The directions were obeyed; and Wyatt's English haughtiness was likely to have fulfilled them to the letter. The effect was magical. The Emperor started, changed colour, hesitated, and then burst in anger. "It is too much," he said, "to use the term ingrate to me. The inferior may be ingrate to the greater. The term is scant sufferable between like." Perhaps, he added, as Wyatt was speaking in a foreign language, he might have used a word which he imperfectly comprehended. Wyatt assured him placidly that there was no error: the word was in his instructions, and its meaning perfectly understood. "The king took it so." "Kings' opinions are not always the best," Charles replied. "I cannot tell, sir," the ambassador answered, "what ye mean by that; but if ye think to note the king my master of anything that should touch him, I assure you he is a prince to give reason to God and the world sufficient in his opinions." Leaving the word as it stood, he required an answer to the material point. [Sidenote: He will not surrender Brancetor.] [Sidenote: If English merchants dislike the Inquisition, they had better avoid Spain.] [Sidenote: Henry makes overtures to Francis.] [Sidenote: He accuses Charles of aiming at universal empire,] [Sidenote: And suggests a coalition which may end in his capture and imprisonment.] If Henry was indifferent to a quarrel, the Emperor seemed to be equally willing; Wyatt gathered from his manner, either that he was careless of consequences, or that he desired to provoke the English to strike the first blow. He answered as before, that Brancetor had committed no crime that he knew of. If the King of England would be more explicit in his accusations, he would consider them. His dispute with the Duke of Cleves he intended to settle by himself, and would allow of no interference; and as to the merchants, he had rather they should never visit his countries at all, than visit them to carry thither their heresy.[554] Irritation is a passion which it is seldom politic to excite; and a message like that of Wyatt had been better undelivered, unless no doubt existed of being able to support it by force. A fixed idea in Cromwell's mind, which we trace in all his correspondence, was the impossibility of a genuine coalition between Charles and Francis. Either misled by these impressions, or deceived by rumours, Henry seems to have been acting, not only in a reliance on the Germans, but in a belief that the Emperor's visit to Paris had closed less agreeably than it had opened, that the Milan quarrel had revived, and that the hasty partnership already threatened a dissolution. Some expectations of the kind he had unquestionably formed, for, on the arrival of Wyatt's letter with the Emperor's answer, he despatched the Duke of Norfolk on a mission into France, which, if successful, would have produced a singular revulsion in Europe. Francis was to be asked frankly how the Italian question stood.