from limb; she would have an authoritative sentence
from the Pope, and would accept nothing else; nothing should make her
alter her opinion, and if after death she could return to life, she would
die over again rather than change it.[43]

Wolsey was in equal anxiety. He had set the stone rolling, but he could
not stop it. If Clement failed the King now, after all that he had
promised, he might not only bring ruin on Wolsey himself, but might bring
on the overthrow of the temporal power of the Church of England. Catherine
was personally popular; but in the middle classes of the laity, among the
peers and gentlemen of England, the exactions of the Church courts, the
Pope's agents and collectors, the despotic tyranny of the Bishops, had
created a resentment the extent of which none knew better than he. The
entire gigantic system of clerical dominion, of which Wolsey was himself
the pillar and representative, was tottering to its fall. If the King was
driven to bay, the favour of a good-natured people for a suffering woman
would be a poor shelter either for the Church or for him. Campeggio turned
to Wolsey for advice on Catherine's final refusal. The Pope, he said, had
hoped that Wolsey would advise the King to yield. Wolsey had advised. He
told Cavendish that he had gone on his knees to the King, but he could
only say to Campeggio that "the King--fortified and justified by reasons,
writings, and counsels of many learned men who feared God--would never
yield." If he was to find that the Pope had been playing with him, and the
succession was to be left undetermined, "the Church would be ruined and
the realm would be in infinite peril."

How great, how real, was the dread of a disputed succession, appears from
an extraordinary expedient which had suggested itself to Campeggio
himself, and which he declares that some perplexed politicians had
seriously contemplated. "They have thought," he wrote on the 28th of
October, "of marrying the Princess Mary to the King's natural son [the
Duke of Richmond] if it could be done by dispensation from His Holiness."
The Legate said that at first he had himself thought of this as a means
of establishing the succession; but he did not believe it would satisfy
the King's desire.[44] If anything could be more astonishing than a
proposal for the marriage of a brother and sister, it was the reception
which the suggestion met with at Rome. The Pope's secretary replied that
"with regard to the dis