There was duplicity of a kind; this cannot be denied; and if not designed to effect this object, this object in fact it answered.  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.[411] 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,[412] not indeed accepting, but not absolutely rejecting it, Charles consented also to waive his objections to the interview between Francis and the pope, on which he had looked hitherto with so much suspicion; provided that the pope would bear in mind some mysterious and unknown communication which had passed at Bologna.[413]

Thus was Francis won.  He cared only, as the pope had seen, for his own interests; and from this time he drew away, by imperceptible degrees, from his engagements to England.  He did not stoop to dishonour or treacherous betrayal of confidence, for with all his faults he was, in the technical acceptation of that misused term, a gentleman.  He declined only to maintain the attitude which, if he had continued in it, would have compelled the pope to yield; and although he continued honestly to urge him to make concessions, he no longer affected to make them the price of preserving France in allegiance to the Holy See.  Nor need we regret that Francis shrank from a resolution which Henry had no right to require of him.  To have united with France in a common schism at the crisis of the Reformation would have only embarrassed the free motions of England; and two nations whose interests and whose tendencies were essentially opposite, might not submit to be linked together by the artificial interests of their princes.  The populace of England were unconsciously on the rapid road to Protestantism.  The populace of France were fanatically Catholic.  England was to go her way through a golden era of Elizabeth to Cromwell, the Puritans, and a Protestant republic; a republic to be perpetuated, if not in England herself, yet among her great children beyond the sea.  France was to go her way through Bartholomew massacres and the dragonnades to a polished Louis the Magnificent, and thence to the bloody Medea’s cauldron of Revolution, out of which she was to rise as now we know her.  No common road could have been found for such destinies as these; and the French prince followed the direction of his wiser instincts when he preferred a quiet arrangement with the pope, in virtue of which his church should be secured by treaty the liberties which she desired, to a doubtful struggle for a freedom which his people neither wished nor approved.  The interests of the nation were in fact his own.  He could ill afford to forsake a religion which allowed him so pleasantly to compound for his amatory indulgences by the estrapade[414] and a zeal for orthodoxy.