. Measures were about to be taken in
Parliament to favour the Lutherans. He was going himself into Yorkshire,
where he intended to commence an opposition. If the Emperor would help him
he would take the field behind the crucifix, and would raise the banner of
Castile. Measures might be concerted with the Scots; a Scotch army might
cross the border as soon as he had himself taken arms; an Imperial
squadron should appear simultaneously at the mouth of the Thames, and a
battalion of soldiers from Flanders should be landed at Hull, with arms
and money for the poorer gentlemen. He and the northern lords would supply
their own forces. Many of the other Peers, he said, entirely agreed with
him. He named especially Lord Derby and Lord Dacre.[296]

This letter is of extreme importance, as explaining the laws which it was
found necessary to pass in the ensuing Parliament. A deeply rooted and
most dangerous conspiracy was actively forming--how dangerous the
Pilgrimage of Grace afterwards proved--in which Darcy and Hussey were the
principal leaders. The Government was well served. The King and Cromwell
knew more than it was prudent to publish. The rebellion meditated was the
more formidable because it was sanctified by the name of religion, with
the avowed purpose of executing the Papal Brief. Fitzgerald's rising in
Ireland was but the first dropping of a storm designed to be universal.
Half the Peers who surrounded Henry's person, and voted in Parliament for
the reforming statutes, were at heart leagued with his enemies. He had a
right to impose a test of loyalty on them, and force them to declare
whether they were his subjects or the Pope's.

For a moment it seemed as if the peril might pass over. It became known in
England in October that Clement VII. had ended his pontificate, and that
Cardinal Farnese reigned in his stead as Paul III. On Clement's death the
King, according to Chapuys, had counted on a schism in the Church, and was
disappointed at the facility with which the election had been carried
through; but Farnese had been on Henry's side in the divorce case, and the
impression in the English Council was that the quarrel with Rome would
now be composed. The Duke of Norfolk, who had been the loudest in his
denunciations of Clement, was of the opinion that the King, as a Catholic
Prince, would submit to his successor. Even Cromwell laid the blame of the
rupture on Clement personally, and when he heard that he was gone,
exc