Gardiner, henceforth Lord Chancellor, had once vehemently opposed the validity of her mother’s marriage, although he had since amply vindicated his claim to Mary’s regard, and stood highest of all in her counsels, a sufficient answer to the charge so often made that the Queen had foredoomed Cranmer, because he had pronounced the sentence of divorce. Mary lost no time in acquainting the Emperor and the French King with her resolve to bring back Catholic worship. Henry congratulated her on her intention, and urged her to proceed at once; but Charles advised caution, and told her to pause until she had obtained the consent of Parliament.[316] From Rome came still other counsel. If Mary was strangely unconscious of the change that had come over the country since the days of her childhood, at the heart of Christendom a still greater optimism prevailed. Reginald Pole wrote to her, urging not only the reconciliation of her kingdom with the Holy See, but also the restitution of Church lands. He congratulated her on the manner of her accession, and trusted that as she had been tutored in the school of God how to rule herself, her realm would become a mirror of good order and true justice, to the comfort of all good men.[317] He also wrote to the Emperor, representing that as the principal foundation of her right to the Crown rested on the legitimacy of her mother’s marriage, which depended on the Papal dispensation of Julius II.; by deferring the re-establishment of Papal authority her right was in consequence deferred also.[318] Again he wrote to Mary herself, drawing attention to her own spiritual danger and to the shipwrecked condition of the English nation, “for the Queen, or at least England, was assuredly shipwrecked, when she threw herself into the sea of this century; and having drawn a picture of the danger, her Majesty will judge whether it is the time to deliberate, or rather to act as ordained and prescribed her by divine and human counsel”.[319]