy must be above suspicion, or at least beyond the reach of open cavil in England. So new treasons were enacted, and any one who called the King a heretic, schismatic, tyrant, infidel, or usurper, was rendered liable to the heaviest penalty which the law could inflict. As an earnest of the royal and parliamentary desire for an increase of virtue in religion, an act was concurrently passed providing for the creation of a number of suffragan bishops.[924] [Footnote 923: _Ibid._, vii., 1377.]