Page:Church and State under the Tudors.djvu/94

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CHURCH AND STATE UNDER THE TUDORS

portant questions touching the precise relations between the Crown and the Papacy. On mediæval theory the King is a spiritual son of the Pope, and the Pope may be the King's superior in things spiritual only, or in things temporal and spiritual alike.'

The mediæval popes had grasped after, and to a great extent obtained, power over matters which, if they belonged to the borderland of spiritual and temporal at all, belonged almost more to the latter than to the former; and the constant effort of the kings had been to limit this borderland as narrowly as possible; and this, and nothing more than this, is, and was always at the time, supposed to be the scope of the antipapal legislation of the Plantagenet and Lancastrian Kings. Henry VIII. took a bolder and a different course, and, ignoring to a great extent the distinction between spiritual and temporal, made himself, with the connivance of Parliament and the forced acquiescence of Convocation, the supreme arbiter of both, and thus, as Chapuys called him, 'Pope of England.'

To this year belong also one or two other matters which, though not directly affecting the relations of Church and State, serve to throw some light upon them. On February 24, just six months before his death, Archbishop Warham drew up his famous protest against all enactments made against the Pope's authority or the ecclesiastical privileges of the Church of Canterbury. The same archbishop, who but a few months before had, in his capacity of president of the Upper House of Convocation, put to the vote the submission of the clergy, and as a peer of Parliament had been involved in the whole of the antipapal legislation, now, in his own palace at Lambeth, with the full consciousness that death is at hand, and feeling that the hopes