the mother and sister of the lady whom he intended to
marry; precisely the same obstacle existed, therefore, to his marriage
with Anne, being further aggravated by incest. No attempt was ever made to
prove these charges; no particulars were given of time or place. No
witnesses were produced, nor other evidence, though to prove them would
have been of infinite importance. Queen Catherine, who if any one must
have known it if the accusation was true, never alludes to Mary Boleyn in
the fiercest of her denunciations. It was heard of only in the
conversation of disaffected priests or secret visitors to the Spanish
Ambassador, and was made public only in the manifesto of Reginald Pole,
which accompanied Paul III.'s Bull for Henry's deposition. Even this
authority, which was not much in itself, is made less by the fact that in
the first draft of "Pole's Book," sent to England to be examined in 1535,
the story is not mentioned. Evidently, therefore, Pole had not then heard
of it or did not believe it. The guilt with the mother is now abandoned as
too monstrous. The guilt with the sister is peremptorily insisted on, and
the words of the dispensation are appealed to as no longer leaving room
for doubt. To what else, it is asked, can such extraordinary expressions
refer unless to some disgraceful personal _liaison_?

The uninstructed who draw inferences of fact from the verbiage of legal
documents will discover often what are called "mare's nests." I will
request the reader to consider what this supposition involves. The
dispensation would have to be copied into the Roman registers, subject to
the inspection of the acutest canon lawyers in the world. If the meaning
is so clear to us, it must have been clear to them. We are, therefore, to
believe that Henry, when demanding to be separated from Catherine, as an
escape from mortal sin, for the relief of his conscience and the surety of
his succession, was gratuitously putting the Pope in possession of a
secret which had only to be published to extinguish him and his plea in an
outburst of scorn and laughter.

There was no need for such an acknowledgment, for the intrigue could not
be proved. It could not be required for the legitimation of the children
that were to be born; for a man of Wolsey's ability must have known that
no dispensation would be held valid that was granted after so preposterous
a confidence. It was as if a man putting in a claim for some great
property, before th