cases, however, it is clear that some orders had been taken; and therefore, in the strict sense of the term, these Cardinals were no longer laymen. The real state of the case is that the rank of Cardinal is, as every degree in the Pope's Court should strictly speaking he, ecclesiastical, though it is no sacred order, but that practically it has been conferred on laymen by the intervention of a fiction like that invented to make
sufficient number of sons to secure the continuation of the line, went back to his religious profession. A yet more singular example of the length to which a Pope may venture on stretching his assumed authority to dispense from the observance of the fundamental rules of morality, would seem to be furnished by Spanish history. Henry IV. of Castile had no children by his wife, Dona Blanca of Arragon, sister to Ferdinand the Catholic. Being desirous of having offspring, he sought the Pope's dispensation to marry another wife, and obtained it, but with the extraordinary condition that if no children were born from her within a fixed term, then King Henry must separate from his second spouse and return to the original one. This second wife was the Infanta Juana of Portugal. The appointed term passed without any offspring having been actually born, but shortly after there came into the world a girl. This girl King Henry declared legitimate, and his heir; but on his death his sister, Isabella the Catholic, successfully disputed the succession on two grounds,—that Dona Juana was no child of her brother's, but of a certain Don Beltran de la Cueva, and that having come into the world at the period she did, she never could claim to be legitimate, inasmuch as the marriage had
