¹ I am grateful to Dr G. W. Bernard, Mr John D. Cooper, Dr S. J. Gunn, Mr David Rundle, Dr Tim Thornton and Dr John Watts for valuable comments.

² See, e.g., Starkey, David, ‘Which Age of Reform?’, in Revolution Reassessed, ed. Coleman, Christopher and Starkey, David (Oxford, 1986), 13–27Google Scholar.

³ Revolution Reassessed, ed. Coleman and Starkey, seems, for the moment at least, to have silenced discussion on the ‘administrative revolution’.

⁴ Tudors (1955), 168; ‘Political Creed’, Studies 2, 235; Studies 3, 434 (review of Joel Hurstfield, Freedom, Corruption, and Government).

⁵ Letters and Papers of Henry VIII [hereafter LP], XX, pt II, no.738.

⁶ Nicholson, Graham, ‘The Act of Appeals and the English Reformation’, in Law and Government under the Tudors: Essays Presented to Sir Geoffrey Elton on his Retirement, ed. Cross, Claire, Loades, David and Scarisbrick, J. J. (Cambridge, 1988), 19–30Google Scholar; Murphy, Virginia, ‘;The Literature and Propaganda of Henry Vffl's First Divorce’, in The Reign of Henry VIII, ed. Diarmaid MacCulloch, (1995), 135–58Google Scholar.

⁷ Calendar of State Papers, Spanish [hereafter CSP Span.], 1529–30, no. 460, p. 758.

⁸ See the pamphleteers, preachers and memorialists discussed in Policy and Police, cap. 4, and Reform and Renewal, cap. 3.

⁹ ‘Anon. MS on the King's Marriage’, in Records of the Reformation, ed. Pocock, Nicholas (2 vols., Oxford, 1870), II, 487–9Google Scholar, discussed in Policy and Police, 183.

¹⁰ 24 Hen. VIII c.io in Statutes of the Realm, [hereafter SR], ed. Luders, A. et al., (11 vols., 1810–28), III, 425–6Google Scholar.

¹¹ See Hughes, Philip, The Reformation in England (rev. edn, 3 vols. in one, 1963), II, plate 2Google Scholar; it is intriguing that the whole society, including laywomen, is shown speaking Latin (if only ‘vivat rex’), except for a solitary ‘God save the king’ by the lowest placed layman.

¹² CSP Span., 1529–30, no. 460, p. 761.

¹³ 3I Hen. VIII c. 9, SR, HI, 728; Scarisbrick, J. J., Henry VIII (1968), 513Google Scholar.

¹⁴ 25 Hen. VIII c. 6; 31 Hen. VIII c. 14., ss. 5 and 20; 33 Hen. VIII c. 8 (SR, III, 441, 739–43, 837). For Henry's probable interest in the first two measures, see Reform and Renewal, 148, and MacCulloch, ‘Henry VIII and the Reform of the Church’, in The Reign of Henry VIII, ed. MacCulloch, , 159–80Google Scholar, at 178. Henry Brinklow complained that the Six Articles were unprecedently draconian, ‘for the pope never made the marriage of priests to be death’; The Complaynt of Roderyck Mors, ed. Meadows Cowper, J., Early English Text Soc., extra ser., 22 (1874), 57Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Reform and Renewal, 122–3 (St German made the initial proposal for public works; see Guy, J. A., Christopher St German on Chancery and Statute, Selden Soc, suppl. series, 6 (1985), 127–35)Google Scholar; Heinze, R-W., The Proclamations of the Tudor Kings (Cambridge, 1976), 112–16Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Tudor-Craig, Pamela, ‘Henry VIII and King David’, in Early Tudor England: Proceedings of the 1987 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Williams, Daniel (Woodbridge, 1989), 183–205Google Scholar, esp. 197; the quotation is from the first psalm.

¹⁷ Anglo, Sydney, Spectacle, Pageantry, and Early Tudor Policy, (Oxford, 1969), 261Google Scholar.

¹⁸ See the revision of Anglo's, views generally in his Images of Tudor Kingship (1992)Google Scholar, esp. 109–12.

¹⁹ Colvin, H. M. and Summerson, John, ‘ The King's Houses, 1485–1660’, in The History of the King's Works, ed. Colvin, (6 vols., 1963–1982), IV, 1–364Google Scholar, at 5–7.

²⁰ Redworth, Glyn, In Defence of the Church Catholic: The Life of Stephen Gardiner (Oxford, 1990). 141Google Scholar

²¹ Scarisbrick, , Henry VIII, 485Google Scholar.

²² Starkey, ‘Which Age of Reform?’.

²³ Gwyn, Peter, The King's Cardinal (1990), 116Google Scholar, and Guy, J. A., The Cardinal's Court (Hassocks, 1977), 30Google Scholar, 37, 120 for Wolsey's Star Chamber orations.

²⁴ SR, III, 206–81; compare 14 & 15 Hen. VIII caps. 1 and 2, SR, III, 206–9.

²⁵ Elton came close to accepting this; ‘Cromwell treated Parliament as the only instrument available, and usable despite the difficulties involved, for the carrying out of a major reform programme’; ‘Redivus’, Studies 3, 386.

²⁶ Guy, , St German, 24–5Google Scholar.

²⁷ The Reports of Sir John Spelman, ed. Baker, J. H., 2 vols., Selden Soc, 93–4Google Scholar (1977–8 for 1976–7), II, introduction, 44, 65; pace Parliament, 34–5, the case is 1506 (21 Hen. VII), not 1529; see Les reportes del cases Edw. V-Hen. VIII (1679; repr. 1981), Hilary 21 Hen. VII, pl. 1.

²⁸ Doc, Norman, Fundamental Authority in Late Medieval English Law (Cambridge, 1990)Google Scholar. Doe also considers judge-made law, but the positivistic case seems strongest in the case of statute, and there seems no case of sixteenth-century judges disallowing statute; 57–9, 79.

²⁹ ‘Lex’, in Studies 4, 37–57, esp. 41–3; Guy, John, ‘The Henrician Age’, in The Varieties of British Political Thought, 1500–1800, ed. Pocock, J. G. A. (Cambridge, 1993), 13–46Google Scholar, and ‘The Rhetoric of Counsel in Early Modern England’, in Tudor Political Culture, ed. Hoak, Dale, (Cambridge, 1995), 292–310Google Scholar. Cf. also Lockwood, Shelley, ‘Marsilius of Padua and the Case for the Royal Ecclesiastical Supremacy’, supra, 6th ser., I, (1991), 89–119Google Scholar, for William Marshall's adaptation of Marsilio not only to replace popular sovereignty by parliamentary authority, but to diminish restraints on the prince.

³⁰ ‘Lex, Studies 4, 46; the act (its title, revealingly, ‘An act abolishing diversity in opinions’), 31 Hen. VIII 0.14, see Constitution (1982), 399–401, or SR, III, 739–43. Cf. the circular of 1535 which invokes the law of God, Scripture, ‘due consultation and deliberate advisement and consent’ of ‘all other our nobles and commons temporal assembled in our high court of parliament, and by authority of the same’, for the abolition of papal power and the ‘grant’ of the supreme headship; adding the subsequent ‘recognition’ of the king's new style by bishops and clergy, in convocation and by their individual oaths; Tudor Royal Proclamations, ed. Hughes, P. L. and Larkin, J. F. (3 vols., New Haven, CT, 1964 1969)Google Scholar, 1, no. 158.

³¹ For political thinkers urging apparently incompatible positions in support of the same argument, see Antony Black, ‘Political Languages in Later Medieval Europe’, and Perry, Diana, ‘Paradisis de Puteo - a Fifteenth-Century Civilian's concept of Papal Sovereignty’, in Church and Sovereignty: Essays in Honour of Michael Wilks, ed. Wood, Diana, Studies in Church History, Subsidia, 9 (Oxford, 1991), 313–28 and 369–92Google Scholar.

³² Reform and Renewal, 67. Strictly Morris conceded only that ‘the Holy Ghost is as verily present’ at the making of an act of parliament ‘as ever it was at any General Council’, possibly an equivocation.

³³ ‘Lex’, Studies 4, 47–8; 25 Hen. VIII c. 21, SR, III, 464–71, at 464.

³⁴ Obedience in Church and State: Three Political Tracts by Stephen Gardiner, ed. Janelle, Pierre (Cambridge, 1930), 90Google Scholar, 92. The tendentious English translation of Mary's reign went further in talking of the title ‘granted’ by Parliament, 91; and cf. ‘Lex’, Studies 4, 47, quoting Obedience, 115.

³⁵ Obedience, 156.

³⁶ Letters of Stephen Gardiner, ed. Muller, J. A., (Cambridge, 1933), no. 42, pp. 56–7Google Scholar.

³⁷ Policy and Police, 222–4; Hughes, , Reformation, I, 270Google Scholar for a convenient printing of the oath as set out in Lords Journal, I, 82. The oath-taker was sworn ‘to your cunning, wit, and uttermost of your power, without guile, fraud or other undue means … [to] keep, maintain and defend this Act … and all other Acts and Statutes made since the beginning of this present parliament’. Elton's implied analogy with the Test Acts surely fails, in that the latter were voluntary in the sense of being imposed on aspirants to offices, not on all subjects.

³⁸ Talmon, J. L, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (1952)Google Scholar.

³⁹ The legal fiction seems to have begun as a device to prevent a plea of ignorance of a statute; see Chief Justice Thorpe in 1366, cited ‘Representation’, Studies 2, 36. It soon became a claim that all Englishmen (and Englishwomen?) had personally willed a statute; Doe, , Fundamental Authority, 8Google Scholar, 16–18, 39. Interestingly 25 Hen. VIII c. 27 (SR, III, 483–4), deposing the Italian bishops of Salisbury and Worcester, excused the king for having appointed them because of his ignorance of existing law.

⁴⁰ Fourth Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England (1681 edn), cap. 74, p. 343; cf. , St. German, Doctor and Student, ed. Plucknett, T. F. T. and Barton, J. L., Selden Soc., 91 (1974), 300Google Scholar. The question at issue concerned tithe and therefore the law of God.

⁴¹ The House of Commons, 1509–1558, ed. Bindoff, S. T., History of Parliament Trust, 3 vols. (1982), I, 264Google Scholar, 284. The Calais act refers to the town as ‘one of the most principal treasures belonging to his Realm of England’. For an attempted refutation of the statement that Tournai was represented at Westminster in 1514 [ibid., I, 285) and for a discussion of the status of Calais, see Davies, C. S. L., ‘Tournai and the English Crown, 1513–9’, Historical Journal, 40 (1997)Google Scholar.

⁴² House of Commons, I, 283–4.

⁴³ Durham was granted representation in 1673, pace the uncharacteristic error in ‘Representation’, Studies 2, 42, 51. Robert Cecil was unaware in 1597 that it was not represented; Kishlansky, Mark A., Parliamentary Selection: Social and Political Choice in Early Modem England (Cambridge, 1986), 23Google Scholar. For Cheshire see 34 & 35 Hen. VIII c. 13 [SR, III, 911), discussed by Thornton, Tim, ‘Political Society in Early Tudor Cheshire, 1480–1560’ (DPhil thesis, Oxford University, 1993), 152–4Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ Bradshaw, Brendan, The Irish Constitutional Revolution of the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1979), 145–6, 157–8Google Scholar; Ellis, Steven G., Tudor Ireland (1985), 131–2Google Scholar, 193–5. For the Irish legislation, see Statutes at Large: Ireland (20 vols., Dublin, 1786–1801), I, 66–174Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ Bradshaw, , Revolution, 156–7Google Scholar, 193–4, 232–3, 264; Ellis, , Ireland, 134–41Google Scholar. Henry insisted on re-enacting the kingship act to eliminate any trace of a ‘grant’ of the title.

⁴⁶ Statutes at Large: Ireland, I, 252–73, 275–304; quotation at 300. Cf. Ellis, , Tudor Ireland, 210–11Google Scholar, 236.

⁴⁷ Dodds, M. H. and Dodds, Ruth, The Pilgrimage of Grace 1536–7 and the Exeter Conspiracy 1538 (2 vols., Cambridge, 1915), I, 182Google Scholar; Bush, M. L., ‘“ Up for the Commonweal”: The Significance of Tax Grievances in the English Rebellions of 1536’, English Historical Review, 106 (1991), 299–318Google Scholar.

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⁴⁹ Collinson, Patrick, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, Bull. of the John Rylands Library, 69 (1986–1987), 394–424Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ Dodds, , Pilgrimage, I, 136–8Google Scholar, at 136.

⁵¹ Hughes, , Reformation, I, 338Google Scholar, compares Henry's ‘our own church’ with Gardiner's invocation, ‘cum summo populi consensu, suaeque [my italics] ecclesiae iudicio’, Obedience, 86.

⁵² Dodds, , Pilgrimage, I, 275–8Google Scholar; Guy, John, in Guy, and Alastair Fox, , Reassessing the Henrician Age (Oxford, 1986), 145Google Scholar, also characterises Henry's answer as ‘ disingenuous’.

⁵³ Proclamations, I, no. 191. The authority quoted by Henry is obscure. The editors believe it may anticipate the Proclamations Act which was introduced in the immediately subsequent Parliament, on the grounds that the Supremacy Act makes no mention of the council, 285 n.i. Perhaps this is another example of Henry reaching for justification regardless of legal nicety.

⁵⁴ Tudor-Craig, , ‘Henry VIII and King David’, 199Google Scholar, for convenient edition of the revised oath; 187, for dating.

⁵⁵ Lehmberg, Stanford E., The Later Parliaments of Henry VIII, 1536–1547 (Cambridge, 1977). 16Google Scholar, 36.

⁵⁶ Ibid., 141. Cf. also Sir Robert Wingfield's telling Henry that he had been ordained since before the Creation to restore the principles of Christianity; LP, XIV, pt I, no. 368. I owe this reference to Dr Bernard.

⁵⁷ Lehmberg, , Later Parliaments, 170Google Scholar.

⁵⁸ English Historical Documents,1485–1558, ed. Williams, C. H. (1967), 361–86Google Scholar, at 367.

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⁶⁰ Wriothesley's Chronicle, ed. Hamilton, W. D., 2 vols., Camden Soc., new ser., 11 & 20 (1875 and 1877), I, 26Google Scholar, 102–3, II. 9–10.

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⁶⁴ While they disagree on timing, both Hirst, Derek, The Representative of the People? (Cambridge, 1975)Google Scholar, and Kishlansky, Parliamentary Selection, see this as a seventeenth-century development.

⁶⁵ Helmholz, R. H., Roman Canon Law in Reformation England (Cambridge, 1990), cap. 2, 28–54Google Scholar; Logan, F. D., ‘Thomas Cromwell and the Vice-Gerency in Spirituals’, Eng. Hist. Rev., 103 (1988), 658–67Google Scholar; MacCulloch, Diarmid, Thomas Cranmer (New Haven and London, 1996), 122–3, 129–30, 133–5, 165–6, 184, 272Google Scholar.

⁶⁶ Cross, Claire, The Royal Supremacy in the Elizabethan Church (1969), 35–6Google Scholar; Guy, John, ‘The 1590's: The Second Reign of Elizabeth I?’, in The Reign of Elizabeth I, ed. Guy, (Cambridge, 1995), 1–19Google Scholar, at 11–13; Russell, Conrad, The Fall of the British Monarchies, 1637–1642 (Oxford, 1991), 39–40Google Scholar; cf. ‘Redivivus’, Studies 3, 385.

⁶⁷ Pocock, J. G. A., The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Reissue with Retrospect (Cambridge, 1987), 289–94Google Scholar.

⁶⁸ Heinze, , Proclamations, 113–16Google Scholar; there were attempts as late as 1551–2 to settle meat prices by proclamation (240–2), but apparently none under Mary or Elizabeth.

⁶⁹ Slavin, A. J., ‘The Tudor State, Reformation, and Understanding Change through the Looking Glass’, in Political Thought and the Tudor Commonwealth, ed. Fideler, Paul A. and Mayer, T. F. (1992), 223–53Google Scholar, quotation at 224.

⁷⁰ Bush, , Pilgrimage, 408–14Google Scholar; Schofield, Roger, ‘Taxation and the Political Limits of the Tudor State’, in Law and Government, 227–55Google Scholar.

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⁷² SirSmith, Thomas, De Repubtka Anglorum, ed. Dewar, Mary (Cambridge, 1982), 53Google Scholar.

⁷³ ‘Faction’ has become a term of art. I share the multi-dimensional view of Tudor politics expounded by Steven Gunn, ‘The Structure of Politics in Early Tudor England’, supra, 6th ser., V (1995), 59–90; i.e. I do not believe that Henry must necessarily be classified as either puppet or puppeteer, but rather that the relationships between king and his entourage were multi-dimensional and varied according to circumstances.

⁷⁴ ‘Decline and Fall’, Studies I, 189–230; it would be redundant to list the works of Lacey Baldwin Smith, J. J. Scarisbrick, E. W. Ives and David Starkey.

⁷⁵ Cf. Ives, Eric, The Common Lawyers of Pre-Reformation England (Cambridge, 1983), 244–5Google Scholar; ‘there was not the antithesis between “Tudor Despotism” and the rule of law and king-in-parliament which has sometimes been supposed; rather the royal will operated through due legal process and the “High Court of Parliament” … The Tudor courts rendered the power of the crown legitimate.’ I am grateful to Dr John Watts for reminding me of this passage. Elton himself could write that the Tudor monarchs, ‘content with the reality of great political power,… never bothered [my italics] to clothe it in a formal doctrine of absolutism’; Constitution (1982), 14. Since I accept that the forms of traditional government were respected, discussion of the allegedly despotic aims behind the Proclamations Act is not necessary here.

⁷⁶ Parliament, 22–4, 346–7, 378–9.

⁷⁷ Policy and Police, cap. 6, esp. 288–9.

⁷⁸ Lehmberg, S. E., ‘Parliamentary Attainder in the Reign of Henry VIII’, Historical Journal, 18 (1975), 675–702Google Scholar.

⁷⁹ Hurstfleld, Joel, ‘Was there a Tudor Despotism after all?’, supra, 5th ser., XVII (1967), 83–108Google Scholar; repr. in Hurstfield, Freedom, Corruption and Government in Elizabethan England (Cambridge, MA, 1973), 23–49.