t to have made it
impossible to him to refuse; his conduct would have been liable to no
imputation, and our sympathies would without reserve have been on his side.
He could not have been expected to love a person to whom he had been
married as a boy for political convenience, merely because she was his
wife; especially when she was many years his senior in age, disagreeable in
her person, and by the consciousness of it embittered in her temper. His
kingdom demanded the security of a stable succession; his conscience, it
may not be doubted, was seriously agitated by the loss of his children; and
looking upon it as the sentence of Heaven upon a connection, the legality
of which had from the first been violently disputed, he believed that he
had been living in incest, and that his misfortunes were the consequence of
it. Under these circumstances he had a full right to apply for a
divorce.[406]

The causa urgentissima of the canon law for which, by the pope's own
showing, the dispensing powers had been granted to him, had arisen in an
extreme form; and when the vital interests of England were sacrificed to
the will of a foreign prince, sufficient reason had arisen for the nation
to decline submission to so emphatic injustice, and to seek within itself
its own remedies for its own necessities. These considerations must be
allowed all their weight; and except for them, it is not to be supposed
that Henry would have permitted private distaste or inclination to induce
him to create a scandal in Europe. In his conduct, however, as in that of
most men, good was chequered with evil, and sincerity with self-deception.
Personal feeling can be traced from the first, holding a subsidiary,
indeed, but still an influential place, among his motives; and exactly so
far as he was influenced by it, his course was wrong, as the consequence
miserably proved. The position which, in his wife's presence, he assigned
to another woman, however he may have persuaded himself that Catherine had
no claim to be considered his wife, admits neither of excuse nor of
palliation; and he ought never to have shared his throne with a person who
consented to occupy that position. He was blind to the coarseness of Anne
Boleyn, because, in spite of his chivalry, his genius, his accomplishments,
in his relations with women he was without delicacy himself. He directed,
or attempted to direct, his conduct by the broad rules of what he thought
to be just; and in the w