It was a sort of triangular game between the three monarchs--a game full of finesse and far-reaching designs. If Charles attacked Francis, Henry attacked Charles, while the astute Charles, knowing well the desire of the English King to repudiate Katharine and make Anne Boleyn his queen, whispered seductive promises of the papal chair to Wolsey, who was in turn to establish his own influence over his royal master by bringing about the marriage with Anne, upon which the King's heart was set, and then be rewarded by securing Henry's promise of neutrality for Charles, in his designs of overreaching Francis--and, after that, the road to Rome for the aspiring cardinal would be a straight one! It was an intricate diplomatic net-work, in which the thread of Henry's desire for the fair Anne was mingled with Wolsey's desire for preferment, and both interlaced with the ambitious, far-reaching purposes of the other two monarchs. All these events were very absorbing, and while they were splendidly gilding the surface of Europe in the first half of the sixteenth century, it seemed a small matter that an obscure monk was denouncing the Pope and defying the power of the Catholic Church. Little did Charles suspect that, when his victories and edicts were forgotten, the words of the insolent heretic would still be echoing down the ages. A few years later, and the Apollo-like beauty and false heart of Francis I. were dissolving in the grave; Henry VIII. had gone to another world, to meet his reward--and his wives; and Charles V. was sadly counting his beads in the monastery of St. Jerome, at Juste, reflecting upon the vanity of human ambitions. But the murmur of protest from the unknown monk had become a roar--the rivulet had swollen into a threatening torrent. As it is the invisible forces that are the most powerful in nature, so it is the obscure and least observed events that have accomplished the most tremendous revolutions in human affairs.