Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/203

1922 THE GREAT STATUTE OF PRAEMUN1RE 195 fate. So very severe penalties were prescribed for any one who procured, pursued, brought into the realm, or published, docu- ments of any kind instituting or announcing proceedings against ecclesiastics for executing judgements of English secular courts. The question of arbitrary translation was perhaps still more perplexing. None of the statutes of provisors mentions transla- tions. It was generally recognized that only the pope could translate bishops, 1 and no one wanted to stop translations altogether. The statute of 1351, however, laid it down that episcopal elections were to be free, and if it had been enforced in this particular, the pope would have been permitted to translate a bishop to another English see only at the request of its chapter. But what if the pope translated an English bishop to a see in partibus infidelium or schisinaticorum ? 2 The king might forbid him to leave the realm, but more he could not do. The bishop could not retain his English see, and if he did not try to obey the pope's command, he might incur the gravest spiritual penalties. Even in the case of translations from one English see to another, the king's powers, as the law then stood, were of little avail against such a policy as Boniface was said to be contemplating. He could keep a translated bishop out of his new see ; he could proceed against him for a breach of the statute of provisors : but he could not keep him in his old see or save him from the spiritual dangers of offending the pope. The petition of the commons dwells entirely on the negative aspect of translation. It was a means whereby the pope might deprive the king of his counsellors and also (though this is not expressly men- tioned) deprive his counsellors of salaries which were no burden on the treasury. The commons limit their complaint to transla- tions made without the consent of either the king or the prelates affected, and if Boniface really had the intentions ascribed to him, it is clear that his motives were political and highly improbable that he was prompted by any Englishman. There seems to have been no means of preventing the pope from doing what he pleased in the matter. The only hope of defeating him lay in keeping translated prelates in ignorance of what had befallen them. This the statute tried to do, but there was obviously little chance of its succeeding. Five years afterwards, indeed, Richard II was consulting the judges as to what he could do in defence of royal rights threatened by a series of translations then being made, and asking the clergy whether the pope might lawfully make translations at his will and if there were any justifiable method of preventing his doing 1 On this see Stubbs, Const. Hist. iii. 316. 2 This had, of course, recently been done at the instance of the lords appellant, who prevailed on Urban VI to translate Archbishop Neville from York to St. Andrews. 02