The king of France very adverse to England’s becoming independent of Rome, at last prevailed upon Henry to send two English agents (Gardiner and Bryan) to Marseilles. ‘You will keep your eyes open,’ said Henry VIII. to them, ‘and lend an attentive ear, but you will keep your mouths shut.’ The English envoys being invited to a conference with Clement and Francis, and solicited by those great personages to speak, declared that they had no powers. ‘Why then were you sent?’ exclaimed the king unable to conceal his vexation. The ambassadors only answered with a smile.[343] Francis who meant to uphold the authority of the pope in France, was unwilling that England should be free: he seems to have had some presentiment of the happy effects that independence would work for the rival nation. Accordingly he took the ambassadors aside, and prayed them to enter immediately on business with the pontiff. ‘We are not here for his Holiness,’ dryly answered Gardiner, ‘or to negotiate anything with him, but only to do what the King of England commands us.’ The tricks of the papacy had ruined it in the minds of the English people. Francis I., displeased at Gardiner’s silence and irritated by his stiffness, intimated to the King of England that he would be pleased to see ‘better instruments’ sent.[344] Henry did send another instrument to Marseilles, but he took care to choose one sharper still. Edward Bonner, archdeacon of Leicester, was a clever, active man, but ambitious, coarse and rude, wanting in delicacy and consideration towards those with whom he had to deal, violent, and, as he showed himself later to the protestants, a cruel persecutor. For some time he had got into Cromwell’s good graces, and as the wind was against popery, Bonner was against the pope. Henry gave him his appeal to a general council, and charged him to present it to Clement VII.: it was the ‘bill of divorcement’ between the pope and England. Bonner, proud of being the bearer of so important a message, arrived at Marseilles, firmly resolved to give Henry a proof of his zeal. If Luther had burnt the pope’s bull at Wittemberg, Bonner would do as much; but while Luther had acted as a free man, Bonner was only a slave, pushing to fanaticism his submission to the orders of his despotic master.