al bearing of the question. The king's
desire was publicly urged on public grounds, and thus, and thus only, the
pope was at liberty to consider it. The marriages of princes have ever been
affected by other considerations than those which influence such relations
between private persons. Princes may not, as "unvalued persons" may, "carve
for themselves;" they pay the penalty of their high place, in submitting
their affections to the welfare of the state; and the same causes which
regulate the formation of these ties must be allowed to influence the
continuance of them. The case which was submitted to the pope was one of
those for which his very power of dispensing had been vested in him; and
being, as he called himself, the Father of Christendom, the nation thought
themselves entitled to call upon him to make use of that power. A resource
of the kind must exist somewhere--the relation between princes and subjects
indispensably requiring it. It had been vested in the Bishop of Rome,
because it had been presumed that the sanctity of his office would secure
an impartial exercise of his authority. And unless he could have shown
(which he never attempted to show) that the circumstances of the succession
were not so precarious as to call for his interference, it would seem that
the express contingency had arisen which was contemplated in the
constitution of the canon law;[134] and that where a provision had been
made by the church of which he was the earthly head, for difficulties of
this precise description, the pope was under an obligation either to make
the required concessions in virtue of his faculty, or, if he found himself
unable to make those concessions, to offer some distinct explanation of his
refusal. I speak of the question as nakedly political. I am not considering
the private injuries of which Catherine had so deep a right to complain,
nor the complications subsequently raised on the original validity of the
first marriage. A political difficulty, on which alone he was bound to give
sentence, was laid before the pope in his judicial capacity, in the name of
the nation; and the painful features which the process afterwards assumed
are due wholly to his original weakness and vacillation.

Deeply, however, as we must all deplore the scandal and suffering which
were occasioned by the dispute, it was in a high degree fortunate, that at
the crisis of public dissatisfaction in England with the condition of the
church, e