Wow, that’s an impressive bit of spin, you dug up. No facts, all spin.
>> If he had remained a Catholic, he might have been able to secure an annulment on the grounds of some defect in the marriage; but since he had become a Lutheran, he could expect no consideration from the pope. Nor would Luther permit recourse to the Catholic device. <<
The irony is at this very moment, the Pope was recognizing Henry VIII as Defender of the Faith. Boy, I bet HE’d get granted an annulment for the asking, huh?
>> But Luther AT THIS POINT (emphasis mine) interpreted the Gospels rigidly and held to the word of Christ as reported by Matthew that divorce is permissible only for adultery. <<
IOW, the author acknowledges that this is inconsistent with Luther’s statements.
>> Luther’s final comment was that if anyone thereafter should practice bigamy, let the Devil give him a bath in the abyss of hell. <<
CYA
“The irony is at this very moment, the Pope was recognizing Henry VIII as Defender of the Faith. Boy, I bet HE’d get granted an annulment for the asking, huh?”
Since you have obviously spent more time researching this than I have, you undoubtedly are aware that Catherine was the youngest child of King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile. She had been married to Henry VIII for, I believe, 16 years and had multiple children by him, with only Mary surviving.
When Henry VIII asked for an annulment, the Pope (Pope Clement VII) was the prisoner of Catherine’s nephew, Emperor Charles V.
Given Catherine’s importance politically, and the number of children she bore over the many years of their marriage, it speaks volumes that Henry VIII felt capable of ASKING for an annulment.
Of course, that wouldn’t happen in modern times, would it - unless your name is Kennedy?
You are quick to claim others are biased, when your own thought reeks of it.
"Between January 1510 and November 1518 Catherine gave birth to six children (including two princes), who were all stillborn or died in infancy except Mary, born in 1516, and rumour did not fail to ascribe this series of disasters to the curse pronounced in Deuteronomy on incestuous unions. In 1526 the condition of Catherine's health made it highly improbable that she would have more children. No woman had ever reigned in England, alone and in her own right, and to avoid a fresh dispute concerning the succession, and the revival of the civil war, a male heir to the throne was a pressing necessity. The act of marriage, which depended for its validity on the decision of the ecclesiastical courts, had, on account of the numerous dissolutions and dispensations granted, not then attained the security since assured to it by the secular law. For obtaining dissolutions of royal marriages the facilities were especially great. Pope Clement VII. himself permitted such a dissolution in the case of Henry's own sister Margaret, in 1528, and looked not unfavourably, with the same aim, on the project for marrying the duke of Richmond to Mary, a brother to a sister. 3 In Henry's case also the irregularity of a union, which is still generally reprobated and forbidden in Christendom, and which it was very doubtful that the pope had the power to legalize, provided a moral justification for a dissolution which in other cases did not exist. It was not therefore the immorality of the plea which obstructed the papal decree in I Cal. of State Pap., England and Spain, i. 469.
2 Letters and Papers, iv. 6627, 6705, and app. 261. Ib. iv. 5072. Henry's favour, but the unlucky imprisonment at this time of Clement VII. at the hands of Charles V., Catherine's nephew, which obliged the pope, placed thus "between the hammer and the anvil," to pursue a policy of delay and hesitation. Nor was the immorality of Henry's own character the primary cause of the project of divorce. Had this been so, a succession of mistresses would have served as well as a series of single wives. The real occasion was the king's desire for a male heir. But, however clear this may be, the injustice done to Catherine was no less cruel and real."
Hmmm...maybe Luther's idea wasn't original?