the Pope and his successors; that they should suffer no wrong by any means with his advice, consent, or connivance, that their counsel he would not discover, their regality he would help, maintain and defend, against all men; their rights, honours, privileges, authorities, he would augment and promote; and any designs against the same, which came to his knowledge, he would resist and denounce:--to the King, that he would thenceforward utterly forsake all clauses, words, sentences, grants which he had or should have hereafter from the Pope’s Holiness in virtue of his bishopric that in any wise were or might be prejudicial to his Highness, his heirs, successors, dignity, privilege, or estate royal; that to him and his he would be faithful and true, and live and die with him against all people; that he acknowledged himself to hold his bishopric of him only, and accordingly besought of him the restitution of the temporalities of the same.[236] Now to be impaled on one or other of the horns of such an alternative as this was a cruel situation into which no man ought to have been forced; and though it is an easy thing for an indifferent spectator at a distance to philosophise upon the unseemly writhings of the victim, yet some allowance will be made for him by every pitiful-hearted observer if, in his struggles to get off the hook, he should chance to uncover his nakedness. The question indeed, resolved itself into this; were there, or were there not, to be bishops in England? for if none would take the oaths who could not acquiesce in both of them to the letter, and if none were to be admitted to consecration who refused either of the oaths, the order of prelates was at an end.[237] On the 30th March, 1533, Cranmer was consecrated by the Bishops of Lincoln, Exeter, and St. Asaph; and in the May following (the convocation having declared the King’s marriage with Katharine unlawful) he publicly pronounced the sentence of their separation; and about the same time confirmed by another judgment, the match with Ann Bullen. Thus was he now fairly embarked in the same boat with the King, and the part he took in the transactions of these days was faithfully treasured up in the memory of Mary, and served at length (though not in the scriptural sense of the expression) to heap coals of fire upon his head. But however important such measures were in fact, they were doubly so in principle. The Pope had joined a King and Queen together as lawful man and wife; his right to do this is not only disputed, but denied; and the church of England, assuming an attitude of independence, rescinds his decision, and sets his authority at nought. This could not be passed over. Rome threatens the King with excommunication; and as the last ounce it is that breaks the camel’s back, so here the menace proved enough to try the question of papal claims upon England, and to effect the rejection of them for ever.