for a Bull to annul for reasons of State a marriage that had been permitted for reasons of State. The King's personal desires and whims certainly played their part in the drama of his divorce as in the greater drama of the Reformation. But in support of Henry's claims, if not, as he said, as first incentive of them, there were the questions raised by the French ambassadors who came to England to treat of a marriage of the Dauphin with Mary, as to whether the princess were legitimate. It was a common occurrence in the middle Christian centuries for doubts of the legality of marriages contracted under papal dispensations, to be raised after those marriages had taken place, by parties troubled in their consciences concerning them, and by others who, from political motives, found it expedient to doubt them. This state of affairs was not unprofitable to the Roman Court. Further Bulls legalizing the issue of marriages could then be granted. The whole process contributed to the surer establishment of papal authority. It became to the interest of princes entering into "dispensed" marriages, to support the authority that had allowed and could disallow them.

Whether conscientious or unconscientious, there was at least nothing in the appeal of Henry that was inconsistent with papal custom. No reply of Rome to the reiterated requests of the King voiced any righteous indignation because such an appeal had been made. On the contrary we have the word of the secretary of Clement VII., writing to Cardinal Campeggio, appointed with Cardinal Wolsey legate to try Katharine's cause in England, that the Pope was in great trouble between the English and the Imperial ambassadors. He (the Pope) wished to please the King (of England), but the King and Cardinal (Wolsey) must not expect him to move till they had forced the Venetians to restore the papal territories.'

So much for the Pontifical veneration of the "Sacrament" of marriage! Undoubtedly if Henry had been able to wrench the lost lands of the Church from the grasp of the Venetians, the annulling of his union with Katharine would have been speedily "dispensed." As it was, the Pope vacillated and temporized; being, as

he himself complained, "between the hammer and the anvil" of the English king and the Spanish emperor.

Charles V., King of Spain, Naples and Sicily, lord of the Netherlands, Brabant and Burgundy, Emperor of the German and Austrian states, conqueror of Italy and gaoler of the Pope himself, was Katharine's nephew.

Very early in the struggle with Henry, Katharine appealed to Charles to champion her. She considered that Henry, styled "Defender of the Faith" for the book he had written against Martin Luther, was in high favour at Rome, and she remembered, too, that Wolsey was her enemy because disappointed of the emperor's interest when he had made his English bid for the Papacy. Later on, when she made her public appeal to the Pope, "who held the place and had the power of God upon earth," she shrewdly commented in private that “she, not the King, had cause to complain of His Holiness." The Holy Father had conspicuously displayed his desire to oblige King Henry. Yet Katharine had faith in her appeal. She judged, and judged correctly, that the concern of the Pope for his temporal dominion would lead him in the end to take the course the Emperor Charles should prescribe.

And all the time that the war spiritual lasted, Pope's emissaries, like Campeggio, native bishops of the undivided Catholic Church, like Fisher of Rochester, and foreign friends and champions of the Queen, like Charles, besought Katharine to cut the Gordian knot of the difficulty by renouncing her matrimonial claims and retiring to a convent. They argued with her also against setting up the contention that her union with Prince Arthur had been only a solemn betrothal. They pointed out to her that by this plea she accused Rome, since, in the directness of a judgment more truly Catholic than that of the supreme head of Catholicism, she implicitly declared that, had she ever been the wife of Arthur, no power on earth could have made her union with Henry valid.

But Katharine too was a woman, though of a genus different from the class in which we have to place Anne.

Boleyn. She persisted that she had never been Arthur's wife in fact. Yet she had been his princess ceremonially and in the eyes of law ecclesiastical and civil. The affinity existed which had created the necessity for dispensations for her marriage with Henry.

Anne Boleyn swallowed greedily the ideas that Katharine had never been legally wedded to Henry, and that in a fresh union for the King lay the only security of an undisputed succession, the only hope for the New Order in politics and in religion. Her attitude is not to be wondered at. Wiser and better persons appropriated the notions quite sincerely.

One, Thomas Cranmer, Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, having fallen into talk with Stephen Gardiner, the King's secretary, and Dr. Fox, the King's almoner, on the matter of the divorce, stated his view that the King ought to take the opinions of the divines of the universities, and if the majority agreed that the marriage was invalid, His Majesty might assume the responsibility of remarrying without the permission of the Bishop of Rome. It was a wonder to receive an original suggestion. The King said this Cranmer had the sow by the right ear, and, while proceeding to give effect to his suggestion, called upon the learned Fellow to write him a book upon the divorce matter. To place him under influences that would induce in the work the opinion the King desired, the author was quartered upon Anne's father, lately raised to the rank of Earl of Wiltshire.

In Durham House, on the north side of the Strandwhere Coutts's bank now stands-Cranmer must many times have discoursed with Anne concerning the iniquity of permitting for political considerations and in Heaven's name, unions which, apart from these considerations, were held to be contrary to God's laws. They must have debated, too, upon the great inconveniences of allowing appeals in matrimonial causes" from a nation that was "a complete body, having full power to do justice in all cases, both spiritual and temporal," to an alien authority; especially when such appeals "put them to great charge

and occasioned many delays." And if to Anne the matter was entirely personal, it would not be forgotten by wideeyed Cranmer that on meaner people, even more than on princes, the delays and exactions "grounded on the Pope's power of dispensing " pressed sorely.

That Anne discoursed intelligently and behaved modestly we may be sure from the opinion Cranmer formed of her and held almost to the end. Even when she lay in the Tower, charged by her incensed husband with the blackest of vices, Cranmer dared to tell the King that he had never had a better opinion of any woman than of her. He had "loved her not a little because of the love which she seemed to bear to God and His gospel." He added, however, that “if she were guilty, all that loved the gospel must hate her, as having given the greatest slander to the gospel."

It is certain that during the period that Cranmer was writing his book at Durham House, he had cause to believe that the Holy Scriptures were unfeignedly beloved by Anne's father and by herself, for about that time Erasmus-the Dutch Reformer, and perhaps the wisest and sincerest of all the devotees of the New Learning-wrote to congratulate Lord Wiltshire that he had "such a desire to that pearl of price," the "sacred Scriptures.' Now Cranmer was in constant correspondence with Erasmus, who undoubtedly obtained the report he had of Anne's father from the future archbishop himself. At least Cranmer's interpretations of the Gospels must have instilled in Anne something of his own sincere belief that the greater number of the claims and practices of Rome were unscriptural and ungodly.

The break came at last. Henry defied the Papacy once and for all. He married Anne, putting away Katharine on the ground of her pre-contract to his brother, and elevated Cranmer to the Primacy.

Anne's panegyrists among the Protestants make much of her queenly patronage of learned and pure-lived divines; of her more than royal liberality in the giving of alms; and of her "mild nature," which made her bear not

only to be admonished," but also to "require her chaplains plainly and freely to tell whatsoever they saw in her amiss." She is commended, too, for her " zealous defence of Christ's gospel" in placing Hugh Latimer in a bishopric, and in prevailing upon the King to brave the old superstition that no king should hunt in Woodstock Park or enter Oxford except at risk of his life. By her "Christian" persuasions, so it was reported, Henry "did both, and received no harm."

But when the time came for her overthrow, all her good actions were powerless to maintain her innocence against her levities of manner, her jocularities of speech, her "advanced" ways and her unbecoming "humilities." That she was vilified by the envious, and accused of crimes she never committed, we may not doubt. Yet she had not been discreet, and had decidedly disobeyed the gospel injunction to avoid even appearances of evil. Before the King's notice fell on her there had been some love-making between the young Lord Percy of that time and herself. When proof was afforded of a pre-contract with this lord, Cranmer had no alternative but to judge in her case, as he had in that of Katharine. The day before she was beheaded, her marriage with the King was solemnly annulled by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

One phrase of her "last words" upon the scaffold forms for her a fitting and a pathetic epitaph—And if any person will meddle with my cause, I require them to judge the best.

After Anne came Jane; Jane, whose fate it was to mother the very hope and darling of the early Protestants of this country. She lived only ten days after her son was born. Her life was short, but it was in the conventional sense, at least—a religious one. We do not hear of her taking one step that was not governed by a high consideration. There was not in England in the reign of Henry VIII. any organized community of Protestants, nor any considerable section of people professing antagonism to the Catholic Church. Only certain definite usurpations of national authority by the Court of Rome, called forth protest.