into the common law. Consequently it also belonged to the common
law courts to enforce the laws of God and the Church. St. German went
further and declared the claim that there was a separate law of equity
or conscience a false one, made by chancellors who had usually been
spiritual men with a superficial knowledge of the common law, which
‘commandeth all thing that is good for the common wealth to be done,
and prohibiteth all thing that is evil and that is against the common
weal’. St. German is the probable author of a series of anonymous tracts
which exalted the power of common law and the king-in-parliament
over the Church, and of proposals drafted in 1531 in the style of an act
of parliament, for the reform of the clergy, the creation of a secular
system of poor relief, and the putting-away ‘of the great multitude of
vagabonds and valiant beggars’ which were damaging the common-
wealth. In his last tract of about 1535, he even asked ‘why should not
the parliament then which representeth the whole catholic church of
England expound scripture rather than the convocation which repre-
senteth only the state of the clergy’.^26
More, who as chancellor was a zealous ally of the bishops in the
pursuit of heretics, leapt to the defence of the clerical estate and of ‘the
very good old and long approved laws, both of this realm and of
the whole corps of Christendom’. But his public career and eventually
his life were destroyed by his conflicting allegiances to the laws of
England and the laws of the universal church. In May 1532 he resigned
his office as chancellor, in April 1534 he was imprisoned in the Tower
for refusing to take the oath required by the Act of Succession accom-
panying Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, and eventually he was
condemned on an indictment which he rejected as ‘grounded upon an
act of Parliament directly repugnant to the laws of God and Holy
Church, the supreme government of which or of any part whereof may
no temporal prince presume by any law to take upon him’.^27
It was during this political contest expressed in terms of the legislative
sovereignty of the king-in-parliament that Thomas Starkey’s Dialogue
between Pole and Lupset, probably written in 1529–32, first used ‘state’
in England at a level of abstraction which left behind ‘of the king’, ‘of
State and sovereignty 307(^26) St. German’s Doctor and Student, ed. T. F. T. Plucknett and J. L. Barton, Selden Soc. 91
(London, 1975), 27–45; J. A. Guy, Christopher St German on Chancery and Statute, Selden
Soc. Supplementary Series, 6 (London, 1985), 101–3, 133; Fox and Guy, Reassessing the
Henrician Age, 174 and 95–120: ‘Thomas More and Christopher St. German’; C. Russell,
‘Thomas Cromwell’s Doctrine of Parliamentary Sovereignty’, TRHS, 6th ser. 7 (1997), 238;
Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450–1700, 180–1; see also J. W. Gough, Funda-
mental Law in English Constitutional History(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), 17–19, 23–4;
N. Doe, Fundamental Authority in Late Medieval English Law(Cambridge UP, 1991), 76–7,
134–6, 177.
(^27) G. R. Elton, The Tudor Constitution: Documents and Commentary(Cambridge UP,
1960), 6–12, 237–9.