Early the next morning Cromwell entered the King's chamber between hope and fear, and found Henry frowning and sulky. "How does your Grace like the Queen?" he asked. Henry grumblingly, and not quite relevantly, replied that he, Cromwell, was not everybody; and then he broke out, "Surely, my lord, as you know, I liked her not well before, but now I like her much worse." With an incredible grossness, and want of common decency, he then went into certain details of his wife's physical qualities that had disgusted him and turned him against her. He did not believe, from certain peculiarities that he described, that she was a maid, he said; but so far as he was concerned, he was so "struck to the heart" that he had left her as good a maid as he had found her.[204] Nor was the King more reticent with others. He was free with his details to the gentlemen of his chamber, Denny, Heneage, and others, as to the signs which it pleased him to consider suspicious as touching his wife's previous virtue, and protested that he never could, or would, consummate the marriage; though he professed later that for months after the wedding he did his best to overcome his repugnance, and lived constantly in contact with his wife. But he never lost sight of the hope of getting free. If he did not find means soon to do so, he said, he should have no more issue. His conscience told him--that tender conscience of his--that Anne was not his legal wife; and he turned to Cromwell for a remedy, and found none: for Cromwell knew that the breaking up of the Protestant union, upon which he had staked his future, would inevitably mean now the rise of his rivals and his own ruin. He fought stoutly for his position, though Norfolk and Gardiner were often now at the King's ear. His henchman, Dr. Barnes, who had gone to Germany as envoy during the marriage negotiations, was a Protestant, and in a sermon on justification by faith he violently attacked Gardiner. The latter, in spite of Cromwell and Cranmer, secured from the King an order that Barnes should humbly and publicly recant. He did so at Easter at the Spital, but at once repeated the offence, and he and two other clergymen who thought like him were burnt for heresy. Men began to shake their heads and look grave now as they spoke of Cromwell and Cranmer; but the Secretary stood sturdily, and in May seemed as if he would turn the tables upon his enemies. Once, indeed, he threatened the Duke of Norfolk roughly with the King's displeasure, and at the opening of Parliament he took the lead as usual, expressing the King's sorrow at the religious bitterness in the country, and demanding large supplies for the purposes of national defence.