legitimacy and heirship to the English crown she would
only surrender with her own life. So to all smooth suggestions that she
should make things pleasant all round by acquiescing in the King's view of
their marriage, she was scornfully irresponsive.

Through the plague-scourged summer of 1528 Henry and Anne waited
impatiently for the coming of the Legate Campeggio. He was old and gouty,
hampered with a mission which he dreaded; for he could not hope to
reconcile the irreconcilable, and the Pope had quietly given him the hint
that he need not hurry. Clement was, indeed, in a greater fix than ever.
He had been made to promise by the Emperor that the case should not be
decided in England, and yet he had been forced into giving the
dispensation and decretal not only allowing it to be decided there in
favour of Henry, but had despatched Campeggio to pronounce judgment. He
had, however, at the same time assured the Emperor that means should be
found to prevent the finality of any decision in England until the Emperor
had approved of it, and Campeggio was instructed accordingly. The
Spaniards thought that the English Cardinal would do his best to second
the efforts of the Pope without appearing to do so, and there is no doubt
that they were right, for Wolsey was now (the summer of 1528) really
alarmed at the engine he had set in motion and could not stop. Katharine
knew that the Legate was on his way, and that the Pope had, in appearance,
granted all of Henry's demands; but she did not know, or could not
understand, the political forces that were operating in her favour, which
made the Pope defraud the King of England, and turned her erstwhile mortal
enemy Wolsey into her secret friend. Tact and ready adaptability might
still have helped Katharine. The party of nobles under Norfolk, it is
true, had deserted her; but Wolsey and the bureaucrats were still a power
to be reckoned with, and the middle classes and the populace were all in
favour of the Queen and the imperial alliance. If these elements had been
cleverly combined they might have conquered, for Henry was always a coward
and would have bent to the stronger force. But Katharine was a bad hand at
changing sides, and Wolsey dared not openly do so.

For a few days in the summer of 1528, whilst Campeggio was still lingering
on the Continent, it looked as if a mightier power than any of them might
settle the question for once and all. Henry and Anne were at Greenwich
when