dragged along against his
will, and was still "facing both ways" in honest or dishonest
irresolution. While issuing the brief under compulsion, he said precisely
the opposite in his communication with the French Ambassador, the Bishop
of Tarbes. The Ambassador was able to assure his own master that the Pope
would never give sentence in Catherine's favour. In direct contradiction
of the brief, the Bishop wrote "that the Pope had told him more than three
times in secret he would be glad if the marriage between Henry and Anne
was already made, either by dispensation of the English Legate or
otherwise, provided it was not by his authority or in diminution of his
powers of dispensation and limitation of divine law."[111] In England the
Pope had still his own Nuncio--a Nuncio who, as Chapuys declared, was
"heart and soul" with the King. He was the brother of Sir Gregory Casalis,
Henry's agent at Rome, and Henry was said to have promised him a bishopric
as soon as his cause should be won. The Pope could not have been ignorant
of the disposition of his own Minister.

Chapuys reported a mysterious State secret which had reached him through
Catherine's physician. The Smalcaldic League was about to be formed among
the Protestant Princes of Germany. Francis was inviting the King to
support them and to join with himself in encouraging them to dethrone the
Emperor; the King was said to have agreed on the ground that the Pope and
the Emperor had behaved ill to him, and the probability was that both
France and England in the end would become Lutheran.

Had there been nothing else, the Queen's sterility was held a sufficient
ground for the divorce. If she had been barren from the first, the
marriage would have been held invalid at once. Now that the hope of
succession was gone, the Pope, it was said, ought to have ended it.[112]

The King had been busy all the winter carrying out his project of
collecting the opinions of the learned. The Pope's prohibition not having
been issued in England, his own Bishops, the Universities, and the
canonists had declared themselves in favour of the divorce. The assent had
not in all instances been given very willingly. Oxford and Cambridge had
attempted a feeble resistance, and at Oxford the Commissioners had been
pelted with stones. Still, given it had been, and the conservative Peers
and gentry were coming to the same conclusion. The King was known to be
wishing to recall Wolsey. The return of Wols