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."[263] 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.

The dreary details of the negotiations I have no intention of pursuing.  They are of no interest to any one,—­a miserable tissue of insincerity on one side, and hesitating uncertainty on the other.  There is no occasion for us to weary ourselves with the ineffectual efforts to postpone an issue which was sooner or later inevitable.

I may not pass over in similar silence another unpleasant episode in this business,—­the execution of Cranmer’s project for collecting the sentiments of Europe on the pope’s dispensing power.  The details of this transaction are not wearying only, but scandalous; and while the substantial justice of Henry’s cause is a reason for deploring the means to which he allowed himself to be driven in pursuing it, we may not permit ourselves either to palliate those means or to conceal them.  The project seemed a simple one, and likely to be effective and useful.  Unhappily, the appeal was still to ecclesiastics, to a body of men who were characterised throughout Europe by a universal absence of integrity, who were incapable of pronouncing an honest judgment, and who courted intimidation and bribery by the readiness with which they submitted to be influenced by them.  Corruption was resorted to on all sides with the most lavish unscrupulousness, and the result arrived at was general discredit to all parties, and a conclusion which added but one more circle to the labyrinth of perplexities.  Croke,[264] a Doctors’ Commons lawyer, who was employed in Italy, described the state of feeling in the peninsula as generally in Henry’s favour; and he said that he could have secured an all but universal consent, except for the secret intrigues of the Spanish agents, and their open direct menaces, when intrigue was insufficient.  He complained bitterly of the treachery of the Italians who were in the English pay; the two Cassalis, Pallavicino, and Ghinucci, the Bishop of Worcester.  These men, he said, were betraying Henry when they were pretending to serve him, and were playing secretly into the hands of the emperor.[265] His private despatches were intercepted, or the contents of them by some means were discovered; for the persons whom he named as inclining against the papal claims, became marked