In 1535 the ways parted, a decision could not be deferred, he renounced Rome and preached his sermon “de vera Obedientia,” in which he recognized in Henry the supremacy of a Byzantine emperor. The pang this act cost him lasted till he died, and he told the papal nuncio “he made this book under compulsion, not having the strength to suffer death patiently, which was ready for him.”[303] Indeed, when dying, his apostacy seems to have been his last thought, for in his closing hours, as the story of the passion was read to him he exclaimed, “Negavi cum Petro, exivi cum Petro, sed nondum flevi cum Petro.” All his life long his enemies accused him of dissimulation and hypocrisy for acts like these, but it was precisely this quality which raised him to eminence. Had he not been purchasable, he could hardly have survived as an Anglican bishop; an enthusiast like Fisher would have ended on Tower Hill. Perhaps more fully than any other prelate of his time, Gardiner represented the faction of Henry and Norfolk; he was as orthodox as he could be and yet prosper. He hated Cromwell and all “gospellers,” and he loved power and splendour and office. Fisher, with the temperament of Saint Anselm, shivering in his squalid house, clad in his shirt of hair, and sleeping on his pallet of straw, might indeed “humbly thank the king’s majesty” who rid him of “all this worldly business,” but men who rose to eminence in the reformed church were made of different stuff, and Gardiner’s ruling passion never burned more fiercely than as he neared his death. Though in excruciating torments from disease, he clung to office to the last. Noailles, the French ambassador, at a last interview, found him “livid with jaundice and bursting with dropsy: but for two hours he held discourse with me calmly and graciously, without a sign of discomposure; and at parting he must needs take my arm and walk through three saloons, on purpose to show himself to the people, because they said that he was dead.”[304]