Dean Hook, whose thorough English honesty and candour is constantly making wild work with his preconceived theory of the Church of England, remarks in regard to another prelate of the same reign. Archbishop Winchelsey, that 'he had only the one object, of introducing a novel assumption of papal power which would have reduced the country to a mere province of Rome.'[1] He makes a very similar remark concerning each of the three immediate predecessors of Winchelsey, viz. Archbishops Peckham, Kilwardly, and Boniface, and accounts for the alleged fact by two of them being friars and the third a Savoyard. Winchelsey was none of these, but an Englishman and a secular; and yet Hook constantly speaks of the English bishops as being opposed to the claims of Rome.
Coming now to the reign of Edward II., we find that king actually applying to the Pope, Clement V., to annul the election by the Chapter of Canterbury of Cobham as archbishop, and to provide for the see by nominating Walter Reynolds, the King's own candidate—a proceeding which affords a good example of the mode in which the kings occasionally allied themselves with the Pope, in order to suppress any attempt at independence on the part of the body with whom the election of a bishop nominally lay. In the same reign also, in 1319, two nominations were made to the vacant see of Winchester—one by the King, and another by the Chapter. The dispute was referred to the Pope, John XXII., who rejected both candidates and nominated his own nuncio. The Archbishop sided with the King, and refused to consecrate the Pope's nominee. In the end, however, he had to yield, and permitted his consecration to be performed by the Bishop of London.
- ↑ Hook's Archbishops, vol. iii. p. 403.
