the reigns of the feebler Stuarts, and it appears prominently in the curious clause of the Act of Uniformity,[1] which gives to that 'most religious and gracious sovereign' Charles II. a power of dispensing in the case of certain foreigners with episcopal orders, as a qualification for the cure of souls, and has only disappeared in practice with the recent gradual absorption of the royal prerogative in the powers of the Houses of Parliament.
The great Acts of the following year, 1535, were less legislative than external and executive Acts. They did not so much alter the legal relations between Church and State as show how much those relations had been already altered; they were like the heavy and dangerous swell that agitates the sea after the gale which produced it has for the time abated. Cromwell received his commission as vicegerent; the King issued a proclamation by which the Pope's name was ordered to be erased from the service-books. Fisher and More were beheaded. Pope Paul III. replied to the abrogation of his power in England by excommunicating Henry and his abettors, and a new departure was made by the King in his ecclesiastical policy by the first visitation of the monasteries; but neither Parliament nor Convocation sat.
With the year 1536 we commence another period of legislative activity. The famous Parliament of 1529 held its last session at the beginning of the year, and was dissolved on March 31, having sat through seven such years as England never saw before or since. Convocation, as usual, followed the same course. The latter assembly does not seem to have signalised its last session by any very important discussions. In Parliament no less than nine Acts more or less affecting the
- ↑ 13 and 14 Car. II. c. 4, s. sv.
