ny legate who had been employed for
centuries, and, nevertheless, he found himself accused of heresy by
the Vicar of Christ upon earth. Such an insult was unjust and
unprovoked; and his holiness should consider also what he was doing in
bringing the queen, the mother of obedience, into heaviness and
sorrow. Mother of obedience the Queen of England might well be called,
whom God had made a mother of sons who were the joy of the whole
church. How was the pope rewarding this sainted woman, when with the
thunder of his voice he accused the king, her husband, of schism, and
himself, the legate, of heresy?[606]

[Footnote 606: Pole to the Pope: Strype's
_Memorials_, vol. vi. p. 34, etc.]

Scarcely in his whole troubled life had a calamity more agitating
overtaken Reginald Pole. To maintain the supremacy of the successor of
St. Peter, he had spent twenty years in treason to his native country.
He had held up his sovereign to the execration of mankind for
rejecting an authority which had rewarded him with an act of enormous
injustice; and to plead his consciousness of innocence before the
world against his spiritual sovereign, would be to commit the same
crime of disobedience for which he had put to death Cranmer, and
laboured to set Europe on fire. Most fatal, most subtle
retribution--for he knew that he was accused without cause; he knew
that the pope after all was but a peevish, violent, and spiteful old
man; he knew it--yet even to himself he could not admit his own
conviction.

Fortune, however, seemed inclined for a time to make some amends to
Mary in the results of the war.

The French usually opened their summer campaigns by an advance into
Lorraine or the Netherlands. This year their aggressive resources had
been directed wholly into Italy, and at home they remained on the
defensive. Philip, with creditable exertion, collected an army of
50,000 men, to take advantage of the opportunity. Fixing his own
residence at Cambray, he gave the command in the field to the Duke of
Savoy; and Philibert, after having succeeded in distracting the
attention of the enemy, and leading them to expect him in Champagne,
turned suddenly into Picardy, and invested the town of St. Quentin.
The garrison must soon have yielded, had not Coligny, the Admiral of
France, broken through the siege lines and carried in reinforcements.
Time was thus gained, and the constable, eager to save a strong place,
th