e of insincerity on
one side, and hesitating uncertainty on the other. There is no occasion for
us to weary ourselves with the ineffectual efforts to postpone an issue
which was sooner or later inevitable.

I may not pass over in similar silence another unpleasant episode in this
business,--the execution of Cranmer's project for collecting the sentiments
of Europe on the pope's dispensing power. The details of this transaction
are not wearying only, but scandalous; and while the substantial justice of
Henry's cause is a reason for deploring the means to which he allowed
himself to be driven in pursuing it, we may not permit ourselves either to
palliate those means or to conceal them. The project seemed a simple one,
and likely to be effective and useful. Unhappily, the appeal was still to
ecclesiastics, to a body of men who were characterised throughout Europe by
a universal absence of integrity, who were incapable of pronouncing an
honest judgment, and who courted intimidation and bribery by the readiness
with which they submitted to be influenced by them. Corruption was resorted
to on all sides with the most lavish unscrupulousness, and the result
arrived at was general discredit to all parties, and a conclusion which
added but one more circle to the labyrinth of perplexities. Croke,[264] a
Doctors' Commons lawyer, who was employed in Italy, described the state of
feeling in the peninsula as generally in Henry's favour; and he said that
he could have secured an all but universal consent, except for the secret
intrigues of the Spanish agents, and their open direct menaces, when
intrigue was insufficient. He complained bitterly of the treachery of the
Italians who were in the English pay; the two Cassalis, Pallavicino, and
Ghinucci, the Bishop of Worcester. These men, he said, were betraying Henry
when they were pretending to serve him, and were playing secretly into the
hands of the emperor.[265] His private despatches were intercepted, or the
contents of them by some means were discovered; for the persons whom he
named as inclining against the papal claims, became marked at once for
persecution. One of them, a Carmelite friar, was summoned before the
Cardinal Governor of Bologna, and threatened with death;[266] and a certain
Father Omnibow, a Venetian who had been in active co-operation with Dr.
Croke, wrote himself to Henry, informing him in a very graphic manner of
the treatment to which, by some treachery, he had bee