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36 respect wore off in the friction of conflict. But it was essential at first to the position and the tactics of Wolsey. Henry appeared in the character of an affectionate husband, bewildered in conscience by scruples he was anxious to remove. Nobody could bind him under deeper obligation than by enabling him to live with Catharine undisturbed. As late as the month of May 1529, long after this fiction had become contemptible, Gardiner had the effrontery to say that Henry still lived with the Queen on unaltered terms. But Wolsey soon put off this pretence ; for if the only difficulty arose from a defect in the dispensation, the Pope could have afforded relief, as the Emperor proposed, by an act in more ample form.

After the failure of Knight, and of his Italian colleagues, Wolsey's tone became peremptory, and he resolved to make his strong hand felt. He despatched the King's almoner, Fox, with his own secretary, Gardiner, a man who had been engaged in the hidden work of the preceding May, and who was fitted to encounter the Roman jurists on their own ground, unswayed by shame or fear. He charged them to make Clement understand that Henry's determination to put away Catharine was founded on secret causes lying deeper than love for Anne Boleyn, causes which neither the removal of his scruples nor any other remedy could touch ; and that it would be executed, if necessary, independently of Rome. That course would imperil the succession, would overthrow Wolsey, and, in the presence of advancing Lutheranism, would ruin the Church in England. It was the Pope's interest, therefore, as much as his own, that the thing which could not be prevented should be done with full religious sanction ; that an act of deference on one side should be met on the other by an act of grace. He wrote at the same time to Orvieto that the instruments granted to Knight were little better than a mockery, and that he regarded the hostile influence of the Emperor as the only obstacle he had to overcome.

Gardiner was charged to obtain a Bull for Wolsey, in