in the first place, a sense of the necessity of obtaining the licence of the civil powers for his proceedings, and, in the second, a truly remarkable forgetfulness of the fact that Wolsey, less than half a century earlier, had obtained the same licence to perform the same act, yet it had failed to shield him from the Præmunire, the very same law which the utmost efforts of Pole's friends in Parliament had failed to get repealed. But, whatever may be thought of the security, or the reverse, of Pole's position, it is clear that the English Church, so far as that mysterious entity was represented by Convocation, had got itself placed effectually between the upper and the nether millstone.
And now there remains but little more to be said of the relations of Church and State in Mary's reign. The Church in England now meant nothing but the Popish clergy, and of the Church in that sense of the word Mary was the abject slave: but Mary was a Tudor monarch, and a Tudor monarch could say, with as much truth as Louis XIV. a century later, 'L'etat c'est moi'; so that the whole country was delivered up to the tender mercies of the Popish clergy, and truly is it said that the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel. True, these saintly men would not embrue their hands in human blood; but they would, and they did, arrange with the State that from their judgment there should be no appeal, and that their convicts should die by the cruellest death which human wickedness has ever yet invented.
There are one or two matters connected with Mary's persecution which, although they do not come directly within the category of matters affecting the relations of Church and State, yet concerned those
