ignominious war. The French force was utterly defeated in battle. The Pope
and Charles signed a treaty--all was nicely arranged. The Pope's nephew
was to marry the Emperor's natural daughter; certain towns were to be
restored to the Pope, who was to crown Charles with the Imperial crown.
The participators in the sacking of Rome were to be absolved from sin; the
proceedings against the Emperor's aunt, Katharine, were to be null and
void. If Katharine could not obtain justice in England, Henry should not
have his justice in Rome. The Pope and the Emperor kissed again, and Henry
finally cut himself adrift from Rome. It was the failure of the divorce
that made England a Protestant country.

Henry now openly defied the Pope, by whom he was excommunicated, and so
"deprived of the solace of the rites of religion; when he died he must lie
without burial, and in hell suffer torment for ever." The mind shrinks
from contemplating the tortures to which the soul of His Majesty might
have been subjected but for the timely intervention of his Grace the
Archbishop of Canterbury.

So far from Henry suffering in a temporal sense, he continued to defy the
opinion and the power of the world. He showed his greatness by looking
public opinion unflinchingly in the face; by ignoring, he conquered it.
Amid the thunderous roarings of the Papal bull, Henry stood--as we see him
in his picture--smiling and indifferent. "I never saw the King merrier
than now," wrote a contemporary in 1533. Henry always had good cards--now
he held the ace of public opinion up his sleeve.

Wolsey, although averse to the Queen's divorce and the marriage of Anne
Boleyn, expressed himself in terms of the strongest opposition to the
overbearing Pope. A few days before the Papal revocation arrived, the
Cardinal wrote thus: "If the King be cited to appear at Rome in person or
by proxy, and his prerogative be interfered with, none of his subjects
will tolerate it. If he appears in Italy, it will be at the head of a
formidable army." Opposed as they were to the divorce, the English people
were of one mind with Wolsey in this attitude.

Henry was not slow to avail himself of the new development, and he made
the divorce become in the eyes of the people but a secondary consideration
to the pride of England. He drew the red herring of the Reformation across
the trail of the divorce. The King and his Parliament held that the Church
should not meddle with temporal affairs. The C