Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 3.djvu/539

1542.] be your Majesty's ruin. He had done much for you, and you little for him; and when Pope, and Emperor, and all the world would have had him to overrun you and your realm, he withheld himself, and stayed them all.' Paget said his heart 'throbbed with anger,' at this most audacious speech. Francis owed his release from a Spanish prison to Henry's interference; he owed the recovery of his children to Henry's money; and he had repaid him with promises, broken as easily as they were made; with intrigues in Scotland, ceaseless and mischievous; with the breach of a series of engagements which had run parallel to the quarrel with the Papacy; and now, at last, with the repudiation of his debts. If England was not invaded in 1539, her escape was not due to the King of France, but to the cannon which guarded the English shores, and the nerve with which English conspiracies had been crushed. Henry had ample cause of quarrel with every Catholic sovereign in Europe, had he cared to insist upon it. Francis believed that he would have God and the world against him, and that his ruin was near. Francis was an