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 Clement was negotiating with France, who did her utmost to draw the Papacy from the embrace of Spain. Francis I proposed the marriage of his second son Henry with Catharine, daughter of Lorenzo de' Medici the younger, and did his very best to help Clement to prevent an assemblage of the Council, as we now know from the disclosures of Antonio Soriano. The marriage of Catharine de' Medici, through whom her House attained to royal honour, was celebrated with great solemnity at Marseilles in October, 1533. Clement himself had come to witness the triumph of his family in the person of his great-niece. The young girl, scarcely more than a child, whom he handed over to the royal House of France, proved a terrible gift to the land; for some thirty-eight years later she contrived the Massacre of St Bartholomew. The jewels which Filippo Strozzi counted over to the French as forming part of the dowry of the little princess,—Genoa, Milan, Naples,—never came into the possession of France, and Henry was forced in the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis to yield all the gains of the French policy of annexation in Italy.

Clement was back in Rome by December 10, 1533, and in the following March annulled Thomas Cranmer's declaration that the marriage of Henry VIII with his sister-in-law Catharine of Aragon was void. The Pope threatened the King with excommunication if he did not re-establish the marriage. The King's answer was the separation of England from the obedience of Rome. Shortly before this the articles of the League of Schmalkalden had recorded the desertion of a considerable part of South Germany to the Reformation. The Council which was to have restored unity to the Church had not come into being. Clement certainly raised hopes of it in the near future at Bologna (January 10, 1533), but only for the sake of appearances. In reality he had every reason to prevent all discussion by a Council of his personal and dynastic policy, and he attained his end by excuses and means which led the Emperor's confessor, Cardinal Garcia de Loaysa (May, 1530), to write to Charles V that this Pope was the most mysterious of beings, that he knew more ciphers than anyone else on earth, and that he would not hear of a Council at any price.

Even the last act of the dying Pope leaves a painful impression. On September 23, 1534, he wrote a long letter to the Emperor, to recommend to his care, not the welfare of the Church or of Italy, but the preservation of the rule of the Medici in Florence, and the protection of his two beloved nephews, the Cardinal Ippolito and Alessandro, whom Clement had appointed to be his heirs.

After a painful illness Clement VII died on September 25, 1534. His friend Francesco Vettori gives testimony that for a century no better man had occupied Peter's Chair than Clement, who was neither cruel nor proud, neither venal, nor avaricious, nor luxurious. And despite of this, he continues, the catastrophe came in his time, while