We have arrived at a point from which the issue of the labyrinth is clearly visible. The course of it has been very dreary; and brought in contact as we have been with so much which is painful, so much which is discreditable to all parties concerned, we may perhaps have lost our sense of the broad bearings of the question in indiscriminate disgust. It will be well, therefore, to pause for a moment to recapitulate those features of the story which are the main indications of its character, and may serve to guide our judgment in the censure which we shall pass.
It may be admitted, or it ought to be admitted, that if Henry VIII. had been contented to rest his demand for a divorce merely on the interests of the kingdom, if he had forborne, while his
request was pending, to affront the princess who had for many years been his companion and his queen; if he had shown her that respect which her high character gave her a right to demand, and which her situation as a stranger ought to have made it impossible to him to refuse; his conduct would have been liable to no imputation, and our sympathies would without reserve have been on his side. He could not have been expected to love a person to whom he had been married as a boy for political convenience, merely because she was his wife; especially when she was many years his senior in age, disagreeable in her person, and by the consciousness of it embittered in her temper. His kingdom demanded the security of a stable succession; his conscience, it may not be doubted, was seriously agitated by the loss of his children; and looking upon it as the sentence of Heaven upon a connection, the legality of which had from the first been violently disputed, he believed that he had been living in incest, and that his misfortunes were the consequence of it. Under these circumstances he had a full right to apply for a divorce.[406]
The causa urgentissima of the canon law for which, by the pope's own showing, the dispensing powers had been granted to him, had arisen in an extreme form; and when the vital interests of England were sacrificed to the will of a foreign prince, sufficient reason had arisen for the nation to decline submission to so emphatic injustice, and to seek within itself its own remedies for its own necessities. These considerations must be allowed all their weight; and except for them, it is not to be supposed that Henry would have permitted private distaste or inclination to induce him to create a scandal in Europe. In his conduct, however, as in that of most men, good was chequered with evil, and sincerity with self-deception. Personal feeling can be traced from the first, holding a subsidiary, indeed, but still an influential place, among his motives; and exactly so far as he was influenced by it, his course was wrong, as the consequence miserably proved. The position which, in his wife's presence, he assigned to another woman, however he may have persuaded
himself that Catherine had no claim to be considered his wife, admits neither of excuse nor of palliation; and he ought never to have shared his throne with a person who consented to occupy that position. He was blind to the coarseness of Anne Boleyn, because, in spite of his chivalry, his genius, his accomplishments, in his relations with women he was without delicacy himself. He directed, or attempted to direct, his conduct by the broad rules of what he thought to be just; and in the wide margin of uncertain ground where rules of action cannot be prescribed, and where men must guide themselves by consideration for the feelings of others, he—so far as women were concerned—was altogether or almost a stranger. Such consideration is a virtue which can be learned only in the society of equals, where necessity obliges men to practise it. Henry had been a king from his boyhood; he had been surrounded by courtiers who had anticipated all his desires; and exposed as he was to an ordeal from which no human being could have escaped uninjured, we have more cause, after all, to admire him for those excellences which he conquered for himself, than to blame the defects which he retained.
But if in his private relations the king was hasty and careless, towards the pope to whom we must now return, he exhausted all resources of forbearance: and although, when separation from Rome was at length forced upon him, he then permitted no half measures, and swept into his new career with the strength of irresistible will, it was not till he had shown resolution no less great in the endurance of indignity; and of the three great powers in Europe, the prince who was compelled to break the unity of the Catholic church, was evidently the only one who was capable of real sacrifices to preserve it unbroken. Clement comprehended his reluctance, but presumed too far upon it; and if there was sin in the "great schism" of the Reformation, the guilt must rest where it is due. We have now to show the reverse side of the transactions at Bologna, and explain what a person wearing the title of his Holiness, in virtue of his supposed sanctity, had been secretly doing.
In January, 1532, some little time before his conversation with Sir Gregory Cassalis on the subject of the two wives, the pope had composed a pastoral letter to Henry, which had never been issued. From its contents it would seem to have been written on the receipt of an indignant remonstrance of Queen Catherine, in which she had complained of her desertion by her husband, and of the public position which had been given to her
rival. She had supposed (and it was the natural mistake of an embittered and injured woman) that Anne Boleyn had been placed in possession of the rights of an actual, and not only of an intended wife; and the pope, accepting her account of the situation, had written to implore the king to abstain, so long as the cause remained undetermined, from creating so great a scandal in Christendom, and to restore his late queen to her place at his side. This letter, as it was originally written, was one of Clement's happiest compositions.[407] He abstained in it from using any expression which could be construed into a threat: he appealed to Henry's honourable character, which no blot had hitherto stained; and dwelling upon the general confusion of the Christian world, he urged with temperate earnestness the ill effects which would be produced by so open a defiance of the injunctions of the Holy See in a person of so high a position. So far all was well. Henry had deserved that such a letter should be written to him; and the pope was more than justified in writing it. The letter, however, if it was sent, produced no effect, and on the 15th of November, three days before Clement's departure to Bologna, where he pretended (we must not forget) that he considered Henry substantially right; he added a postscript, in a tone not contrasting only with his words to the ambassadors, but with the language of the brief itself.
Again urging Henry's delinquencies, his separation from his wife, and the scandal of his connection with another person, he commanded him, under penalty of excommunication, within one month of the receipt of those injunctions, to restore the queen to her place, and to abstain thenceforward from all intercourse with Anne Boleyn pending the issue of the trial. "Otherwise," the pope continued, "when the said term shall have elapsed, we pronounce thee, Henry King of England, and the said Anne, to be ipso facto excommunicate, and command all men to shun and avoid your presence; and although our mind shrinks from allowing such a thought of your Serenity, although by ourselves and by our auditory of the Rota an inhibition has been already issued against you; although the act of which you are suspected be in itself forbidden by all laws human and divine, yet the reports which are brought to us do so move us, that once more we do inhibit you from dissolving your marriage with the aforesaid Catherine, or from continuing process, in your own courts, of divorce from her. And we do also hereby warn you,
that you presume not to contract any new marriage with the said or with any other woman; we declare such marriage, if you still attempt it, to be vain and of none effect, and so to be regarded by all persons in obedience to the Apostolic see."[408]