late been grievous abuse of power, and that dispensations only hold good if they are granted for sufficient cause. It was a source of weakness in dealing with the first signs of Protestantism in England to adopt a position which had been so recently discarded in the conflict with the Reformation in Germany. But Fisher went still farther. The strength of the argument for the Queen was that a prohibition could not be absolute from which the contingency of a brother dying childless had been specially excepted. But her advisers would not trust that plea. The law was clearer than the exception. No brother, in the history of Christianity, had felt bound to obey the injunction of Deuteronomy. The prohibition of Leviticus had been almost universally observed. This objection was felt so strongly, that Fisher and the advocates of Catharine contended that even if the Divine law forbade the marriage, the Divine law must yield to the law of the Church.[1] Clement, however, admitted that the right to dispense against the law of God was not generally assigned to him by divines,[2] and, being so little versed in books himself that he took no offence when men spoke of his want of learning, he did not insist on it. The claim was an unsafe ground for sustaining the marriage ; for the marriage was the most effective precedent by which papal Canonists sustained the claim.[3] The argument was set aside by the more cautious disputants, both in Rome and in England ; but it had done the work of a signal of distress, to indicate the insecurity of the cause,
- ↑ The Belgian canonists employed for Catharine said : "Concedantur omnia Regi, quod auctoritas praedicta sit juris divini, et quod factum de quo est quaestio, sit in terminis affinitatis, nullatenus tamen illi concedendum est, quod Pont, non licuerit etiam hoc casu dispensare. . . . Cum maximo consensu et canonum consulta et prudentum responsa pontifici juris divini declarandi, interpretandi, limitandi, et contra illud dispensandi potestatem concedant." Fisher, De Causa Matrimonii, p. 42, writes : "Nullis argumentatiouibus diffiniri potest, sed solius Pont, interpretatione."
- ↑ The Pope said to Casale on Christmas Day, 1529, that all the divines are against the power of the Pope to dispense in such a case (Brewer, iv. 6103). Gardiner wrote on the 21st of April : "The Pope will hear no disputation as to his power of dispensing. He seems not to care himself whether the cause be decided by that article or no, so he did it not" (5476).
- ↑ "Quod Papa possit, ex gestis Rom. Pont, patet. . . . Moderna quoque Regina Angliae consummaverat prius matrimonium cum olim fratre istius Regis Angliae sui mariti" (Cajetan, in Summam, Sec. Secundae, 154, 9).
