from Court, Anne's bills for dressmaker's finery amounted to extravagant proportions. The position was rendered the more bitter for Katharine when she recognised that the Pope, in a fright now at Henry's defiance, was trying to meet him half way, and was listening to the suggestion of referring the question to a tribunal at Cambray or elsewhere; whilst the Emperor himself was only anxious to get the cause settled somehow without an open affront to his house or necessary cause for quarrel with Henry.[82] And yet, withal, the divorce did not seem to make headway in England itself. As we have seen, the common people were strongly against it: the clergy, trembling, as well they might, for their privileges between the Pope and the King, were naturally as a body in favour of the ecclesiastical view; and many of Henry and Anne's clerical instruments, such as Dr. Bennet in Rome and Dr. Sampson at Vienna, were secretly working against the cause they were supposed to be aiding: even some of the new prelates, such as Gardiner of Winchester and Stokesley of London, grew less active advocates when they understood that upon them and their order would fall ultimately the responsibility of declaring invalid a marriage which the Church and the Pope had sanctioned. Much stronger still even was the dislike to the King's marriage on the part of the older nobility, whose enmity to Wolsey had first made the marriage appear practicable. They had sided with Anne to overthrow Wolsey; but the obstinate determination of the King to rid himself of his wife and marry his favourite, had brought forward new clerical and bureaucratic ministers whose proceedings and advice alarmed the aristocracy much more than anything Wolsey had done. If Katharine had been tactful, or even an able politician, she had the materials at hand to form a combination in favour of herself and her daughter, before which Henry, coward as he was, would have quailed. But she lacked the qualities necessary for a leader: she irritated the King without frightening him, and instead of conciliating the nobles who really sympathised with her, though they were forced to do the King's bidding, she snubbed them haughtily and drove them from her.