against the cause
they were supposed to be aiding: even some of the new prelates, such as
Gardiner of Winchester and Stokesley of London, grew less active advocates
when they understood that upon them and their order would fall ultimately
the responsibility of declaring invalid a marriage which the Church and
the Pope had sanctioned. Much stronger still even was the dislike to the
King's marriage on the part of the older nobility, whose enmity to Wolsey
had first made the marriage appear practicable. They had sided with Anne
to overthrow Wolsey; but the obstinate determination of the King to rid
himself of his wife and marry his favourite, had brought forward new
clerical and bureaucratic ministers whose proceedings and advice alarmed
the aristocracy much more than anything Wolsey had done. If Katharine had
been tactful, or even an able politician, she had the materials at hand to
form a combination in favour of herself and her daughter, before which
Henry, coward as he was, would have quailed. But she lacked the qualities
necessary for a leader: she irritated the King without frightening him,
and instead of conciliating the nobles who really sympathised with her,
though they were forced to do the King's bidding, she snubbed them
haughtily and drove them from her.

Anne flattered and pleased the King, but it was hardly her mind that moved
him to defy the powerful Papacy, or sustained him in his fight with his
own clergy. From the first we have seen him leaning upon some adviser who
would relieve him from responsibility whilst giving him all the honour for
success. He desired the divorce above all things; but, as usual, he wanted
to shelter himself behind other authority than his own. When in 1529 he
had been seeking learned opinions to influence the Pope, chance had thrown
the two ecclesiastics who were his instruments, Fox and Gardiner, into
contact with a learned theologian and Reader in Divinity at Cambridge
University. Thomas Cranmer had studied and lived much. He was a widower,
and Fellow of Magdalene, Cambridge, of forty years of age; and although in
orders and a Doctor of Divinity, his tastes were rather those of a learned
country gentleman than of an ecclesiastic in monkish times. In
conversation with Fox and Gardiner, this high authority on theology
expressed the opinion that instead of enduring the delays of the
ecclesiastical courts, the question of the legality of the King's marriage
should be decided by divi