Moreover, all this would take time, and delay was as dear to Clement as irresponsibility.

But Henry was determined to have such a sentence as would preclude all doubts of the legitimacy of his children by the second marriage, and was as anxious to shift the responsibility to Clement's shoulders as the Pope was to avoid it.

Clement next urged Catherine to go into a nunnery, for that would only entail injustice on herself, and would involve the Church and its head in no temporal perils.[594] When Catherine (p.

214) refused, he wished her in the grave, and lamented that he seemed doomed through her to lose the spiritualties of his Church, as he had lost its temporalties through her nephew, Charles V.[595] [Footnote 590: _L.

and P._, iv., 5152, where Henry's ambassadors quote this precedent to the Pope._Cf.