same doctrines as he taught had been maintained by Wicliffe, whose disciples, usually called Lollards, lasted as a numerous, though obscure and proscribed sect, till, aided by the confluence of foreign streams, they swelled into the protestant church of England. We hear indeed little of them during some part of the fifteenth century; for they generally shunned persecution; and it is chiefly through records of persecution that we learn the existence of heretics. But immediately before the name of Luther was known, they seem to have become more numerous, or to have attracted more attention; since several persons were burned for heresy, and others abjured their errors, in the first years of Henry VIII.'s reign. Some of these (as usual among ignorant men engaging in religious speculations) are charged with very absurd notions; but it is not so material to observe their particular tenets as the general fact, that an inquisitive and sectarian spirit had begun to prevail.
Those who took little interest in theological questions, or who retained an attachment to the faith in which they had been educated, were in general not less offended than the Lollards themselves with the inordinate opulence and encroaching temper of the clergy. It had been for two or three centuries the policy of our lawyers to restrain these within some bounds. No ecclesiastical privilege had occasioned such dispute, or proved so mischievous, as the immunity of all tonsured persons from civil punishment for crimes. It was a material improvement in the law under Henry VI. that, instead of being instantly claimed by the bishop on their arrest for any criminal charge, they were compelled to plead their privilege at their arraignment, or after conviction. Henry VII. carried this much farther, by enacting that clerks convicted of felony should be burned in the hand. And in 1513 (4 H. 8), the benefit of clergy was entirely taken away from murderers and highway robbers. An exemption was still made for priests, deacons, and subdeacons. But this was not sufficient to satisfy the church, who had been accustomed to shield under the mantle of her immunity a vast number of persons in the lower degrees of orders, or without any orders at all; and had owed no small part of her influence to those who derived so important a benefit from her protection. Hence, besides violent language in preaching against this statute, the convocation attacked one Doctor Standish, who had denied the divine right of clerks to their exemption from temporal jurisdiction. The temporal courts naturally defended Standish; and the parliament addressed the king to support him against the malice of his persecutors. Henry, after a full debate between the opposite parties in his presence, thought his prerogative concerned in taking the same side; and the clergy sustained a mortifying defeat. About the same time, a citizen of London named Hun, having been confined on a charge of heresy in the bishop's prison, was found hanged in his chamber; and though this was asserted to be his own act, yet the bishop's chancellor was indicted for the murder on such vehement presumptions, that he would infallibly have been convicted, had the attorney-general thought fit to proceed in the trial. This occurring at the same time with the affair of Standish, furnished each party with an argument; for the clergy maintained that they should have no chance of justice in a temporal court; one of the bishops declaring, that the London juries were so prejudiced against the church, that they would find Abel guilty of the murder of Cain. Such an admission is of more consequence than whether Hun died by his own hands, or those of a clergyman; and the story is chiefly worth remembering, as it illustrates the popular disposition towards those who had once been the objects of reverence.83
Henry VIII.'s controversy with Luther.—Such was the temper of England when Martin Luther threw down his gauntlet of defiance against the ancient hierarchy of the catholic church. But, ripe as a great portion of the people might be to applaud the efforts of this reformer, they were viewed with no approbation by their sovereign. Henry had acquired a fair portion of theological learning, and on reading one of Luther's treatises, was not only shocked at its tenets, but undertook to confute them in a formal answer.84 Kings who divest themselves of their robes to mingle among polemical writers, have not perhaps a claim to much deference from strangers; and Luther, intoxicated with arrogance, and deeming himself a more prominent individual among the human species than any monarch, treated Henry, in replying to his book, with the rudeness that characterised his temper. A few years afterwards, indeed, he thought proper to write a letter of apology for the language he had held towards the king; but this letter, a strange medley of abjectness and impertinence, excited only contempt in Henry, and was published by him with a severe commentary.85 Whatever apprehension therefore for the future might be grounded on the humour of the nation, no king in Europe appeared so steadfast in his allegiance to Rome as Henry VIII. at the moment when a storm sprang up that broke the chain for ever.
His divorce from Catherine.—It is certain that Henry's marriage with his brother's widow was unsupported by any precedent and that, although the pope's dispensation might pass for a cure of all defects, it had been originally considered by many persons in a very different light from those unions which are merely prohibited by the canons. He himself, on coming to the age of fourteen, entered a protest against the marriage which had been celebrated more than two years before, and declared his intention not to confirm it; an act which must naturally be ascribed to his father.86 It is true that in this very instrument we find no mention of the impediment on the score of affinity; yet it is hard to suggest any other objection, and possibly a common form had been adopted in drawing up the protest. He did not cohabit with Catherine during his father's lifetime. Upon his own accession, he was remarried to her; and it does not appear manifest at what time his scruples began, nor whether they preceded his passion for Anne Boleyn.87 This, however, seems the more probable supposition; yet there can be little doubt, that weariness of Catherine's person, a woman considerably older than himself and unlikely to bear more children, had a far greater effect on his conscience than the study of Thomas Aquinas or any other theologian. It by no means follows from hence that, according to the casuistry of the catholic church and the principles of the canon law, the merits of that famous process were so much against Henry, as out of dislike to him and pity for his queen we are apt to imagine, and as the writers of that persuasion have subsequently assumed.
It would be unnecessary to repeat, what is told by so many historians, the vacillating and evasive behaviour of Clement VII., the assurances he gave the king, and the arts with which he receded from them, the unfinished trial in England before his delegates, Campegio and Wolsey, the opinions obtained from foreign universities in the king's favour, not always without a little bribery,88 and those of the same import at home, not given without a little intimidation, or the tedious continuance of the process after its adjournment to Rome. More than five years had elapsed from the first application to the pope, before Henry, though by nature the most uncontrollable of mankind, though irritated by perpetual chicanery and breach of promise, though stimulated by impatient love, presumed to set at nought the jurisdiction to which he had submitted, by a marriage with Anne. Even this was a furtive step; and it was not till compelled by the consequences that he avowed her as his wife, and was finally divorced from Catherine by a sentence of nullity, which would more decently, no doubt, have preceded his second marriage.89 But, determined as his mind had become, it was plainly impossible for Clement to have conciliated him by anything short of a decision, which he could not utter without the loss of the emperor's favour and the ruin of his own family's interests in Italy. And even for less selfish reasons, it was an extremely embarrassing measure for the pope, in the critical circumstances of that age, to set aside a dispensation granted by his predecessor; knowing that, however erroneous allegations of fact contained therein might serve for an outward pretext, yet the principle on which the divorce was commonly supported in Europe, went generally to restrain the dispensing power of the holy see. Hence it may seem very doubtful whether the treaty which was afterwards partially renewed through the mediation of Francis I., during his interview with the pope at Nice about the end of 1533, would have led to a restoration of amity through the only possible means; when we consider the weight of the imperial party in the conclave, the discredit that so notorious a submission would have thrown