this realm, to the spiritual prelates and other abbots and priors of the Upper House, assembled and convocate by the king’s writ in convocation."[419] If Catherine’s cause was as just as Catholics and English high churchmen are agreed to consider it, the English church might have saved her.  If Catherine herself had thought first or chiefly of justice, she would not perhaps have accepted the arbitration of the English convocation; but long years before she would have been in a cloister.

Thus it is that while we regret, we are unable to blame; and we cannot wish undone an act, to have shrunk from which might have spared a single heart, but might have wrecked the English nation.  We increase our pity for Catherine because she was a princess.  We measure the magnitude of the evils which human beings endure by their position in the scale of society; and misfortunes which private persons would be expected to bear without excessive complaining, furnish matter for the lamentation of ages when they touch the sacred head which has been circled with a diadem.  Let it be so.  Let us compensate the queen’s sorrows with unstinted sympathy; but let us not trifle with history, by confusing a political necessity with a moral crime.

The English parliament, then, had taken up the gauntlet which the pope had flung to it with trembling fingers:  and there remained nothing but for the Archbishop of Canterbury to make use of the power of which by law he was now possessed.  And the time was pressing, for the new queen was enciente, and further concealment was not to be thought of.  The delay of the interview between the pope and Francis, and the change in the demeanour of the latter, which had become palpably evident, discharged Henry of all promises by which he might have bound himself; and to hesitate before the menaces of the pope’s brief would have been fatal.

The act of appeals being passed, convocation was the authority to which the power of determining unsettled points of spiritual law seemed to have lapsed.  In the month of April, therefore, Cranmer, now Archbishop of Canterbury,[420] submitted to it the two questions, on the resolution of which the sentence which he was to pass was dependent.

The first had been already answered separately by the bench of bishops and by the universities, and had been agitated from end to end of Europe—­was it lawful to marry the widow of a brother dying without issue, but having consummated his marriage; and was the Levitical prohibition of such a marriage grounded on a divine law, with which the pope could not dispense, or on a canon law of which a dispensation was permissible?[421]

The pope had declared himself unable to answer; but he had allowed that the general opinion was against the power of dispensing,[422] and there could be little doubt, therefore, of the reply of the English convocation, or at least of the upper house.  Fisher attempted an opposition; but wholly without effect.  The, question was one in which the interests of the higher clergy were not concerned, and they were therefore left to the dominion of their ordinary understandings.  Out of two hundred and sixty-three votes, nineteen only were in the pope’s favour.[423]