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 the King now, after all that he had promised, he might not only bring ruin on Wolsey himself, but might bring on the overthrow of the temporal power of the Church of England. Catherine was personally popular; but in the middle classes of the laity, among the peers and gentlemen of England, the exactions of the Church courts, the Pope's agents and collectors, the despotic tyranny of the Bishops, had created a resentment the extent of which none knew better than he. The entire gigantic system of clerical dominion, of which Wolsey was himself the pillar and representative, was tottering to its fall. If the King was driven to bay, the favour of a good-natured people for a suffering woman would be a poor shelter either for the Church or for him. Campeggio turned to Wolsey for advice on Catherine's final refusal. The Pope, he said, had hoped that Wolsey would advise the King to yield. Wolsey had advised. He told Cavendish that he had gone on his knees to the King, but he could only say to Campeggio that "the King—fortified and justified by reasons, writings, and counsels of many learned men who feared God—would never yield." If he was to find that the Pope had been playing with him, and the succession was to be left undetermined, "the Church would be ruined and the realm would be in infinite peril."

How great, how real, was the dread of a disputed succession, appears from an extraordinary expedient which had suggested itself to Campeggio himself, and which he declares that some perplexed politicians had seriously contemplated. "They have thought," he wrote on the 28th of October, "of marrying the Princess Mary to the King's natural son [the Duke of Richmond] if it could be done by dispensation from His Holiness." The Legate said that at first he had