578: _L. and P._, iv., 4977.]

[Footnote 579: _Sp. Cal._, ii., 379.]

[Footnote 580: _L. and P._, iv., 6627, 6705, App.
261.]

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 (p. 209)
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 apparen