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 of the brief, the Bishop wrote "that the Pope had told him more than three times in secret he would be glad if the marriage between Henry and Anne was already made, either by dispensation of the English Legate or otherwise, provided it was not by his authority or in diminution of his powers of dispensation and limitation of divine law." In England the Pope had still his own Nuncio—a Nuncio who, as Chapuys declared, was "heart and soul" with the King. He was the brother of Sir Gregory Casalis, Henry's agent at Rome, and Henry was said to have promised him a bishopric as soon as his cause should be won. The Pope could not have been ignorant of the disposition of his own Minister.

Chapuys reported a mysterious State secret which had reached him through Catherine's physician. The Smalcaldic League was about to be formed among the Protestant Princes of Germany. Francis was inviting the King to support them and to join with himself in encouraging them to dethrone the Emperor; the King was said to have agreed on the ground that the Pope and the Emperor had behaved ill to him, and the probability was that both France and England in the end would become Lutheran.

Had there been nothing else, the Queen's sterility was held a sufficient ground for the divorce. If she had been barren from the first, the marriage would have been held invalid at once. Now that the hope of succession was gone, the Pope, it was said, ought to have ended it.

The King had been busy all the winter carrying out his project of collecting the opinions of the learned.