Among the many technical questions which had been raised upon the divorce, the most serious was on the validity of the original dispensation; a question not only on the sufficiency of the form the defects of which the brief had been invented to remedy; but on the more comprehensive uncertainty whether Pope Julius had not exceeded his powers altogether in granting a dispensation where there was so close affinity.  No one supposed that the pope could permit a brother to marry a sister; a dispensation granted in such a case would be ipso facto void.—­Was not the dispensation similarly void which permitted the marriage of a brother’s widow?  The advantage which Henry expected from raising this difficulty was the transfer of judgment from the partial tribunal of Clement to a broader court.  The pope could not, of course, adjudicate on the extent of his own powers; especially as he always declared himself to be ignorant of the law; and the decision of so general a question rested either with a general council, or must be determined by the consent of Christendom, obtained in some other manner.  If such general consent declared against the pope, the cause was virtually terminated.  If there was some approach to a consent against him, or even if there was general uncertainty, Henry had a legal pretext for declining his jurisdiction, and appealing to a council.

Thomas Cranmer, then a doctor of divinity at Cambridge,[251] is said to have been the person who suggested this ingenious expedient, and to have advised the king, as the simplest means of carrying it out, to consult in detail the universities and learned men throughout Europe.  His notorious activity in collecting the opinions may have easily connected him with the origination of the plan, which probably occurred to many other persons as well as to him; but whoever was the first adviser, it was immediately acted upon, and English agents were despatched into Germany, Italy, and France, carrying with them all means of persuasion, intellectual, moral, and material, which promised to be of most cogent potency with lawyers’ convictions.

This matter was in full activity when the Earl of Wiltshire, Anne Boleyn’s father, with Cranmer, the Bishop of London, and Edward Lee, afterwards Archbishop of York, was despatched to Bologna to lay Henry’s remonstrances before the emperor, who was come at last in person to enjoy his miserable triumph, and receive from the pope the imperial crown.  Sir Nicholas Carew, who had been sent forward a few weeks previously, described in piteous language the state to which Italy had been reduced by him.  Passing through Pavia, the English emissary saw the children crying about the streets for bread, and dying of hunger; the grapes in midwinter rotting on the vines, because there was no one to gather them; and for fifty miles scarcely a single creature, man or woman, in the fields.  “They say,” added Carew, “and the pope also showed us the same, that the whole people