Charles was not unmindful of the perils which surrounded his aunt and cousin, but he was greatly embarrassed for means to help them. Henry was deaf to persuasive arguments; the argument of force still remained to be applied, but this would involve the Emperor in a series of complications, out of which he did not see his way. If he made war on Henry, he would have to reckon with Henry’s ally and his own enemy, the King of France, who was by no means so scrupulous a Catholic, that he would hesitate to take up a hostile attitude towards the Pope, in a matter which was considered by the rest of Christendom as the Pope’s peculiar province. Henry had effected a formal rupture with Rome, and still Francis was as friendly to him as before. Moreover, the French court, although it had professed to be shocked by Anne’s effrontery, was known to favour the new Queen secretly; and dominating all these other difficulties was the Emperor’s accumulated debt to Henry, which his nephew was less than ever in a position to pay. A chess-board policy was therefore all that was possible in the actual state of affairs. Not any amount of sacrifices on the part of Charles would avail to help his aunt’s cause, and the letter which he wrote at this juncture to his ambassador in France, is alike a voucher for the accuracy of Chapuys’ narrative of affairs in England, and a confession of weakness by the Emperor. “You have done well,” he writes, “to report what you have heard touching practices against the Princess of England, and what the King of France has said to you touching the King of England’s rupture with the Pope and the Holy See, and his making alliance with the Lutherans, and pretending that the Queen our aunt is ill. We have heard the same from our ambassador in England, much to our grief. And you are to tell Francis that the more Henry disowns obedience to the Holy See, the more he ought to support it. As to the report spread by the King of England, that the Queen our aunt is ill, you are to take an opportunity of telling him that she is in very good health of body, notwithstanding her ill-treatment, and that the spreading of such a report is very suspicious—all the more, as they have put her in a very unhealthy habitation, and taken away her physician, and almost all her servants, so that the _essai_ of viands is no longer made. You have done right to inform Cifuentes[118] of this, although our ambassador in England has also done so.”[119] Whether Chapuys was right in thinking that Anne would make a pretence of friendship with Mary, in order to destroy her more completely, or whether, having tried her utmost to break the Princess’s spirit, she now thought to win her enemy by gentler means, it is certain that in March 1534 she suddenly changed her tactics.