Meantime the Cardinal at Rome, powerless as he was to prevent the ruin of his family, was contriving in some way to humble the arrogant King and the ruthless minister who had caused him so much woe. The Pope saw that what Henry dreaded most of all was a coalition of Francis and Charles, and as there was a good prospect of this event at the close of 1538, he sent Pole to each of these two sovereigns to urge them to agree to stop all trade with England and lay the foundation for a continental league against her. Pole gladly accepted the task, and careless of his own safety, though he knew that his path would be full of Henry’s hired assassins, he set out for Spain and reached the Emperor’s Court at Toledo in safety in February, 1539. When the King heard of his arrival there, he wrote to Charles in very much the same way that he had addressed Francis two years before, accusing Pole as a traitor, and demanding his extradition as such, or at least insisting that Charles should not grant him an audience[533]. But unfortunately Henry was now no longer in a position to dictate, and the Emperor, realizing this, saw no reason to accede to his request, and answered, as Cromwell later wrote to Wriothesley, that if Pole ‘wer_e_ his owne trayto_ur_, co_m_myng from that holy father’ he could not refuse him audience[534]. But in spite of all this, the Cardinal’s mission was a failure. Charles for the present was content with the slight rebuke that he had given Henry for his bullying ways; cautious as ever, he did not propose to put himself in a position from which he could not retreat until he was sure of his ground, and intimated to the legate that the Pope had made a great mistake in publishing censures which he could not enforce. Pole could not obtain his consent to the Papal proposals and left Toledo much discouraged[535]. He was also exceedingly suspicious of some design of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s to cause his assassination, and mentioned it in a later letter to Cardinal Contarini[536]. That his fears were not entirely groundless is shown by a cipher letter from Wyatt to Cromwell containing many passages pregnant with hidden meaning which can only be explained if such a design is premised[537]. Pole soon betook himself to his friend Sadolet at Carpentras, whence he sent a messenger to Francis on the same errand as that on which he himself had gone to Charles. The French King’s reply was as unsatisfactory as the Emperor’s had been, and in 1540 the Cardinal returned to Rome with his mission unaccomplished, and deriving only small consolation from the thought that he had been successful in baffling the attempts of Henry’s and Cromwell’s assassins.