to support the now prevalent theory of the national character of the Church in England during the Middle Ages, are to be found in the series of antipapal statutes enacted under the Plantagenet and later kings. The true explanation of these is that quoted above from Bishop Stubbs, and amounts to the fact that they were intended to prevent the encroachment of the popes into the region of temporal government. Even in this, as we have seen, they were not remarkably successful. They were continually infringed by the kings themselves, and sometimes by their subjects; they had an incurable tendency to fall into abeyance; and moreover they were all passed at a time in which the Papacy was in a state of depression, and as soon as it revived, under Martin V., they were almost forgotten—to such an extent, at least, that when Henry VIII. suddenly revived the Statute of Præmunire, no one knew what it meant, and he was able to attach to it just what value pleased him.
Under Henry VIII. all this was completely changed. On the fall of Wolsey, he undertook on his own account a reform of the Church, which ended in nothing short of a revolution. By an ingenious application of the Statute of Præmunire he drove the clergy into a submission to himself which was practically unconditional, and he induced Parliament, by a series of measures culminating in the Act of Appeals and the Act of Supremacy, to simply transfer the whole of the papal power from the Pope to himself and his successors.
These Acts for the first time made the Church in England a National Church; but, at the same time, they incurred the excommunication of the Pope, and made it also, in ecclesiastical parlance, schismatical.[1] Here
- ↑ It is worthy of notice that Ranke used the words 'schism' and 'schis-
