tter, or contention now depending for the causes before rehearsed, or
that hereafter shall come into contention for any of the same causes in any
of the foresaid courts, which hath, doth, shall, or may touch the king, his
heirs or successors, kings of this realm; in all or every such case or
cases the party grieved as aforesaid shall or may appeal from any of the
said courts of 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