"A.D. 1537. A heresy and a new error broke out in England, the effects of pride, vainglory, avarice, sensual desire, and the prevalence of a variety of scientific and philosophical speculations, so that the people of England went into opposition to the pope and to Rome. At the same time they followed a variety of opinions, and the old law of Moses, after the manner of the Jewish people, and they gave the title of Head of the Church of God to the king. There were enacted by the king and council new laws and statutes after their own will." But the laws and statutes enacted by the king and council in England, for changing the national religion, were not immediately either extended to, or proposed for imitation in, Ireland. The zeal of the crowned apostle was tempered by the exigencies of the politician. Before this king's time, the English power in Ireland had been essentially a colonial power; "a pale" or enclosure, or garrison. Whoever will not mark the point, will miss the very pivot of all the operations of the new religion in Ireland. Henry VIII. had inherited from his father, the first king of united England for a century, the ambition of making himself equally master of the neighboring nation. During the twenty years of the sway of his great cardinal-chancellor, this object never was for a moment lost sight of. When Wolsey went down to the grave in disgrace without seeing it fulfilled, his royal pupil continued to prosecute the plan to its entire accomplishment. This result, however, he only reached in the thirty-second year of his reign, (1541,) some six years before his miserable end. Ten years previously, (1531,) he may be said to have established the new religion in England by compelling the majority of the clergy to subscribe to his supremacy in spirituals; within two years followed his marriage with Anne Boleyn; and in 1535, his order appeared commanding the omission "of the name of the Bishop of Rome from every liturgical book," which may be said to have completed the severance of England from Rome.