t Wolsey's failure to obtain
a sentence in Henry's favour as the sole or main cause of his fall.
Had he succeeded, he might have deferred for a time his otherwise
unavoidable ruin, but it was his last and only chance. He was driven
to playing a desperate game, in which the dice were loaded against
him. If his plan failed, he told Clement over and over again, it would
mean for him irretrievable ruin, and in his fall he would drag down
the Church. If it succeeded, he would be hardly more secure, for
success meant the predominance of Anne Boleyn and of her
anti-ecclesiastical kin. Under the circumstances, it is possible to
attach too much weight to the opinion of the French and Spanish
ambassadors, and of Charles V. himself, that Wolsey suggested the
divorce as the means of breaking for ever the alliance between England
and the House of Burgundy, and substituting for it a union with
France.[573] The divorce fitted in so well with Wolsey's French
policy, that the suspicion was natural; but the same observers also
recorded the impression that Wolsey was secretly opposing the divorce
from fear of the ascendancy of Anne Boleyn.[574] That suspicion had
been brought to Henry's mind as early as June, 1527. It was probably
due to the facts that Wolsey was not blinded by passion, as Henry was,
to the difficulties in the way, and that it was he who persuaded Henry
to have recourse to the Pope in the first instance,[575] when the
King desired to follow Suffolk's precedent, obtain a sentence (p. 205)
in England, marry again, and trust to the Pope to confirm his
proceedings.

[Footnote 573: _L. and P._, iv., 4112, 4865, 5512.]

[Footnote 574: _Sp. Cal._, iii., 432, 790; _Ven.
Cal._, 1529, 212.]

[Footnote 575: "He showed me," writes Campeggio,
"that in order to maintain and increase here the
authority of the Holy See and the Pope he had done
his utmost to persuade the King to apply for a
legate... although many of these prelates declared
it was possible to do without one" (iv., 4857;
_cf._ iv., 5072, 5177).]

It is not, however, impossible to trace Wolsey's real designs behind
these conflicting reports. He knew that Henry was determined to have a
divorce and that this was one of those occasions upon which "he would
be obeyed, whosoever spo