T HE twelve months appointed in Cranmer's mandate ran out, but no
declaration came from the archbishop about the teaching to be given
on what he had described as doubtful points. And in the autumn of
1535 the king sent his first ambassador to the Lutheran princes of Germany,
the new Bishop of Hereford, Edward Foxe, who had been Gardiner's col. -
league in the Roman mission of 1529. With Foxe went an Austin Friar, his
Cambridge contemporary, Dr. Robert Barnes, and also Dr. Nicholas Heath.
Barnes had paid more heavily than Latimer for the heretical demonstration
that had stirred Cambridge in 1525. Although he, too, had abjured before
Wolsey, the cardinal had kept him in durance for the best part of three years;
and then the friar fled to Germany where he remained until, in 1531, Henry
sent him a safe conduct and he came home, to serve the king's anti-papal and
anti-imperial policies. So it was that, in 1533, Barnes had gone to Germany
as the king's agent in an intrigue with the free city of Lübeck for aid in estab-
lishing in Denmark a king favourable to Henry. That mission had failed --
not through any fault of Barnes, however -- and now Christmas Day, 1535
found the one-time convict for heresy at Schmalkalden, discussing with
Luther's sovereign the terms of a politico-religious entente.

So it was that there began a whole series of events which were to influence
English life and character permanently -- but none of which events were
intended by Henry precisely as they happened. There is little evidence,
indeed, that the king was ever interested in religious changes as such. The
papal power had been a most serious obstacle to his personal arrangements,
and so it had had to go; to confiscate the monasteries had been an obviously
simple means of financing the state through a serious crisis; to bring the
whole ecclesiastical life of the country under the royal authority was, again,
a great convenience of state. For all change that made for the exaltation of
his own place the king was enthusiastic. But it would be hard to find an
instance where he was moved to make ecclesiastical changes by any thought
of the burdens which the status quo imposed on the rank and file of the pope's
subjects. He "released" monks and nuns from their vows of obedience, as
a necessary part of the destruction of monasticism, and from their vows of
poverty in order that, like other citizens, they could lawfully hold property
and become amenable to the law in that regard; but so far was he from
sympathising with difficulties arising from their third vow that to enforce it he
introduced the unheard of sanction of the death penalty. Again it is not hard
to see the chances of profit to the crown in the attack on the cultus of the
saints -- the wealth of the shrines now plundered was considerable. The

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