Note (back) — Chapter VII

So Henry VIII. convinced himself that the dispensation granted by Julius II. was null and void, that he had never been married to Catherine, and that to continue to live with his brother's wife was sin. "The King," he instructed his ambassador to tell Charles V. in 1533, "taketh himself to be in the right, not because so many say it, but because he, being learned, knoweth the matter to be right.... The justice of our cause is so rooted in our breast that nothing can remove it, and even the canons say that a man should rather endure all the censures of the Church than offend his conscience."[550] No man was less tolerant of heresy than Henry, but no man set greater store on his own private judgment. To that extent he was a Protestant; "though," he instructed Paget in 1534 to tell the Lutheran princes, "the law of every man's conscience be but a private court, yet it is the highest and supreme court for judgment or justice". God and his conscience, he told Chapuys in 1533, were on very good terms.[551] On another occasion he wrote to Charles Ubi Spiritus Domini, ibi libertas,[552] with the obvious implication that he possessed the spirit of the Lord, and therefore he might do as he liked. To him, as to St. Paul, all things were lawful; and Henry's appeals to the Pope, to learned divines, to universities at home and abroad, were not for his own satisfaction, but were merely concessions to the profane herd, unskilled in royal learning and unblessed with a kingly conscience. Against that conviction, so firmly rooted in the royal breast, appeals to pity were vain, and attempts to shake it were perilous. It was his conscience that made Henry so dangerous. Men are tolerant of differences about things indifferent, but conscience makes bigots of us all; theological hatreds are proverbially bitter, and religious wars are cruel. Conscience made Sir Thomas More persecute, and glory in the persecution of heretics,[553] and conscience earned Mary her epithet "Bloody". They were moved by conscientious belief in the Catholic faith, Henry by conscientious belief in himself; and conscientious scruples are none the less exigent for being reached by crooked paths.