Page:English laws for women in the nineteenth century.djvu/160

148 him the one gleam of faint-hearted pity, to which, perhaps, that struggling despairing woman had looked for help. She was condemned; by those who did not believe her criminal; for crimes which nature revolted at; for crimes she never committed. She died her death of just expiation on a false plea; she left the child of her brief day of love and triumph to reign gloriously over England as Queen Elizabeth; and she left the rescue of her blotted name, to the yearning regret of her poet-admirer Wiatt, and the skill of contending historians.

The day she perished, Henry took another queen. The cannon which boomed from the Tower, when with patient dignity that forsaken creature laid her head on the block, brought to the king's ear a double signal; of death and rejoicing. He had thrown off the bondage of a second marriage, and he joyously contracted a third. Every circumstance attending that sudden freedom, should have surrounded it with a grave horror. He had executed his wife,—the mother of his child and our future sovereign,—on the accusation of being paramour to divers men, amongst whom was her own brother. He had himself asserted that he had lived in intimate relations with her sister. Her mother had been slandered for his sake: and Dr Bayley in his Life of Bishop Fisher (one of Henry's victims), alludes to the belief entertained by some persons that Anne Boleyn was the king's own daughter. He had sought to bastardize the legitimate offspring of his first queen, and afterwards of his second. He had slaughtered churchmen for interfering with the gratification of his passions, and he now slaughtered the woman who had been his temptation.

Out of that mass of sin, misery, struggle, and lawless confusion of rights, sprung the germ of our English form of divorce. From that date, the power of the sacerdotal blessing stood in direct conflict with the right of the civil law to annul it: and man was pronounced perfectly capable of putting asunder those who had been joined before God. The consent of the Church was asked to that divorce; the pleas held to be