I suppose to have been from the council, and
another, said also to have been from "the
nobility," were evidently written under the same
impression, and at the same time, when the idea of
the recall was new.]

[Footnote 605: Letters to the Pope: Strype, vol.
vi. pp. 476-482. The drafts of the letters are not
signed, nor does it appear what names were attached
to them. It is not even certain that they were
sent.]

Karne's letter produced a brief hope that the pope would relent. But
the partial promise of reconsidering his resolution had been extorted
from Paul, while it was uncertain whether England would actually join
in the conflict; the intended declaration of war had in the interval
become a reality, and the pope, more indignant than ever, chose to
consider Pole personally responsible for the queen's conduct. Since a
point was made of the presence of a papal legate in England, he was so
far ready to give way; but so far only. The king left England the
first week in July. Mary accompanied him to Dover, and there a papal
nuncio met her, bringing a commission by which Pole was reduced into
the ordinary rank of archbishop; and the office of papal
representative was conferred on Peto, the Greenwich friar. For his
objections to the present legate, the pope gave the strange but
wounding reason, that his orthodoxy was not above suspicion.

The queen, with something of her father's temper in her, ordered the
nuncio to return to Calais till she could again communicate with Rome.
She interdicted Peto from accepting the commission, and desired Pole
to continue to exercise his functions till the pope had pronounced
again a final resolution. Pole, however, was too faithful a child of
the church to disobey a papal injunction; he relinquished his office,
but he sent Ormaneto to Rome with his own entreaties and protests.

Never had a legate of the Holy See been treated as he was treated, he
said; there was no precedent, therefore, to teach him how to act, nor
was ever charge of heresy urged with less occasion than against one
whose whole employment had been to recover souls to Christ and his
church, and to cut off those that were obstinate as rotten members.
His services to the {p.290} church, he passionately exclaimed,
transcended far the services of a