driven to this extremity, and therefore we beseech your Holiness without
further delay to assist his Majesty's just and reasonable desires. We
entreat you to confirm the judgment of these learned men; and for the sake
of that love and fatherly affection which your office requires you to show
towards us, not to close your bowels of compassion against us, your most
dutiful, most loving, most obedient children. The cause of his Majesty is
the cause of each of ourselves; the head cannot suffer, but the members
must bear a part. We have all our common share in the pain and in the
injury; and as the remedy is wholly in the power of your Holiness, so does
the duty of your fatherly office require you to administer it. If, however,
your Holiness will not do this, or if you choose longer to delay to do it,
our condition hitherto will have been so much the more wretched, that we
have so long laboured fruitlessly and in vain. But it will not be wholly
irremediable; extreme remedies are ever harsh of application; but he that
is sick will by any means be rid of his distemper; and there is hope in the
exchange of miseries, when, if we cannot obtain what is good, we may obtain
a lesser evil, and trust that time may enable us to endure it.

"These things we beseech your Holiness, in the name of our Lord Jesus
Christ, to consider with yourself. You profess that on earth you are His
vicar. Endeavour, then, to show yourself so to be, by pronouncing your
sentence to the glory and praise of God, and giving your sanction to that
truth which has been examined, approved, and after much deliberation
confirmed by the most learned men of all nations. We meanwhile will pray
the all-good God, whom we know by most sure testimony to be truth itself,
that He will deign so to inform and direct the counsels of your Holiness,
that we obtaining by your authority what is holy, just, and true, may be
spared from seeking it by other more painful methods."

Thus was the great crisis steadily maturing itself, and the cause by this
petition was made to rest upon its proper merits. The justification of the
demand for the divorce was the danger of civil war; and into civil war the
nation had no intention of permitting themselves to be drifted by papal
imbecility. Whatever was the origin of Henry's resolution, it was acted out
with calmness, and justified by sober reason; and backed by the good sense
of his lay subjects, he proceeded bravely, in spite of excommunicat