manner, spiritual authority, or jurisdiction ought or may lawfully be reformed, repressed, ordered, redressed, corrected, restrained, or amended, most to the pleasure of Almighty God, the increase of virtue in Christ's religion, and for the conservation of the peace, unity, and tranquillity of this realm, any usage, custom, foreign laws, foreign authority, prescription, or any other thing or things to the contrary hereof notwithstanding.'
Not only, as has been so often observed, was the quasi-saving clause 'quantum per Christi legem licet,' with which the members of Convocation had attempted to gild the bitter pill which they were enforced to swallow, omitted in the Act which became the law of the land equally to layman and to clerk, but so comprehensive are the terms used, so entire is the absorption of the powers of all 'manner of spiritual authority' into the prerogative of the Crown, that we feel that it justified to the full, and if possible even more than justified, the language already quoted from the Spanish ambassador when the subject was in debate in Convocation three and a half years before, that it was 'in effect as much as if they had declared him (the King) Pope of England.' This is in fact, though not in name, what both the Convocation and the Parliament had done; it is what Henry VIII. fully intended that they should do. Pope of England he was, and Pope of England he remained, and so did his successors after him; and though Edward, from the necessity of his age, and Elizabeth from a certain sense of personal dignity and the fitness of things, placed their papal authority, if I may say so, 'in commission,' neither of them dreamed of abdicating it. It continued on, less vigorously exercised, but not always less offensively asserted, through
