Francis had perhaps said more than he meant; Henry supposed him to have meant more than he said.  Yet some promise was made, which was not afterwards observed; and Francis acknowledged some engagement in an apology which he offered for the breach of it.  He asserted, in defence of himself, that he had added a stipulation which Henry passed over in silence,—­that no steps should be taken towards annulling the marriage with Catherine in the English law courts until the effect had been seen of his interview with the pope, provided the pope on his side remained similarly inactive.[390] Whatever it was which he had bound himself to do, this condition, if made at all, could be reconciled only with his advice that Henry should marry Anne Boleyn without further delay, on the supposition that the interview in question was to take place immediately; for the natural consequences of the second marriage would involve, as a matter of course, some speedy legal declaration with respect to the first.  And when on various pretexts the pope postponed the meeting, and on the other part of his suggestion Henry had acted within a few months of his return from Calais, it became impossible that such a condition could be observed.  It availed for a formal excuse; but Francis vainly endeavoured to disguise his own infirmity of purpose behind the language of a negotiation which conveyed, when it was used, a meaning widely different.

The conference was concluded on the 1st of November, but the court was detained at Calais for a further fortnight by violent gales in the Channel.  In the excited state of public feeling, events in themselves ordinary assumed a preternatural significance.  The friends of Queen Catherine, to whom the meeting between the kings was of so disastrous augury, and the nation generally, which an accident to Henry at such a time would have plunged into a chaos of confusion, alike watched the storm with anxious agitation; on the king’s return to London, Te Deums were offered in the churches, as if for his deliverance from some extreme and imminent peril.  The Nun of Kent on this great occasion was admitted to conferences with angels.  She denounced the meeting, under celestial instruction, as a conspiracy against Heaven.  The king, she said, but for her interposition, would have proceeded, while at Calais, to his impious marriage;[391] and God was so angry with him, that he was not permitted to profane with his unholy eyes the blessed Sacrament.  “It was written in her revelations,” says the statute of her attainder, “that when the King’s Grace was at Calais, and his Majesty and the French king were hearing mass in the Church of Our Lady, that God was so displeased with the King’s Highness, that his Grace saw not at that time the blessed sacrament in the form of bread, for it was taken away from the priest, being at mass, by an angel, and was ministered to the said Elizabeth, there being present and invisible, and suddenly conveyed and rapt thence again into the nunnery where she was professed."[392]