Renard, the Emperor’s Ambassador, had broached the idea of a marriage between Mary and Philip, the Prince of Spain, less than a week after the Queen’s entry into London; and thenceforward the arrangements for the match went forward apace. The people generally were in an agony of fear; Gardiner himself, the Queen’s Chancellor, and most of her wisest Councillors, looked coldly upon the idea; they would rather she had married Courtney, and formed a close political alliance with the House of Spain. But the Queen was a daughter of Catharine of Aragon, and the exalted religious ideas of her race had caused her to look upon herself as the divinely-appointed being who was to bring to pass the salvation of her people, and this she knew could only be done by the power and money that Spain could bring to her. The connection would enable her, too, to be revenged upon France, which had befriended her mother’s supplanter, and was still subsidising revolution against her. Those who were Catholics first and Englishmen afterwards, applauded her determination to wed her Spanish cousin; and the priests in Rome watched, from the moment of her advent, for the possibility of the restoration of England to the faith, and the disgorging of the plunder of the Church by those who had swallowed it. Most of these saw in the Spanish match the probable realisation of their hopes. Immediately after Mary’s accession the Pope had appointed Cardinal Pole to negotiate with these ends. He was an Englishman of the blood royal, who had no special Spanish ends to serve: his one wish was to bring back England into the fold of the Church. But before he started on his journey to England, Charles V. took fright. His views were quite different. He and his son wanted to get political control over England for their own dynastic interests. So long as the religious element helped them in this, they were glad to use it; but if the priests went too fast and too far, and caused disgust and reaction in England, their plans would fail. So, as usual when it was a choice between religion and politics by statesmen of that age, they chose politics. The difficulty was that the Churchmen had expected that the return of England to the fold would necessarily mean the restitution of all ecclesiastical property. Pole himself was full of this idea, and his first powers from the Pope gave him little or no discretion to abate the claim for entire and unconditional surrender of the Church plunder. But at the instance of the Emperor, the Pope was induced to grant to Pole full discretionary powers. Then he was persuaded to send the Legate to France and Brussels on his way to England, with the ostensible purpose of mediating a peace between France and the Emperor, but really in order that he might be influenced in the Spanish interest, and his departure for England was thus delayed until it was considered prudent to let him go. It was not until he had