ABSTRACT
Cromwell's advice \vas apparently too overwhelming to be fully accepted at once; nevertheless the parliamentary sess~on of 1532 made it plain that a new temper had taken hold of the government. The uncertainties and futilities of the last three years were to give way to a definite plan and purpose. In this session both the English Church and the papacy were for the first time attacked ,vith real weapons instead of with threats, and the measures used to do this are indisputably linked with Cromwell. In 1531 the Church had been compelled to acknowledge a so far meaningless title and agree to a heavy fine (much of which was never paid); in 1532, the constitutional independence of the Church was overthrown. The instrument employed for this was that petition against Church courts of which Croffi\vell had taken charge in 1529. As he revised it, a document originally representative of the genuine grievances of the commons concentrated on the one issue in it which affected the crown-the fact that the laws of the Church did not depend on royal sanction. The petition known as 'the Commons' Supplication against the Ordinaries' was introduced into a house exasperated by the king's demands for their assent to a bill strengthening his feudal rights; naturally, the commons took it up \vith relief and soon convinced themselves that they \vere debating their o\vn proposals-as in a manner they were.
