The inconsistency of Henry's conduct, in seeking to remove by the same method from his second marriage the disability which was held to invalidate his first, helps us to define the precise position which Henry took up and the nature of his peculiar conscience.

Obviously he did not at this stage deny the Pope's dispensing power; for he was invoking its aid to enable him to marry Anne Boleyn.

He asserted, and he denied, no principle whatever, though it must be remembered that his own dispensation was an almost, if not quite, unprecedented stretch of papal power.

To dispense with the "divine" law against marrying the brother's wife, and to dispense with the merely canonical obstacle to his marriage with Anne arising out of his relations with Mary Boleyn, were very different matters; and in this light the breach between England and Rome might be represented as caused by a novel extension of papal claims.

Henry, however, was a casuist concerned exclusively with his own case.