Note (back) — Chapter VIII

Henry's suspicions, and his knowledge that Wolsey would be hostile to his marriage with Anne Boleyn, induced him to act for the time independently of the Cardinal; and, while Wolsey was in France hinting at a marriage between Henry and Renée, the King himself was secretly endeavouring to remove the obstacles to his union with Anne Boleyn. Instead of adopting Wolsey's suggestion that Ghinucci should be sent to Rome as an Italian versed in the ways of the Papal Curia, he despatched his secretary, Dr. William Knight, with two extraordinary commissions, the second of which he thought would not be revealed "for any craft the Cardinal or any other can find".[577] The first was to obtain from the Pope a dispensation to marry a second wife, without being divorced from Catherine, the issue from both marriages to be legitimate. This "licence to commit bigamy" has naturally been the subject of much righteous indignation. But marriage-laws were lax in those days, when Popes could play fast and loose with them for political purposes; and, besides the "great reasons and precedents, especially in the Old Testament," to which Henry referred,[578] he might have produced a precedent more pertinent, more recent, and better calculated to appeal to Clement VII. In 1521 Charles V.'s Spanish council drew up a memorial on the subject of his marriage, in which they pointed out that his ancestor, Henry IV. of Castile, had, in 1437, married Dona Blanca, by whom he had no children; and that the Pope thereupon granted him a dispensation to marry a second wife on condition that, if within a fixed time he had no issue by her, he should return to his first.[579] A licence for bigamy, modelled after this precedent, would have suited Henry admirably, but apparently he was unaware of this useful example, and was induced to countermand Knight's commission before it had been communicated to Clement. The demand would not, however, have shocked the Pope so much as his modern defenders, for on 18th September, 1530, Casale writes to Henry: "A few days since the Pope secretly proposed to me that your Majesty might be allowed two wives. I told him I could not undertake to make any such proposition, because I did not know whether it would satisfy your Majesty's conscience. I made this answer because I know that the Imperialists have this in view, and are urging it; but why, I know not."[580] Ghinucci and Benet were equally cautious, and thought the Pope's suggestion was only a ruse; whether a ruse or not, it is a curious illustration of the moral influence Popes were then likely to exert on their flock.