After that certain Churches had renounced this universal power of the Pope, one would expect in reason that the civil sovereigns in all those Churches should have recovered so much of it, as before they had unadvisedly let it go, was their own right, and in their own hands. And in England it was so in effect; saving that they, by whom the kings administered the government of religion by maintaining their employment to be in God’s right, seemed to usurp, if not a supremacy, yet an independency on the civil power, and they but seemed to usurp it, inasmuch as they acknowledged a right in the king to deprive them of the exercise of their functions at his pleasure.