must also necessarily, from time to time, have ordained other priests to perform the same worship, and imposed upon them the obligation of that continency which he himself did not observe. In a word, we see his subscription still affixed to a great variety of doctrinal articles and injunctions, issued during that reign, which we know to have been in direct opposition to his real sentiments.” “Every one knows that Cranmer owed his rise in the church to the part which he took in Henry’s divorce from queen Catherine of Arragon. Henry tired out with the opposition of Rome, and impatient to be united with his beloved Ann Boleyn, privately marries her Nov. 14, 1532, and Cranmer himself is one of the witnesses of the contract. {653a} On the 11th. of the following March this same prelate writes a letter to Henry, from “pure motives of conscience” as he declares, {653b} but from a preconcerted scheme as the fact proves, representing the necessity there was of determining the long depending cause between him and his queen, and demanding of him the necessary ecclesiastical jurisdiction to decide it. {653c} This being granted, he on the 20th of May pronounces a sentence of divorce between the royal pair, and authorises Henry to take another wife; {653d} six months after he himself had officiated as witness to his marriage with Ann Boleyn, and only four months before the latter was delivered of an infant who was afterwards queen Elizabeth. {654a} What a scandalous collusion in so important a matter of conscience and public example!” “In less than three years however [his sacred majesty] grows weary of the consort whom he had moved heaven and earth to gain, {654b} and becomes enamoured of a new beauty. Nevertheless appearances must be saved; and therefore Cranmer presents himself as the ready instrument in smoothing the way to the gratification of [his sovereign’s] passions. After a feint effort to save Ann, to whose family he had such infinite obligations, in a cold adulatory letter to the king, which he wrote on the occasion, {655a} he lent all his aid to ruin and oppress her, permitting, if not persuading, her, (standing as she then did upon the verge of eternity) to confess what he knew to be false; {655b} and pronouncing a sentence of divorce, which contained that she had never been _validly married to Henry_, at the very time when she was lying under sentence of death for violating his bed by adultery!” {655c}