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 some curious scruples of conscience, and he could not bring himself to take the sacrament while he was unfaithful to his wife. Insuperable antipathy prevented marital relations; continence was out of the question; debauchery endangered his soul. He put his hard case before the heads of the Lutheran Church. They disbelieved in divorce; so did Henry VIII, but they did not possess Henry's talent for discovering proofs that he had never been married to the wife he wished to repudiate; and bigamy, from which the Tudor abstained, appeared the only solution. The same idea had occurred before to Clement VII; a previous Pope had licensed bigamy in the case of Henry IV of Castile; and the Old Testament precedents were familiar to all. Luther, Melanchthon, and Bucer all concurred in approving Philip's second marriage on condition that it remained a secret. The ceremony took place at Rothen-burg on March 4, 1540, and the news soon leaked out. Melanchthon quailed before the public odium and nearly died of shame, but Luther wished to brazen the matter out with a lie. "The secret 'yea,'" he wrote, "must for the sake of Christ's Church remain a public 'nay.'" By denying the truth of the rumours he would, he argued, be doing no more than Christ Himself did when He said He knew not the day and the hour of His second coming, and he also alleged the analogy of the confessional; a good confessor must deny in Court all knowledge of what he has learnt in confession.

The moral effect of this revelation upon the Lutheran cause was incalculable. Cranmer wrote from England to his uncle-in-law Osiander of the pain which it caused, to the friends of the Reformation and the handle it gave to the enemy. Ferdinand avowed that he had long been inclined to evangelical doctrines, but that this affair had produced a revulsion of feeling. John Frederick and Ulrich of Württemberg refused to guarantee Philip immunity for his crime, the legal penalty for which was death; and the Landgrave, seriously alarmed, sought to make his peace with the Habsburgs, and possibly with Rome; as a last resort he felt he could obtain a dispensation from the Pope, who would willingly pay the price for a prodigal son. In the autumn of 1540 he began his negotiations with Granvelle, and on June 13, 1541, concluded his bargain with Charles; he abandoned his relations with England, France, and Cleves, undertook to exclude them all from the Schmalkaldic League, to side with Charles on all political questions, and to recognise Ferdinand as Charles' successor in the Empire. In return he only obtained security against personal attacks; he would not be exempt from the consequences of a general war against Protestants. Philip's son-in-law, Maurice, who succeeded his father Henry as Duke of Albertine Saxony in that year, was included in the arrangement; and Joachim of Brandenburg was induced to promise help against Cleves in return for the confirmation of his church establishment. As the Elector John Frederick could not be induced to abandon bis brother-in-law of Cleves,