ing
Henry's assent, he, Cromwell and the rest of the council were (p. 351)
amazed to hear the King break out into an uncompromising defence
of the French King's conduct in invading Savoy and Piedmont.[981] That
invasion was the third stroke of good fortune which befel Henry in
1536. As Henry and Ferdinand had, in 1512, diverted their arms from
the Moors in order to make war on the Most Christian King, so, in
1536, the Most Christian King and the sovereign, who was at once King
Catholic and the temporal head of Christendom, instead of turning
their arms against the monarch who had outraged and defied the Church,
turned them against one another. Francis had never lost sight of
Milan; he had now recovered from the effects of Pavia; and in the
spring of 1536 he overran Savoy and Piedmont. In April the Emperor
once more visited Rome, and on the 17th he delivered a famous oration
in the papal Consistory.[982] In that speech he denounced neither
Luther nor Henry VIII.; he reserved his invectives for Francis I.
Unconsciously he demonstrated once and for all that unity of faith was
impotent against diversity of national interests, and that, whatever
deference princes might profess to the counsels of the Vicar of
Christ, the counsels they would follow would be those of secular
impulse.

[Footnote 980: _Cf._ Stern, _Heinrich VIII. und der
Schmalkaldische Bund_, and P. Singer, _Beziehung
des Schmalkald. Bundes zu England_. Greifswald,
1901.]

[Footnote 981: _L. and P._, x., 699.]

[Footnote 982: _Ibid._, x., 678, 684, 968.]

* * * * *

Henry was thus left to deal with the great domestic crisis of his
reign without intervention from abroad. The dissolution of the
monasteries inevitably inflicted considerable hardship on a numerous
body of men. It had been arranged that the inmates of the dissolved
religious houses should either be pensioned or transferred to other
monasteries; but, although the pensions were adequate and (p. 352)
sometimes even generous in scale,[983] and although the commissioners
themselves showed a desire to prevent unnecessary trouble by obtaining
licences for many houses to continue for a time,[984] the monks found
some difficulty in obtaining their pensions, and Chapuys draws a
moving picture of their sufferings as they wandered about the country,