In April 1535 Henry issued a mandate which declared that “sundry persons both religious and secular, priests and curates, daily set forth and extol the jurisdiction and authority of the Bishop of Rome, otherwise called Pope, sowing their pestilential and false doctrine, praying for him in the pulpit, making him a god, illuding and seducing our subjects, and bringing them into great errors, sedition and evil opinions, more preserving the power, laws and jurisdiction of the said bishop than the most holy laws and precepts of Almighty God.” Any person offending in this way was to be apprehended at once and committed to prison without bail until the King’s pleasure in his case was known[25]. Royal letters were sent out on 1 June 1535 to all the bishops to command them to declare the King’s new title in their sermons every Sunday, and to cause their clergy to do the same. The name of the Bishop of Rome was to be erased from all services and mass books. This was followed on the 3rd by an “Order for preaching and bidding of the beads in all sermons to be made within the realm.” The Pope and the Cardinals of Rome were no longer to be named in the bidding of the beads. The prayers were to be “for the whole Catholic Church and for the Catholic Church of the realm; for the King, only Supreme Head of the Catholic Church of England, for Queen Anne and the Lady Elizabeth, for the whole clergy and temporality, and especially for such as the preacher might name of devotion; for the souls of the dead, and specially of such as it might please the preacher to name.” Every preacher was ordered to preach against the usurped power of the Bishop of Rome, and they were to abstain for one year from any reference to purgatory, honouring of saints, marriage of priests, pilgrimages, miracles[26]. The shock which this measure gave to the nation will be to some extent illustrated in the following chapters. It struck at the very foundations of the existing creed. The papal authority was not always popular in England,—men grumbled at the Pope, sneered at him, criticised him,—but that he was the only supreme head of Christianity was as firmly believed and as confidently accepted as that the sun rose in the east. When simple country priests were called upon to deny weekly a proposition which they had never before dreamed of questioning, they and their congregations might well think that the foundations of society were giving way, and their worst fears seemed to be realised by the Act for the Suppression of the Smaller Monasteries, passed in the following year[27]. It is not necessary to repeat the well-known story of Henry’s dealings with the monasteries, and the whole of the following work is a commentary on it. In the same year the privileges of the palatinate of Durham and other exempted districts were abolished[28].