Katharine in her neglected tomb at Peterborough was avenged, but the fissure that had been opened up between England and the Papacy for the sake of this woman had widened now past bridging. Politicians might, and did, make up their differences now that the "concubine" was dead, and form alliances regardless of religious affinities; but submission to the Papacy in future might mean that the most powerful people in England would be deprived of the fat spoils of the Church with which Cromwell had bought them, and that the vainest king on earth must humbly confess himself in the wrong. Anne herself was a mere straw upon a whirlpool, though her abilities, as Cromwell confessed, were not to be despised. She did not plan or make the Reformation, though she was forced by her circumstances to patronise it. The real author of the great schism of England was not Anne or Cranmer, but Luther's enemy, Charles V., the champion of Catholicism. But for the pressure he put upon the Pope to refuse Henry's divorce, in order to prevent a coalition of England and France, Cranmer's defiance of the Papacy would not have been needed, and Henry might have come back to Rome again easily. But with Cranmer to provide him with plausible pretexts for the repeated indulgence of his self-will, and Cromwell to feed his pride and cupidity by the plunder of the Church, Henry had already been drawn too far to go back. Greed and vanity of the ruling powers thus conspired to make permanent in England the influence of evanescent Anne Boleyn. [Illustration: _JANE SEYMOUR_ _From a painting by_ HOLBEIN _in the Imperial Collection at Vienna_] CHAPTER VII 1536-1540 PLOT AND COUNTERPLOT--JANE SEYMOUR AND ANNE OF CLEVES