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 he drove Mai distracted with his evasions. "I have said all that I could to his Holiness and the Cardinals without offending them," he reported to Charles. "Your Majesty may believe me when I say that these devils are to a man against us. Some take side openly, being of the French or English faction; others will be easily corrupted, for every day I hear the English Ambassador receives bills for thousands of ducats, which are said to go in bribery."

Promises were given in plenty, but no action followed, and Ortiz had the same story to tell Catherine. "Your Ambassador at Rome," she wrote to her nephew, "thinks the Pope as cold and indifferent as when the suit began. I am amazed at his Holiness. How can he allow a suit so scandalous to remain so long undecided? His conduct cuts me to the soul. You know who has caused all this mischief. Were the King once free from the snare in which he has been caught he would confess that God had restored his reason. His misleaders goad him on like a bull in the arena. Pity that a man so good and virtuous should be thus deceived. God enlighten his mind!"

To the Emperor himself, perhaps, the problem was growing more difficult than he expected. He himself at last pressed for sentence, but sentence was nothing unless followed by excommunication if it was disobeyed, and the Pope did not choose to use his thunder if there was to be no thunderbolt to accompany it. The Cardinal Legate in Spain assured him that the Emperor would employ all his force in the execution of the censures. The Pope said that he prized that promise as "a word from Heaven." But though