Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 3.djvu/342

322 do in such cases, and had often before done, the Convocation, by the tenor of those their present letters, declared his Majesty not to be any longer bound by the matrimony in question, which matrimony was null and invalid; and both his Majesty and the Lady Anne were free to contract and consummate other marriages without objection or delay.

To this judgment two archbishops, seventeen bishops, and a hundred and thirty-nine clergy set their hands. Their sentence was undoubtedly legal, according to a stricter interpretation of the canon law than had been usual in the ecclesiastical courts. The case was of a kind in which the Queen, on her separate suit, could, with clear right, have obtained a divorce a vinculo had she desired; and the country had been accustomed to see separations infinitely more questionable obtained in the court of the Rota or at home, with easy and scandalous levity. Nor could the most scrupulous person, looking