en the wife of Prince
Arthur, eldest son of Henry VII., but the death of that prince occurred
only five months after the marriage. The uncertainty of the laws of
marriage, and the innumerable refinements of the Roman canon law,
affected the legitimacy of the children and raised scruples of
conscience in the mind of the king. The loss of his children must have
appeared as a judicial sentence on a violation of the Divine law. The
divorce presented itself to him as a moral obligation, when national
advantage combined with superstition to encourage what he secretly
desired.

Wolsey, after thirty years' experience of public life, was as sanguine
as a boy. Armed with this little lever of divorce, he saw himself in
imagination the rebuilder of the Catholic faith and the deliverer of
Europe from ecclesiastical revolt and from innovations of faith. The
mass of the people hated Protestantism as he, a true friend of the
Catholic cult, sincerely detested the reformation of Luther. He believed
that the old life-tree of Catholicism, which in fact was but cumbering
the ground, might bloom again in its old beauty. But a truer political
prophet than Wolsey would have been found in the most ignorant of those
poor men who were risking death and torture in disseminating the
pernicious volumes of the English Testament.

Catherine being a Spanish princess, Henry, in 1527, formed a league with
Francis I., with the object of breaking the Spanish alliance. The pope
was requested to make use of his dispensing power to enable the King of
England to marry a wife who could bear him children. Deeply as we
deplore the outrage inflicted on Catherine, and the scandal and
suffering occasioned by the dispute, it was in the highest degree
fortunate that at the crisis of public dissatisfaction in England with
the condition of the church, a cause should have arisen which tested the
whole question of church authority in its highest form. It was no
accident which connected a suit for divorce with the reformation of
religion.

_Anne Boleyn_

The Spanish emperor, Charles V., gave Catherine his unwavering support,
and refused to allow the pope to pass a judicial sentence of divorce.
Catherine refused to yield. Another person now comes into conspicuous
view. It has been with Anne Boleyn as with Catherine of Aragon--both are
regarded as the victims of a tyranny which Catholics and Protestants
unite to remember with horror, and each has taken the place of