While Mary was destroying the enemies of the church, Julius the Third had died at the end of March, and Reginald Pole was again a candidate for the vacant chair. The courts of Paris and Brussels alike promised him their support, but alike gave their support to another. They flattered his virtues, but they permitted Marcellus Cervino, the Cardinal of St. Cross, to be elected unanimously; and the English legate was told that he must be contented with the event which God had been pleased to send.[461] An opportunity, however, seemed to offer itself to him of accomplishing a service to Europe. [Footnote 461: Noailles to the King of France, April 5 and April 17. Montmorency to Noailles, April 21. Noailles to Montmorency, April 30: _Ambassades_, vol. iv.] {p.207} For thirty-five years the two great Catholic powers had been wrestling with but brief interruption. The advantage to either had been as trifling as the causes of their quarrel were insignificant. Their revenues were anticipated, their credit was exhausted, yet year after year languid armies struggled into collision. Across the Alps in Italy, and along the frontiers of Burgundy and the Low Countries, towns and villages, and homesteads were annually sacked, and peasants and their families destroyed--for what it were vain to ask, except it was for some poor shadow of imagined honour. Two mighty princes believed themselves justified in the sight of Heaven in squandering their subjects' treasure and their subjects' blood, because the pride of each forbade him to be the first in volunteering insignificant concessions. France had conquered Savoy and part of Piedmont, and had pushed forward its northern frontier to Marienbourg and Metz: the emperor held Lombardy, Parma, and Naples, and Navarre was annexed to Spain. The quarrel might have easily been ended by mutual restitution; yet the Peace of Cambray, the Treaty of Nice, and the Peace of Crepy, lasted only while the combatants were taking breath; and those who would attribute the extravagances of human folly to supernatural influence might imagine that the great discord between the orthodox powers had been permitted to give time for the Reformation to strike its roots into the soil of Europe. But a war which could be carried on only by loans at sixteen per cent. was necessarily near its conclusion. The apparent recovery of England to the church revived hopes which the Peace of Passau and the dissolution of the Council of Trent had almost extinguished; and, could a reconciliation be effected at last, and could Philip obtain the disposal of the military strength of England in the interests of the papacy, it might not even yet be too late to lay the yoke of orthodoxy on the Germans, and, in a Catholic interpretation of the Parable of the Supper, "compel them to come in."