but reason, to lead men after you; what instrument did the devil use to seduce our parents in Paradise? you have followed the serpent; with guile you destroyed your King, the realm, and the Church, and you have brought to perdition thousands of human souls.
'Compared with you, all others who have been concerned in these deeds of evil, are but objects of pity; many of them long resisted temptation, and yielded only to the seductions of your impious tongue; you made yourself a bishop,—for what purpose, but to mock both God and man? Your first act was but to juggle with your King, and you were no sooner Primate, than you plotted how you might break your oath to the Holy See; you took part in the counsels of the evil one, you made your home with the wicked, you sat in the seat of the scornful. You exhorted your King with your fine words, to put away his wife; you prated to him of his obligations to submit to the judgment of the Church;[1] and what has followed that unrighteous sentence? You parted the King from the wife with whom he had lived for twenty years; you parted him from the Church, the common mother of the faithful; and thenceforth throughout the realm law has been trampled under foot, the people have been ground with
- ↑ The innumerable modern writers who agree with Pole on the iniquity of the divorce of Catherine forget that, according to the rule which most of us now acknowledge, the marriage of Henry with his brother's wife really was incestuous—really was forbidden by the laws of God and nature; that the Pope had no more authority to dispense with those laws then than he has now; and that if modern law is right, Cranmer did no more than his duty.
