HISTORY OF THE REFORMATION.” 381 
soever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall 
marry another; committeth adultery—words to which the Dominican 
friar, and the rest of the canonists, jurists, and divines, consulted on 
this occasion, could, with all their latitude of interpretation, attach 
no other meaning than this, that the nuptial bond was indissoluble, 
when not violated by adultery. Upon Pope Clement resolving not 
to be accessary to the degradation of Queen Catharine, Henry ven- 
tured upon the perilous experiment of obtaining the opinion of the 
universities of Europe,?9 as to whether a brother may lawfully 
marry a brother’s widow. And; that they might respond in the ne- 
gative, money was plentifully distributed among them by his agents. 
In one of his letters, Clement asserts that the most undue influence 
was used with these public bodies to bring them over to the king’s 
cause. Burnett, however, is anxious to demonstrate to us that no 
bribes ever touched the hands of these foreign doctors. In his 
proofs, among other flaws, isthis: that he himself allows that some 
of the cardinals were bribed by Henry’s ambassador, both in 1528 
and in 1532. Burnett, also, can yield so far to his own prejudice as 
to disbelieve that the king menaced the universities, in case of their 
not subscribing to his wishes. But it would have been any thing 
short of insanity to battle with such a being for conscience sake, af- 
ter three such letters as they had received from him; for had they 
been more fixed than they were in their attitude of defiance, one of 
these epistles, considering the character of the writer, would have 
been quite sufficient to awe them into complete submission. That 
the decision of these learned doctors, had no effect in lessening the 
aversion of the women of England to the divorce, the consciousness 
of which is said to have been so annoying to Henry, is quite evident 
from the following passage of Hall:—<* All wise men in the realm 
much abhorred that marriage ; but women, and such as were more 
wilful than wise or learned, spake against the determination, and 
said that the universities were corrupt and enticed so to do.” 
We are almost afraid that the candid enquirer, solicitous only af- 
ter truth, will be apt to suspect that Burnett’s treatment of Catha- 
rine’s noble and affecting speech before the papal legates as a fiction, 
is assignable to no other reason than that it makes his hero the ex- 
emplification of everything that is unfeeling in tyranny. For the 
story of her behaviour on this occasion, which is immortalized by 
%° Most readers must be aware that the credit is usually ascribed to 
Cranmer of having first given this piece of advice to Henry; but, according 
to an authority in Wordsworth’s £ccles. Biog., p. 437, it is due to Wolsey. 
