[Footnote J:  Appendix, Note J.]

Hooper, who was made a bishop in the reign of Edward VI., expressed the Protestant view of Henry’s reforms in a letter written about the year 1546.  “Our king,” he says, “has destroyed the pope, but not popery....  The impious mass, the most shameful celibacy of the clergy, the invocation of saints, auricular confession, superstitious abstinence from meats, and purgatory, were never before held by the people in greater esteem than at the present moment.”  In other words, the independence of the Church of England was secured by those who, if they were not Roman Catholics, were certainly closer in faith to Rome than they were to Protestantism.  The Protestant doctrines did not become the doctrines of the Church of England until the reign of Edward VI., and it was many years after that before the separation from Rome was complete in doctrine as well as respects the authority of the pope.

These facts indicate that there must have been other causes for the success of the English Reformation than the greed or ambition of the monarch.  Those causes are easily discovered.  One of them was the hostility of the people to the alien priories.  The origin of the alien priories dates back to the Norman conquest.  The Normans shared the spoils of their victory with their continental friends.  English monasteries and churches were given to foreigners, who collected the rents and other kinds of income.  These foreign prelates had no other interest in England than to derive all the profit they could from their possessions.  They appointed whom they pleased to live in their houses, and the monks, being far away from their superiors, became a source of constant annoyance to the English people.  The struggle against these alien priories had been carried on for many years, and so many of them had been abolished that the people became accustomed to the seizure of monasteries.

Large sums of money were annually paid to the pope, and the English people were loudly complaining of the constant drain on their resources.  It was a common saying in the reign of Henry III., that “England is the pope’s farm.”  The “Good Parliament,” in 1376, affirmed “that the taxes paid to the church of Rome amounted to five times as much as those levied for the king; ... that the brokers of the sinful city of Rome promoted for money unlearned and unworthy caitiffs to benefices of the value of a thousand marks, while the poor and learned hardly obtain one of twenty.”  Various laws, heartily supported by the clergy as well as by the civil authorities, were enacted from time to time, aimed at the abuses of papal power.  So steadfast and strong was the opposition to the interference of foreigners in English affairs, it would be possible to show that there was an evolution in the struggle against Rome that was certain to culminate in the separation, whether Henry had accomplished it or not.  What might have occurred if the monks had reformed