ret, Queen of Scotland.[562] Her
pretexts were infinitely more flimsy than Henry's own. She alleged a
precontract on the part of her husband, Angus, which was never proved.
She professed to believe that James IV. had survived Flodden three
years, and was alive when she married Angus. Angus had been
unfaithful, but that was no ground for divorce by canon law; and she
herself was living in shameless adultery with Henry Stewart, who had
also procured a divorce to be free to marry his Queen. No objection
was found at Rome to either of these divorces; but neither Angus nor
Margaret Mortimer had an Emperor for a nephew; no imperial armies
would march on Rome to vindicate the validity of their marriages, and
Clement could issue his bulls without any fear that their justice
would be challenged by the arms of powerful princes. Not so with
Henry; while the secret proceedings before Wolsey were in progress,
the world was shocked by the sack of Rome, and Clement was a prisoner
in the hands of the Emperor's troops. There was no hope that a Pope in
such a plight would confirm a sentence to the detriment of his
master's aunt. "If the Pope," wrote Wolsey to Henry on receipt of the
news, "be slain or taken, it will hinder the King's affairs not a
little, which have hitherto been going on so well."[563] A little
later he declared that, if Catherine repudiated his authority, it
would be necessary to have the assent of the Pope or of the cardinals
to the divorce. To obtain the former the Pope must be liberated; to
secure the latter the cardinals must be assembled in France.[564] (p. 201)

[Footnote 562: _L. and P._, iv., 4130.]

[Footnote 563: _Ibid._, iv., 3147.]

[Footnote 564: _L. and P._, iv., 3311.]

To effect the Pope's liberation, or rather to call an assembly of
cardinals in France during Clement's captivity, was the real object of
the mission to France, on which Wolsey started in July. Such a body,
acting under Wolsey's presidency and in the territories of the French
King, was as likely to favour an attack upon the Emperor's aunt as the
Pope in the hands of Charles's armies was certain to oppose it. Wolsey
went in unparalleled splendour, not as Henry's ambassador but as his
lieutenant; and projects for his own advancement were, as usual, part
of the programme. Louise of Savoy, the queen-mother of France,
suggested to him that all Christian princes should repudiate the
P