possible 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.[1]
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 ^hen 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
- ↑ Individual interests have to yield necessarily and justly to the interests of a nation, provided the conduct or the sacrifice which the nation requires is not sinful. That there would have been any sin on Queen Catherine's part if she had consented to a separation from the King, was never pretended; and although it is a difficult and delicate matter to decide how far unwilling persons may be compelled to do what they ought to have done without compulsion, yet the will of a single man or woman cannot be allowed to constitute itself an irremovable obstacle to a great national good.
