he Germans, if securities could be taken that
the Queen and Princess should not be compelled to sign or promise anything
without the Emperor's consent, the evident sense of the Spanish Council of
State was that the proceedings against the King should be suspended,
perhaps for his life, and that no stipulations should be insisted on,
either for the King's return to the Church or for his consent to the
meeting of the General Council. God might perhaps work on the King's
conscience without threat of force or violence; and the Emperor, before
starting on his expedition to Tunis, might tell the English Ambassador
that he wished to be the King's friend, and would not go to war with any
Christian Prince unless he was compelled. The Queen's consent would, of
course, be necessary; she and the Princess would be more miserable than
ever if they were made to believe that there was no help for them.[330]
But their consent, if there was no alternative, might be assumed when a
refusal would be useless.

If the willingness to make concessions was the measure of the respective
anxieties for an agreement between the two countries, Spain was more eager
than England, for the Emperor was willing to yield the point on which he
had broken the unity of Christendom and content himself with words, while
Henry would yield nothing, except the French alliance, for which he had
cared little from the time that France had refused to follow him into
schism.

An alliance of the Emperor with an excommunicated sovereign in the face of
a sentence which he had himself insisted on, and with a Bull of Deposition
ready for launching, would be an insult to the Holy See more dangerous to
it than the revolt of a single kingdom. The treaty might, however, have
been completed on the terms which Wallop and the Imperial Ambassador had
agreed on at Paris, and which the Imperial Council had not rejected. The
Pope saw the peril, struck in, and made it impossible. In the trial and
execution of the Carthusians Henry had shown to Europe that he was himself
in earnest. The blood of martyrs was the seed of the Church, and Paul
calculated rightly that he could not injure the King of England more
effectually than by driving him to fresh severities and thus provoking an
insurrection. No other explanation can be given for his having chosen this
particular moment for an act which must and would produce the desired
consequence. Bishop Fisher and Sir Thomas More had been allowed si