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Updated: June 14, 2025
In form, the Act in Restraint of Appeals was not a fresh piece of legislation but a declaration of the existing law; a flat assertion that any appeal to the jurisdiction of Rome from the English courts brought the appellant under the penalties of praemunire, the "spiritualty" of the country being competent to deal with spiritual cases, and the sovereign recognising no jurisdiction superior to his own.
The canonist still studied at Oxford or Cambridge, but his career was increasingly clerical, and the Church, unlike the State, was unable to nationalise itself, though the whole career of Wycliffe and the strenuous efforts of the kings and statesmen who passed the statutes of Provisors and Praemunire, showed that some of the English clergy, and many of the English laity, were willing to make the effort.
Proceeding rapidly in the same direction, it was declared that commissioners in ecclesiastical causes should adjudge nothing as heresy which was not expressly so condemned by the Canonical Scriptures, the received General Councils, or by Parliament. The penalty of praemunire was declared in force, and, to crown the work, the celebrated "Act of Uniformity" was passed.
Wolsey had begun the internal amendment, by his visitation and suppression of the smallest monasteries and the appropriation of ecclesiastical property to educational purposes, and by some substitution of the superior organisation of the legatine court for that of the Ordinaries; but the latter step had been cancelled by his fall and by the ominous appeal to the statute of Praemunire against legatine jurisdiction.
For we must not lose sight of the well-ascertained fact that the English queen, who at the very commencement of her reign had had her spiritual supremacy acknowledged by the Irish Parliament under pain of forfeiture, praemunire, and high-treason, insisted all along on the binding obligation of this title; and though at first she had secretly promised that this law should not be enforced against the laity, she showed by all her measures that its observance was of paramount importance in her eyes.
As her attorneys in the suit to try title to this world's wardship clamor for truth without trimmings, and rest their case upon "principles of justice" untainted by prescription or praemunire, suppose we grant their prayer and proceed to the consideration of their cause unhandicapped by chivalric sentiment. That the greater intelligence should control the lesser must be conceded.
The Archbishop of Canterbury was empowered to grant dispensations, and the penalties of Praemunire were levelled against all persons who should apply for faculties to the Pope. By a third Act a prohibition against appeals to Rome was renewed, although it was permitted to appeal from the court of the Archbishop of Canterbury to the king's Court of Chancery.
Similarly the Statute of Praemunire by which it was forbidden under the penalty of forfeiture and outlawry to bring cases cognizable in the English courts before foreign courts, or to introduce into the realm provisions, reservations, or letters contrary to the rights of the king or his subjects, was passed to prevent an undoubted abuse at the time, and was enforced rarely as the frequent appeals to Rome amply prove.
Friends, I doubt there be but few of you that have seen the spirituality of the law of works. But this is one thing in which it discovereth its spirituality, and this is the proper work of the Law. Now, when He hath brought the soul into this praemunire,13 into this puzzle, then,
Bishops appointed by the Crown and sitting in the House of Lords, though awkward facts, were too familiar to be upsetting. The secular and Parliamentary origin of praemunire and conge d' elire were less notorious and more disagreeable subjects. They were indeed to be found in Hallam. But Hallam had not the popularity or the influence of Froude. Constitutional histories are for the learned classes.
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