Page:Church and State under the Tudors.djvu/85

 greater or less force, completeness, and permanence over every country in Europe, succeeding best in those which were most akin to England, should have spread to England sooner or later; and, as we have seen, it would find, as it did find, all the elements there which it needed for its success. It required a motive applied to the King himself which should call up all his strongest personal feelings and range them actively against the Pope and the clergy, instead of more or less languidly in their favour as they had previously been, in order to make him the champion and leader of the anti-Church movement instead of its moderator or even suppressor, as in other circumstances he might have been; and just this required motive was supplied by the question of the divorce and the particular treatment which it received at the hands of Clement VII.

Into the history of the divorce it is unnecessary to go here at length. It has afforded, and will afford, matter for dispute so long as the history of their forefathers continues to be a subject of interest to mankind, and each man's ultimate decision upon it will be governed, as it ever has been, very much by his sympathies and antipathies. But so much has the subject been obscured by heated discussion that it seems advisable in this place to state the main points of the case as plainly as possible. It will, I think, appear that the old belief so much in fashion a generation ago that many persons even now can hardly hear it questioned without a shock, that the divorce was taken in hand merely to gratify Henry's caprice, and the scruples only put forward as a decent veil wherewith to cover it, must be abandoned by every one who makes the slightest pretence to impartial judgment or to any capacity for weighing evidence.

It is, then, obvious that, primâ facie, the King had