other's wife was forbidden by the universal
law of Christendom. Kings, dukes, and other great men who disposed as they
pleased of the hands of their sons and daughters, found it often
desirable, for political or domestic reasons, to form connections which
the law prohibited, and therefore they maintained an Italian conjuror who
professed to be able for a consideration to turn wrong into right. To
marriages so arranged it was absurd to attach the same obligations as
belonged to unions legitimately contracted. If, as often happened, such
marriages turned out ill, the same conjuror who could make could unmake.
This function, also, he was repeatedly called on to exercise, and, for a
consideration also, he was usually compliant. The King of England had been
married as a boy to Catherine of Aragon, carrying out an arrangement
between their respective fathers. The marriage had failed in the most
important object for which royal marriages are formed: there was no male
heir to the crown, nor any prospect of one. Henry, therefore, as any other
prince in Europe would have done, applied to the Italian for assistance.
The conjuror was willing, confessing that the case was one where his
abilities might properly be employed. But another of his supporters
interfered, and forced him to refuse. The King of England had always paid
his share for the conjuror's maintenance. He was violently deprived of a
concession which it was admitted that he had a right to claim. But for the
conjuror's pretensions to make the unlawful lawful he would not have been
in the situation in which he found himself. What could be more natural
than that, finding himself thus treated, he should begin to doubt whether
the conjuror, after all, had the power of making wrong into right?
whether the marriage had not been wrong from the beginning? And, when the
magical artist began to curse, as his habit was when doubts were thrown on
his being the Vicar of the Almighty, what could be more natural also than
to throw him and his tackle out of window?

The passing of the Act increased the anxiety about the position of the
Princess Mary. In the opinion of most reasonable persons her claim to the
succession was superior to that of Elizabeth, and, if she had submitted to
her father, it would probably have been allowed and established. In the
eyes of the disaffected, however, she was already, by Clement's sentence,
the legitimate possessor of the throne. Reginald Pole, Lady Sali