England was still an excommunicated land, and both Queen and King Consort were anxious to receive the papal peace. As soon as he had been informed by Mary of her succession to the throne, the Pope, Julius II., had selected Cardinal Pole to be his Legate to England (early in August 1553). No one could have been more suitable. He was related to the royal house of England, a grandson of the Duke of Clarence, who was the brother of Edward IV. He had so thoroughly disapproved of the anti-papal policy of Henry VIII. that he had been compelled to live in exile. He was a Cardinal, and had almost become Pope. No one could have been more acceptable to Mary. He had protested against her mother's divorce, and had suffered for it; and he was as anxious as she to see England restored to the papal obedience. But many difficulties had to be cleared away before Pole could land in England as the Pope's Legate. The English people did not love Legates, and their susceptibilities had to be soothed. If the Pope made the restoration of the Church lands a condition of the restoration of England to the papal obedience, and if Mary insisted on securing that obedience, there would be a rebellion, and she would lose her crown. No one knew all these difficulties better than the Emperor, and he exerted himself to overcome them. The Curia was persuaded that, as it was within the Canon Law to alienate ecclesiastical property for the redemption of prisoners, the Church might give up her claims to the English abbey lands in order to win back the whole kingdom. Pole himself had doubts about this. He believed that he might be allowed to reason with the lay appropriators and persuade them to make restoration, and his enthusiasm on the subject caused many misgivings in the minds of both Charles and Philip. Nor could the Cardinal land in England until his attainder as an English nobleman had been reversed by Parliament. He had been appointed Legate to England once before (February 7th, 1536), in order to compass Henry VIII.'s return to the papal obedience; he had written against the Royal Supremacy. Neither Lords nor Commons were very anxious to receive him.