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interpretation. It is scarcely disputable that, frightened at the reception of Anne Boleyn in France, the Pope found it necessary to pretend for a time an altered disposition towards Henry; and that the Emperor, unable to feel wholly confident that a person who was false to others was true to himself, had exacted the brief from him as a guarantee for his good faith; Charles, on his side, reserving the publication until Francis had been gained over, and until Clement was screened against the danger which he so justly feared, from the consequences of the interview at Calais.

That then there was duplicity of some kind cannot be denied; and if not designed to effect this object, this object in fact it answered. February.While Clement was talking smoothly to Bennet and Cassalis, secret overtures were advanced at Paris for a meeting at Nice between the Pope, the Emperor, and the King of France, from which Henry was to be excluded.^[1] The Emperor made haste with concessions to Francis, which but a few months before would have seemed impossible. He withdrew his army out of Lombardy, and left Italy free; he consented to the marriage which he had so earnestly opposed between Catherine de Medici and the Duke of Orleans, agreeing also, it is probable, to the contingency of the Duchy of Milan becoming ultimately her dowry. And Francis having coquetted with the proposal for the Nice meeting,^[2] not indeed accepting, but not absolutely re-

1. Sir John Wallop to Henry: State Papers, vol. vii. p. 422.
2. Francis represented himself to Henry as having refused with a species of bravado. 'He told me,' says Sir Juhn Wallop, 'that he had