Note (back) — Chapter VIII

Meanwhile, Campeggio found help from an unexpected quarter in his efforts to waste the time. Quite unknown to Henry, Wolsey, or Clement, there existed in Spain a brief of Julius II. fuller than the original bull of dispensation which he had granted for the marriage of Henry and Catherine, and supplying any defects that might be found in it. Indeed, so conveniently did the brief meet the criticisms urged against the bull, that Henry and Wolsey at once pronounced it an obvious forgery, concocted after the doubts about the bull had been raised. No copy of the brief could be found in the English archives, nor could any trace be discovered of its having been registered at Rome; while Ghinucci and Lee, who examined the original in Spain, professed to see in it such flagrant inaccuracies as to deprive it of all claim to be genuine.[614] Still, if it were genuine, it shattered the whole of Henry's case. That had been built up, not on the denial of the Pope's power to dispense, but on the technical defects of a particular dispensation. Now it appeared that the validity of the marriage did not depend upon this dispensation at all. Nor did it depend upon the brief, for Catherine was prepared to deny on oath that the marriage with Arthur had been anything more than a form;[615] in that case the affinity with Henry had not been contracted, and there was no need of either dispensation or brief. This assertion seems to have shaken Henry; certainly he began to shift his position, and, early in 1529, he was wishing for some noted divine, friar or other, who would maintain that the Pope could not dispense at all.[616] This was his first doubt as to the plenitude of papal power; his marriage with Catherine must be invalid, because his conscience told him so; if it was not invalid through defects in the dispensation, it must be invalid because the Pope could not dispense. Wolsey met the objection with a legal point, perfectly good in itself, but trivial. There were two canonical disabilities which the dispensation must meet for Henry's marriage to be valid; first, the consummation of Catherine's marriage with Arthur; secondly, the marriage, even though it was not consummated, was yet celebrated in facie ecclesiæ, and generally reputed complete. There was thus an impedimentum publicæ honestatis to the marriage of Henry and Catherine, and this impediment was not mentioned in, and therefore not removed by, the dispensation.[617]