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 Catherine the king appeared to be renewed. Then one of her Spanish servants, Francis Felipe or Philips, desired license of her to go to Spain and see his mother, who, he said, was very ill. Catherine refused the permission, and urged the king not to grant it. Henry, rightly suspecting that there was collusion between them, dissembled also, and persuaded her to let him go. Thus the king won her confidence; but he at the same time sent a message to Wolsey, then in France, to find means to get Philips detained in that country, in spite of any safe-conduct. On his way to France, Wolsey contrived artfully to misrepresent the case to Fisher, bishop of Rochester, Catherine's confessor, whom he induced to believe that the rumours of an intended divorce had been spread abroad by the queen's own indiscretion; for the king only wanted, he said, to test the validity of an objection raised by others. When the bishop offered to remonstrate with her upon her conduct, Wolsey persuaded him to leave the matter to the king. But whatever art might be used to promote the divorce, it was impossible to avoid application to Rome, and equally impossible to do without Wolsey's aid; yet Henry gave the cardinal but half his confidence, and made an abortive effort to obtain a commission from the pope through another agent. At last Cardinal Campeggio arrived in England with a joint commission for himself and Wolsey to try the cause in October 1528, and the king and Anne Boleyn both looked for the realisation of their wish.

They did not know that before he left Rome Campeggio had secretly pledged himself not to give sentence in the cause without communicating first with the pope. He was only authorised to endeavour to dissuade the king from his purpose, or, if he could arrange a compromise, to induce the queen to enter a nunnery. To this latter object he accordingly addressed himself in some conferences that he had with Catherine soon after his arrival; but she insisted on the matter being decided judicially. The king was at first no less anxious to press forward the trial, and on Sunday, 8 Nov., he summoned the lord mayor and aldermen to his palace at Bridewell to explain his scruples of conscience. But meanwhile Catherine had information of the existence in Spain of a brief granted by Julius II for her marriage, more full and satisfactory than the bull of dispensation which Henry was trying to invalidate, and she produced a copy of it given her by the Spanish ambassador. The king insinuated that it was a forgery, and he got the queen's own counsel to inform her that she must send for the original brief to Spain. She actually wrote to the emperor as desired, requesting him to send the brief to England. Thomas Abell [q. v.], by whom she sent the letter, wrote himself to inform the emperor before he delivered it that she had written only under compulsion.

The king and his council sent to Rome to try and collect evidence against the genuineness of the brief, and they made much of the fact that it did not appear entered on the papal registers. But his agents were also instructed to sound the papal lawyers as to whether, if the queen could be induced to retire into a nunnery, without taking the vows, the pope could not, 'by his mere and absolute power,' allow him to proceed to a second marriage. Thus, after protesting the pope's incompetence to legalise marriage with a brother's widow, Henry was prepared to admit without question his competence to legalise bigamy. He was really in despair how to accomplish his object. He had drawn up a paper of advice which was to be pressed upon the queen as if in her own interest, apparently by her own counsel, if not by the legates who were to try her cause, in which they were to warn her that some ill-disposed persons seemed to be conspiring in her behalf against the king and Wolsey, and that she ought to be on her guard against giving them any countenance. If she did not act more discreetly, it was urged, the king might not only feel it right to abandon her company himself, but also to withdraw the princess from her mother's society. All these cruel suggestions, however, were only meant to prepare the way for one more strong appeal to her to solve the difficulty by going into a nunnery. And she need not fear, the speakers were to urge, that by so doing she would enable the king to take another wife, for he could certainly not marry again while she lived. Thus the king indirectly endeavoured to make her take a false step in reliance on the strength of her own cause.

Henry compelled even the most staunch friends of Catherine to reveal their conversations with her. He had allowed her the use of counsel, and among them was the renowned scholar Ludovicus Vives; but Vives was required by the king to relate all that had passed between them. This demand he justly protested against, although, as he said, it could injure no one even if their whole conversations were posted on church doors. Being forced to report them, however, he did so, and said the queen had sought his counsel as her countryman who spoke her language. The main point was that she begged him to ask the imperial ambassador