The English parliament, then, had taken up the gauntlet which the pope had flung to it with trembling fingers: and there remained nothing but for the Archbishop of Canterbury to make use of the power of which by law he was now possessed. And the time was pressing, for the new queen was enciente, and further concealment was not to be thought of. The delay of the interview between the pope and Francis, and the change in the demeanour of the latter, which had become palpably evident, discharged Henry of all promises by which he might have bound himself; and to hesitate before the menaces of the pope's brief would have been fatal. The act of appeals being passed, convocation was the authority to which the power of determining unsettled points of spiritual law seemed to have lapsed. In the month of April, therefore, Cranmer, now Archbishop of Canterbury,[420] submitted to it the two questions, on the resolution of which the sentence which he was to pass was dependent. The first had been already answered separately by the bench of bishops and by the universities, and had been agitated from end to end of Europe--was it lawful to marry the widow of a brother dying without issue, but having consummated his marriage; and was the Levitical prohibition of such a marriage grounded on a divine law, with which the pope could not dispense, or on a canon law of which a dispensation was permissible?[421] The pope had declared himself unable to answer; but he had allowed that the general opinion was against the power of dispensing,[422] and there could be little doubt, therefore, of the reply of the English convocation, or at least of the upper house. Fisher attempted an opposition; but wholly without effect. The, question was one in which the interests of the higher clergy were not concerned, and they were therefore left to the dominion of their ordinary understandings. Out of two hundred and sixty-three votes, nineteen only were in the pope's favour.[423] The lower house was less unanimous, as might have been expected, and as had been experienced before; the opposition spirit of the English clergy being usually then, as much as now, in the ratio of their poverty. But there too the nature of the case compelled an overwhelming majority.[424] It was decided by both houses that Pope Julius, in granting a licence for the marriage of Henry and Catherine, had exceeded his authority, and that this marriage was therefore, _ab initio_, void.