bly or that the
finding of the bishops and ultimate annulment of the marriage was not in
accordance with their consciences. We are encouraged to assume that all
this was indeed so, when we consider that Jeanne de Valois submitted
without protest to the divorce, and that neither then nor subsequently
at any time did she prefer any complaint, accepting the judgement, it is
presumable, as a just and fitting measure.

She applied to the Pope for permission to found a religious order, whose
special aim should be the adoration and the emulation of the perfections
of the Blessed Virgin, a permission which Alexander very readily
accorded her. He was, himself, imbued with a very special devotion for
the Mother of the Saviour. We see the spur of this special devotion of
his in the votive offering of a silver effigy to her famous altar of the
Santissima Nunziata in Florence, which he had promised in the event of
Rome being freed from Charles VIII. Again, after the accident of the
collapse of a roof in the Vatican, in which he narrowly escaped death,
it is to Santa Maria Nuova that we see him going in procession to hold
a solemn thanksgiving service to Our Lady. In a dozen different ways
did that devotion find expression during his pontificate; and be it
remembered that Catholics owe it to Alexander VI that the Angelus-bell
is rung thrice daily in honour of the Blessed Virgin.

To us this devotion to the Mother of Chastity on the part of a churchman
openly unchaste in flagrant subversion of his vows is a strange and
incongruous spectacle. But the incongruity of it is illumining. It
reveals Alexander's simple attitude towards the sins of the flesh,
and shows how, in common with most churchmen of his day, he found no
conscientious difficulty in combining fervid devotion with perfervid
licence. Whatever it may seem by ours, by his lights--by the light of
the examples about him from his youth, by the light of the precedents
afforded him by his predecessors in St. Peter's Chair--his conduct was
a normal enough affair, which can have afforded him little with which to
reproach himself.

In the matter of the annulment of the marriage of Louis XII it is to
be conceded that Alexander made the most of the opportunity it afforded
him. He perceived that the moment was propitious for enlisting the
services of the King of France to the achievement of his own ends, more
particularly to further the matter of the marriage of Cesare Borgia
with Ca