e to yield; and although he continued honestly to urge him to make
concessions, he no longer affected to make them the price of preserving
France in allegiance to the Holy See. Nor need we regret that Francis
shrank from a resolution which Henry had no right to require of him. To
have united with France in a common schism at the crisis of the Reformation
would have only embarrassed the free motions of England; and two nations
whose interests and whose tendencies were essentially opposite, might not
submit to be linked together by the artificial interests of their princes.
The populace of England were unconsciously on the rapid road to
Protestantism. The populace of France were fanatically Catholic. England
was to go her way through a golden era of Elizabeth to Cromwell, the
Puritans, and a Protestant republic; a republic to be perpetuated, if not
in England herself, yet among her great children beyond the sea. France was
to go her way through Bartholomew massacres and the dragonnades to a
polished Louis the Magnificent, and thence to the bloody Medea's cauldron
of Revolution, out of which she was to rise as now we know her. No common
road could have been found for such destinies as these; and the French
prince followed the direction of his wiser instincts when he preferred a
quiet arrangement with the pope, in virtue of which his church should be
secured by treaty the liberties which she desired, to a doubtful struggle
for a freedom which his people neither wished nor approved. The interests
of the nation were in fact his own. He could ill afford to forsake a
religion which allowed him so pleasantly to compound for his amatory
indulgences by the estrapade[414] and a zeal for orthodoxy.

It became evident to Henry early in the spring that he was left
substantially alone. His marriage had been kept secret with the intention
that it should be divulged by the King of France to the pope when he met
him at Marseilles; and as the pope had pretended an anxiety that either the
King of England should be present in person at that interview, or should be
represented by an ambassador of adequate rank, a train had been equipped
for the occasion, the most magnificent which England could furnish. Time,
meanwhile, passed on; the meeting, which was to have taken place first in
January, and then in April, was delayed till October, and in the interval
the papal brief had appeared in Flanders; the queen's pregnancy could not
admit of concealm