[Footnote 924: These were not actually created till 1540; the way in which Henry VIII. sought statutory authority for every conceivable thing is very extraordinary. There seems no reason why he could not have created these bishoprics without parliamentary authority.] Henry was now Pope in England with powers no Pope had possessed.[925] The Reformation is variously regarded as the liberation of the (p. 326) English Church from the Roman yoke it had long impatiently borne, as its subjection to an Erastian yoke which it was henceforth, with more or less patience, long to bear, or as a comparatively unimportant assertion of a supremacy which Kings of England had always enjoyed. The Church is the same Church, we are told, before and after the change; if anything, it was Protestant before the Reformation, and Catholic after. It is, of course, the same Church. A man may be described as the same man before and after death, and the business of a coroner's jury is to establish the identity; but it does not ignore the vital difference. Even Saul and Paul were the same man. And the identity of the Church before and after the legislation of Henry VIII. covers a considerable number of not unimportant changes. It does not, however, seem strictly accurate to say that Henry either liberated or enslaved the Church. Rather, he substituted one form of despotism for another, a sole for a dual control; the change, complained a reformer, was merely a _translatio imperii_.[926] The democratic movement within the Church had died away, like the democratic movements in national and municipal politics, before the end of the fifteenth century. It was never merry with the Church,[927] complained a Catholic in 1533, since the time when bishops were wont to be chosen by the Holy Ghost and by their Chapters. [Footnote 925: With limitations, of course. Henry's was only a _potestas jurisdictionis_ not a _potestas ordinis_ (see Makower, _Const. Hist. of the Church of England_, and the present writer's _Cranmer_, pp. 83, 84, 95, 232, 233). Cranmer acknowledged in the King also a _potestatem ordinis_, just as Cromwell would have made him the sole legislator in temporal affairs; Henry's unrivalled capacity for judging what he could and could not do saved him from adopting either suggestion.] [Footnote 926: _L. and P._, XIV., ii., p. 141.] [Footnote 927: _Ibid._, vi., 797 [2]; a Venetian declared that Huguenotism was "due to the abolition of the election of the clergy" (Armstrong, _Wars of Religion_, p. 11).]