II - Particular controversies with the King or Crown.

Summary

The first controversy of the Bishop of Lincoln with the Crown was that regarding the Legitimation of Special Bastards i.e. of such children whose parents intermarry after the birth of the said Children. Marriage being a mutual contract of the two sexes for an undivided society of life in order to the production, generation and education of the children. All conjunction of the two sexes without such contract is illicit and offspring of such conjunctions illegitimate, i.e. incapable of inheriting from their parents and of being admitted to holy orders or benefice without dispensation. But this incapacity, whether civil or sacred, being only a positive constitution either of the state or church, the Civil and Canon Laws take it away when the parents of such bastards intermarry, tho it be after the children's birth and restores the said children to their full right of inheriting etc. as much as if born in lawfull wedlock. And this the Canon and Civil Laws allow, not to encourage unlawful conjunctions, which the Church takes care to punish by her canons and penances, but only to make the best of an evil they would but cannot always prevent, by encouraging the delinquent parties to intermarry so to prevent the evil effects of their crime, whether upon their harmless offspring which without any fault of its own would suffer the penalty of disinherison, or upon the parties themselves, especially the woman whose dishonour might otherwise hinder her from being an useful and honest mother to the society and hurry her into worse crimes. Or finally upon the contract of marriage of which such hasty anticipation of marriage rites are, or ought to be, deemed an intentional pledge; but a pledge whose effect remains suspended if the contract be not allowed and encouraged to follow, at least where it ought to have proceeded. In opposition to this prudent disposition of the Civil and Canon Laws the laudable Municipal, or Customary Laws of England, more attentive to preserve the purity and holiness of Christian matrimony unstained than to prevent the ill effects of its violation, would not allow of the legitimation approved by the Imperial and Pontifical Laws, but left such bastards whose parents married after their birth in the same state of illegitimacy as they were in before the subsequent marriage of their parents.