Footnote 1011: Odet de Selve, Corresp. Pol., p. 268.[(back)]
Footnote 1012: This was part of the revived influence of the Roman Civil Law in England which Professor Maitland has sketched in his English Law and the Renaissance, 1901. But the influence of these ideas extended into every sphere, and not least of all into the ecclesiastical. Englishmen, said Chapuys, were fond of tracing the King's imperial authority back to a grant from the Emperor Constantine—giving it thus an antiquity as great and an origin as authoritative as that claimed for the Pope by the false Donation of Constantine (L. and P., v., 45; vii., 232). This is the meaning of Henry's assertion that the Pope's authority in England was "usurped," not that it was usurped at the expense of the English national Church, but at the expense of his prerogative. So, too, we find instructive complaints from a different sort of reformers that the reformation as effected by Henry VIII. was merely a translatio imperii (ibid., XIV., ii., 141). Henry VIII.'s encouragement of the civil law was the natural counterpart of the prohibition of its study by Pope Honorius in 1219 and Innocent IV. in 1254 (Pollock and Maitland, i., 102, 103).[(back)]
Footnote 1013: Cromwell has a note in 1533, "for the establishing of a Council in the Marches of Wales" (L. and P., vi., 386), and there had been numerous complaints in Parliament about their condition (ibid., vii., 781). Henry was a great Unionist, though Separatist as regards his wives and the Pope.[(back)]
Footnote 1014: See an admirable study by Miss C.A.J. Skeel, The Council in the Marches of Wales, 1904. Cromwell's great constitutional idea was government by council rather than by Parliament; in 1534 he had a scheme for including in the King's Ordinary Council (not of course the Privy Council) "the most assured and substantial gentlemen in every shire" (L. and P., vii., 420; cf. his draft bill for a new court of conservators of the commonwealth and the more rigid execution of statutes, vii., 1611).[(back)]
Footnote 1015: L. and P., vii., 1554.[(back)]
Footnote 1016: Cf. Maitland, English Law and the Renaissance, p. 70; Lee to Cromwell: "if we should do nothing but as the common law will, these things so far out of order will never be redressed" (D.N.B., xxxii., 375; the letter is dated 18th July, 1538, by the D.N.B. and Maitland, but there is no letter of that date from Roland Lee in L. and P.; probably the sentence occurs in Lee's letter of 18th July, 1534, or that of 18th July, 1535 (L. and P., vii., 988, viii., 1058), though the phrase is not given in L. and P.).[(back)]
Footnote 1017: See R. Dunlop in Owens College Studies, 1901, and the Calendar of Carew MSS. and Calendar of Irish State Papers, vol. i.[(back)]
Footnote 1018: L. and P., xvi., 43, 77.[(back)]
Footnote 1019: L. and P., xvi., 28; cf. Leadam, Court of Requests, Selden Soc., Introd.[(back)]
Footnote 1020: Official Return of Members of Parliament, i., 369.[(back)]