Footnote 931: Defensor Pacis, ii., 6.[(back)]
Footnote 932: A much neglected but very important constitutional question is whether the King quâ Supreme Head of the Church was limited by the same statute and common law restrictions as he was quâ temporal sovereign. Gardiner raised the question in a most interesting letter to Protector Somerset in 1547 (Foxe, vi., 42). It had been provided, as Lord Chancellor Audley told Gardiner, that no spiritual law and no exercise of the royal supremacy should abate the common law or Acts of Parliament; but within the ecclesiastical sphere there were no limits on the King's authority. The Popes had not been fettered, habent omnia jura in suo scrinio; and their jurisdiction in England had been transferred whole and entire to the King. Henry was in fact an absolute monarch in the Church, a constitutional monarch in the State; he could reform the Church by injunction when he could not reform the State by proclamation. There was naturally a tendency to confuse the two capacities not merely in the King's mind but in his opponents'; and some of the objections to the Stuarts' dispensing practice, which was exercised chiefly in the ecclesiastical sphere, seem due to this confusion. Parliament in fact, as soon as the Tudors were gone, began to apply common law and statute law limitations to the Crown's ecclesiastical prerogative.[(back)]
Footnote 933: L. and P., viii., 52; Rymer, xiv., 549.[(back)]
Footnote 934: The general idea that Fisher and More were executed for refusing to take an oath prescribed in the Act of Supremacy is technically inaccurate. No oath is there prescribed, and not till 1536 was it made high treason to refuse to take the oath of supremacy; even then the oath was to be administered only to civil and ecclesiastical officers. The Act under which they were executed was 26 Henry VIII., c. 13, and the common mistake arises from a confusion between the oath to the succession and the oath of supremacy.[(back)]
Footnote 935: L. and P., viii., 876.[(back)]
Footnote 936: L. and P., iv., 6199; vi., 1164, 1249. He told Chapuys that if Charles invaded England he would be doing "a work as agreeable to God as going against the Turk," and suggested that the Emperor should make use of Reginald Pole "to whom, according to many, the kingdom would belong" (Chapuys to Charles, 27th September, 1533). Again, says Chapuys, "the holy Bishop of Rochester would like you to take active measures immediately, as I wrote in my last; which advice he has sent to me again lately to repeat" (10th October, 1533). Canon Whitney, in criticising Froude (Engl. Hist. Rev., xii., 353), asserts that "nothing Chapuys says justifies the charge against Fisher!"[(back)]
Footnote 937: This statement has been denounced as "astounding" in a Roman Catholic periodical; yet if More believed individual conscience (i.e., private judgment) to be superior to the voice of the Church, how did he differ from a Protestant? The statement in the text is merely a paraphrase of More's own, where he says that men are "not bound on pain of God's displeasure to change their conscience for any particular law made anywhere except by a general council or a general faith growing by the working of God universally through all Christian nations" (More's English Works, p. 1434; L. and P., vii., 432).[(back)]
Footnote 938: Οὑ γἁρ τἱ μοι Ζευς ἡν ὁ κηρυξας τἁδε
οὑδ ἡ ξὑνοικος τὡν κἁτω θεὡν Δἱκη
Sophocles, Antigone, 450.[(back)]
Footnote 939: L. and P., vii., 83.[(back)]
Footnote 940: Ibid., x., 28, 59, 60, 141.[(back)]