and his right unquestioned, this predominance became less marked.[1] William, the very type of a strong monarch, had maintained his own supremacy in Church as well as in State; so to almost an equal degree had his able and politic son Henry I.; but the balance had inclined in the other direction by the time that Henry II. was compelled to give up the constitutions of Clarendon, and the power of the State was hopelessly outweighed when John had consented to hold his crown as a fief from the successor of St. Peter. From his time downward not even Edward I. and Edward HI. were able to shake off the control of the Church, though they and their successors attempted from time to time, and with more or less success, by measures such as the Acts of Provisors and Præmunire, to restrain it within endurable limits.[2] These and similar measures seem, however, to have had an incurable tendency to fall into abeyance, and during the wars of the Roses, the kings, especially those of the House of Lancaster, were often ready to prop up their own doubtful authority by the powerful help of the clergy, without always considering the price which they had to pay for it.
There was generally, during these ages at least, a constant tendency to a rivalry between Church and State, which not unfrequently deepened into a sharp contention. When the ordinary division of parties became temporarily altered in times in which the State was divided against itself, the Church would side now with one party and now with another, and there was at
- ↑ Appendix I. p. 25.
- ↑ Appendix I. p. 30, sub fin., wherein Bishop Stubbs defines the object of the statute of Præmunire as being to 'prevent the recourse to Rome upon points which the civil tribunals at home were competent to settle,' not, as some people seem to fancy, to prevent such recourse altogether
