So striking a coincidence could be only explained by the relation of cause and effect.

Men who saw the judgment of God in the sack of Rome, might surely discern in the fatality that attended the children of Henry VIII.

a fulfilment of the doom of childlessness pronounced in the Book of the Law against him who should marry his brother's wife.

"God," wrote the French ambassador in 1528, "has long ago Himself passed sentence on it;"[508] and there is no reason to doubt Henry's assertion, that he had come to regard the death of his children as a Divine judgment, and that he was impelled to question his marriage by the dictates of conscience.

The "scruples of conscience," which Henry VII.