insolence, as well as his French political leanings, had caused the populace to hate him; the commercial classes, who suffered most by the wars with their best customers, the Flemings and Spaniards, were strongly opposed to him; whilst the territorial and noble party, which had usually been friendly with Katharine, and were traditionally against bureaucratic or ecclesiastical ministers of the crown, suffered with impatience the galling yoke of the Ipswich butcher's son, who drove them as he listed. Anne was in the circumstances a more powerful ally for them than Katharine. She was the niece of the Duke of Norfolk, the leader of the party of nobles, and her ambition would make her an apt and eager instrument. The infatuation of the King for her grew more violent as she repelled his advances,[51] and, doubtless at the prompting of Wolsey's foes, it soon began to be whispered that if Henry could get rid of his wife he might marry his English favourite. Before the Cardinal had been in France a month, Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador, first sounded the new note of alarm to the Emperor, by telling him that Anne might become the King's wife. It is hardly possible that no hint of the danger can have reached Wolsey, but if it did he was confident of his power over his master when he should return to England. Unfortunately for him his ideas for the King's divorce were hampered by the plans for his own advancement; and the proposals he wrote to Henry were all founded on the idea of exerting international pressure, either for the liberation of the Pope, or to obtain from the Pontiff the decree of divorce. It was evident that this process must be a slow one, and Anne as well as Henry was in a hurry. Unlike Charles, who, though he was falsity itself to his rivals, never deceived his own ministers, Henry constantly showed the moral cowardice of his character by misleading those who were supposed to direct his policy, and at this juncture he conceived a plan of his own which promised more rapidity than that of Wolsey.[52] Without informing Wolsey of the real object of his mission, old Dr. Knight, the King's confidential secretary, was sent to endeavour to see the Pope in St. Angelo, and by personal appeal from the King persuade him to grant a dispensation for Henry's marriage either before his marriage with Katharine was dissolved formally (_constante matrimonio_), or else, if that was refused, a dispensation to marry after the declaration had been made nullifying the previous union (_soluto matrimonio_); but in either case the strange demand was to be made that the dispensation was to cover the case of the bride and bridegroom being connected within the prohibited degrees of affinity.[53]