In the meantime the famous Act of Succession[226], bastardizing the Princess Mary and establishing the offspring of Anne Boleyn as lawful heirs to the throne of England, had also been passed in Parliament, and before the year had closed a new statute[227] had formally recognized the King’s ecclesiastical supremacy for the third time; for Henry was not satisfied with the acknowledgements he had wrung from the clergy in 1531 and 1532, nor with the express assertion that the King was on earth Supreme Head of the Church of England, contained in the oath to the new succession, which Cromwell’s commissioners began to administer throughout the realm in the summer of 1534. The last vestige of the independence of the English bishops was also removed in the course of this memorable year, by certain provisions of the final Act for the restraint of Annates[228]. It had not been necessary, however, to introduce any very radical innovation here. The bishops were already virtually in the King’s hands, for the elections by chapters had long been a mere farce, and the royal nominee had been almost invariably chosen. So the Act had aimed at a legalization of the _status quo_--merely adding a few new provisions to strengthen the King’s hold on the Church. All relations with the Pope were of course to cease; the bishops were to be consecrated by virtue of a royal commission; and if the chapter failed to elect within twelve days, the King was empowered to fill the vacancy by letters patent. But even this does not seem to have been enough to satisfy Cromwell. A letter of Chapuys in the early part of 1535 informs us that the King’s Secretary called some of the bishops before the Council to ask them if the King could not make and unmake them at pleasure: ‘they were obliged to say yes, else they should have been deprived of their dignities: as the said Cromwell told a person, who reported it to me, and said that the Council had been summoned only to entrap the bishops[229].’ Cromwell followed this up, later in the year, by causing a Prohibitory Letter to be sent out in the King’s name, forbidding the bishops to visit any monastery or to exercise any right of jurisdiction during the visitation of the religious houses then in progress[230]. It appears that even Cromwell, with all his audacity, was at a loss to devise a means to silence the objections which were raised against this high-handed measure. He was not ashamed to take a hint from the fertile brains of his two blood-hounds, Legh and Ap-Rice, who suggested an ingenious argument to crush all opposition, the gist of which is contained in the following quotation from a letter which they wrote to Cromwell, Sept. 24, 1535[231]:--