ide margin of uncertain ground where rules of
action cannot be prescribed, and where men must guide themselves by
consideration for the feelings of others, he--so far as women were
concerned--was altogether or almost a stranger. Such consideration is a
virtue which can be learned only in the society of equals, where necessity
obliges men to practise it. Henry had been a king from his boyhood; he had
been surrounded by courtiers who had anticipated all his desires; and
exposed as he was to an ordeal from which no human being could have escaped
uninjured, we have more cause, after all, to admire him for those
excellences which he conquered for himself, than to blame the defects which
he retained.

But if in his private relations the king was hasty and careless, towards
the pope to whom we must now return, he exhausted all resources of
forbearance: and although, when separation from Rome was at length forced
upon him, he then permitted no half measures, and swept into his new career
with the strength of irresistible will, it was not till he had shown
resolution no less great in the endurance of indignity; and of the three
great powers in Europe, the prince who was compelled to break the unity of
the Catholic church, was evidently the only one who was capable of real
sacrifices to preserve it unbroken. Clement comprehended his reluctance,
but presumed too far upon it; and if there was sin in the "great schism" of
the Reformation, the guilt must rest where it is due. We have now to show
the reverse side of the transactions at Bologna, and explain what a person
wearing the title of his Holiness, in virtue of his supposed sanctity, had
been secretly doing.

In January, 1532, some little time before his conversation with Sir Gregory
Cassalis on the subject of the two wives, the pope had composed a pastoral
letter to Henry, which had never been issued. From its contents it would
seem to have been written on the receipt of an indignant remonstrance of
Queen Catherine, in which she had complained of her desertion by her
husband, and of the public position which had been given to her rival. She
had supposed (and it was the natural mistake of an embittered and injured
woman) that Anne Boleyn had been placed in possession of the rights of an
actual, and not only of an intended wife; and the pope, accepting her
account of the situation, had written to implore the king to abstain, so
long as the cause remained undetermined, from creati