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210 well as princes had appealed to the Roman law-courts, and suits pending or determined there might be reopened at home and produce confusion unless provided for. However complacent the Pope might appear, it could not be supposed that he would bear patiently the open renunciation of his authority. Excommunication was half perceived to be a spectre; but spectres had not wholly lost their terrors. With an excommunication pronounced in earnest might come interdict and stoppage of trade, perhaps war and rebellion at home; and one of the members for London said that if the King would refer the question between himself and the Queen to a General Council, the City of London would give him two hundred thousand pounds. The arrival of Cranmer's Bulls, while the Act was still under discussion, moderated the alarm. The Pope evidently was in no warlike humour. At the bottom of his heart he had throughout been in Henry's favour; he hoped probably that a time might come when he could say so, and that all this hostile legislation would then be repealed. When the excitement was at its hottest, and it was known at Rome, not only that the last brief had been defied, but that the King was about to marry the lady, the Pope had borne the news with singular calmness. After all, he said to the Count de Cifuentes, if the marriage is completed, we have only to think of a remedy. The remedy, Cifuentes said, was for the Pope to do justice; the King had been encouraged in his rash course by the toleration with which he had been treated and the constant delays. Clement answered that he would certainly do justice; but if the marriage was "a fact accomplished," he wished to know what the Emperor meant to do. Cifuentes told him that his Holiness