to take away the annates from the Pope, and also their petition to him (1) 'that the Church may enjoy her privileges,' (2) 'that the limits of Præmunire may be defined in Parliament,' (3) 'that as the clergy are much impoverished by recent Acts annulling the liberty of the Church and sanctiones canonicas, to the peril of the souls of those who made the Acts, in the framing of which they were not consulted, &c., that the same fathers whose business it is to declare the truth of the canons may provide a remedy.' This last is, and can be nothing else than, a formal and explicit disclaimer, on the part of the clergy, of all share in, and all responsibility for, the ecclesiastical legislation of Henry VIII.; so that we know not only that they did not originate it, but that they were not even asked to concur in it up to this time. The Act of Appeals and that for the apparel of the clergy (24 Hen. VIII. c. 12 and 13) in the following year do not appear to have been submitted to Convocation at all.
The legislation of the year 1534[1] was, as we have seen, that which completed the great schism which entirely divided the Anglican from the Roman Church, and which actually provoked the papal excommunication in the following year. The share which the clergy took in it appears to have been the passing of an abstract resolution to the effect that 'the Pope had no greater jurisdiction in the realm of England conferred on him by God in Holy Scripture than any other foreign Bishop,' and a concurrence in the Act for the Submission of the Clergy—the reduction into law of their own submission of two years before, made by them simply and almost avowedly with the knife at their throats in the trenchant shape of an indictment of Præmunire. Before Convoca-
- ↑ Stubbs, Appendix iv. p. 106.
