al cause delayed the
courier; the 23d of March came, and he had not arrived. Du Bellay
implored a further respite. The King of England, he said, had waited six
years; it was not a great thing for the papal council to wait six days.
The cardinals were divided; but the Spanish party were the strongest,
and when the votes were taken carried the day. The die was cast, and the
pope, in spite of himself, his promises, and his conscience, drove at
length upon the rocks to which he had been so long drifting.[256] In
deference to the opinion of the majority of the cardinals, he pronounced
the original marriage to have been valid, the dispensation by which it
was permitted to have been legal; and, as a natural consequence, Henry,
King of England, should he fail in obedience to this judgment, was
declared to be excommunicate from the fellowship of the church, and to
have forfeited the allegiance of his subjects.

[Sidenote: The Imperialists engage that Charles shall enforce the
sentence.]

Lest the censures should be discredited by a blank discharge,
engagements were entered into, that within four months of the
promulgation of the sentence, the emperor would invade England, and
Henry should be deposed.[257] The imperialists illuminated Rome; cannon
were fired; bonfires blazed; and great bodies of men paraded the streets
with shouts of "the Empire and Spain."[258] Already, in their eager
expectation, England was a second Netherlands, a captured province under
the regency of Catherine or Mary.

Two days later, the courier arrived. The pope, at the entreaties of the
Bishop of Paris, reassembled the consistory, to consider whether the
steps which had been taken should be undone. They sat debating all
night, and the result was nothing. No dependence could be placed on the
cardinals, Du Bellay said, for they spoke one way, and voted
another.[259]

[Sidenote: Du Bellay says that the pope was "coacted" by the Spanish
party against his judgment.]

Thus all was over. In a scene of general helplessness the long drama
closed, and, what we call accident, for want of some better word, cut
the knot at last over which human incapacity had so vainly laboured. The
Bishop of Paris retired from Rome in despair. On his way back, he met
the English commissioners at Bologna, and told them that their errand
was hopeless, and that they need not proceed. "When we asked him," wrote
Sir Edward Karne to the king, "the cause of such hasty process, he mad