“I am unable to practise self-restraint,” Philip of Hesse had declared on another occasion, “I am forced to commit fornication or worse, with women.” His sister Elisabeth had already advised him to take a concubine in place of so many prostitutes. In all probability Philip would have abducted Margaret von der Sale had he not hoped to obtain her in marriage through the intervention of her relations and with Luther’s consent. A Protestant historian has recently pointed this out when dealing with Philip’s alleged “distress of conscience.”[48] Bucer was well able to paint in dismal hues the weakness of his princely client; he pointed out, “how the Landgrave, owing to his wife’s deficiencies, was unable to remain chaste; how he had previously lived so and so, which was neither good nor Evangelical, especially in one of the mainstays of the party.”[49] In that very year Philip of Hesse had, as a matter of fact, been ailing from a certain malady brought upon him by his excesses; he himself spoke of it as a “severe attack of the French sickness [syphilis], which is the penalty of an immoral life.”[50] True to his instructions, Bucer went on to say that the Landgrave had firmly “resolved” to make use against his unchastity--which he neither could nor would refrain from with his present wife--of “such means as God permitted and did not forbid,” viz. to wed a second wife. The two Wittenbergers had perforce to listen while Bucer, as the mouthpiece of the Landgrave, put forth as the grounds of his client’s firm resolve the very proofs from Scripture which they themselves had adduced in favour of polygamy; they were informed that, according to the tenor of a memorandum, “both Luther and Philip had counselled the King of England not to divorce his first wife, but rather to take another.”[51] It was accordingly the Landgrave’s desire that they should “give testimony” that his deed was not unjust, and that they should “make known in the press and from the pulpit what was the right course to pursue in such circumstances”; should they have scruples about doing this for fear of scandal or evil consequences, they were at least to give a declaration in writing: “That were I to do it secretly, yet I should not offend God, but that they regard it as a real marriage, and would meanwhile devise ways and means whereby the matter might be brought openly before the world”; otherwise, the instructions proceeded, the “wench” whom the Prince was about to take to himself might complain of being looked upon as an improper person; as “nothing can ever be kept secret,” “great scandal” would indeed arise were not the true state of the case known. Besides, he fully intended to retain his present wife and to consider her as a rightful spouse, and her children alone were to be the “lawful princes of the land”; nor would he ask for any more wives beyond this second one. The Landgrave even piously reminds Luther and Melanchthon “not to heed