ously interpreted, and to attempt to analyse the
motives of a double-minded man is always a hazardous experiment; but a
comparison of date, the character of Clement himself, the circumstances in
which he was placed, and the retrospective evidence from after events,
points almost necessarily to but one interpretation. It is scarcely
disputable that, frightened at the reception of Anne Boleyn in France, the
pope found it necessary to pretend for a time an altered disposition
towards Henry; and that the emperor, unable to feel wholly confident that a
person who was false to others was true to himself, had exacted the brief
from him as a guarantee for his good faith; Charles, on his side, reserving
the publication until Francis had been gained over, and until Clement was
screened against the danger which he so justly feared, from the
consequences of the interview at Calais.

There was duplicity of a kind; this cannot be denied; and if not designed
to effect this object, this object in fact it answered. While Clement was
talking smoothly to Bennet and Cassalis, secret overtures were advanced at
Paris for a meeting at Nice between the pope, the emperor, and the King of
France, from which Henry was to be excluded.[411] The emperor made haste
with concessions to Francis, which but a few months before would have
seemed impossible. He withdrew his army out of Lombardy, and left Italy
free; he consented to the marriage which he had so earnestly opposed
between Catherine de Medici and the Duke of Orleans, agreeing also, it is
probable, to the contingency of the Duchy of Milan becoming ultimately her
dowry. And Francis having coquetted with the proposal for the Nice
meeting,[412] not indeed accepting, but not absolutely rejecting it,
Charles consented also to waive his objections to the interview between
Francis and the pope, on which he had looked hitherto with so much
suspicion; provided that the pope would bear in mind some mysterious and
unknown communication which had passed at Bologna.[413]

Thus was Francis won. He cared only, as the pope had seen, for his own
interests; and from this time he drew away, by imperceptible degrees, from
his engagements to England. He did not stoop to dishonour or treacherous
betrayal of confidence, for with all his faults he was, in the technical
acceptation of that misused term, a gentleman. He declined only to maintain
the attitude which, if he had continued in it, would have compelled the
pop