meant by that. On his replying that the
Emperor's friendship depended on the treatment of the Queen, the King said
coldly that the Emperor had no right to interfere with the laws and
constitution of England.

Chapuys persisted.

The Emperor, he said, did not wish to meddle with his laws, unless they
personally affected the Queen. The King wanted to force her to abandon her
appeal, and it was not to be expected that she would submit to statutes
which had been carried by compulsion.

The King grew impatient. The statutes, he said, had been passed in
Parliament, and the Queen as a subject must obey them.

The Ambassador retorted that new laws could not be retrospective; and, as
to the Queen being a subject, if she was his wife she was his subject; if
she was not his wife, she was not his subject.

This was true, and Henry was to be made to feel the dilemma. He contented
himself, however, with saying that she must have patience, and obey the
laws of the realm. The Emperor had injured him by hindering his marriage
and preventing him from having male succession. The Queen was no more his
wife than she was Chapuys's. He would do as he pleased, and if the Emperor
made war on him he would fight.

Chapuys inquired whether, if an interdict was issued, and the Spaniards
and Flemings resident in England obeyed it, his statutes would apply to
them.

The King did not answer; but, turning to someone present, he said: "You
have heard the Ambassador hint at excommunication. It is not I that am
excommunicated, but the Emperor, who has kept me so long in mortal sin.
That is an excommunication which the Pope cannot take off."[219]

To the lords who carried the message to Catherine she replied as she had
always done--that Queen she was, and she would never call herself by any
other name. As to her establishment, she wanted nothing but a confessor, a
doctor, and a couple of maids. If that was too much, she would go about
the world and beg alms for the love of God.

"The King," Chapuys said, "was naturally kind and generous," but the "Lady
Anne had so perverted him that he did not seem the same man." Unless the
Emperor acted in earnest, she would make an end of Catherine, as she had
done of Wolsey, whom she did not hate with half as much intensity. "All
seems like a dream," he said. "Her own party do not know whether to laugh
or cry at it. Every day people ask me when I am going away. As long as I
remain here it will be always though