completed. Both bodies assembled again in November, for a short session of some six weeks.[1] Convocation was employed in a more or less unsuccessful crusade against heretical books, and in requesting the Archbishop to urge the King to put them down, and forbid religious controversy, and at the same time to have a correct translation of Holy Scripture made and 'delivered to the people for their instruction.'
The Archbishop, too, ordered that in formal documents the word 'metropolitanus' should be substituted in his title for the ancient style 'apostolicæ sedis legatus.'
All these are important matters; important less perhaps in themselves, or even in their consequences, great as some of these have been, than as indications of the ferment of opinion which was characteristic of the times, and as showing how, at one and the same time, while the ecclesiastical authorities were prepared to treat liberty of conscience at once as a chimera and a crime, they were themselves carried away by the irresistible current of antipapal reformation into taking the very measures—such as spreading a knowledge of Scripture amongst the people—which could not but lead directly to it. Meanwhile Parliament was wielding weapons more immediately trenchant and formidable. There were some nine Acts dealing roughly enough with ecclesiastical matters, and among them 26 Henry VIII. c. 2, the Act which compelled all the King's subjects to take an oath to submit to the arrangements made in the previous session for the succession to the Crown—an Act which is made famous, or infamous, by its having given the immediate occasion for two other Acts about the infamy of which posterity has had little doubt, viz. the Acts of attainder of Bishop Fisher and Sir Thomas More.
- ↑ Stubbs, Appendix iv. p. 110.
