To this judgment two archbishops, seventeen bishops, and a hundred and thirty-nine clergy set their hands.[601] 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.[602] Nor could the most scrupulous person, looking at the marriage between Henry and Anne of Cleves on its own merits, pretend that any law, human or divine, would have been better fulfilled, or that any feeling entitled to respect would have been less outraged, by the longer maintenance of so unhappy a connexion. Yet it is much to be regretted that the clergy should have been compelled to meddle with it; under however plausible an aspect the divorce might be presented, it gave a colour to the interpretation which represented the separation from Catherine as arising out of caprice, and enabled the enemies of the Church of England to represent her synods as the instruments of the king's licentiousness.[603] [Sidenote: The queen signifies her acquiescence.] [Sidenote: She will remain in England with the rank of a princess; palaces, pensions, and establishments.] For good or for evil, however, the judgment was given. The Bishop of Winchester spoke a few words in explanation to the two houses of parliament when it was presented;[604] and the next day the Duke of Suffolk and Wriothesley waited on the queen, and communicated the fortune which was impending over her. Anne herself--who, after the slight agitation which the first mooting of the matter naturally produced, had acquiesced in everything which was proposed to her--received the intimation with placidity. She wrote at their request to the king, giving her consent in writing. She wrote also to her brother, declaring herself satisfied, and expressing her hope that he would be satisfied as well. So much facility increased the consideration which her treatment entitled her to claim. The Bishop of Bath had taken with him to the Duke of Cleves an offer, which ought to have been an insult, of a pecuniary compensation for his sister's injury. It was withdrawn or qualified, before it was known to have been refused, to increase the settlement on the ex-queen. For many reasons the king desired that she should remain in England; but she had rank and precedence assigned to her as if she had been a princess of the blood. Estates were granted for her maintenance producing nearly three thousand a year. Palaces, dresses, jewels, costly establishments were added in lavish profusion, to be her dowry, as she was significantly told, should she desire to make a fresh experiment in matrimony. And she not only (it