ts.[548] If her miscarriages and the death of her children (p. 193)
were a grief to Henry, the pain and the sorrow were hers in far
greater measure; if they had made her old and deformed, as Francis
brutally described her in 1519,[549] the fact must have been far more
bitter to her than it was unpleasant to Henry. There may have been
some hardship to Henry in the circumstance that, for political
motives, he had been induced by his council to marry a wife who was
six years his senior; but to Catherine herself a divorce was the
height of injustice. The question was in fact one of justice against a
real or supposed political necessity, and in such cases justice
commonly goes to the wall. In politics, men seek to colour with
justice actions based upon considerations of expediency. They first
convince themselves, and then they endeavour with less success to
persuade mankind.

[Footnote 548: _Sp. Cal._, ii., 201.]

[Footnote 549: _Ven. Cal._, ii., 1230.]

So Henry VIII. convinced himself that the dispensation granted by
Julius II. was null and void, that he had never been married to
Catherine, and that to continue to live with his brother's wife was
sin. "The King," he instructed his ambassador to tell Charles V. in
1533, "taketh himself to be in the right, not because so many say it,
but because he, being learned, knoweth the matter to be right.... The
justice of our cause is so rooted in our breast that nothing can
remove it, and even the canons say that a man should rather endure all
the censures of the Church than offend his conscience."[550] No man
was less tolerant of heresy than Henry, but no man set greater (p. 194)
store on his own private judgment. To that extent he was a Protestant;
"though," he instructed Paget in 1534 to tell the Lutheran princes,
"the law of every man's conscience be but a private court, yet it is
the highest and supreme court for judgment or justice". God and his
conscience, he told Chapuys in 1533, were on very good terms.[551] On
another occasion he wrote to Charles _Ubi Spiritus Domini, ibi
libertas_,[552] with the obvious implication that he possessed the
spirit of the Lord, and therefore he might do as he liked. To him, as
to St. Paul, all things were lawful; and Henry's appeals to the Pope,
to learned divines, to universities at home and abroad, were not for
his own satisfaction, but were merely concessions to the profane herd,
unskilled in r