lleged
to have existed when Ferdinand and Henry VII. arranged the marriage
between their children. The dispensation had been granted by Pope Julius
with reluctance, had been acted upon after considerable hesitation, and
was of doubtful validity, since the necessary conditions were absent. The
marriages of kings were determined with little reference to the personal
affection of the parties. Between Henry and Catherine there was probably
as much and as little personal attachment as there usually is in such
cases. He respected and perhaps admired her character; but she was not
beautiful, she was not attractive, while she was as proud and intractable
as her mother Isabella. Their union had been settled by the two fathers to
cement the alliance between England and Spain. Such connections rest on a
different foundation from those which are voluntarily entered into between
private persons. What is made up for political reasons may pardonably be
dissolved when other reasons of a similar kind require it; and when it
became clear that Catherine could never bear another child, that the
penalty threatened in the Levitical law against marriages of this precise
kind had been literally enforced in the death of the male offspring, and
that civil war was imminent in consequence upon the King's death, Henry
may have doubted in good faith whether she had ever been his wife at
all--whether, in fact, the marriage was not of the character which
everyone would now allow to attach to similar unions. Had there been a
Prince of Wales, the question would never have arisen, and Henry, like
other kings, would have borne his fate. But there was no prince, and the
question had risen, and there was no reason why it should not. There was
no trace at the outset of an attachment to another woman. If there had
been, there would be little to condemn; but Anne Boleyn, when it was first
mooted, was no more to the King than any other lady of the court. He
required a wife who could produce a son to secure the succession. The
powers which had allowed an irregular marriage could equally dissolve it,
and the King felt that he had a right to demand a familiar concession
which other sovereigns had often applied for in one form or another, and
rarely in vain.

Thus as early as 1526 certainly, and probably as much as a year before,
Cardinal Wolsey had been feeling his way at Rome for a separation between
Henry and Catherine. On September 7 in that year the Bishop of B