Great as the concession seemed, this gleam of success failed to hide
from the minister the dangers which gathered round him. The great nobles
whom he had practically shut out from the King's counsels were longing
for his fall. The Boleyns and the young courtiers looked on him as cool
in Anne's cause. He was hated alike by men of the old doctrine and men
of the new. The clergy had never forgotten his extortions, the monks saw
him suppressing small monasteries. The foundation of Cardinal College
failed to reconcile to him the scholars of the New Learning; their poet,
Skelton, was among his bitterest assailants.
The Protestants, goaded by the persecution of this very year, hated him
with a deadly hatred. His French alliances, his declaration of war with
the Emperor, hindered the trade with Flanders and secured the hostility
of the merchant class. The country at large, galled with murrain and
famine and panic-struck by an outbreak of the sweating sickness which
carried off two thousand in London alone, laid all its suffering at the
door of the Cardinal. And now that Henry's mood itself became uncertain
Wolsey knew his hour was come. Were the marriage once made, he told the
French ambassador, and a male heir born to the realm, he would withdraw
from state affairs and serve God for the rest of his life. But the
divorce had still to be brought about ere marriage could be made or heir
be born. Henry indeed had seized on the grant of a commission as if the
matter were at an end. Anne Boleyn was installed in the royal palace and
honored with the state of a wife. The new legate, Campeggio, held the
bishopric of Salisbury, and had been asked for as judge from the belief
that he would favor the King's cause. But he bore secret instructions
from the Pope to bring about if possible a reconciliation between Henry
and the Queen, and in no case to pronounce sentence without reference to
Rome. The slowness of his journey presaged ill; he did not reach England
till the end of September, and a month was wasted in vain efforts to
bring Henry to a reconciliation or Catharine to retirement into a
monastery.
A new difficulty disclosed itself in the supposed existence of a brief
issued by Pope Julius and now in the possession of the Emperor, which
overruled all the objections to the earlier dispensation on which Henry
relied. The hearing of the cause was delayed through the winter, while
new embassies strove to induce Clement to declare this brief also
invalid. Not only was such a demand glaringly unjust, but the progress
of the imperial arms brought vividly home to the Pope its injustice. The
danger which he feared was not merely a danger to his temporal domain in
Italy--it was a danger to the papacy itself. It was in vain that new
embassies threatened Clement with the loss of his spiritual power over
England. To break with the Emperor was to risk the loss of his spiritual
power over a far larger world.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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