Page:Divorce of Catherine of Aragon.djvu/208

 anything worse, and the King might allege his conscience as a reason for not treating the Queen as a husband." Ortiz insisted that the devil had got hold of the King in the shape of that woman, and unless the Pope obliged him to put her away, the Pope would be damned. But it was an absurdity to excommunicate the King and declare him to have forfeited his crown when the original cause of the quarrel was still undecided. The King might prove after all to be right, as modern law and custom has in fact declared him to have been.

Charles himself felt that such a position could not be maintained. Henry was evidently not frightened. There was no sign that the English people were turning against him. If a bull of excommunication was issued, Charles himself would be called on to execute it, and it was necessary to be sure of his ground.

Ortiz raged on. "I told his Holiness," he wrote, "that if he did not excommunicate the King I would stand up at the day of judgment and accuse him before God." Charles was obliged to tell Ortiz that he must be more moderate. A further difficulty had risen in Rome itself. If the cause was tried at Rome, was it to be tried before the Cardinals in consistory or before the court of the Rota? The Cardinals were men of the world. Micer Mai's opinion was that from the Rota only a judgment could be with certainty expected in the Queen's favour. "The winds are against us," he wrote to Secretary Covos; "what is done one day is undone the next. The Cardinals will not stir, but quietly pocket the ducats which come