e case came on for trial privately informed both judge
and jury that it was based on forgery.

We are called on to explain further, why, when all Europe was shaken by
the controversy, no hint is to be found in any public document of a fact
which, if true, would be decisive; and yet more extraordinary, why the
Pope and the Curia, when driven to bay in all the exasperation of a
furious controversy, left a weapon unused which would have assured them an
easy victory. Wolsey was not a fool. Is it conceivable that he would have
composed a document so fatal and have drawn the Pope's pointed attention
to it? My credulity does not extend so far. We cannot prove a negative; we
cannot prove that Henry had not intrigued with Mary Boleyn, or with all
the ladies of his court. But the language of the dispensation cannot be
adduced as an evidence of it, unless King, Pope, and all the interested
world had parted with their senses.

As to the story itself, there is no ground for distinguishing between the
mother and the daughter. When it was first set circulating both were named
together. The mother only has been dropped, lest the improbability should
seem too violent for belief. That Mary Boleyn had been the King's mistress
before or after her own marriage is now asserted as an ascertained fact by
respectable historians--a fact sufficient, can it be proved, to cover with
infamy for ever the English separation from Rome, King, Ministers,
Parliaments, Bishops, and every one concerned with it. The effectiveness
of the weapon commends it to Catholic controversialists. I have only to
repeat that the evidence for the charge is nothing but the floating gossip
of Catholic society, never heard of, never whispered, till the second
stage of the quarrel, when it had developed into a passionate contest;
never even then alleged in a form in which it could be met and answered.
It could not have been hid from Queen Catherine if it was known to
Reginald Pole. We have many letters of Catherine, eloquent on the story of
her wrongs; letters to the Emperor, letters to the Pope; yet no word of
Mary Boleyn. What reason can be given save that it was a legend which grew
out of the temper of the time? Nothing could be more plausible than to
meet the King's plea of conscience with an allegation which made it
ridiculous. But in the public pleadings of a cause which was discussed in
every capital in Europe by the keenest lawyers and diplomatists of the
age, an accu