Note (back) — Chapter VIII

The second commission, with which Knight was entrusted, was hardly less strange than the first. By his illicit relations with Mary Boleyn, Henry had already contracted affinity in the first degree with her sister Anne, in fact precisely the same affinity (except that it was illicit) as that which Catherine was alleged to have contracted with him before their marriage. The inconsistency of Henry's conduct, in seeking to remove by the same method from his second marriage the disability which was held to invalidate his first, helps us to define the precise position which Henry took up and the nature of his peculiar conscience. Obviously he did not at this stage deny the Pope's dispensing power; for he was invoking its aid to enable him to marry Anne Boleyn. He asserted, and he denied, no principle whatever, though it must be remembered that his own dispensation was an almost, if not quite, unprecedented stretch of papal power. To dispense with the "divine" law against marrying the brother's wife, and to dispense with the merely canonical obstacle to his marriage with Anne arising out of his relations with Mary Boleyn, were very different matters; and in this light the breach between England and Rome might be represented as caused by a novel extension of papal claims. Henry, however, was a casuist concerned exclusively with his own case. He maintained merely that the particular dispensation, granted for his marriage with Catherine, was null and void. As a concession to others, he condescended to give a number of reasons, none of them affecting any principle, but only the legal technicalities of the case—the causes for which the dispensation was granted, such as his own desire, and the political necessity for the marriage were fictitious; he had himself protested against the marriage, and so forth. For himself, his own conviction was ample sanction; he knew he was living in sin with Catherine because his children had all died but one, and that was a manifest token of the wrath of Providence. The capacity for convincing himself of his own righteousness is the most effective weapon in the egotist's armoury, and Henry's egotism touched the sublime. His conscience was clear, whatever other people might think of the maze of apparent inconsistencies in which he was involved. In 1528 he was in some fear of death from the plague; fear of death is fatal to the peace of a guilty conscience, and it might well have made Henry pause in his pursuit after the divorce and Anne Boleyn. But Henry never wavered; he went on in serene assurance, writing his love letters to Anne, as a conscientiously unmarried man might do, making his will,[581] "confessing every day and receiving his Maker at every feast,"[582] paying great attention to the morals of monasteries, and to charges of malversation against Wolsey, and severely lecturing his sister Margaret on the sinfulness of her life.[583] He hopes she will turn "to God's word, the vively doctrine of Jesu Christ, the only ground of salvation—1 Cor. 3, etc."; he reminds her of "the divine ordinance of inseparable matrimony first instituted in Paradise," and urges her to avoid "the inevitable damnation threatened against advoutrers". Henry's conscience was convenient and skilful. He believed in the "ordinance of inseparable matrimony," so, when he wished to divorce a wife, his conscience warned him that he had never really been married to her. Hence his nullity suits with Catherine of Aragon, with Anne Boleyn and with Anne of Cleves. Moreover, if he had never been married to Catherine, his relations with Mary Boleyn and Elizabeth Blount were obviously not adultery, and he was free to denounce that sin in Margaret with a clear conscience.