This necessity became more pressing still three months after the interview just described. The Emperor with a demoralised and discontented army laid siege to Metz, which the French had captured from him, and after months of effort and hardship in the depth of winter he was obliged to retreat, defeated and heartsick; already swearing that he would turn monk: “for fortune, like a very strumpet, doth reserve her favours for the young.” In his palace at Brussels—sick, sorry, and dejected—he was obliged to haggle with the German Princes as to the price of their aid to fight the French. His darling son Philip, they stipulated, must be separated from the succession to the Empire, and the dream of the Emperor’s life to leave Philip strong enough to triumph where he himself had failed must be forfeited. The French had stirred up trouble, too, in the Emperor’s Italian dominions; the Turk was dominating the Mediterranean with the blessing of the Christian Pope; the Netherlands were sore and angry at the war taxes and the presence of marauding Spanish soldiery; the Imperial ministers were at deadly feud with each other; and on all sides Charles was surrounded by debts and difficulties. If only England could be prevailed upon to divert the French by attacking them in the Channel during the coming spring campaign, the tide of victory for the Emperor might yet be turned and France be rendered powerless. That, however, was the last thing that suited Northumberland’s book. The continuance of the war, nevertheless, was a standing danger to England itself, for it would have been impossible for her very long to have stood by idly whilst the French overran Flanders; and Northumberland made desperate efforts to bring about peace between the two antagonists. To all approaches in this sense the Emperor and his sister, the Queen-Regent of the Netherlands, could only point to the aggressive action and impossible demands of the King of France. “And,” writes Moryson in April, 1553, “whyle all these sturres ar growing great in Germanie, and whyle the French King is plying both sides with secret aydes and unseen practices, th’ Emperor keepyth his bed as unfyt to hear of the myschiefs that grow rownd about him, as unable to devise how to remedie them if they were told him.”