Pope Julius' licentiousness was well-known and, though priest and monk, he was the father of three illegitimate daughters when elected Pope.24 After much consideration 25 Pope Julius II granted the dispensation and the betrothal of the twelve-year-old boy to the widowed Catherine was entered into, to be followed by marriage, six years later, on that boy's accession to the throne as King Henry VIII. Catherine bore the youthful monarch no male heir and he appealed to Pope Clement VII for a divorce 26 from her, afterwards pressing the appeal with the intention of marrying his mistress, Anne Boleyn. This divorce Clement refused as contrary to the law of the Church: he had, he claimed, no power to cancel the dispensation of Julius II. Moreover, Catherine's nephew, Charles V., had now become Emperor and supported Clement VII in his refusal. Henry's family had already been liberally treated by the Popes in regard to divorces (annulments), and the marriages of his sister Margaret and of both the husbands of his sister Mary, had all been annulled at Rome, two of them by Clement VII himself.27 Pope Clement was of illegitimate birth, and it was significant of the morality of the age that if England, as so often alleged, had a bastard Queen in Henry's daughter, Elizabeth, the Papacy had a bastard Pope in Clement VII. Elizabeth was legitimized by Act of Parlia

24 C. E., vol. viii, p. 562 a; Cambridge Modern History, vol. i, p. 243.

25 J. A. Froude, History of England, vol. i, p. 115 note; Pollard, Henry VIII, pp. 173-174.

26 It was annulment that was sought although it was called divorce in the language of the day.

27 Pollard, Henry VIII, p. 212; see also pp. 199–200.

ment and Clement by dispensation of his cousin, Pope Leo X.28 Henry took jurisdiction de facto over the law of the Church and by the enactments of the English State attempted to undo, with reckless hands, the work of Julius II. A compliant Archbishop of Canterbury annulled his marriage and an obedient Parliament legislated to suit.29 Civil and religious shipwreck followed. Pope Clement continued to the end of his life the rôle of Papal matchmaker for children under the moral age of consent. He married his young relative and ward, Catherine de Medici, at the age of fourteen,30 to Prince Henry of France, and the licentious and degenerate Alessandro the Moor, who was either Pope Clement's illegitimate son or that of his kinsman, the Duke of Urbino,31 to Margaret of Parma, then fourteen years old, the illegitimate daughter of Charles V.32 On the murder of Alessandro in an adulterous intrigue, Charles V and Pope Paul III united in marrying Margaret to Ottavio Farnese, son of Pier Luigi, who was the illegitimate son of Pope Paul III.33

Certain it is that the Latin Church made sorry work when it possessed exclusive and undisputed jurisdiction over marriage. Bad as conditions may be under the exercise of jurisdiction by the modern State, it is doubtful whether even a section of Main Street in the United States surpasses in moral degradation the 28 C. E., vol. iv, p. 24.

29 Froude, History of England, vol. ii, pp. 212–215.

30 C. E., vol. iii, p. 443 a.

31 L. Pastor, Geschichte der Päpste, vol. iv, part 2, p. 172, note 5. 32 E. B., vol. xvii, p. 703; G. F. Young, The Medici, vol. i, p. 499; J. L. Motley, The Rise of the Dutch Republic, vol. i, pp. 227–229. 33 Ibid., vol. i, p. 228; L. Ranke, History of the Popes, vol. i, p. 170; Young, The Medici, vol. i, p. 512.

record we have glimpsed in a section of the sixteenth century in the royal and Papal palaces of Europe. The reflection may perhaps be indulged that the cleansing of the Augean marriage stable of modern life may be more successfully accomplished by the Church of Christ through the forum of conscience than through a legalistic jurisdiction exercised in the right of a factitious ecclesiastical sovereignty in conflict with the State.

CHAPTER XIII

THE TWILIGHT ZONE OF POLITICS

If one were asked to designate the principle which might be regarded as paramount in the ancient political order and as the very foundation of human rights it would not be a great hazard to select that of prescription. It was quaintly defined in the sixteenth century as the principle "that, by the unanimous Consent of all Nations it is forbidden to change, or move the Things which have been for a long Time immoveable.” It was that principle which kept the future locked in the past, and the rights of life, liberty, and happiness among men subject to a perpetual and universal law of mortmain.

Human rights were determined, not by the hopes and possibilities of the future, but by the failures and the dead certainties of the past. Not only were the countries of the earth assigned to permanent ownerships determined by prescriptive possession so immemorial that even their original causes were forgotten, but the people inhabiting those countries were made the living chattels attached to their lands, and with them they were transferred by bargain and sale among the lords of prescriptive right. Pope Adrian IV claimed sovereignty over Ireland because, as was said, the Donation of the Emperor Constantine, eight hundred years before, had given “all islands" to the Pope. In 1156 he donated Ireland to the sovereignty of Eng

3

land1—so initiating the Irish question! It provoked no sensation in the world when Pope Clement IV, in 1265, sold millions of South Italians to Prince Charles of Anjou for a yearly tribute of eight hundred ounces of gold, and declared he would excommunicate the Prince if the first payment was deferred.2 King John was acting quite within theoretic prescriptive right as ruler of England when he agreed to become the vassal of Pope Innocent III, and surrendered that kingdom and its people to him as feudal overlord. But in the great transformation which we have glimpsed here and there in these pages, a new power and a new principle have superseded ancient prescription, and the chattels that were sold in the day of prescription have become the people who rule in the day of popular sovereignty. Everywhere, save in the theories of the Roman Church, the dead hands of prescription have relaxed their hold before that Civic Primacy of Peoples that subordinates the past to the future, makes prescriptive rights plastic to the welfare of mankind, and finds its highest expression in the declaration that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.

It is this principle of immemorial prescription that the Roman Church is still asserting today in derogation of the Civic Primacy of the Italian People. More than half a century ago the people of the States of the Church rejected the secular rule of the Pope of Rome over those States and merged them in the present King

1 C. E., vol. i, p. 158 a.

2 Janus, p. 14, citing Raynald, p. 162; consult also C. E., vol. iv, d.

p. 19

3 Ibid., vol. viii, p. 15 c.