One more important measure, however, was passed by parliament before it separated, and it is noticeable as the first step which was taken in the momentous direction of a breach with the See of Rome.  A practice had existed for some hundreds of years in all the churches of Europe, that bishops and archbishops, on presentation to their sees, should transmit to the pope, on receiving their bulls of investment, one year’s income from their new preferments.  It was called the payment of annates, or firstfruits, and had originated in the time of the crusades, as a means of providing a fund for the holy wars.  Once established, it had settled into custom,[349] and was one of the chief resources of the papal revenue.  From England alone, as much as 160,000 pounds had been paid out of the country in fifty years;[350] and the impost was alike oppressive to individuals and injurious to the state.  Men were appointed to bishopricks frequently at an advanced age, and dying, as they often did, within two or three years of their nomination, their elevation had sometimes involved their families and friends in debt and embarrassment;[351] while the annual export of so much bullion was a serious evil at a time when the precious metals formed the only currency, and were so difficult to obtain.  Before a quarrel with the court of Rome had been thought of as a possible contingency, the king had laboured with the pope to terminate the system by some equitable composition; and subsequently cessation of payment had been mentioned more than once in connection with the threats of a separation.  The pope had made light of these threats, believing them to be no more than words; there was an opportunity, therefore, of proving that the English government was really in earnest, in a manner which would touch him in a point where he was naturally sensitive, and would show him at the same time that he could not wholly count on the attachment even of the clergy themselves.  For, in fact, the church itself was fast disintegrating, and the allegiance even of the bishops and the secular clergy to Rome had begun to waver:  they had a stronger faith in their own privileges than in the union of Christendom; and if they could purchase the continuance of the former at the price of a quarrel with the pope, some among them were not disinclined to venture the alternative.  The Bishop of Rochester held aloof from such tendencies, and Warham, though he signed the address of the House of Lords to the pope, regretted the weakness to which he had yielded:  but in the other prelates there was little seriousness of conviction; and the constitution of the bench had been affected also by the preferment of Gardiner and Edward Lee to two of the sees made vacant by the death of Wolsey.  Both these men had been active agents in the prosecution of the divorce; and Gardiner, followed at a distance by the other, had shaped out, as the pope grew more intractable, the famous notion that the English church could and should subsist as a separate