ar opinion from the University of Paris. Confident in these
authorities, a great body of English peers, spiritual and temporal, now
presented a formal demand to Clement that the King's petition should be
conceded, and intimated that if it was again refused they must seek a
remedy for themselves. Wolsey himself signed, for the petition was drawn
in the summer before his death. Archbishop Warham signed, followed by
bishops, abbots, dukes, earls, and barons. Some, doubtless, had to strain
their consciences, but the act as a whole must be taken as their own. The
King, unless he was supported by the people, had no means of forcing them
or of punishing them if they refused. Norfolk still laboured desperately
to work upon Chapuys. He told him, before the address was despatched,
that, as there seemed no other way of bringing the business to an end, he
would sacrifice the greater part of what he owned in the world if God
would be pleased to take to himself the Queen and his niece also,[121] for
the King would never enjoy peace of mind till he had made another
marriage, for the relief of his conscience and the tranquillity of the
realm, which could only be secured by male posterity to succeed to the
crown.

The King, Norfolk said, could not plead at Rome, which was garrisoned by a
Spanish army, and the Pope would do the Emperor's bidding if it was to
dance in the streets in a clown's coat; the Queen objected to a trial in
England; but could not a neutral place be found with impartial judges?
Might not the Cardinal of Liege be trusted, and the Bishop of Tarbes?

The blunt and honest Norfolk was an indifferent successor to the dexterous
Cardinal. To wish that Catherine and Anne Boleyn were both dead was a
natural, but not a valuable, aspiration. A neutral place of trial was, no
doubt, desirable, and the Cardinal of Liege might be admissible, but de
Tarbes would not do at all. "He had been one of the first," Chapuys
remarked, "to put the fancy in the King's head."[122]

At Rome the diplomatic fencing continued, the Pope secretly longing to
"commit some folly" and to come to terms with Henry, while the Imperial
agents kept their claws fixed upon him. In October Mai reported that
Henry's representatives were insisting that Clement should dissolve the
marriage without legal process, on the ground that the kingdom must have
an heir, and because the King protested that he was living in mortal sin.
If this could not be done, the Pope sho