But marriage-laws were lax (p.

207) in those days, when Popes could play fast and loose with them for political purposes; and, besides the "great reasons and precedents, especially in the Old Testament," to which Henry referred,[578] he might have produced a precedent more pertinent, more recent, and better calculated to appeal to Clement VII.

In 1521 Charles V.'s Spanish council drew up a memorial on the subject of his marriage, in which they pointed out that his ancestor, Henry IV.

of Castile, had, in 1437, married Dona Blanca, by whom he had no children; and that the Pope thereupon granted him a dispensation to marry a second wife on condition that, if within a fixed time he had no issue by her, he should return to his first.[579] A licence for bigamy, modelled after this precedent, would have suited Henry admirably, but apparently he was unaware of this useful example, and was induced to countermand Knight's commission before it had been communicated to Clement.

The demand would not, however, have shocked the Pope so much as his modern defenders, for on 18th September, 1530, Casale writes to Henry: "A few days since the Pope secretly proposed to me that your Majesty might be allowed two wives.