necessary to communicate with the pope; in our name you shall forbid him to hold any such communication:  and he and all who abet him, and all persons whatsoever, not only who shall themselves dare to consult the pope on this matter, but who shall so much as entertain the proposal of consulting him, shall be dealt with in such a manner as shall be an example to all the world.  The liberties of the Gallican Church are touched, and the independence of our theological council, and there is no privilege belonging to this realm on which we are more peremptorily determined to insist."[272]

The haughty missive, a copy of which was sent to England,[273] produced the desired effect.  The doctors became obedient and convinced, and the required declaration of opinion in Henry’s favour, was drawn up in the most ample manner.  They made a last desperate effort to escape from the position in which they were placed when the seal of the university was to be affixed to the decision; but the resistance was hopeless, the authorities were inexorable, and they submitted.  It is not a little singular that the English political agent employed on this occasion, and to whose lot it fell to communicate the result to the king, was Reginald Pole.  He it was, who behind the scenes, and assisting to work the machinery of the intrigue, first there, perhaps, contracted his disgust with the cause on which he was embarked.  There learning to hate the ill with which he was forced immediately into contact, he lost sight of the greater ill to which it was opposed; and in the recoil commenced the first steps of a career, which brought his mother to the scaffold, which overspread all England with an atmosphere of treason and suspicion, and which terminated at last after years of exile, rebellion, and falsehood, in a brief victory of blood and shame.  So ever does wrong action beget its own retribution, punishing itself by itself, and wrecking the instruments by which it works.  The letter which Pole wrote from Paris to Henry will not be uninteresting.  It revealed his distaste for his occupation, though prudence held him silent as to his deeper feelings.

“Please it your Highness to be advertised, that the determination and conclusion of the divines in this university was achieved and finished according to your desired purpose, upon Saturday last past.  The sealing of the same has been put off unto this day, nor never could be obtained before for any soliciting on our parts which were your agents here, which never ceased to labour, all that lay in us, for the expedition of it, both with the privy president and with all such as we thought might in any part aid us therein.  But what difficulties and stops hath been, to let the obtaining of the seal of the university, notwithstanding the conclusion passed and agreed unto by the more part of the faculty, by reason of such oppositions as the adversary part hath made to embezzle the determination that it should not take effect nor go forth in that