Noailles partly suspected what to us now is clear, namely, that all this suavity and tolerance on the part of the Prince of the proudest nation on earth was only a part of the deep-laid plan of the Emperor to obtain for his son the full control of English policy that the marriage treaty had withheld from him. Mary probably suspected this as little as any one. Her position was extremely difficult. She was by this time really in love with her husband, and was deeply desirous of pleasing him; she was anxious for the aggrandisement of Spain, which would mean, she thought, the triumph of the Church over heresy in Europe, and the consolidation of her own throne. But she knew that her people dreaded above all things being dragged into a war with their nearest neighbour in a quarrel which did not concern them: she was an English Queen determined, so far as in her lay, to govern for the benefit of her country, and to her the only road to safety seemed to strive her hardest to bring about a peace between the two antagonists before England was involved in the war. Pole had also been entrusted by the Pope with the mission of pacifying the Emperor and Henry II., and was as earnest in his efforts to do so as was Mary herself. From Brussels, where he had been kept chafing impotently, he had gone to Paris on his mission of peace, but the French arms were on the whole in the ascendant at the time, and he returned to Flanders unsuccessful.[68] These efforts of Mary, Pole, and Gardiner, to reconcile France and Spain, received no active help from Philip and his father. The object of the Emperor was to cripple France by the aid of England, not to patch up another temporary peace with her, and the whole tendency of the Imperial policy was to obtain complete control over England as the first step to this principal object. The Emperor had always used religion when necessary as an instrument for political ends, and it is not surprising that the English Catholic Churchmen should regard his present attitude towards the Catholic party as inconsistent. Gardiner, Pole, Bonner, and the rest of them, who had never yearned for the Spanish connection, thought, perhaps correctly, that they could have restored England to the Church more speedily and safely if they had been unencumbered by the unpopular marriage. Mary, for whom the question was complicated by considerations of her personal maintenance upon the throne, thought otherwise, and wisely the Churchmen had made the best of the position. But they had no intention, if they could help it, of slackening in their own purpose, or of allowing the restoration of their faith in England to be retarded or imperilled for the political interests of the Emperor; and the harsh action of Bonner particularly, supported as it was by Gardiner, caused bitter complaints amongst the English people, and something approaching dismay in the Spanish party of Mary’s Council.