it be so. Let us compensate the Queen's sorrows with unstinted sympathy; but let us not trifle with history, by confusing a political necessity with a moral crime.
The English Parliament, then, had taken up the gauntlet which the Pope had flung to it with trembling fingers: and there remained nothing but for the Archbishop of Canterbury to make use of the power of which by law he was now possessed. And the time was pressing, for the new Queen was enceinte, and further concealment was not to be thought of. The delay of the interview between the Pope and Francis, and the change in the demeanour of the latter, which had become palpably evident, discharged Henry of all promises by which he might have bound himself; and to hesitate before the menaces of the Pope's brief would have been fatal.
The Act of Appeals being passed, Convocation was the authority to which the power of determining unsettled points of spiritual law seemed to have lapsed. April.In the month of April, therefore, Cranmer, now Archbishop of Canterbury,[1] submitted to it the- ↑ He had been selected as Warham's successor, and had been consecrated on the 30th of March, 1533. On the occasion of the ceremony when the usual oath to the Pope was presented to him, he took it with a declaration that his first duty and first obedience was to the Crown and laws of his own country. It is idle trifling to build up, as too many writers have attempted to do, a charge of insincerity upon an action which was forced upon him by the existing relation between England and Rome. The Act of Appeals was the law of the land. The separation from communion with the Papacy was a contingency which there was still a hope might be avoided. Such a protest as Cranmer made was therefore the easiest solution of the difficulty. See it in Strype's Cranmer, Appendix, p. 683. The Pope had been warned against Cranmer, both by Chapuys and by the Nuncio in England. He therefore acted with his eyes open. See Divorce of Catherine of Aragon, p. 232.
