Judicious friends in various European cabinets now urged both parties to recede or to compromise. France and Spain both proffered their good offices. The offer of France was finally accepted, and the French Ambassador was kept running between the Ducal Palace and the Vatican until people began laughing at him also. The emissaries of His Holiness begged hard that, at least, appearances might be saved; that the Republic would undo some of its measures before the interdict was removed, or at least would seem to do so, and especially that it would withdraw its refusals before the Pope withdrew his penalties. All in vain. The Venetians insisted that they had committed no crime and had nothing to retract. The Vatican then urged that the Senate should consent to receive absolution for its resistance to the Pope's authority. This the Senate steadily refused; it insisted, "Let His Holiness put things as before, and we will put things as before; as to his absolution, we do not need it or want it; to receive it would be to acknowledge that we have been in the wrong." Even the last poor sop of all was refused: the Senate would have no great "function" to celebrate the termination of the interdict; they would not even go to the mass which Cardinal Joyeuse celebrated on that occasion. The only appearance of concession which the Republic made was to give up the two ecclesiastics to the French Ambassador as a matter of courtesy to the French king; and when this was done, the Ambassador delivered them to the Pope; but Venice especially reserved all the rights she had exercised. All the essential demands of the papacy were refused, and thus was forever ended the papal power of laying an interdict upon a city or a people. From that incubus, Christendom, thanks to Father Paul and to Venice, was at last and forever free. The Vatican did, indeed, try hard to keep its old claim in being. A few years after its defeat by Fra Paolo, it endeavored to reassert in Spain the same authority which had been so humbly acknowledged there a few years before. It was doubtless felt that this most pious of all countries, which had previously been so docile, and which had stood steadily by the Vatican against Venice in the recent struggle, would again set an example of submission. Never was there a greater mistake: the Vatican received from Spanish piety a humiliating refusal.