With the Reformation as a political movement, the Franciscans had more sympathy. A large section of them had, long before this, taught the supremacy of the State over the Church in all things political[760]; they approved in principle the confiscation of Church-property for the common good[761]; and Friar Henry Standish, in defending the claim of the temporal courts to try and punish criminous clerks, together with the broad principles on which that claim rested, was only applying to present circumstances the time-honoured traditions of his Order[762]. It is true that the Friars of the Observance resisted the royal supremacy in 1534. But the supremacy claimed by Henry VIII went beyond anything asserted by his predecessors, involving, as it did in effect, the establishment of a lay jurisdiction superior to all ecclesiastical courts _in spiritualibus_ as well as _in temporalibus_, constituting Henry ‘a king with a pope in his belly’[763]. The Franciscans at Oxford seem, like most of the religious, to have accepted the supremacy in this extended form and to have taken the oath without demur: at least there is no evidence to the contrary[764]. The oath administered to the monks and friars involved an acknowledgment, not only of the royal supremacy, but of the lawfulness of Henry’s divorce from Katharine and marriage with Anne Boleyn, and a promise to preach the same on every occasion[765]. The attitude of the Oxford Franciscans to the divorce, so far as it can be ascertained, may be briefly stated here. Henry attached great importance to securing a decision in favour of his divorce from the chief universities of Europe. The divorce became the all-absorbing topic at Oxford; and individual Minorites took a prominent part in the discussions. But the convent as a whole did not present a united front. Dr. Thomas Kirkham, a Franciscan, is mentioned as one of the Doctors of Divinity who opposed the divorce and were ready to write against it[766]. Dr. Kynton seems to have been on the same side at first[767]; Archbishop Warham complained of his having spread calumnious reports about himself in connexion with the ‘King’s matter,’ and demanded his punishment. But it is doubtful whether in the end Kynton had the courage of his opinions; he was one of the committee of three appointed by the theological faculty to decide the question with the assistance of thirty other members to be nominated by the smaller committee[768]. This body subsequently issued, in the name of the University, the qualified declaration in favour of the King, the tenour of which is well-known.