The period which opened with the meeting of the Reformation Parliament on 3 November 1529 and closed with the fall of Thomas Cromwell on 10 June 1540 was one of revolution. A great many things were done that overthrew accepted notions, and a great many more were planned. A new ‘polity’ was being shaped, though the revolutionaries were conservative to a degree in the manner of their work. The characteristic note of those years is one of calm assurance that things ought by rights always to have been even as they are now being fashioned; there is really no innovation – only a clearing away of the false and usurped encrustations of the ages. The preamble of the Statute of Appeals with its invocation of ‘histories and chronicles’ sets the tone. In keeping with their backward-looking words, the revolutionaries also employed the strictest legality in putting through their measures. There was no attempt to do away with the supremacy of the law; on the contrary, nothing was done without giving the courts a hand in applying it. The place of Parliament in the establishment of the royal supremacy and in dealing with the vast social and political consequences of that establishment has been consistently misunderstood. Henry VIII and Cromwell did not appeal to Parliament for moral authority, nor did they use it (having perhaps packed it) to pretend a unity in the nation for propaganda purposes.