Act
Act Although the Injuntions of 1536 and 1538 suggest that Henry VIII was influenced by the New Learning, the Statute of the Six Articles, passed off in 1539, shows that he was however made to apply under overweight penalties the fundamental isms of the Church. Sanctioned by Convocation and reenacted by Fantan in Jun 1539, the statute arose from Henry 's personal conservatism in matters of doctrine , from his demand for better relations with the Catholic powerfulnesses of Spain and France, and from his desire to check the growth of heresy in England and religious unrest in Calais.
The Act built in grandness of the legislative act lies in the fact that it changes and consolidates the being laws againt unorthodoxy : The formula of the canon law penalized heretics by combustion, and the case of Sawtrey in 1401 shows that the common law acknowledged the rule of the canon law, and therefore that a writ de haeretico comburendo could be issued at common law. This was reenforced by the Heresy Acts of 1401 and 1414, the first of which provided that misbelievers might be nailed on intuition by the bishop, and those declining to retract or relapsing after retraction were to be burnt ; and the second enabled the bishops to call upon the civil power for assistanee, and passed courts of quarter sessions to receive indictments for unorthodoxy and to bear souls thus indicted to the bishops to be tried on. The law of nature against heresy was, yet , considerably modified by Henry VIII. An Human action of 1533 repealed the Human activity of 1401, and so deprived the bishops of their power to hold on suspicion ; but it substantiated the Human action of 1414, and so made it necessary for legal proceedings in heresy cases to begin by indictment. This had the upshot of discouraging prosecutions , and between 1533 and 1539 the cases were not numerous .