The three years' absence of this formidable adversary of the Gospel had been marked by a slackening of the persecution, and by a more active propagation of the Holy Scriptures. His return was to be distinguished by a vigorous renewal of the struggle against the Gospel. This was the main business of Gardiner. To this he consecrated all the resources of the most acute understanding and the most persistent character. He began immediately to lay snares round the king, whom in this respect it was not very hard to entrap. Two difficulties, however, arose. At first Henry VIII., by the influence of the deceased queen, had been somewhat softened towards the Reformation. Then the rumors of the reconciliation of Gardiner with the pope might have alienated the king from him. The crafty man proceeded cleverly and killed two birds with one stone. 'The pope,' he said to the king, 'is doing all he can to ruin you.' Henry, provoked at the mission of Pole, had no doubt of that. 'You ought then, Sire,' continued the bishop, 'to do all that is possible to conciliate the Continental powers, and to place yourself in security from the treacherous designs of Rome.[254] Now the surest means of conciliating Francis I., Charles V., and other potentates, is to proceed rigorously against heretics, especially against the sacramentarians.' Henry agreed to the means proposed with the more readiness because he had always been a fanatic for the corporal presence, and because the Lutherans, in his view, could not take offence at seeing him burn some of the sacramentarians. A beginning was made with the Anabaptists. The mad and atrocious things perpetrated at Munster were still everywhere talked of, and these wretched people were persecuted in all European countries. Some of them had taken refuge in England. In October, 1538, the king appointed a commission to examine certain people 'lately come into the kingdom, who are keeping themselves in concealment in various nooks and corners.' The commission was authorized to proceed, even supposing this should be in contravention of any statutes of the realm.[255] Four Anabaptists bore the fagots at Paul's church, and two others, a man and a woman, originally from the Netherlands, were burnt in Smithfield. Cranmer and Bonner sat on this commission, side by side with Stokesley and Sampson. This fact shows what astonishing error prevailed at the time in the minds of men. Gardiner wanted to go further; and while associating, when persecution was in hand, with such men as Cranmer, he had secret conferences with Stokesley, bishop of London, Tonstall of Durham, Sampson of Chichester, and others, who were devoted to the doctrines of the Middle Ages. They talked over the means of resisting the reforms of Cranmer and Cromwell, and of restoring Catholicism. [Sidenote: BISHOP SAMPSON.]