And he made himself despotic in the Church no less; for that was the final end of that path on which he made the first step when he divorced Catherine and married Anne in defiance of Rome. For first came thunders, ever louder and louder, from Rome, answered by ever louder defiance. It was defiance that was not displeasing to a large number in England. Already, before any of the ideas of the Reformation were introduced, we have noticed England growing restive under the attempts of the Popes of Rome to dictate to her. We may be sure that this restiveness had been increased of later years. Some of the clergy {49} themselves, as we have seen, were none too pleased at the demands which Rome made upon them for money for Turkish wars, or for the building of St. Peter's Cathedral. They were the less pleased, because of a strong suspicion that it never was intended to use the money for the purposes stated. Henry, therefore, and his powerful and ruthless counsellor were able to turn this dissatisfaction to their own use. The clergy were very ready to support Henry in asserting that the English Church was not to be subservient to Rome. Even the bishops in the Upper House probably thought that they were doing a good work for the freedom of the Church when they passed the Act called the Act of Supremacy which made the King of England head of the English Church. That Church was indeed freed, by the Act, from the authority of Rome, but it was only to put it under another authority, the authority of the English king. And it gave equally little offence to the majority of the clergy when the king drove the monks from their monasteries, and took their land and its revenues for the service of the Crown or gave them to his friends. The good work of the monasteries had been done, and they had passed the time of their usefulness, for their inmates no longer studied to acquire knowledge, nor imparted it to the laity and their children. Only in the north of England did their suppression rouse opposition and lead to a dangerous rising which the Crown's forces put down with great severity. But education had been spreading in England, as elsewhere in Christendom, in spite of the religious troubles. The new opening of the ancient stores of classical literature, and their diffusion by the printing press, could scarcely fail to arouse the interest of men of intelligence. The spirit of protest against Rome which Luther {50} preached had this, at least, in common with the spirit in which Henry of England acted, that both were bitterly and even violently opposed to the Pope's claim of authority. So this spirit of the Reformation made its way in England without encountering the difficulties which it had met in other parts of Europe. The clergy, who, in an earlier reign, would have opposed it, had now become subject, in part by their own act, to the King of England rather than to the Pope of Rome. Protestantism was accepted as the State religion.