credit. If he could have had his own way without breaking with the Papacy he would have preferred to maintain the connection; but the Reformation was in the air, and craftier brains than Henry's led the King step by step by his ruling passions until he had gone too far to retreat. To what extent his various matrimonial adventures served these intrigues we shall see in the course of this book. That Henry's marriage with Katharine soon after his accession was politically expedient has been shown in the aforegoing pages; and the King's Council were strongly in favour of it, with the exception of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Chancellor Warham, who was more purely ecclesiastical than his colleagues, and appears to have had doubts as to the canonical validity of the union. As we have seen, the Pope had given a dispensation for the marriage years before, in terms that covered the case of the union with Arthur having been duly consummated, though Katharine strenuously denied that it had been, or that she knew how the dispensation was worded. The Spanish confessor also appears to have suggested to Fuensalida some doubts as to the propriety of the marriage, but King Ferdinand promptly put his veto upon any such scruples. Had not the Pope given his dispensation? he asked; and did not the peace of England and Spain depend upon the marriage? The sin would be not the marriage, but the failure to effect it after the pledges that had been given. So the few doubters were silenced; young Henry himself, all eager for his marriage, was not one of them, nor was Katharine, for to her the match was a triumph for which she had worked and suffered for years: and on the 11th June 1509 the pair were married privately by Warham at Henry's palace of Greenwich.