Archbishop of Canterbury, probably because he originally opposed the marriage between the king and his sister-in-law, and because it was hoped that his objections remained unaltered.  Warham, however, as we shall see, had changed his mind:  he declined, on the plea of age, and the office of chancellor was given to Sir Thomas More, perhaps the person least disaffected to the clergy who could have been found among the leading laymen.  The substance of power was vested in the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, the great soldier-nobles of the age, and Sir William Fitz-William, lord admiral; to all of whom the ecclesiastical domination had been most intolerable, while they had each of them brilliantly distinguished themselves in the wars with France and Scotland.  According to the French ambassador, we must add one more minister, supreme, if we may trust him, above them all.  “The Duke of Norfolk,” he writes, “is made president of the council, the Duke of Suffolk vice-president, and above them both is Mistress Anne;"[170] this last addition to the council being one which boded little good to the interests of the See that had so long detained her in expectation.  So confident were the destructive party of the temper of the approaching parliament, and of the irresistible pressure of the times, that the general burden of conversation of the dinner-tables in the great houses in London was an exulting expectation of a dissolution of the church establishment, and a confiscation of ecclesiastical property; the king himself being the only obstacle which was feared by them.  “These noble lords imagine,” continues the same writer, “that the cardinal once dead of ruined, they will incontinently plunder the church, and strip it of all its wealth,” adding that there was no occasion for him to write this in cipher, for it was everywhere openly spoken of.[171]

Movements, nevertheless, which are pregnant with vital change, are slow in assuming their essential direction, even after the stir has commenced.  Circumstances do not immediately open themselves; the point of vision alters gradually; and fragments of old opinions, and prepossessions, and prejudices remain interfused with the new, even in the clearest minds, and cannot at a moment be shaken off.  Only the unwise change suddenly; and we can never too often remind ourselves, when we see men stepping forward with uncertainty and hesitation over a road, where to us, we know the actual future, all seems so plain, that the road looked different to the actors themselves, who were beset with imaginations of the past, and to whom the gloom of the future appeared thronged with phantoms of possible contingencies.  The hasty expectations of the noble lords were checked by Henry’s prudence; and though parties were rapidly arranging themselves, there was still confusion.  The city, though disinclined to the pope and the church, continued to retain an inclination for the emperor; and the pope had friends among Wolsey’s enemies, who, by his overthrow,