equivalent to a consciousness that, unless by a court under the Emperor's control, an unfavourable judgment was to be looked for. They could not, any one of them, allow their Sovereign to plead where an Imperial Minister could threaten the lives of uncompliant Cardinals. But, unless every knightly feeling had been dead in them, they could not have refused their sympathy. Had the Pope spoken plainly from the first, most of the Peers would perhaps have stood by the lady before them with voice and sword. But the Pope had allowed that the King was in the right. He had drawn back only under compulsion, and even at that moment was only prevented by fear from deciding on the King's side. Glad as they might have been had the question never been raised, they could not submit their Prince to the indignity of a condemnation by a coerced tribunal—a tribunal which was to be trusted to proceed only, as it now appeared, in the Emperor's own presence.
They carried the answer back to their master. "I feared it would be so," he said, "knowing as I do the heart and temper of the Queen. We must now provide in some other way."
Norfolk, who wished well to the Queen, regretted that she had taken a course so little likely to profit her. "The Emperor's action," he said, "in causing the King to be cited to Rome was outrageous and unprecedented. The cause ought to be tried in England, and the Queen had been unwise in rejecting the advice of the Peers."[1]
The Emperor on reflection reconsidered his own first refusal to allow the cause to be transferred; to insist on the trial being conducted before himself was
- ↑ Chapuys to Charles V., June 24, 1531.—Calendar, Foreign and Domestic, vol. v. pp. 144–5.
