He wanted to be called “sole protector and supreme head of the English church and clergy.” Here was a revolution in the making, and the terms this time were far more portentous than any mere quibble over pluralities or the cost of funerals. Henry was demanding what no king of England, no monarch of any European kingdom, had ever dared to claim. And there was more: he wanted an acknowledgment that he had “cure” of the souls of his subjects—that responsibility for delivering those souls to God rested not with the bishops, not with the pope, but with him. This was an entirely new theory of
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