France in the preceding centuries had been the hereditary enemy of England; Spain and Burgundy her hereditary friends. The marriage of Catherine of Aragon had been a special feature of the established alliance. She was given first to Prince Arthur, and then to Henry, as a link in the confederacy which was to hold in check French ambition. Times were changing. Charles V. had been elected emperor, largely through English influence; but Charles was threatening to be a more serious danger to Europe than France had been. The Italian princes were too weak to resist the conqueror of Pavia. Italy once conquered, the Papacy would become a dependency of the empire, and, with Charles's German subjects in open revolt against it, the Church would lose its authority, and the organisation of the Catholic world would fall into hopeless decrepitude. So thought Wolsey, the most sharp-sighted of English ministers. He believed that the maintenance of the Papacy was the best defence of order and liberty. The only remedy which he could see was a change of partners. England held the balance between the great rival powers. If the English alliance could be transferred from the Empire to France, the Emperor could be held in check, and his supposed ambition neutralised. Wolsey was utterly mistaken; but the mistake was not an unnatural one. Charles, busy with his Italian wars, had treated the Lutheran schism with suspicious forbearance. Notwithstanding his Indian ingots his finances were disordered. Bourbon's lansquenets had been left to pay themselves by plunder. They had sacked monasteries, pillaged cathedral plate, and ravished nuns with irreverent ferocity. The estates of the Church had been as little spared by them as Lombardy; and to Clement VII. the invasion was another inroad of barbarians, and Bourbon a second Attila. What Bourbon's master meant by it, and what he might intend to do, was as uncertain to Clement as perhaps it was to Charles himself. In the prostrate, degraded, and desperate condition into which the Church was falling, any resolution was possible. To the clearest eyes in Europe the Papacy seemed tottering to its fall, and Charles's hand, if he chose to raise it, might precipitate the catastrophe. To ask a pope at such a time to give mortal offence to the Spanish nation by agreeing to the divorce of Catherine of Aragon was to ask him to sign his death-warrant. No wonder, therefore, that he found difficulties. Yet it was to France and England that Clement had to look for help in his extremities. The divorce perhaps had as yet been no more than a suggestion, a part of a policy which was still in its infancy. It could wait at any rate for a more convenient season. Meantime he sent his secretary, Sanga, to Paris to beg aid; and to Henry personally he made a passionate appeal, imploring him not to desert the Apostolic See in its hour of extreme need. He apologised for his importunacy, but he