An inhibitory mandate, was a natural consequence of the conference of Calais, provided that the pope intended to proceed openly and uprightly; and if it had been sent upon the spot, Henry could have complained of nothing worse than of an honourable opposition to his wishes. But the mystery was not yet exhausted. The postscript was not issued, it was not spoken of; it was carried secretly to Bologna, and it bears at its foot a further date of the 23rd of December, the very time, that is to say, at which the pope was representing himself to Bennet as occupied only in devising the best means of satisfying Henry, and to Sir Gregory Cassalis, as so convinced of the justice of the English demands, that he had ventured in defence of them to the edge of rupture with the emperor.
It might be urged that he was sincere both in his brief and in his conversation; that he believed that a verdict ought to be given, and would at last be given, against the original marriage, and that therefore he was the more anxious to prevent unnecessary scandal. Yet a menace of excommunication couched in so haughty a tone, could have been honestly reconciled with his other conduct, only by his following a course with respect to it which he did not follow—by informing the ambassadors openly of what he had done, and transmitting his letter through their hands to Henry himself. This he might have done; and though the issue of such a document at such a time would have been open to question, it might nevertheless have been defended. His Holiness, however, did nothing of the kind. No hint was let fall of the existence of any minatory brief; he sustained his pretence of good will, till there was no longer any occasion for him to counterfeit; and two months later it suddenly appeared on the doors of the churches in Flanders.
Henry at first believed it to be forgery, One forged brief had already been produced by the imperialists in the course of their transactions, and he imagined that this was another; even his past experience of Clement had not prepared him for this last venture of effrontery; he wrote to Bennet, enclosing a copy, and requiring him to ascertain if it were really genuine.[409]
The pope could not deny his hand, though the exposure, and the strange irregular character of the brief itself troubled him, and Bonner, who was again at the papal court, said that "he was in manner ashamed, and in great perplexity what he might do therein."[410]
His conduct will be variously interpreted, and to attempt to analyse the motives of a double-minded man is always a hazardous experiment; but a comparison of date, the character of Clement himself, the circumstances in which he was placed, and the retrospective evidence from after events, points almost necessarily to but one interpretation. It is scarcely disputable that, frightened at the reception of Anne Boleyn in France, the pope found it necessary to pretend for a time an altered disposition towards Henry; and that the emperor, unable to feel wholly confident that a person who was false to others was true to himself, had exacted the brief from him as a guarantee for his good faith; Charles, on his side, reserving the publication until Francis had been gained over, and until Clement was screened against the danger which he so justly feared, from the consequences of the interview at Calais.
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.