merely through dint of monarchical will, or by the actions of Cromwell,
but effected with Henry’s willing accomplices in Parliament. While an
Act restraining the payment of annates and so on, and the Act of
Supremacy both abridged the English church’s power, it was the Act in
Restraint of Appeals which fully arrested any independence of the
English church, for it took from her that right of appeal to Rome which
had established her courts as insubordinate and unanswerable to the
realm of England.^35 This limitation on the English church’s authority,
however, did not prompt Henry VIII to abet theological novelty, as he
maintained his doctrinal ties with the medieval past. Yet prior to his
dynastic worries, Henry VIII had already embraced a movement that for
England, now stripped of any formal and institutional ties to the
traditions of the Roman Church, could only portend further religious
change: Henry fancied himself a Renaissance prince, a friend of
Humanism and its desire for reform, and in this program many
associated with his court, both men and women, joined him.^36
John Colet, dean of St Paul’s cathedral, had in his travels to Italy
fallen under the spell of the humanism of Pico della Mirandola, Lorenzo
Valla and Marsiglius Ficino.^37 Colet, finding himself with numerous
obligations, never acquired linguistic and philological gifts, yet upon his
return to England began lecturing at Oxford on St Paul’s Epistle to the
Romans, setting aside the glossa ordinariafor a simple treatment of the
text.^38 Perhaps Colet’s biggest influence came not upon the English, but
upon a wandering scholar who never loved Colet’s Oxford, the English
climate, nor its beer, but was inspired by Colet to look ad fontes. Thus
Erasmus, pressed by the urging of Colet, in 1500 traveled back to Paris
to begin the study of Greek and Hebrew. He would later confess that he
was too old to learn Hebrew and because of ‘the insufficiency of the
human mind to master a multitude of subjects’, he set aside Hebrew and
concentrated on Greek.^39 Erasmus, initially schooled at Deventer under
the Brethren of the Common Life, and widely regarded as the preeminent
scholar of his day, saw in Colet a model for his own vocation as a
JEWEL TILL 1558 15
(^35) For the texts of these see G.R. Elton, ed., The Tudor Constitution: Documents and
Commentary(Cambridge, 1960), pp. 344–51, 355–56.
(^36) ‘In all simple seriousness they were playing with ideas too strong for them, and in due
course the fire was to burn most of them. But for the present, they gave ready support to
views which called for active reform in Church and State.’ G.R. Elton, Reform and
Reformation, p. 14.
(^37) E. Harris Harbison, The Christian Scholar in the Age of the Reformation(New York,
1956), p. 48.
(^38) A.G. Dickens, The English Reformation, 2nd ed. (University Park, Pennsylvania,
1989), pp. 64–65.
(^39) Harbison,Christian Scholar, p. 79.