give way:
he was to "say plainly to his Holiness that the king's desire and intent
_convolare ad secundas nuptias non patitur negativum_; and whatsoever
should be found of bull, brief, or otherwise, his Highness found his
conscience so inquieted, his succession in such danger, and his most royal
person in such perplexity for things unknown and not to be spoken, that
other remedy there was not but his Grace to come by one way or other, and
specially at his hands, if it might be, to the desired end; and that all
concertation to the contrary should be vain and frustrate."

So peremptory a conviction and so determined a purpose were of no sudden
growth, and had been probably maturing in his mind for years, when the
gangrene was torn open by the Bishop of Tarbes, and accident precipitated
his resolution. The momentous consequences involved, and the reluctance to
encounter a probable quarrel with the emperor, might have long kept him
silent, except for some extraneous casualty; but the tree being thus rudely
shaken, the ripe fruit fell. The capture of Rome occurring almost at the
same moment, Wolsey caught the opportunity to break the Spanish alliance;
and the prospect of a divorce was grasped at by him as a lever by which to
throw the weight of English power and influence into the papal scale, to
commit Henry definitely to the catholic cause. Like his acceptance of
legatine authority, the expedient was a desperate one, and if it failed it
was ruinous. The nation at that time was sincerely attached to Spain. The
alliance with the house of Burgundy was of old date; the commercial
intercourse with Flanders was enormous, Flanders, in fact, absorbing all
the English exports; and as many as 15,000 Flemings were settled in London.
Charles himself was personally popular; he had been the ally of England in
the late French war; and when in his supposed character of leader of the
anti-papal party in Europe he allowed a Lutheran army to desecrate Rome, he
had won the sympathy of all the latent discontent which was fermenting in
the population. France, on the other hand, was as cordially hated as Spain
was beloved. A state of war with France was the normal condition of
England; and the reconquest of it the universal dream from the cottage to
the castle. Henry himself, early in his reign, had shared in this delusive
ambition; and but three years before the sack of Rome, when the Duke of
Suffolk led an army into Normandy, Wolsey's purposed