from its battlements upon scenes so dreadful that it must have
appeared as if the Papacy and the Church itself had been overtaken by the
final judgment. We regard the Spaniards as a nation of bigots, we consider
it impossible that the countrymen of Charles and Philip could have been
animated by any such bitterness against the centre of Catholic
Christendom. Charles himself is not likely to have intended the
humiliation of the Holy See. But Clement had reason for his misgivings,
and Wolsey's policy was not without excuse. Lope de Soria was Charles's
Minister at Genoa, and Lope de Soria's opinions, freely uttered, may have
been shared by many a Catholic besides himself. On the 25th of May, a
fortnight after the storm, he wrote to his master the following noticeable
letter:--

"The sack of Rome must be regarded as a visitation from God, who permits
his servant the Emperor to teach his Vicar on earth and other Christian
princes that their wicked purposes shall be defeated, the unjust wars
which they have raised shall cease, peace be restored to Christendom, the
faith be exalted, and heresy extirpated.... Should the Emperor think that
the Church of God is not what it ought to be, and that the Pope's temporal
power emboldens him to promote war among Christian princes, I cannot but
remind your Majesty that it will not be a sin, but a meritorious action,
to reform the Church; so that the Pope's authority be confined exclusively
to his own spiritual affairs, and temporal affairs to be left to Caesar,
since by right what is God's belongs to God, and what is Caesar's to Caesar.
I have been twenty-eight years in Italy, and I have observed that the
Popes have been the sole cause of all the wars and miseries during that
time. Your Imperial Majesty, as Supreme Lord on earth, is bound to apply a
remedy to that evil."[10]

Heretical English and Germans were not the only persons who could
recognise the fitness of the secular supremacy of princes over popes and
Churches. Such thoughts must have passed through the mind of Charles
himself, and of many more besides him. De Soria's words might have been
dictated by Luther or Thomas Cromwell. Had the Emperor at that moment
placed himself at the head of the Reformation, all later history would
have been different. One statesman at any rate had cause to fear that this
might be what was about to happen. Wolsey was the embodiment of everything
most objectionable and odious to the laity in the ecc