he Crown. "It was the
strangest and newest sight and device," says Cavendish, "that ever we
read or heard of in any history or chronicle in any region that a king
and queen should be convented and constrained by process compellatory to
appear in any court as common persons, within their own realm and
dominion, to abide the judgment and decree of their own subjects, having
the royal diadem and prerogative thereof."

Even this degradation had been borne in vain. Foreign and papal tribunal
as that of the legates really was, it lay within Henry's kingdom and had
the air of an English court. But the citation to Rome was a summons to
the King to plead in a court without his realm. Wolsey had himself
warned Clement of the hopelessness of expecting Henry to submit to such
humiliation as this. "If the King be cited to appear in person or by
proxy and his prerogative be interfered with, none of his subjects will
tolerate the insult. To cite the King to Rome, to threaten him with
excommunication, is no more tolerable than to deprive him of his royal
dignity. If he were to appear in Italy it would be at the head of a
formidable army." But Clement had been deaf to the warning, and the case
had been avoked out of the realm.

Henry's wrath fell at once on Wolsey. Whatever furtherance or hinderance
the Cardinal had given to his remarriage, it was Wolsey who had
dissuaded him from acting, at the first, independently; from conducting
the cause in his own courts and acting on the sentence of his own
judges. Whether to secure the succession by a more indisputable decision
or to preserve uninjured the prerogatives of the papal see, it was
Wolsey who had counselled him to seek a divorce from Rome and promised
him success in his suit. And in this counsel Wolsey stood alone. Even
Clement had urged the King to carry out his original purpose when it was
too late. All that the Pope sought was to be freed from the necessity of
meddling in the matter at all. It was Wolsey who had forced papal
intervention on him, as he had forced it on Henry, and the failure of
his plans was fatal to him. From the close of the legatine court Henry
would see him no more, and his favorite, Stephen Gardiner, who had
become chief secretary of state, succeeded him in the King's confidence.

If Wolsey still remained minister for a while, it was because the thread
of the complex foreign negotiations which he was conducting could not be
roughly broken. Here too, however,