Norman revolution, there is not so much as a single instance of any one bishop, whose election was confirmed by those of Rome, or put in possession of his trust, or tied to them by an oath of canonical obedience; of any council called in England by their authority; or bishop called to their councils abroad; of any person or society exempted from the authority of their proper bishops; or of any appeal made from their courts to that of Rome; of any tenth, first-fruits, or subsidies paid to or imposed by them in short, there is not any law of the state, nor any canon of the church, that gives the least countenance to the pretended authority of the bishops of Rome; there is not the least mark of any jurisdiction or authority exercised by them over the ancient English church. And one who considers, that jurisdiction is a plain and a sensible thing, and appears so evidently in canons and matters of fact; that church discipline and forms of ecclesiastical business do as certainly discover the seat and boundaries of ecclesiastical power, as the style of laws and forms of justice set out the nature of civil government, and enable us to distinguish a monarchy from a commonwealth ;-should, one would think, need nothing more than the entire silence of our history to clear the matter under question.

If this be not enough to give us a just view of the sense and practice of the English church in this particular, it may be fit to observe, that when the legate of the bishop of Rome, Boniface archbishop of Mentz, by whose address the princes of the Carlovingian line were wrought upon to subject, or at least to unite, the Gallican church to that of Rome, in an epistle to Cuthbert archbishop of Canterbury attempted to bring the English church to the like condition; the council of Cloveshoe in the year 747 not only rejected the offer with resentment, but by an express canon' asserted the freedom and independency thereof. Besides, as our history does not afford one single instance in favour of the

as well to Rome as Canterbury. For, a little after, he shows that though Augustine called them to council as a legate of the apostolic see, yet returned, they did proclaim they would not acknowledge him an archbishop, but did contemn both himself and what he had established.' 'I confess,' says he again, that it has ever seemed to me (and he alleges his reasons) that they received the first principles of their Christianity from Asia.'"-Ibid. p. 7.

1 An express canon.] The Acts of the council (see 1 Wilkins's Concilia, p. 90-100) do not seem to warrant this strong expression. I do not see that much can be concluded from them either way.

papal claims, so, on the contrary, they are full and express on the side of the royal supremacy. The kings of England acted as the supreme ordinaries and heads of the national church; and, as such, set out and divided dioceses; named their bishops and received appeals from their courts; convened national councils; and by their laws settled the revenues of the church; directed the conduct, and punished all offences of the clergy against the state; and, as occasion required, subjected their revenues to the support of the government. And the long struggle and opposition which they made to guard their rights from the usurpations of the court of Rome, and the subsequent changes in the polity and order of this church occasioned thereby, so fully confirm what has been already suggested on this head, that if some men had not lost all sense of shame and regard of truth, the supremacy of the bishops of Rome over the ancient English church had never been the subject of dispute. But,

III. It must be owned, that during the reign of William the first, pope Gregory' published the claims of the bishops of Rome to a supreme authority over the whole Christian church; and what our Saviour said to St. Peter of the rock on which he would build his church, the charge he gave him to feed his sheep, and what he said of himself of his being the way and the door; and, in short, all the fine things that could be thought on, were laid together to give weight to, or at least to colour that pretence.But after all, if arguments of a very different nature from those of the gospel had not come in to their aid, the English church after the Conquest had doubtless paid as little regard to this pretence, as it had done before; and this sort of reasoning had signified as much in the Western, as it did in the Eastern churches, which paid no more regard to it than to the claims of the Turks in favour of Mahomet. How it came to pass will be fully accounted for in the following history; but it may be fit shortly to observe here on this head, that king Henry the first, by yielding up his right of investiture and giving way to the legantine power, advanced the bishops of Rome to the head of the English clergy. In consequence of those concessions they became judges of the elections of bishops; put them in possession of their trusts;

1 Pope Gregory.] Of the general history of Hildebrand, or pope Gregory VII. as connected with his vast ambitious designs on England, &c., see Inett, vol. ii. p. 32-69; Christian Institutes, vol. iv. p. 104-7. 120-2. and Index, under Gregory VII.

required an oath of obedience from them; called national councils at home; obliged them to attend their councils abroad; and in time came to lay impositions on the revenues, and to dispose of the preferments of the church. The right of appeals, and the exemptions of the clergy from the authority of the state, contended for and begun in king Stephen's, were yielded up in the following reign of Henry the second; and the designs of that court were consummated, and the civil as well as the ecclesiastical supremacy, so far as was in the power of that prince, was put into their hands by king John.

It is here we have the beginning, the steps, and the foundation of the papal supremacy over the English church, which the flatterers of that pretence look for in vain in the preceding ages. And the whole course of our history so fully justifies this account, that whereas before the Conquest we have neither marks nor footsteps of the papal jurisdiction,-from the time of the aforesaid agreements to the Reformation, our ecclesiastic history is little else but different scenes of oppression, and of remonstrances against the abuses it occasioned.-Whether this change in fact and practice altered the sentiments, and changed the faith and sense of the church and nation in this particular, is the next thing to be enquired into.

IV. One would have expected, that men who are so very forward to reproach us with a parliamentary church and a statereligion, would have produced some canon of an English national council, grounded on the authority of Christ or the consent of the universal church, to justify this change in the government thereof; at least some public act of the state. But after all it is very evident, that all through the long controversies which their claims occasioned, the nobility, bishops, and clergy, some few excepted, adhered steadily to the rights of the crown and the church; and that when king Henry did what in him lay to give them away in the great council held in London in the year 1107, he acted wholly upon political reasons; and was over-influenced by his great minister and favourite the Earl of Mellent, against the sense of the wiser and greater part of that assembly. And this was so much the case in all the other disputes on this subject, that if any credit can be given to history, the supreme authority of the bishops of Rome over the English church had no other foundation, but some unhappy concessions or leagues betwixt the kings of England and those prelates, occasioned by the bad titles,

the weakness, the ill circumstances, or the difficulties which the arts of that court had drawn upon them.

If the same reasons, upon which our princes acted in the aforesaid changes, did not oblige the church and nation to submit to them, then, since (unless the restoration of the papal power in the reign of queen Mary may be so called) it does not appear that a submission was ever settled by any law of the state, or any canon of the English church :-on the contrary, the entire and full sovereignty of the imperial crown of England was so constantly asserted by our several succeeding kings and their great councils; and the pretended supremacy of those prelates was so frequently denied and controlled, and even insulted by the statutes of mortmain, præmunire, and provisors, annates or first-fruits, and that of Henry the seventh rescinding the papal exemptions of the religious from the payment of tithes; and was so restrained in all the parts and branches thereof, whenever it interfered with the rights of the crown or the good of the nation; and was at last so generally renounced and abjured', as well by the whole clergy in convocation, as by the people in parliament; and all this brought about in fewer weeks than it had cost years to obtain; and whilst popery, in other respects, continued the established religion, and did depend so far on the authority of the bishops of Rome, that it was easy to foresee that this change would open the way to the Reformation which the body of his clergy so much dreaded hence if any judgment can be made of the faith of a Christian church and nation by the canons, the laws and practices thereof, the supremacy of the bishops of Rome was never received as a part of the religion of England, any more than it is at this time in France; but, on the contrary, was ever esteemed an usurpation on the rights of the monarchy and the church. Besides it is very evident, that the attempt of king John to render the kingdom a fief of the papacy, though attended with the forms and appearances of law, was ever thought a void and illegal act, and

Renounced and abjured.] An Act (26 Hen. VIII. c. i. A.D. 1535-6) concerning the King's Highness to be Supreme Head, &c., and An Act (28 Hen. VIII. c. x. A.D. 1537) extinguishing the authority of the Bishop of Rome.

2 Ever thought a void.] The king (Edward III.) had lately received notice, that the pope, in consideration of the homage which John, king of England, had formerly paid to the see of Rome, and of the tribute by him granted to the said see, intended by process to cite his majesty to appear at

served only to reproach the memory of that prince and the wickedness of that court which compelled him to it; and to let

his court at Avignon, to answer for his defaults in not performing what the said king, his predecessor, had so undertaken for him and his heirs, kings of England. Whereupon the king required the advice of his parliament, what course he had best take, if any such process should come out against him. The bishops, lords and commons desired until the following day to give in their answer; when being again assembled, after full deliberation, they declared as follows: that "neither king John, nor any other king, could bring himself, his realm, and people, under such subjection without their assent; and if it was done, it was done without consent of parliament, and contrary to his coronation oath; that he was notoriously compelled to it by the necessity of his affairs and the iniquity of the times. Wherefore the said estates enacted, that in case the pope should attempt any thing by process, or any other way, to constrain the king and his subjects to perform what he says he lays claim to in this respect, they would resist and withstand him to the utmost of their power." Parliamentary History of England, vol. i. p. 130. Compare Cotton's Abridgment, p. 102. fol.

Of hardly inferior value, is a very explicit testimony even from Sir Thomas More:

"Nowe if he saye, as in dede some wryters saye, that king John made England and Ireland tributary to the pope and the see apostolike, by the graunt of a thousand markes; we dare surely saye agayne that it is untrue; and that all Rome neither can shewe such a graunt, nor never could: and if they could, it were right nought worth. For never could any kinge of England geve away the realm to the pope, or make the land tributary though he would; nor no such moneye is there payde, nor never was." The Supplication of Souls. Works of Sir Thomas More, p. 296. 1557. fol. The testimony, I say, is valuable, as proceeding from a high constitutional authority. At the same time, you cannot but remark, in reference to a different point, that it is not pleasant to see with what confidence, in a controversial spirit, and in extenuation of the offences of the see of Rome, such a man should so confidently contradict, as he here does, the unquestionable facts of this tribute having been imposed, and exacted, till it came to be denied in a tone too firm for the pope to overcome. It is true that More might not have so fully all the sources of information which we possess ; but ignorance can hardly be thought a sufficient excuse for assertions so positive and confident.

See also Sir Thomas Smith's Commonwealth of England, b. i. c. ix.

We may remark yet again, on this important point, that we have the general argument well put and clearly expressed, in a short tract of bishop Hooper, preserved by Strype, in his Ecclesiastical Memorials, (vol. iii. No. xxvi. Records), and entitled De vera ratione inveniendæ et fugiendæ falsæ doctrine. It was written, as the reader will perceive, in the reign of queen Mary.

"Et quod auctoritatem suam papa ratum esse voluerit, quasi a regibus et principibus concessam; certo scimus reges et principes, et si vellent, non posse