already noted, to have been at once the first suggestion for separation from Rome, and a spontaneous act of the clergy themselves; though others[1] and amongst them the late Mr. J. E. Green, not certainly a strong partisan of the Protestants, treat it, as it plainly was, as merely an attempt on their part to leave a position with some show of dignity, from which it was evident that they would otherwise have been ignominiously driven. There was also the famous complaint of the Commons[2] against the clergy, consisting of twelve articles, which formed the groundwork for most of the legislation of the session, and of which the first article was that 'canons were made in Convocation without royal assent, or lay assent, and in derogation of the royal authority.' And there was a petition of the clergy of the province of Canterbury to the King, containing four articles, of which the third ran thus: 'That as the clergy are much impoverished by recent Acts annulling the liberty of the Church, et sanctiones canonicas, to the peril of the souls of those who made the Acts, in the framing of which they were not consulted, and as these Acts are so capricious that it is difficult not to violate them, that the same fathers whose business it is to declare the truth of the canons may provide a remedy.'[3] The words of this petition might in themselves surely furnish a sufficient answer to the pretence that the clergy were in any sense free agents in the ecclesiastical legislation of Henry VIII. That legislation became, notwithstanding, the law of the land, and remains in a very great measure the law of
