CHAPTER V
REIGN OF HENRY VIII. (continued)
After the enumeration of the actual legislative measures affecting the Church contained in the last chapter, let us now endeavour to take stock of the entire amount of those changes, and to see how far the position of the Church at the end of Henry's reign differed from what it was at the time when Wolsey fell. This will be a question of the more interest, in that we know there are writers, on the one hand, who will tell us that the true Reformation in England was complete at his death, and that the subsequent changes have been for the most part for the worse; and, on the other hand, some who consider that the real Reformation was in his time hardly begun, and that what he had established was merely popery without the pope. Here it is before all things necessary to bear in mind the distinction already pointed out between the separation from Rome and the reformation of doctrine. The separation from Rome was as complete years before the end of Henry's reign as it ever has been since. The Act of Appeals (24 Hen. VIII. c. 12); the Act for the submission of the clergy (25 Hen. VIII. c. 19); the Act restraining the payment of annates (25 Hen. VIII. c. 20); and that restraining the payment of Peter's-pence and other exactions of the Pope (25 Hen. VIII. c. 21)—had put a stop to all the existing relations between the Church
