While these matters were going on, Cranmer was at Rome, asking the pope for that discussion which the pontiff had promised him at their conference in Bologna. Clement VII. had never intended to grant it: he had thought that, once at Rome, it would be easy to elude his promise; it was that which occupied his attention just now. Among the means which popes have sometimes employed in their difficulties with kings, one of the most common was to gain the agents of those princes. It was the first employed by Clement; he nominated Cranmer grand almoner for all the states of the King of England, some even say for all the Catholic world. It was little more than a title, and ‘was only to stay his stomach for that time, in hope of a more plentiful feast hereafter, if he had been pleased to take his repast on any popish preferment.’[68] But Cranmer was influenced by purer motives; and without refusing the title the pope gave him,—since having the task of winning him to the king’s side, he would thus have compromised his mission,—he made no account of it, and showed all the more zeal for the accomplishment of his charge. The embassy had not succeeded, and they were getting uneasy about it in England. Some of the pope’s best friends could not understand his blindness. The two archbishops, the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, the marquises of Dorset and Exeter, thirteen earls, four bishops, twenty-five barons, twenty-two abbots, and eleven members of the Lower House determined to send an address to Clement VII. ‘Most blessed father,’ they began, ‘the king, who is our head and the life of us all, has ever stood by the see of Rome amidst the attacks of your many and powerful enemies, and yet he alone is to reap no benefit from his labors.... Meanwhile we perceive a flood of miseries impending over the commonwealth.[69] If your Holiness, who ought to be our father, have determined to leave us as orphans, we shall seek our remedy elsewhere.... He that is sick will by any means be rid of his distemper; and there is hope in the exchange of miseries, when, if we cannot obtain what is good, we may obtain a lesser evil.... We beseech your Holiness to consider with yourself; you profess that on earth you are Christ’s vicar. Endeavor then to show yourself so to be by pronouncing your sentence to the glory and praise of God.’ Clement gained time: he remained two months and a half without answering, thinking about the matter, turning it over and over in his mind. The great difficulty was to harmonize the will of Henry VIII., who desired another wife, and that of Charles V., who insisted that he ought to keep the old one.... There was only one mode of satisfying both these princes at once, and that was by the king’s having the two wives together. Wolsey had already entertained this idea. More than two years before the pope had hinted as much to Da Casale: ‘Let him take another wife,’ he had said, speaking of