English process to have been null and void, and the king, by his disobedience, to have incurred, ipso facto, the threatened penalties of excommunication.  Of his clemency he suspended these censures till the close of the following September, in order that time might be allowed to restore the respective parties to their old positions:  if within that period the parties were not so restored, the censures would fall.[612] This brief was sent into Flanders, and fixed in the usual place against the door of a church in Dunkirk.

Henry was prepared for a measure which was no more than natural.  He had been prepared for it as a possibility when he married.  Both he and Francis must have been prepared for it on their meeting at Calais, when the French king advised him to marry, and promised to support him through the consequences.  His own measures had been arranged beforehand, and he had secured himself in technical entrenchments by his appeal.  After the issue of the brief, however, he could allow no English embassy to compliment Clement by its presence on his visit to France.  He “knew the pope,” as he said.  Long experience had shown him that nothing was to be gained by yielding in minor points; and the only chance which now remained of preserving the established order of Christendom, was to terrify the Vatican court into submission by the firmness of his attitude.  For the present complications, the court of Rome, not he, was responsible.  The pope, with a culpable complacency for the emperor, had shrunk from discharging a duty which his office imposed upon him; and the result had been, that the duty was discharged by another.  Henry could not blame himself for the consequences of Clement’s delinquency.  He rather felt himself wronged in having been driven to so extreme a measure against his will.  He resolved, therefore, to recall the embassy, and once more, though with no great hope that he would be successful, to invite Francis to fulfil his promise, and to unite with himself in expressing his resentment at the pope’s conduct.

His despatch to the Duke of Norfolk on this occasion was the natural sequel of what he had written a few weeks previously.  That letter had failed wholly of its effect.  The interview was resolved upon for quite other reasons than those which were acknowledged, and therefore was not to be given up.  A promise, however, had been extracted, that it should be given up, if in the course of the summer the pope “innovated anything” against the King of England; and Henry now required, formally, that this engagement should be observed.  “A notorious and notable innovation” had been made, and Francis must either deny his words, or adhere to them.  It would be evident to all the world, if the interview took place under the present circumstances, that the alliance with England was no longer of the importance with him which it had been; that his place in the struggle, when the struggle came, would be found on the papal side.