d never been
the King's lawful wife, and this opinion was confirmed by the Chancellor,
the Duke of Suffolk, the Earl of Oxford, and a committee of bishops. The
confession itself belonged to the secrets which Cromwell described as "too
abominable to be made known," and was never published. The judgment of the
Archbishop itself was ratified on the 28th of June by the two Houses of
Convocation. It was laid before Parliament and was made the basis of a new
arrangement of the succession. But the Statute merely says "that God, from
whom no secret things could be hid, had caused to be brought to light
evident and open knowledge of certain impediments unknown at the making of
the previous Act, and since that time confessed by the Lady Anne before
the Archbishop of Canterbury, sitting judicially for the same, whereby it
appeared that the marriage was never good nor consonant to the laws."

Conjecture was, of course, busy over so singular a mystery. Some said that
the Archbishop had declared Elizabeth to have been Norris's bastard, and
not the daughter of the King. Others revived the story of Henry's supposed
intrigue with Anne's sister, Mary, and Chapuys added a story which even he
did not affect to believe, agreeable as it must have been to him. "Many
think," he said, "that the Concubine had become so audacious in vice,
because most of the new bishops had persuaded her that she need not go to
confession; and that, according to the new sect, it was lawful to seek aid
elsewhere, even from her own relations, when her husband was not able to
satisfy her."[424] The Wriothesley Chronicle says positively that, on the
17th of May, in the afternoon, at a solemn court kept at Lambeth by the
Archbishop of Canterbury and the doctors of the law, the King was divorced
from his wife, Queen Anne; and there at the same court was a privy
contract approved that she had made to the Earl of Northumberland, afore
the King's time, and so she was discharged, and was never lawful Queen of
England.[425]

There are difficulties in accepting either of these conjectures. Chapuys,
like Dr. Lingard after him, decided naturally for the hypothesis most
disgraceful to the King. The Mary Boleyn story, authoritatively confirmed,
at once covered Henry's divorce process with shame, and established the
superior claim of Mary to the succession.[426] But in the Act of
Parliament the cause is described as something unknown in 1533, when the
first Statute was passed: an