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S i d e b a r
"Enslaved by Your Passion for a Girl"
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This Rock
Volume 18, Number 4
 April 2007 
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After Catherine’s death and shortly before Anne’s execution, Henry received a letter "written in genuine anxiety for Henry’s fate in eternity" from Reginald Pole, an English cleric who weathered the storm on the continent and later became the Cardinal Archbishop of Canterbury during the brief period of Catholic revival under Mary Tudor: At your age of life and with all your experience of the world, you were enslaved by your passion for a girl. But she would not give you your will unless you rejected your wife, whose place she longed to take. The modest woman would not be your mistress; no, but she would be your wife. She had learned, I think, if from nothing else, at least from the example of her own sister, how soon you got tired of your mistresses; and she resolved to surpass her sister in retaining you as her lover . . .
Now what sort of person is it whom you have put in the place of your divorced wife? Is she not the sister of her whom first you violated? And for a long time after kept as your concubine? She certainly is. How is it, then, that you now tell us of the horror you have of illicit marriage? Are you ignorant of the law which certainly no less prohibits marriage with a sister of one with whom you have become one flesh, than with one with whom your brother was one flesh? If the one kind of marriage is detestable, so is the other. Were you ignorant of this law? Nay, you knew it better than others. How do I prove that? Because, at the very time you were rejecting your brother’s widow, you were doing your utmost to get leave from the pope to marry the sister of your former concubine. (Philip Hughes, The Reformation in England, I.159; cf. Pole, Pro Ecclesiasticae Unitatis Defensione III.LXXVI.LXXVII)
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