Lord Dacre, speaking before the Council, had a tongue as free as when he led his Yorkshire yokels to battle. “It is thou,” he said boldly, confronting Cromwell, “that art the very special and chief cause of all this rebellion and wickedness, and dost daily travail to bring us to our ends and strike off our heads. I trust that ere thou diest, though thou wouldst procure all the noblest heads within the realm to be stricken off, yet there shall one head remain that shall strike off thy head.” After the pardon at Doncaster, three hundred persons wished to pull the curate out of the pulpit at Kendal Church, crying out: “He shall proclaim the Pope to be supreme head of the Church, or be cast into the water!”[208] But in spite of the anxieties caused by the rebellion, the perennial subject of the disposal of Mary’s hand in marriage was occupying public attention both at home and abroad. It kept the possibility of an alliance with Henry perpetually before the arbiters of European affairs, and did more to avert war than all his other tactics. But it is clear, with the whole history of his negotiations before us, that he never intended Mary to leave the country, and risk her repudiation of all that he had been at so great pains to wring from her. Already, in February 1536, the Emperor had devised a marriage between his cousin Mary, and Don Loys, brother of King Emanuel of Portugal, his brother-in-law. Henry appeared to look favourably on the proposed match, and in June, a formal demand was made for her hand. The matter was allowed to drag on indefinitely; raised from time to time with much affectation of seriousness, to suit Henry’s policy, it was again repeatedly dropped, for the nice adjustment of the scale, when Francis became restive, at the apparent understanding between his ally and his enemy. Then the proposed union of the Princess Mary with the Duke of Orleans was once more brought forward, and so the changes rang for some time. But all this was merely on the surface; and the question of Mary’s legitimacy was the only real point at issue, for it involved the whole series of events which had landed Henry in his actual position with regard to his own subjects, to his fellow-sovereigns, and to the Pope, still a power to be reckoned with. To yield that point was to give up all he had been fighting for during the last ten years, and to cut away the ground from under his feet. If he temporised long enough, the possible birth of a son might allow him to restore his daughter without loss of his own dignity. Charles V., in putting forward Don Loys as a suitor, made the condition, that the slur cast by Henry on Mary’s birth should be removed; and Henry’s instructions to his special envoy, Sir Thomas Wyatt, on the renewal of his amity with the Emperor, show the use her father intended to make of her renunciation of her birthright.