relenting in one or other of the two princes who held their minatory arms extended over him, might spare himself and the Church the calamity of a decision. For to the Church any decision was fatal. If he declared for Charles, England would fall from it; if for Henry, Germany and Flanders were lost irrecoverably, and Spain itself might follow. His one hope was to procrastinate; and in this policy of hesitation for two more years he succeeded, till at length the patience of Henry and of England was worn out, and all was ended. When the Emperor required sentence to be passed, he pretended to be about to yield; and at the last moment, some technical difficulty ever interfered to make a decision impossible. When Henry was cited to appear at Rome, a point of law was raised upon the privilege of kings, threatening to .open into other points of law, and so to multiply to infinity. The Pope, indeed, finding his own ends so well answered by evasion, imagined that it would answer equally those of the English nation, and he declared to Henry's secretary that 'if the King of England would send a mandate ad totam causam, then if his Highness would, there might be given so many delays by reason of matters which his Highness might lay in, and the remissorials that his Grace might ask, ad partes, that peradventure in ten years or longer a sentence should not be given.'[1] In point of worldly prudence, his conduct was unexceptionably wise; but something beyond worldly prudence was demanded of a tribunal which claimed to be inspired by the Holy Ghost.
- ↑ State Papers, vol. vii. p. 317.
