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Updated: June 14, 2025
Wolsey, with whom he has fair and understanding sympathy, he sketches as the transition minister, 'loving England well, but loving Rome better, who intends a reform of the Church, but who, as the Pope's commissioner for that very purpose, is liable to a praemunire, and therefore dare not appeal to Parliament to carry out his designs, even if he could have counted on the Parliament's assistance in any measures designed to invigorate the Church.
Early in Edward III's reign a claim was made that the king, in virtue of his anointing at coronation, could exercise spiritual jurisdiction, and the statutes of Praemunire and Provisors prohibited the exercise in England of the pope's powers of judicature and appointment to benefices without the royal licence, though royal connivance and popular acquiescence enabled the papacy to enjoy these privileges for nearly two centuries longer.
Many of the latter were allowed to take possession of their temporalities so far as they were within English power by taking an oath of allegiance, specially drawn for them. Others, when prevented from so doing by the penalties of praemunire, delegated their authority to Vicars General, who contrived to elude the provisions of the statute.
As it had availed Wolsey nothing that his breach of praemunire had been countenanced by the King, so it availed Cromwell nothing that the King had seemed to support him. If the King had done so, in each case, it was merely because he in his innocence had been misled by his minister, so that in fact their crime was aggravated. For the merciless minister, there was no mercy.
In the second Richard's reign, so eventful for the English interest in Ireland, it had been enacted that any of the clergy procuring appointments directly from Rome, or exercising powers so conferred, should incur the penalty of a praemunire that is, the forfeiture of their lands and chattels, beside being liable to imprisonment during the King's pleasure.
On certain questions of importance the national hierarchies were inclined to side with the State against the Pope; and thus, for example, the claims of the Curia to tax the clergy, and to override the rights of ecclesiastical patrons, were restricted at one time or another by concordats, or by secular legislation such as the English statutes of Provisors and Praemunire.
VIII. c. 19 is a bar to any such divine right, because that act makes it no less than a praemunire for them, so much so as to meet without the king's writ, &c." So that the force of his argument lieth here; if the clergy had a divine right, it is taken away by the 25th of Henry the Eighth. And as ridiculous as this argument is, the preface and book are founded upon it.
All officers and ministers, ecclesiastical or lay, were bound to take the oath of supremacy, under pain of forfeiture or incapacity; and any one who maintained the spiritual supremacy of the Pope was to forfeit, for his first offence, all his estates, real and personal, or be imprisoned for one year, if not worth twenty pounds; for the second offence, to be liable to praemunire; and for the third, to be guilty of high-treason."
The first sentiment had found expression again and again in refusals to pay tribute to Rome, in defiance of papal bulls, and in the famous statutes of praemunire, which made it a criminal offence to acknowledge any authority in England higher than the crown. The revolt of Henry VIII. was simply the carrying out of these acts of Edward I. and Edward III. to their logical conclusion.
Nine Englishmen in ten were quite prepared to glorify the reformers, and were by no means sorry to find how much evidence there was for the good old English view of a Parliamentary Church. The Statutes of Supremacy and of Praemunire, even the execution of More and Fisher, reminded them that the Bishop of Rome neither had nor ought to have any jurisdiction within this realm of England.
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