We must be on our guard against attaching too much significance to such legal enactments. It must be borne in mind that a good deal of this kind of lawmaking was not much more than giving statutory expression--often with brutal frankness--to what had long existed in fact. The royal authority had always been what the royal power had been able to make it, little under weak or indifferent kings, strong under masterful ones. The novelties after the period which is called “the Reformation” were in reality much slighter than is generally supposed. Henry VIII, when he exercised authority over the Church by virtue of the Act of Supremacy or in virtue of his title of “Supreme Head,” was not pressing much more hardly on the liberties of his subjects than he had done before the new title had been invented. The history of the Staffordshire monasteries in previous centuries shows abundantly that whenever the King desired he could exercise the most arbitrary control over the religious houses in all sorts of ways. The only effective check before the Reformation was, not “Papal authority,” or “ecclesiastical privileges,” or “religious immunities”--all these could be, and were, overridden and set aside,--but public opinion. Precisely the same check was influential afterwards and to much the same extent as formerly. The skill of Henry VIII and his ministers was shown in the way they won public opinion to their side or crushed it away out of sight. English history, and continental too, has shown again and again that the civil power can never be permanently restrained by “immunities” and “concordats.” The force of circumstances is always liable to be too strong for such artificial arrangements: the power of Parliament must, as a _force majeure_, be the final arbiter. It may, indeed, be argued that the statutes which seemed to place the English Church beneath the heel of the State, and which for three centuries have given the enemy occasion to blaspheme, gave her in reality a greater measure of freedom than many “unestablished” churches have enjoyed. It may almost be said that modern history has shown that the anxiety of Parliament to assert itself over a non-established church may be greater than over an established church, and that its powers may be exercised in the former case with greater tyranny and offensiveness than in the latter; it has also shown that the powers and titles claimed by King and Parliament in Tudor times were, after all, only “stage properties”: the same authority may be claimed, and the same deeds done, without them.