Page:Divorce of Catherine of Aragon.djvu/132

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The Divorce of Catherine of Aragon

course, refused. She was much alarmed about the Parliament, "the King having played his cards so well that he would have a majority of votes in his favour." It was quite certain that he meant to persevere. She professed outwardly that she was personally attached to the King; yet she desired Chapuys expressly to caution the Emperor against believing that his conduct had anything to do with conscience. The idea of separation, she said, had originated entirely in his own iniquity and malice, and when the treaty of Cambray was completed, he had announced it to her with the words: "My peace with the Emperor is made: it will last as long as you choose."[1]

Chapuys had been charged to ascertain the feeling of the English people. He found them generally well affected to the Queen. But the Lutheran heresy was creeping in. The Duke of Suffolk had spoken bitterly of Papal legates, and Chapuys believed if they had nothing to fear but the Pope's malediction, there were great numbers who would follow the Duke's advice and make Popes of the King and Bishops, all to have the divorce case tried in England.[2] The Queen was afraid of pressing her appeal, fearing that if the Commons in Parliament heard that the King had been summoned to Rome, measures injurious to her might easily be proposed and carried.[3] Even the Duke of Norfolk was not satisfactory. He professed to be devoted to the Emperor; he said he would willingly have lost a hand so that the divorce question should never have been raised; but it was an affair of theology and canon law, and he had not meddled with it.

  1. Chapuys to Charles V., Sept. 2, 1529.—Spanish Calendar, vol. vi, part 1, pp. 236–7.
  2. Ibid. p. 236.
  3. Ibid. p. 274.