must send hither at once an able
person, with full powers, to take charge of the negotiation:" since he,
Chapuys, was in ill health and unequal to it.

Thus the English Catholic reaction that had been symbolised by the
repudiation of Anne of Cleves, and the marriage with Katharine Howard, was
triumphantly producing the results which Henry and Gardiner had intended.
The excommunicated King, the man who had flung aside his proud Spanish
wife and bade defiance to the vicegerent of Christ, was to be flattered
and sought in alliance by the head of the house of Aragon and the
appointed champion of Roman orthodoxy. He was to come back into the fold
unrepentant, with no submission or reparation made, a good Catholic, but
his own Pope. It was a prospect that appealed strongly to a man of Henry's
vain and ostentatious character, for it gave apparent sanction to his
favourite pose that everything he did was warranted by the strictest right
and justice; it promised the possibility of an extension of his
Continental territory, and the establishment of his own fame as a warrior
and a king. We shall see how his pompous self-conceit enabled his ally to
trick him out of his reward, and how the consequent reaction against those
who had beguiled him drew his country farther along the road of the
Reformation than Henry ever meant to go. But at present all looked
rose-coloured, for the imperial connection and the miserable scandal of
Katharine Howard rather benefited than injured the chances of its
successful negotiation. Cranmer, Hertford, and Audley had shot their bolt
in vain so far as political or religious aims were attained.

In the meanwhile the evidence against Katharine and her abettors was being
laboriously wrung out of all those who had come into contact with her. The
poor old Duchess of Norfolk and her son and daughters and several
underlings were condemned for misprison of treason to perpetual
imprisonment and confiscation,[225] and in Parliament on the 21st January
a Bill of Attainder against Katharine and three lady accomplices was
presented to the Lords. The evidence presented against Katharine was
adjudged to be insufficient in the absence of direct allegations of
adultery after her marriage, or of specific admissions from herself.[226]
This and other objections seem to have delayed the passage of the Bill
until the 11th of February, when it received the royal assent by
commission, condemning Katharine and Lady Rochford to