Symptoms such as these boded ill for a self-reform of the church, and it was further imperilled by the difficulty which it is not easy to believe that Wolsey had forgotten.  No measures would be of efficacy which spared the religious houses, and they would be equally useless unless the bishops, as well as the inferior clergy, were comprehended in the scheme of amendment.  But neither with monks nor bishops could Wolsey interfere except by a commission from the pope, and the laws were unrepealed which forbade English subjects, under the severest penalties, to accept or exercise within the realm an authority which they had received from the Holy See.  Morton had gone beyond the limits of the statute of provisors in receiving powers from Pope Innocent to visit the monasteries.  But Morton had stopped short with inquiry and admonition.  Wolsey, who was in earnest with the work, had desired and obtained a full commission as legate, but he could only make use of it at his peril.  The statute slumbered, but it still existed.[103] He was exposing not himself only, but all persons, lay and clerical, who might recognise his legacy to a Premunire; and he knew well that Henry’s connivance, or even expressed permission, could not avail him if his conduct was challenged.  He could not venture to appeal to parliament.  Parliament was the last authority whose jurisdiction a churchman would acknowledge in the concerns of the clergy; and his project must sooner or later have sunk, like those of his two predecessors, under its own internal difficulties, even if the accident had not arisen which brought the dispute to a special issue in its most vital point, and which, fostered by Wolsey for his own purposes, precipitated his ruin.

It is never more difficult to judge equitably the actions of public men than when private as well as general motives have been allowed to influence them, or when their actions may admit of being represented as resulting from personal inclination, as well as from national policy.  In life, as we actually experience it, motives slide one into the other, and the most careful analysis will fail adequately to sift them.  In history, from the effort to make our conceptions distinct, we pronounce upon these intricate matters with unhesitating certainty, and we lose sight of truth in the desire to make it truer than itself.  The difficulty is further complicated by the different points of view which are chosen by contemporaries and by posterity.  Where motives are mixed, men all naturally dwell most on those which approach nearest to themselves:  contemporaries whose interests are at stake overlook what is personal in consideration of what is to them of broader moment; posterity, unable to realise political embarrassments which have ceased to concern them, concentrate their attention on such features of the story as touch their own sympathies, and attend exclusively to the private and personal passions of the men and women whose character they are considering.