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Brief institutes of our constitutional history
Brief institutes of our constitutional history Author:Elisha Benjamin Andrews Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LECTURE II. THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND. § i. Special Character. The ecclesiastical and theological overturn which moved all Europe in the XVIth century,... more » assumed in England a character quite suigeneris, being here less a phase, or an immediate product, of the Renaissance, more indebted to that sort of influences usually termed accidental. So peculiar had been the development of religious, social and political ideas in England that, but for the initiative of Henry VIII.— personal and arbitrary in a sense in which Luther's, Zwingli's or Calvin's was not, the Renaissance would, in all probability, have done its work and passed without radically changing the ecclesiastical system. Yet Henry's course had its essential conditioning antecedents, among which, besides the Renaissance, the most potent were (a) the (for England) abnormal might of monarchy at death of Henry VII., (b) the influence of Wyclif, and (c) the special nature and posture of the church in England. These are the salient points in the fore-history of the English Reformation'; let us canvass them in the reverse order. § 2. The Church. John's subservience to papacy had not been suffered to become precedent; on the contrary, the same Teutonic development of the constitution which limited the royal prerogative, encroached with still greater persistency and effect upon the dominance of church, i. The " benefit of clergy," which had become an indescribable abuse, was modified so as to bring before secular courts at least clerks guilty of felony, and in fact, to establish a virtual surveillance of the civil over ecclesiastical jurisdiction. In England, nowhere else, a statute had to be passed (first 1401) that heretics might be burned. 2. Clerical immunity from taxation by state annulled through vigor of Edward I...« less