The spokesman of the English mission, Bishop Edward Fox, demanded from Luther the admission that the King had separated from his first wife “on very just grounds.” Luther, however, would only agree that he had done so “on very many grounds.” He said later, in conversation, that his insistence on this verbal nicety had cost him three hundred Gulden, which he would have received from England in the event of his compliance.[27] He cannot indeed be accused of having been, from ecclesiastico-political motives, too hasty in gratifying the King’s demands in the matter of the divorce. Yet, on the other hand, it is not unlikely that the desire to pave the way for a practical understanding was one of the motives for his mode of action. His previous outspoken declarations against any dissolution of the Royal marriage compelled him to assume an attitude not too strongly at variance with his earlier opinion. After the new marriage had taken place negotiations with England continued, principally with the object of securing such acceptance of the new doctrine as might lead to a politico-religious alliance between that country and the Schmalkalden Leaguers. Luther, however, stubbornly refused to concede anything to the King in the matter of his chief doctrines, for instance, regarding Justification or the rejection of the Mass. The articles agreed upon at the lengthy conferences held during the early months of 1536--and made public only in 1905 (see above, p. 9, n. 4)--failed to satisfy the King, although they displayed a very conciliatory spirit. Melanchthon outdid himself in his endeavour to render the Wittenberg teaching acceptable. “It is true that the main points of faith were not sacrificed,” remarks the discoverer and editor of the articles in question, “but the desire to please noticeable in their form, even in such questions as those concerning the importance of good works, monasteries, etc., is nevertheless surprising.”[28] Luther himself, in a letter of April 29, 1536, to the Electoral Vice-Chancellor Burkhard, spoke of the concessions made in these articles as the final limit; to go further would be to concede to the King of England what had been refused to the Pope and the Emperor; “at Augsburg [in 1530] we might have come to terms more easily with the Pope and the Emperor, nay, perhaps we might do so even now.” To enter into an ecclesiastico-political alliance with the English would, he considers, be “dangerous,” for the Schmalkalden Leaguers “were not all of one mind”; hence the (theological) articles ought first to be accepted; the League was, however, a secular matter and therefore he would beg the “beloved Lords and my Gracious Master to consider” whether they could accept it without a previous agreement being reached on the point of theology.[29]