There seems to be no reason for questioning the sincerity of Henry's doubts about the legitimacy of his marriage with Catharine, or that he actually looked upon the repeated destruction of his hopes of a male heir as a divine punishment for the sin of that contract.[396]Questions of national policy and impulses of passion quicken marvellously conscientious convictions, but they do not show that the convictions are not real. In the perplexities of his position the shortest way out seemed to be to ask the Pope to declare that he had never been legally married to Catharine. If he had scruples of conscience about his marriage with his brother's widow, this would end them; if the fears of a disputed succession haunted him, he could marry again, and might hope for a son and a lawful heir whose succession none would dispute. Cardinal Wolsey adopted his master's plans, and the Pope was to be asked for a declaration that the marriage with Catharine had been no marriage at all. There entered, however, into all this, at what time it is not easy to determine, an element of sordidness which goes ill with asserted scruples of conscience and imperious necessities of State. Wolsey was astonished when he learned that Henry had made up his mind to marry Anne Boleyn, a lady whose station in life and personal reputation unfitted her for the position of Queen of England. It was Henry's inordinate, if not very long-lived, passion for this lady that put him in the wrong, and enabled the Pope to pose as the guardian of the public morality of Europe. It is plain that Henry VIII. fully expected that the Pope would declare his first marriage invalid; there was many a precedent for such action--two in Henry's own family;[397] and the delay had nothing to do with the interests of public morality. The Pope was at the time practically in the power of Charles V., to whom his aunt, the injured Catharine, had appealed, and who had promised her his protection. One has only to study the phases of the protracted proceedings in the "Divorce" and compare them with the contemporary situation in Italy to see that all that the Curia cared for was the success of the papal diplomacy in the Italian peninsula. The interests of morality were so little in his mind that Clement proposed to Henry more than once that the King might take a second wife without going through the formality of having his first marriage declared null and void.[398] This had been the papal solution of the matter in an earlier instance, and Clement VII. saw no reasons why what had been allowed to a King of Spain should be denied to the King of England.[399] He was prepared to tolerate bigamy, but not to thwart Charles, so long as the Emperor was master within Italy.[400]