254 THE AGE OF HAPSBURG ASCENDENCY immunities, whether these were threatened by the Crown or by the pope. Henry vm. regarded himself as a theological expert and a champion of orthodoxy, and he would have nothing to say to the reformed doctrines. But the pope would not annul his marriage with Katharine of Aragon, since Charles v. her nephew championed her cause. Therefore Henry resolved to take the bull by the horns and repudiate papal authority. Therein he found support from bishop and clergy, though not from monks and friars. When he proceeded to declare himself head of the Church, the clergy carried protest as far as they dared, but were The compelled to submit. The king also wanted money, Monasteries. anc j had exhausted the normal means of raising it. The Church was enormously wealthy, and he went on to despoil it, suppressing the monasteries and appropriating their lands on the pretext, for which there was evidence in some cases, that most of them were not seminaries of religion, but hot-beds of vice. There his so-called reformation stopped. But the attack on the power and political wealth of the Church inevitably sapped its authority, and prepared the way for an attack on the theological doctrines on which the claims of priestly authority rested. Henry was no sooner dead than the council which governed the country in the minority of his son Edward vi. introduced Reformation cnan g es m doctrines and ceremonial derived from and Lollardy, or from the Lutherans, or from the Swiss Reaction. schools of reformers ; the clergy for the most part accepted the situation. But the young king died, and was suc- ceeded by his elder half-sister Mary. She was a fervent devotee of the old faith, restored the old doctrines and the old cere- monial again with the general acquiescence of the clergy, and then began a persecution of the Protestants, in the course of which some three hundred were burnt at the stake, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cranmer. The persecution turned the scale, for hitherto it had been extremely doubtful whether popular opinion was on the Protestant or the Roman Catholic side; and when Mary was succeeded by Elizabeth in 1558 the country on the whole welcomed a reversion to the Protestantism of the last reign. Incidentally, the Reformation in England had had the effect of creating in the
