Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 4.djvu/112

92 the Emperor has more hurt from you than the King of England. The King is spending only his treasure, which is reparable. The Emperor is spending his honour and credit, which is not reparable.' 'We bade them good night,' he wrote in a letter to England, 'as academics that would neither say yea nor nay, with purpose when we come to the Emperor to tell him a very plain tale.'

The Bishop and Hertford had been directed to take their last answer only from Charles. An interview which they resolved to make decisive was conceded, and three days later they were received in his private apartments. He had been suffering from a return of gout, and when they entered he 'was sitting in a low chair with his legs wrapped in a cloth.' Men who play for high stakes in life know the value of simplicity in common things; and Charles, like Augustus Cæsar, in his private intercourse, exchanged the monarch for the well-bred gentleman. The Viceroy of Sicily and M. du Praet came in with the English, The Emperor was full of courtesy; he 'devised familiarly on his disease;' and Du Praet being a fellow-sufferer, 'the Emperor smiled upon him and bade him take a stool and sit down, for no one should see him.' He then 'fashioned himself' to hear what Gardiner and Hertford had to say.

They went at length over the often-trodden ground. They complained of Granvelle, whose language, they