CHAPTER VI. HENRY VIII. SUPPORTED IN FRANCE AND ITALY BY THE CATHOLICS, AND BLAMED IN GERMANY BY THE PROTESTANTS. (JANUARY TO SEPTEMBER 1530.) [Sidenote: Henry Appeals To Foreign Opinion.] The king did not limit himself to asking the opinions of England; he appealed to the universal teaching of the Church, represented according to his views by the universities and not by the pope. The element of individual conviction, so strongly marked in Tyndale, Fryth, and Latimer, was wanting in the official reformation that proceeded from the prince. To know what Scripture said, Henry was about sending delegates to Paris, Bologna, Padua, and Wittemburg; he would have sent even to the East, if such a journey had been easy. That false catholicism which looked for the interpretation of the Bible to churches and declining schools where traditionalism, ritualism, and hierarchism were magnified, was a counterfeit popery. Happily the supreme voice of the Word of God surmounted this fatal tendency in England. Henry VIII., full of confidence in the friendship of the King of France, applied first to the university of Paris; but Dr. Pedro Garry, a Spanish priest, as ignorant as he was fanatical (according to the English agents),[58] eagerly took up the cause of Catherine of Aragon. Aided by the impetuous Beda, he obtained an opinion adverse to Henry’s wishes. When he heard of it, the alarmed prince summoned Du Bellay, the French ambassador, to the palace, gave him for Francis I. a famous diamond fleur-de-lis valued at 10,000_l._ sterling, also the acknowledgments for 100,000 livres which Francis owed Henry for war expenses, and added a gift of 400,000 crowns for the ransom of the king’s sons. Unable to resist such strong arguments, Francis charged Du Bellay to represent to the faculty of Paris ‘the great scruples of Henry’s conscience;’[59] whereupon the Sarbonne deliberated, and several doctors exclaimed that it would be an attaint upon the pope’s honor to suppose him capable of refusing consolation to the wounded conscience of a Christian. During these debates, the secretary took the names, received the votes, and entered them on the minutes. A fiery papist observing that the majority would be against the Roman opinion, jumped up, sprang upon the secretary, snatched the list from his hands, and tore it up. All started from their seats, and ‘there was great disorder and tumult.’ They all spoke together, each trying to assert his own opinion; but as no one could make himself heard amid the general clamor, the doctors hurried out of the room in a great rage. ‘Beda acted like one possessed,’ wrote Du Bellay.